GASTRIC DISTURBANCE DUE TO FOREIGN BODIES. 199 



the gastric disturbances described below should be considered as 

 complications, and not as diseases. 



Causation. In young animals foreign bodies may be composed of 

 hairs, wool, bristles, cotton, and clover hairs. 



Hair balls are common in the rumen, and are sometimes met with in 

 the fourth stomach. They cause irritation, indigestion, sometimes pyloric 

 obstruction, dilatation, and eventually death. 



Wool balls in lambs, bristle balls in young pigs, cause much gastric 

 irritation. Cotton balls occur in lambs fed on cotton-seed cake ; the fibre 

 constitutes a foreign body. The hairs of clover leaves may form a ball 

 in the abomasum of lambs. 



Under the influence of depraved appetite animals of the bovine 

 species consume, apart from their regular food, the most varying sub- 

 stances, such as linen, fragments of wood, nails, stones, gravel, sand, etc. 

 Moreover, forage, even when of good quality, often contains foreign 

 bodies like nails and pins (when the fields are near factories), sewing or 

 knitting needles (when the animals are looked after by women), frag- 

 ments of iron wire derived from bales of compressed forage, etc., etc. 

 The ingestion of such objects is followed by various consequences, which 

 may be studied in three divisions, in the first of which the foreign object 

 is soft in character, in the second is blunt at one extremity and pointed 

 at the other, and in the third is pointed at both ends. 



(1.) Soft objects. The movements of the rumen, the warmth and 

 the action of the digestive fluids, may cause soft objects to be broken 

 up ; the disturbance they produce is then insignificant. 



Of such substances, however, some are quite incapable of digestion 

 (clothing, sacks, linen, etc.), and may produce obstructions ; others are 

 both indigestible and heavy (gravel and sand), and may fall into the 

 depressions of the compartments, where they remain, or, if passed into the 

 reticulum, may become arrested in the deepest lying part. They then 

 produce atony of the muscular coats, slowing of peristaltic movements, 

 diminution in the frequency of eructation, and, as an additional conse- 

 quence, chronic tympanites, sometimes visible at the flank. 



The symptoms are vague and common to a number of the digestive 

 diseases already described. The animals masticate without having any- 

 thing in the mouth ; rumination becomes irregular or is altogether sup- 

 pressed, but this is not characteristic, being a symptom common to 

 many visceral diseases. 



Later, as a result of auto-infection, diarrhcea sets in ; under the 

 influence of abnormal fermentation in the gastric compartments the 

 eructations become foetid ; the animals fall into a condition of marasmus. 

 Death usually results after a varying time— when large quantities of 

 foreign substances have been ingested, in twenty to thirty days. 



