I guess finding a trash can is just too much work for some people!
Yesterday as I was planting rye in the soybean field along the road, I noticed a lot of trash lying among the stubble. This morning, I went back to pick it up. This is what I found…
Trash like this will very easily be either chopped up with the corn silage or baled up with the hay, finding its’ way in small, sharp pieces, into the cows feed.
One our best milking cows recently “went off feed”, began running a high fever, and dropped in milk production to almost nothing. She hunched her back as if she was in pain. After Jim and the vet checked her out, they determined that she is most likely suffering from “hardware”.
When a cow ingests a foreign object, it can pierce her stomach and cause pain and infection. In some cases, she recovers. In some cases, however, the object can go through the wall of her stomach and pierce her heart, causing irreparable damage. That’s what they think happened to this cow; the object most likely pierced the sack around her heart and may have damaged a valve.
We do what we can to prevent hardware. Each of our animals swallows a magnet like the one below...
The magnet remains in her stomach in hopes that it will draw pieces of metal to it, preventing them from going through the cow’s digestive system. But…in that small pile of trash that I found, there are glass bottles and pieces of hard plastic as well. And…the magnet is not foolproof.
#264 is slowly beginning to make more milk again. Her fever is down and her appetite is back, but she will not likely recover fully. She could have a relapse at any time and will probably have to be slaughtered.
All that said, throwing trash out the car window is not just ugly…it’s causing real problems for someone, somewhere! But I know none of you would ever consider it… right?!
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