PAPERSPAST

DISEASES OF CATTLE.

Although we do not profess to give anatomical details in this article it may be of service to describe briefly the process of digestion in the ox. The ox is liable to choking by attempting to swallow a piece oi; turnip. or other food tx> large for the gullet. A stout new rope is often mad&todo duty where no proper probang ia available, and if. the resistance is not; great may succeed. Oowrkeepers should, however, be warned against the dangerous practice of employing a cart whip, which has a knack of coming undone at the thong and getting left in the gullet. A probang and gag should always be at hand where cattle are kept.

From the gullet the imperfectly masticated food passes into the rumen paunch, or first stomach, wbere it is macerated for a time before being returned for a further grinding (chewing the cud). Sometimes the rumen is overloaded, and the animal moans, the flanks swell, aad much dangor exists* The probang has to be used, or perhaps the stomach pump, after injecting fluid to dissolve the food, or in some cases it becomes necessary to make an incision and remove the food by the hand. A more easily dealt with trouble is tympanites or hoven which results from an excessive evolution of gas in the rumen. A simple and often effectual remedy is a dose of ivro drachms 'of chlorinated lime mixed with half'a pint of water. The function of the second stomach (reticulum or honeycomb) is further to prepare the food for remastication. After the second chewing the food passes into tlia thud stomach, ormaniplies, which consist of a series of leaves which uitiuute the food into a state of division, and thence into the fourth stomach, iv which true digestion takes place. The order in which the food is received into the various stomachs is not very clear, but from the slaughter of an animal in the act of feeding Professor Simonds infers that the above is the correct one. A single experiment upon one kind of food, is however, scarcely conclusive, as pocket knives and bunches of keys have been found in the rumen after months and years and there is reason to suppose that the stomach of the cow has some power of selection like that commonly accorded to the pylorus or intestinal opening of the stomach in man, which rejects a foreign body time after time aud finally allows it to pass. I am etc., John C. Cabman, P.S Dr., M.P.S., N.Z. Chemist, Warkwortfc For Children's Hacking Cough at uight, Woods' Great Peppermint Cure, Is 6d, 2s 6d

Click here to view this newspaper article

This text was automatically generated by a computer. It has not been manually reviewed or corrected and may include errors. You can view the article in its original format or read the entire page.

About the computer-generated text

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process for automatically extracting text from scanned pages. OCR enables searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is not 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original newspaper and its condition at the time of microfilming. Newspapers with poor quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple column layouts or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.

The page where this item appears has an estimated OCR accuracy of 97.95%.