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.
The balls may be spherical, elliptical, ovoid, or, when flattened by
mutual compression, discoid.
_Symptoms._ Generally these balls cause no appreciable disturbance of
the functions of the stomach. This is especially true of the large, old
and smoothly encrusted masses. The museum of the N. Y. S. V. College
contains specimens of 5½ inches in diameter, found after death in a fat
heifer, which had always had good health and which was killed for beef.
This is the usual history of such formations, they are not suspected
during life, and are only found accidentally when the rumen is opened in
the abattoir.
The smaller specimens, the size of a hen’s or goose’s egg, or a billiard
ball, have produced severe suffering, with gulping, eructation, vomiting
and tympany from obstruction of the demicanal or gullet, and such
symptoms continued until the offending agents were rejected by the
mouth. (Caillau, Leblanc, Prevost, Giron). Again they may block the
passage from the first to the third stomach (Schauber, Feldamann,
Adamovicz, Tyvaert, Mathieu).
In calves on milk they are especially injurious as beside the dangers of
blocking the passages already referred to, the unencrusted hairs and
straws irritate the mucous membranes and still worse, the putrid
fermentations going on in their interstices, produce irritant and
poisonous products, and disseminate the germs of similar fermentations
in the fourth stomach and intestine. Here the symptoms are bloating,
colics, impaired or irregular appetite, fœtid diarrhœa, fœtor of the
breath and cutaneous exhalations, and rapidly progressive emaciation.
_Diagnosis_ is too often impossible. Tympanies, diarrhœa, colics, etc.,
may lead to suspicion, but unless specimens of the smaller hair balls
are rejected by the mouth or anus there can be no certainty of their
presence. If arrested in the cervical portion of the gullet they may be
pressed upward into the mouth by manipulations applied from without. The
looped wire extractor may be used on any portion of the œsophagus. If
lodged in the demicanal the passage of a probang will give prompt
relief. If retained in the rumen and manifestly hurtful, rumenotomy is
called for as soon as a diagnosis can be made.