ANYWAY, Sorry its been so long! I feel like I am always apologizing for it being a long time between posts. Usually we try to have students keep the blogging up to date, but during the summer the supply of student bloggers is pretty low, and us staff members at the farm are usually trying to do other projects and stuff and it generally gets back-burnered, unfortunately.
I wanted to write an educational post this time. This one is about warts!
Yes, cows can get warts, and ours are no exception. They are usually caused by the bovine papilloma virus. Perdue University wrote a really easy to read article about this, which you can read by following this link:
https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/VY/VY-58.html
Usually the pesky warts show up on a heifer when she is around a year old or so. They can be on their neck, ears or even sometimes on their faces. They look yucky and can crack and be unpleasant. Generally once these gals grow up the warts tend to go away. I usually describe it to people as being a little like acne, some people get it as teenagers, and most of the time it clears up as they mature. For most of our heifers this holds true, which means that really all we need to do is keep an eye out for infection, and wait for them to go away.
Sometimes the gals get warts around their brucellosis tag, which is not fun either. They go away usually in the same time frame, but they look gross in the meantime, and are usually itchy and crusty (from what the gals tell me). The brucellosis vaccine and eartag is mandatory if we ever wanted to sell our cattle out of state, and since we have a pretty nice registered herd, its important to keep that option open. Also, I would prefer that no one gets brucellosis, so there's that too. It would be nice if not tagging them was an option, but because this is a state-regulated thing done by the vet, it stays.
Occasionally though, we have had one or two ladies that the wart has persisted a little longer. Warts are opportunistic buggers and like to spread if there are openings in the skin, which means that any time they get any boo boos near the wart they could be looking at getting more warts. It also means that by scrubbing on a wart to clean it off, we open it up to grow more. Both of these options suck, so we decided to talk to look into matters a little deeper.
Option A) There are companies that can make a vaccine against warts! We liked that idea, but upon doing further research and consulting with several professionals, we found out that they are not nearly as effective as we were hoping. We already vaccinate for pretty much everything, and the idea of having to poke the ladies with yet another needle full of something that may or may not be effective didn't sound very nice. Maybe as science progresses further we can re-evaluate.
We evaluated Option A as:
effectiveness 2.5 out of 5
stress: 1.5 out of 5
Option B) Surgery is an option. This can be as simple as using pliars or something of the like to pinch off the base of the wart, and then remove it, or as complex as actually using a scalpel and removing the wart and much of the surrounding tissue, then following this with stitches and salve of some kind. These options are very unpleasant, and result in an animal that has to be on antibiotics and sometimes pain killers for a period of time.
We evaluated Option B as:
effectiveness 4 out of 5
stress 4 out of 5
Option C) Wait longer. This option is the one that has been pretty much universally recommended. As they mature, the warts should regress on their own.
effectiveness 4.5 out of 5
stress 1 out of 5
So, based on these options, it looks like Option A is pretty low stress but doesn't really work, Option B is pretty high stress and usually works, and Option C is low stress and usually works. The choice seems pretty apparent.
Now, you may notice that I did not say that Option C is 5/5 effectiveness... We have found that cattle typically do not read the literature nor do they all follow the rules. The majority of our gals are wart free by the time they are two and a half, although I have had two gals that have kept their warts until three and a half.
In the end, the warts will go away, which is really the main goal. If someone requires intervention or vet assistance, we readily supply it as necessary. Warts are annoying, but just like with people, they don't really hurt anything.
I keep reminding the girls that they should work on being "wart free by birthday three" (as if they could actually do anything about it, but hey, its a fun phrase, so I keep using it). Some of them seem to like this advice, and give me a big hearty scratchy lick to show their approval. Others, who are less ensnared by catchy phrases give the the old dad-joke-eye-roll and go on chewing their cuds, ignoring me entirely. As usual.