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Large Calf Rapid Death - No real symptoms

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sw said:
Sounds to me like classic "redwater" if they have never been vaccinated with a 7-way or some Clostridial combination and they are drinking out of a pond that has snails in it. I have seen mature cows tip over dead with no symptoms at all and posted them and that is what they had. If they are stressed from something else they can tip over very fast with no outside symptoms at all. You had better run the rest of the calves through and give them a shot of 7-way

agree!!! have your pond checked before you lose any more!!!!!!
 
shorthorn said:
sounds like he ate some metal? Do you have any metal laying around?

WOW!!!

This morning I was trying to think outside the box about what could be happening - and the two things I thought of were the exact same things you've put on this forum:

1) Alot of calves have been licking and chewing on the old broken up (metal!!) hay feeder. Wondering if that could be a problem.

2) The pond is really going down and could something in the pond (fertilizer or something) be getting more and more concentrated to the point of poisonous. I was REALLY wondering this because a few hours before the angus/mix calf died he was in the pond drinking away.

Thank GOODNESS we're getting this calf posted. BUT no matter what they say, it sounds like we need to get the metal out of the field and get the pond tested! Removing the metal is easy....how do we get the pond water tested (reasonably!)? Extension agency???

thank you all so much for your input!
 
Kentucky said:
shorthorn said:
sounds like he ate some metal? Do you have any metal laying around?

WOW!!!

This morning I was trying to think outside the box about what could be happening - and the two things I thought of were:

1) Alot of calves have been licking and chewing on the old broken up (metal!!) hay feeder.

2) The pond is really going down and could something in the pond (fertilizer or something) be getting more and more concentrated to the point of poisonous. I was REALLY wondering this because a few hours before the angus/mix calf died he was in the pond drinking away.

Thank GOODNESS we're getting this calf posted. BUT no matter what they say, it sounds like we need to get the metal out of the field and get the pond tested! Removing the metal is easy....how do we get the pond water tested (reasonably!)? Extension agency???

Yes, KY, call your extension office, if a lab on campus can't test it, they will (or should) know where another lab that can do it is.

Best of luck...keep your head up and welcome to the unfortunate reality of the cattle business...

Cheers--

TTB
 
Extention agent would be a good place to start. If they don't do the test, I'm sure they can point you in the right direction as to who does.
Hope you get it figured out soon, how long till you know any results from having the calf posted?
(sound like a lil kid, "how many more miles?") but I'm sure your on pins and needles waitin for an answer.

this is just an off the wall guess, but how old is the baler, and does it have any paint on it, could it be lead poisonin?
did a search:
Cattle-Intakes of greater then 6 mg/kg body weight can lead to chronic poisoning and intakes greater than 10 mg/kg BW may cause acute lead poisoning.
Symptoms of Toxicity
The general symptoms of lead poisoning are universal although more informaton is available on poisoning in humans. The first symptoms of lead toxicity are very general and nonspecific. These include nausea, sluggishness, vomiting, painful gastrointestinal irritation, diarrhea, loss of appetite, colic, weakness and dehydration. These symptoms are common to many disorders and can often lead to inaccurate diagnosis.
Some symptoms more specific to human poisoning include discoloration of the lips and skin attributed mild secondary anemia, a lead line on the gums, developmental disorders, sterility and abortion. There have also been some prelimiunary reports indicating that chronic lead poisoning can also lead to chronic nephritis and premature development of arteriosclerosis.
More severe cases of poisoning can produce symptoms including convulsions,"wrist drop" or external limb paralysis, coma and ultimately death.

another article I found says:
A case of poisoning by chronic ingestion of lead in calves with a peracute clinical course is described. The source of lead was a prime coat of white lead on old white painted doors. These doors originated from an institution for aged people and had been used as pen walls for fattening calves. About 12 weeks later five animals died within hours after onset of CNS-symptoms. The post mortem examination of three animals revealed one with multifocal laminar edema and mild vasculitis in the cerebrocortex, one with acid fast intranuclear inclusion bodies in the renal tubular epithelial cells and one without lesions. Liver, kidney and abomasal contents of two animals were analysed for lead content. The concentration was diagnostic for lead poisoning in one case only.


Good luck with finding out what's goin on. We'll be waiting to hear what ya find out.
 
That is just what I was thinking BMR. We had a brilliant guy working at MSU that went out in one of the pastures target practicing on some old batteries. Only killed 3 calves and 3 cows before anybody figured out what he did and made him go clean up all of the pieces of lead
 
I sure do appreciate everyone's advice.

We're sitting on pins and needles waiting for the post results.

No matter what they find - we're going to follow everyone's advice on the metal and the pond testing.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and we'll let you all know as soon as the test results are in!
 
While waiting for the test results can you move the cattle away from the pond or put an electric fence around it and provide other water?

I would try to eliminate any possible causes until the problem is found.
 
Hey Everyone:

Preliminary reports have come in on our dead calf. Initial diagnoses are peritinitis and plueritis (not sure if I'm spelling those right). Basically, it's inflammation of the lining of the lungs (I'm told). Our vet says it would have been caused by some type of internal trauma, such as eating some metal.

The Vet Center doing the post is going to continue running tests to try to determine the causes of the P & P - so we should know a lot more by next week.

But we were thrilled that it definitely had no contageous disease and no parasites(!). So we feel like we can breathe a sigh of relief that hopefully there's nothing about to spread through our whole herd.

So guess what we're doing this weekend.....getting EVERY SCRAP of metal and debris out of that field!
 

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