Common features of group. Ruminants; depraved appetite; objects
swallowed: hair balls. Sheep eating wool in winter. Pigs eat bristles.
Puppies swallow marbles, etc., wantonly. Solipeds swallow hair,
plaster, earth, sand, and lick manger or rack. Fowls eat their
feathers. Causes: soil exhaustion, lack of lime, soda, potash,
phosphorous; relation to osteo malacia; granitic or sandy soils, peat,
muck, causative; digestive disorder; faulty food; yearly breeding and
heavy milking; constant stabling; dry seasons. Course: chronic.
Lesions; emaciation; anæmia; serous exudate; catarrh of the bowels.
Treatment: soil; good fodder; salts of soda, potash and lime,
phosphates; tonics; apomorphine. Wool eating; example: digestive
disorders; emaciation. Treatment: open air; good fodder; salts of the
bones and soft tissues; clip nurses; apomorphine.
_Definition._ We have here a class of morbid habits, which cannot be
referred to any constant lesion or group of lesions, and which appear in
certain cases to result from example and to constitute nothing more than
a bad habit.
_Symptoms._ _Ruminants_ without any appreciable cause, lick the clothes
of their care-takers, chew and swallow articles of clothing of all
kinds, bones, old shoes, gloves, socks, cuffs, collars, small forks,
pocket-knives, nails, wires, needles, coins, stones, lumps of clay,
hair, which may give rise to secondary troubles of a more or less
serious kind. Pregnant cows are especially subject to this infirmity.
The small pointed objects like pins, needles, ends of wires, etc., which
are mostly taken by accident with the food are especially apt to be
entangled in the alveoli of the reticulum and make their way to the
heart, with fatal effect, or through the abdominal walls creating a
fistula. Hair aggregates with saliva, mucus and phosphates, to form
balls in the first two or three stomachs. Other indigestible objects may
also become encrusted and prove sources of irritation. Licking the skin
of another animal is doubtless at times encouraged by the taste of the
salts of perspiration, but in other cases it has all the appearance of a
mutual kind service as the cow with itching head will walk up and
present it to its fellow which rarely fails to respond to the
invitation. Stump licking is not uncommon.
=Sheep= shut up in the winter get in the habit of chewing each other’s
wool, thus virtually depilating their fellows and accumulating wool
balls in their stomachs.
=Pigs= when running at large eat human fæces often infecting themselves
with the cysticercus cellulosa, and devour their own or their fellows’
bristles, which form ovoid and irritating aggregations in the stomach.
=Puppies= are proverbial for swallowing every small object that comes in
their way, coal, pebbles, marbles, leather, hair, etc., with the result
of inducing nausea and vomiting, or more seriously, wounds of the
stomach, gastritis and enteritis. In older dogs the habit is more likely
to imply rabies.
=Solipeds= will lick and swallow each others hair, eat off the hair from
each other’s tails and manes, eat their clothing, lick the wall plaster,
earth or sand, and even the manger or rack. The last named habits are
usually connected with disease.
=Fowls= can digest almost anything they swallow, but if they take to
picking their feathers, they create serious injury to the skin and
indirectly to the general health.
_Causes and Nature._ In general terms it may be said that the causes of
depraved appetite are very numerous, so that the trouble must be looked
upon as a symptom of many morbid conditions in place of a disease _sui
generis_.
_Heredity_ has been invoked as a cause, mainly, it would appear, because
the disease appears enzootically on certain exhausted soils, or in herds
kept in the same unhygienic conditions. In such cases the real cause is
usually to be found in faulty conditions of soil, water, buildings,
food, etc., on the correction of which the trouble disappears. When,
however, from a long continuance of unhygienic conditions, a weakness of
constitution is transmitted from parent to offspring, such hereditary
debility may be accepted as a predisposing factor.
_An exhausted soil_, lacking especially the elements of lime and
phosphorus, is a common cause, though by no means the only one. Nessler
who analyzed the hay and water, furnished to cattle suffering from this
disease in the Black Forest found a notable absence of the soda salts.
In others in which osteo malacia was the prominent symptom the lack was
in phosphate of lime as well. In the nature of things the soil that has
been continuously cropped to exhaustion is robbed of both earthy and
alkaline salts, and the animals fed on its exclusive products suffer not
only as regards the nutrition of the bone, but also of the soft parts.
Hence Trasbot says that in osteo malacia, pica is never absent. Roloff
and Röll hold that it is the first symptom of osteomalacia. In South
Africa where the land has been cropped with oats year after year without
manure and as long as it will bear, the disease became prevalent in the
street car horses fed on the oats, and was corrected by the addition of
phosphates, or phosphate bearing food, to the ration. In the older
dairying farms of New York which have been kept under grass for a great
length of time, and all the milk products sold off, depraved appetite in
all its forms is quite frequent. Where the land is originally light and
sandy and naturally deficient in lime, osteo malacia is often a
concurrent disorder. The two conditions may however occur independently
of each other, and especially may pica appear alone, in keeping with the
greater solubility of the soda and potash salts and the readiness with
which these can be washed out of the soil, while the less soluble lime
salts in part remain.
Lemcke, Haubner and Siedamgrotzky attribute the disease to a nervous
disorder. Lemcke indeed traces the disorder to a lack of phosphorus, and
claims that osteomalacia only supervenes where the rheumatic diathesis
is also present.
It may be shortly stated that the disease prevails especially on
granitic or sandy soils, or on those which are mainly composed of
organic debris (peat, muck). Limestone soils and those which contain any
considerable proportion of potash or soda are usually exempt.
_Digestive disorder_ though starting from a different point may tend to
the same end. A hyperacidity of the stomach has been observed to
coincide with the malady, and by interfering with easy and normal
digestion, it may stand in the way of such assimilation as is necessary
to vigorous health.
_Faulty food_ operates in a similar manner. The exhausted soils, and
their products deficient in alkaline and earthy salts have been already
referred to; we must also note the evil effect of fibrous fodders, the
main nutritive elements of which have been washed out by intemperate
weather after they were cut, the rank aqueous products of wet or swampy
soils, the fibrous and siliceous plants (rushes, carex, equisetums,
etc.) which grow on poor, wet or soured soils, the innutritious and
fermented products of beet sugar factories, and generally the spoilt
food which has undergone fermentation.
_Yearly breeding_ and _constant milking_, by undermining the general
health, predisposes so strongly that in many cases the affection is seen
in dairy cows, while oxen and young cattle escape. The last period of
gestation when the demands for the growing calf are greatest, is the
period of especial danger.
_Permanent stabling_ which denies the invigorating influence of sun,
exercise and pure air contributes toward the general debility and
therefore, in animals that are closely stabled for the winter the spring
is especially to be feared, when compulsory inactivity, poor feeding,
gestation and milking have combined to reduce the system.
_Dry seasons_ have been noticed to increase the affection manifestly by
reducing the supply of food.
_Course._ The affection is chronic and unless arrested by the
supervention of more favorable conditions, may last for a year or more.
Spontaneous recovery may set in when turned out to pasturage and open
air life, and especially if a rich grain feeding is added. Without
change in the conditions however, the tendency is to a fatal result.
_Lesions._ The victims of the disorder are emaciated, the fatty tissue
contains a yellow serum, there is little blood, and that is thin and
watery and coagulates loosely, the muscles are pale and flabby, and the
gastro-intestinal mucous membrane is the seat of catarrh.
_Treatment._ To treat rationally and successfully we must adapt the
measures to the obvious causes. When the soil has been scourged and
exhausted, a change of pasture, and of land used for hay or soiling
crops is the first consideration. If these cannot be secured then grain
and seeds rich in protein, and alkaline and earthy salts should be added
to the ration. Wheat bran, middlings, peas, beans, cotton seed meal,
linseed meal, rapecake may be named among available resorts, or in their
absence, daily doses of phosphate of lime, and sodium chloride or
bicarbonate, or potash salts may be allowed, or even bone dust.
If imperfect digestion is a manifest factor, sodium chloride, or
potassium chloride, calcium phosphate, iron and bitters will serve a
good end. In hyperacidity, limewater, chalk, or magnesia may be given.
If the digestion is torpid, hydrochloric acid with bitters may be
resorted to.
Feser and especially Lemcke strongly recommend apomorphia. It is used
hypodermically in doses of 2 grains for horse or cow repeated daily for
three days.
=Secondary Symptoms in Wool-eating Lambs.= Lambs from two to six weeks
old especially such as suck ewes with woolly udders (merino, Cotswold)
first swallow the wool inadvertently, and then acquire a liking for the
saline matters in the abundant yolk (merino), till finally the
accumulating wool balls produce digestive and nervous disorder and a
craving for the indulgence. Thus the breed must be considered in
estimating the symptoms. For the same reason the wool about the hips or
elsewhere soiled with salts of the urine or liquid fæces prove
attractive to the victim. The proximity of other wool eaters is another
cause which starts others to follow the bad example. The general
conditions of debility, exhausted soil, and the absence of alkaline and
earthy salts must be borne in mind. So too with prolonged confinement
indoors in winter, the absence of invigorating exercise and the
restriction of the animals (dams) to food which is deficient in saline
matters.
Beyond the mere eating of the wool and the destruction of fleeces, the
lambs do not usually suffer seriously. But if the consumption of wool is
excessive the accumulating balls of the size of marbles in the stomach,
and the blocking of the pylorus and small intestine, may give rise to
intermittent constipations and diarrhœas, deranged digestion,
muco-enteritis, mucous covered stools, loss of condition, emaciation and
retarded development.
_Treatment_ consists first in the securing of a more healthy regimen.
This is but one of the evils of the close winter confinement of an
animal preëminently adapted to freedom and exercise. Turning out in a
wide range, especially if pasture is available, is a prime
consideration. The separation from the flock, of the first wool eaters,
will check the propagation of the vice by imitation. Food that is
defective in one or more constituents must be supplemented by that which
will correct the deficiency. Salt, potassic salts and above all
phosphate of lime or bone meal will sometimes benefit. May recommends
the separation of the lambs from the ewes except when nursing, three
times a day. Finally Lemcke claims for apomorphia the same curative
effect as in other animals. The dose is 2 grains, subcutem, as in the
cow and may be repeated three days in succession.