Help! My cow has refused to go for long call

It was a dry December some years ago when I had just left the vet school and was steaming with the zest of a young vet. I came across a case that has ever since stuck in my mind like the memory of a maiden kiss.

Word had gone round Lung’anyiro village that I had graduated, joining the league of paltry vets in Matungu constituency.

Dr Kelly Nelima had enjoyed the monopoly of being the only vet. Initially they were two before Dr Joseph Wamukoya using the good name he had created through his vet practice won him a parliamentary seat.

Now, among those who had received the news was Mr Okwiri, a budding dairy farmer and friend. He had two Friesian cows purchased from Kitale. Okwiri’s wife was the farm manager.

Okwiri’s distress call was about one cow in its third trimester of pregnancy.

Deadly constipation

From the telephone conversation I picked that Okwiri’s wife was a good farm manager; she had observed that for the last two or so days the animal had not given its daily share of dung. The little it had produced had unfamiliar soft consistence and a foul smell that attracted big blue flies.

She noticed this since the cow had been separated from the rest in preparation for calving down. But that wasn’t the only reason she noticed the abnormality, other villagers had observed it too.

In the village, cow dung has many functions among them plastering of hut walls. Women engage in a race to outdo each other in the art of plastering hut walls and giving them graffiti with merry messages.

Okwiri’s wife had thus received reports from these villagers that no dung was forthcoming from the secluded cow. When I saw the animal it was dull, body temperature and pulse were within their normal ranges ruling out any infectious disease and giving that relief a vet needs at such times.

My class notes were still fresh albeit in a soft copy somewhere in my balding head; this has to be a simple indigestion, abomasal impaction or at worst abomasal displacement – I thought.

The latter two would be a challenge and I prayed they aren’t the definitive diagnosis.

After hearing Mr Okwiri’s side I settled on simple indigestion.

Mrs Okwiri was feeling the pinch of feeding the two dairy animals which he had bought without adequately planning on how to feed- this is a common mistake would be dairy farmers make. The two Friesians had already devoured all the napier grass that Okwiri had planted in preparation for the dairy herd; they were now subsisting on maize stovers, banana leaves and some dried grass that on a village scale passed for hay.

The animals had transited from an area of plenty; with huge appetite but nothing to eat on landing at Okwiri’s farm, so they ate a lot of maize stovers – this are poor quality and bulky feeds that shouldn’t be consumed in huge quantities.

This led to the indigestion.

Indigestion is caused by sudden alteration in the intraruminal environment either due to excess fresh feeds hence rapid fermentation or poor quality roughages.

This results in pH changes and subsequently reduced gastric movements and rotting of ingested feeds – this can be dangerous. In times of scarcity, animals tend to consume poor quality feeds or materials like bedding predisposing them to indigestion.

Clinical signs for indigestion include reduced milk production, loss of appetite, a soft or doughy rumen.

Simple indigestion as the name implies is easy to manage but a farmer needs to report it early enough.

But it requires vet skills to deliver lukewarm water or saline via a stomach tube right into the rumen to normalize the pH, followed by vigorous massage of the rumen will quickly relief the animal. Change of diet should be done immediately. But in complicated situations, a surgery (laparatomy) will have to be done and transfaunation – harvesting gut content from a slaughter house and replacing it with what is in the sick animal.

(The writer is a vet surgeon working with KENTTEC)