TRP or Hardware Disease

[inyati13]

I recently had a cow get sick. She was not eating well and her behavior changed. The vet came and we put her in the squeeze chute. He examined her well and did not find anything wrong. I ask that he put a magnet in her. He did and also put in a couple of medications to get her digestive system back on tract. She is doing fine. We speculated that it may have been related to going on hay. The hay I am feeding is very rich since it has a lot of alfalfa. I worry about cows picking up metal. I have removed a lot of old fence and cleared a lot of my farm with a dozer. Pushing out old fence is going to leave metal no matter how careful you try to be. My question is how frequent is TRP (Traumatic Reticuloperitonitis) or hareware disease and does anyone else put magnets in their cows to help guard against it?

 

[dun]

When we fed hay baled using baling wire we put a magnet in everything. Now we're feeding hay baled with twine and haven;t bothered and haven;t had a problem.
When we would butcher a cow with a magnet we took the magnet and cleaned it and used it again. Amazing how much short pieces of metal would be stuck to it. We used the high quality stnless solid magnets, not the cheap laminated with plastic ones.

 

[Lucky_P]

Had a first-calf heifer, last winter, with TRP - starting out, I thought she was just lame on a front leg, but it got worse fairly quickly - walking slow and hunched up, 'crossing over' with her front legs as she walked, keeping her elbows out. A magnet and a big dose of LA-200, and she improved pretty quickly.
Had another cow this week, that started moving slow, hunched up, with head down - last one in to eat two days in a row - gave her a magnet on Friday morning. She's now standing right - no longer hunched up - but still walking slow and a little hunched. May take a few days for things to 'cool off', if the wire/nail had penetrated the reticulum and set up some local peritonitis.
I haven't committed to putting magnets in every cow, but the hardware's almost GOT to be coming in in the hay we buy - the only wire on this place is the HT fences we've erected since we bought this piece of property 18 years ago. The wife is a fanatic about not leaving any scrap of wire or nail lying around for fear of a hayburner stepping on it.

I see cows through the necropsy lab all the time that have old adhesions between the reticulum, diaphragm, and liver - indicating that they've had a previous bout of TRP - but those are incidental findings, and the offending wire/nail are long gone. Probably see a full-blown case of 'hardware disease', where the wire has penetrated all the way into the pericardial sac, resulting in constrictive pericarditis and heart failure, maybe once or twice a year.