COMMON DISEASES OF CATTLE

The cow is generally healthy and if fed, stabled and cared for properly she will seldom be ill.

When a cow is sick, provide clean, comfortable quarters, with plenty of bedding and let her lie down.  If weather is cold, cover her with a blanket.  A healthy cow has a good appetite, the muzzle is moist, the eye bright, coat is smooth, the horns are warm, breathing is regular, the milk is given in good quantities and the process of rumination is constant soon after eating.  The sick cow has more or less fever, the muzzle is dry and hot, the breathing is rapid, no appetite, an increase in the pulse, dull eye, rough coat, a suspension of rumination, and the cow will stand alone with head down.  Usually all that is needed is Pratts Cow Remedy with bran mashes and good digestible feed.  Give pure, clean water, and careful attention.

Preventing Milk Fever

Many excellent cows have been lost through milk fever within a day or two of the birth of the calf.  The preventive measures include: 

(1) Reducing the quantity of the food fed.

(2) Feeding food that is not unduly succulent, lest the milk flow should be overstimulated.

(3) Giving a mild purgative a day or two before the calf is born, or within a few hours after its birth.  The purgative most commonly used is Epsom salts, and the dose is three-quarters of a pound to one pound.

(4) Removing only a small portion of the milk at a time for the first two or three days.  Only moderate amounts of food are necessary until the danger of milk fever is past.  Where Pratts Cow Remedy has been given, there is little, if any, danger of milk fever.  The value of this splendid prescription during the calving season has been tested time and time again.

Abortion

A germ disease highly contagious and one of the most injurious of those which affect dairy cattle.  The money-making value of a herd in which the germs of contagious abortion are permitted to exist will be completely destroyed.

A cow which has once aborted will do so again unless carefully treated.  So contagious is the disease that the germs introduced into a perfectly healthy cow will cause her to abort, and it is no uncommon thing for the infection to spread through an entire herd in a single season.  The herd bull readily becomes a source of herd infection, and service from a bull, where there are aborting cows should be refused.

Cause.—­By infection, the herding together of a large number of cows, high feeding, smutty corn and ergotty pastures.  In a small number of cows abortion may result from accidental injuries.  Such cases are pure accidents and are not to be considered along with contagious abortion.

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Bradford, Ohio.

     Abortion had got a hold on my herd and I was expecting to have to
     dispose of them, when Pratts Cow Remedy came to my rescue.  Calves
     are all coming now at the right time.