SYMPTOMS OF MUSCULAR RHEUMATISM IN CATTLE.
This may set in with the same abruptness as articular rheumatism, the animal in the morning after a wet, dewy or frigid night showing general stiffness and lameness with extreme sensitiveness of the skin and muscles along the back and loins. The animal moves slowly and stiffly, grunting perhaps at each step and shows inappetence, fever, dry muzzle and costiveness. This is essentially rachialgia or lumbago. Pandiculation on rising is entirely omitted.
Not infrequently the muscles of the shoulder are mainly affected and become exceedingly tender to manipulation. The patient seeks to remain recumbent and when raised will get up on his hind parts and remain thus for some time resting on the knees before he can be made to get up in front.
When the muscles of the croup are attacked the mode of getting up is reversed, the animal rising first on its fore feet and remaining for a time sitting on its haunches or resting on the hocks before it gets on the hind.
If the muscles of the neck are involved there is the same stiffness, soreness, tenderness and twisting to one side or rigid elevation of the neck as seen in the horse in similar circumstances.
In any case there is a tendency to extension or shifting from one part to another, and notably to the implication of the tendons, synovial sheaths and joints. This is especially the case in the acute type, while chronic rheumatism may remain long confined to the groups of muscles which are first attacked. In the acute forms too there is the greatest liability to internal complications not only cardiac, but according to Cruzel abdominal and thoracic as well.
A fatal result is rare, but the impairment of appetite and digestion, the constant and often severe suffering, the destruction of the red globules, and the malnutrition, and increased and perverted metabolism as shown in the pallor of the visible mucous membranes, the steady loss of condition and advancing emaciation, the rigid, dry, scurfy, hidebound skin, tends to wear out the subject or render it unprofitable. In the chronic form it may last for months.