HAIR BALLS IN THE RUMEN AND RETICULUM. EGAGROPILES.
Balls of hair, wool, clover hairs, bristles, paper, oat-hair, feathers, chitin, mucus, and phosphates. Causes: Sucking and licking pilous parts, eating hairy or fibrous products. Composition. Symptoms: Slight, absent, or, gulping eructation, vomiting, tympany, in young putrid diarrhœa, fœtid exhalations, emaciation. Diagnosis. Treatment.
Definition. The term egagropile, literally goat-hair, has been given to the felted balls of wool or hair found in the digestive organs of animals. The term has been applied very widely, however, to designate all sorts of concretions of extraneous matters which are found in the intestinal canal. In cattle the hair licked from their skin and that of their fellows rolled into a ball by the action of the stomach and matted firmly together with mucus and at times traces of phosphates, are the forms commonly met with. In sheep two forms are seen, one consisting of wool matted as above and one made up of the fine hairs from the clover leaf similarly matted and rolled into a ball.
In pigs the felted mass is usually composed of bristles, (exceptionally of paper or other vegetable fibre), and in horses felted balls of the fine hairs from the surface of the oat, mingled with more or less mucus and phosphate of lime make up the concretion. These are found in the stomach, and intestines. In predatory birds the feathers and in insectivorous birds chitinous masses are formed in the gizzard and rejected by vomiting.
Causes. Suckling animals obtain the hair from the surface of the mammary glands hence an abundance of hair or wool on these parts favors their production. The vicious habit of calves of sucking the scrotum and navel of others is another cause. In the young and adult alike the habit of licking themselves and others especially at the period of moulting is a common factor.
Composition. Hair, wool, and the fine hairs of clover are the common predominant constituents, but these are matted together more or less firmly by mucus and phosphates, the ammonia-magnesian phosphate uniting with the mucus and other matters in forming a smooth external crust in the old standing balls of adult animals. The centre of such balls is made up of the most densely felted hair. In balls of more recent formation the external crust is lacking and the mass is manifestly hairy on the surface, and the density uniform throughout. These have a somewhat aromatic odor, contain very little moisture, and have a specific gravity approximating .716 (sheep) to .725 (ox). Ellagic, and lithofellic acids, derivatives of tannin, are usually present, and are abundant in the egagropiles of antilopes.
In the balls of recent formation, as seen especially in sucking calves, the hair is only loosely matted together, and often intermixed with straw and hay, and is saturated with liquid and heavier than the old masses. These are usually the seat of active putrefactive fermentation, and being occasionally lodged in the third or even the fourth stomach, the septic products act as local irritants, and general poisons. They are therefore far more injurious than the consolidated hairballs of the adult animal, and often lay the foundation of septic diarrhœas and gastro-enteritis.
The balls may be spherical, elliptical, ovoid, or, when flattened by mutual compression, discoid.
Symptoms. Generally these balls cause no appreciable disturbance of the functions of the stomach. This is especially true of the large, old and smoothly encrusted masses. The museum of the N. Y. S. V. College contains specimens of 5½ inches in diameter, found after death in a fat heifer, which had always had good health and which was killed for beef. This is the usual history of such formations, they are not suspected during life, and are only found accidentally when the rumen is opened in the abattoir.
The smaller specimens, the size of a hen’s or goose’s egg, or a billiard ball, have produced severe suffering, with gulping, eructation, vomiting and tympany from obstruction of the demicanal or gullet, and such symptoms continued until the offending agents were rejected by the mouth. (Caillau, Leblanc, Prevost, Giron). Again they may block the passage from the first to the third stomach (Schauber, Feldamann, Adamovicz, Tyvaert, Mathieu).
In calves on milk they are especially injurious as beside the dangers of blocking the passages already referred to, the unencrusted hairs and straws irritate the mucous membranes and still worse, the putrid fermentations going on in their interstices, produce irritant and poisonous products, and disseminate the germs of similar fermentations in the fourth stomach and intestine. Here the symptoms are bloating, colics, impaired or irregular appetite, fœtid diarrhœa, fœtor of the breath and cutaneous exhalations, and rapidly progressive emaciation.
Diagnosis is too often impossible. Tympanies, diarrhœa, colics, etc., may lead to suspicion, but unless specimens of the smaller hair balls are rejected by the mouth or anus there can be no certainty of their presence. If arrested in the cervical portion of the gullet they may be pressed upward into the mouth by manipulations applied from without. The looped wire extractor may be used on any portion of the œsophagus. If lodged in the demicanal the passage of a probang will give prompt relief. If retained in the rumen and manifestly hurtful, rumenotomy is called for as soon as a diagnosis can be made.