Care with Your Bedding

Bracken is a common plant but it does contain a whole host of toxins including ptaquiloside, kaempferol and shikimic acid which can be detected in the meat and milk of animals that have ingested any of it. Young shoots seem to be the most toxic and animals can be poisoned by eating any part of the plant. The toxins in bracken can cause a blood disorder if sufficient is ingested. Young animals may show signs of haemorrhage to their mucus membranes with blood in their faeces and urine. There is rapid weight loss. There are no drugs that can reverse these changes once they are noticed affected animals are not suitable for human consumption so losses can be significant. Bracken also contains carcinogens. Smaller intakes over a prolonged period will affect the condition of your cows small growths start in the lining of the bladder as they get bigger persistent blood will occur in the urine. Occasionally tumours will occur in other organs of animals that have eaten bracken, usually by this stage the animal will be in such poor condition that she would have been sent for slaughter. There seems to be a temptation to use all sorts of things as bedding at the moment as straw is so expensive. Just take care when you decide what to use as bracken has been known to cause untreatable problems even some years after cattle have had access to it.

Vaccination Trial Setback

Several times now I have seen smiling faces of farmers who are tenants of the National Trust in the West Country lending their support to the badger vaccination programme on their farms. The National Trust has organised the vaccination of badgers on its farms since 2011 nearly fifty badgers were injected in the first year now over two hundred doses are given each year. This is an area that has an ongoing Tuberculosis problem. One farmer with a self contained dairy herd has replaced his stock six times since 2001 and has spent tens of thousands of pounds on fencing. This is one of the six farms in this area that now has reactors on their farm. It is perhaps too early to say if the badger vaccination programmes are having any effect. This one in Devon should be a good test as it has been going on for four years so it should have had some impact on the numbers of infected badgers by now. Hopefully the National Trust has fully funded the vaccination of these badgers as it sounds like the farmers involved have got enough to contend with to get their cattle clear of TB.

Milk from Sheep

As a whole we tend to pay less attention to mastitis in sheep than we do when cattle get the infection.This is strange as it can have a similar economic impact. Ewes with mastitis are not able to rear their lambs. Sheep can sometimes get a viral form of mastitis as this is one of the manifestations of  maedi visna. There is no treatment for viral mastitis affected animals will need to be culled. Pasturella haemolytica is responsible for acute mastitis, the udder goes blue and may be cold to the touch. Many ewes will not survive this infection, those that do will have lost all of their mammary tissue to the disease. For some reason the Pasturella vaccine does nothing to protect ewes from this sort of mastitis. It is fortunate that cows do not get Pasturella infections in their udder and unexplained why E. coli is a rare cause of mastitis for sheep. Some ewes get mastitis because older lambs damage the teats when they are not able to get enough milk. We should pay more attention to ewe’s udders when they go to the ram and at scanning time. If the gland is not soft dry cow antibiotics may be able to check the progress of infection and save the udder for next years lambs.

Horse Toxin

There have been further reports of the severe muscle disease that affects horses at this time of the year. The seeds and leaves of sycamore trees contain a toxin hypoglycine-A which is poisonous to horses. Symptoms include muscle tremors, dark coloured urine and weakness. Some animals will not be able to get up. All muscles are affected and it has been reported that sometimes the first thing noticed is that affected animals seem to be breathless. Some authorities advise to make sure there is sufficient supplementary feeding for horses at this time of the year, but it would be better if you can avoid pastures where there are sycamore trees until all of the leaves have rotted down as atypical myopathy is a difficult condition to treat and outcomes, even if it is treated in the early stages, are not always satisfactory.

Acute Fluke

There is a high risk of fluke in sheep at the moment particularly on farms that are known to have contaminated wet fields and where environmental schemes discourage drainage. Last winter was wet and mild and the thought is that higher than expected numbers of cercaria were shed onto pastures in the spring. The warm summer has also helped to maintain snail numbers so animals on wet pasture are still taking in massive numbers of metacercaria. In the early stages no eggs are seen from faecal samples as there are no mature fluke in the liver. Cases we have seen this month have shown signs of anaemia with bloated abdomens and unexpected deaths.

Available Drugs

At this time of the year if you have seen or suspect that you have acute fluke you will be using a drench containing Triclabendazole as this is the only drug that will treat immature fluke as soon as they get to the liver. Triclabendazole is partly metabolised by the liver for it to work properly so nothing will help if large numbers have reached the liver before treatments starts. If you cannot move the flock to drier pastures you will need to repeat the dose every three weeks. There has been some talk about resistance to the drugs that we use to treat liver fluke disease in sheep and cattle and encouragement to use a different product each year. This is difficult if you have the acute disease. There is no easy way to monitor the response to fluke treatments in live animals so at the moment it is better to carry on with Tricabendazole as this is the most efficient drug available.

Scouring Calf Meeting

If you have cattle you should have with this newsletter an invitation to the Moredun meeting at the Welshpool Auction Market in November. The talks this year are about cryptosporidia and calf scour and will be presented by Beth Wells from Moredun and Suzie Bell from AHVLA Shrewsbury. This is a useful topic and it should be an informative meeting. Please let me know if we missed to send you an invitation. All are welcome and admission is free.  

Kennel Cough

Rarely do we mention dogs in this newsletter, but you might be interested to hear about kennel cough that is causing a few problems at the moment. I realise the dogs that you have would seldom if ever go into boarding kennels. They can still get kennel cough as it is transmitted by casual contact between animals. The usual presentation is a soft cough that responds well to treatment in the initial stages. Working farm dogs and particularly working gun dogs are vulnerable to developing this infection so don’t ignore your dog if he starts coughing. Effective treatments are available.       

Return to Newsletters