Symptoms. Rumination is slow and irregular, appetite capricious, tympanies appear after each feed, and there is a marked tendency to aggregation of the ingesta in solid masses, which resist the disintegration and floating which is necessary to rumination, and favor the occurrence of putrid fermentation. There is usually a tendency to lick earth, lime from the walls, and the manger, and a depraved appetite shown in a desire to chew and swallow foreign bodies of many kinds. Vomiting or convulsive rejection of the contents of the rumen is not unknown (Vives, Pattaes). There is slight fever with heat of the horns and ears, dry muzzle, and tenderness to pressure on the left flank. The bowels may be alternately relaxed and confined, and bad cases may end in a fatal diarrhœa. In other cases the disease may become acute and develop nervous symptoms, as in tympany and impaction. When the disease takes a favorable turn, under a careful ration, recovery may be complete in eight or ten days.
Lesions. These are violet or brownish patches of hyperæmia on the mucosa of the rumen, circumscribed ecchymoses, exudates in the sense of false membranes and even pin’s head ulcerations. On the affected portions the mucosa is swollen, puffy, dull and covered with mucus, and epithelium may desquamate. The papillæ are often red, and thickened or shrunken and shortened. In the specific affections like aphthous fever and sheeppox the lesions are rounded vesicles containing liquid. The ingesta is more or less packed in masses.
Treatment. If irritant foreign bodies have been taken rumenotomy is demanded. If caustic alkalies, acetic or other mild acid. If acids, lime water or magnesia. Feed well boiled flax seed, or farina gruels, and wheat bran or middlings in limited quantity. Solids may be at first withheld, coarse or indigestible food must be. It may be necessary to rouse the organ by 10 or 12 ozs. of sulphate of soda with a little common salt and abundance of thin gruels as drink. As a tonic the animal may take nitrate of bismuth ½ oz., powdered gentian ½ oz., and nux vomica 20 grains, twice a day. The application of a mustard pulp or of oil of turpentine on the left side of the abdomen may also be resorted to. A weak current of electricity through the region of the paunch for twenty minutes daily is often of great service.
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.