The diagnosis of this condition is easy, but the outlook is not promising.
Treatment is rather difficult. Some operators recommend dividing the terminal sphincter with a small, specially formed bistouri caché, provided with two cutting points. The operation has very satisfactory immediate results, but after the little wounds so produced have healed, cicatricial contraction takes place around the orifice.
Forcible dilatation is far preferable. It is carried out in the same way as in human medicine, where the sphincter ani or the orifice of the uterus has to be dilated. No superficial lesion and no incision is produced; the result is therefore more permanent (see “Operative Technique”).
WOUNDS OR TRAUMATIC LESIONS.
CHAPS AND CRACKS.
These injuries consist in little transverse or oblique wounds of the teat.
Causation. In free milkers the udder appears completely relaxed after milking. In the intervals between the different milkings, however, the quarters become swollen, and are sometimes so distended as to overcome the resistance of the sphincter at the base of the teat. The teats are then greatly elongated, and, despite the richness of the tissues in elastic fibres, this distension leads to little superficial epidermic fissures.
These small lesions are unimportant, but if they become infected by contact with the litter they granulate and suppurate, so that grave complications may eventually follow.
The wounds caused by the calves’ teeth when sucking, or simply by the rough way in which the little animal seizes the teat, may produce similar accidents.
Symptoms. The teat shows one or more little transverse fissures, a few millimètres to a centimètre or more in length. The base of the fissure appears of a reddish or brownish-red colour, and has thickened, indurated, painful, discharging or suppurating margins. Local sensitiveness may be either slight or very pronounced. In the latter case, the patients resist being milked, and even refuse to let the calf suck.