This is proving to be a particularly bad year for ticks and theileria.
A couple of the late calves had some mild scours that ordinarily would not have been an issue. But even with treatment one died. Joe made an open field tackle to catch another one.
Theileria causes a severe anemia. You can see how pale this calf’s conjunctiva is.
Then while checking the rest of the field we saw a dead cow.
The masses of ticks have changed the behavior of the cows. They now just stand in a stagnant pond in the sun,
even though they have access to a mile of creek frontage with plenty of shade.
The dead cow was completely covered in ticks.
Her ears were just a solid mass of them.
There is no currently available treatment. The one drug listed as helping to control theileria, buparvaquone, is not available in the US. Farming has never been easy but it is getting a lot more difficult lately.
3 comments:
That is just awful! that poor cow....
Is there any way to change the environment to make it hostile to ticks that will still be safe for ranching?
We have it down here in South Africa, too. It's a real beast---although we're lucky to have approved drugs to treat it. Best we can do is pour-ons to prevent the ticks from biting in the first place, but it's by no means foolproof.
This was truly bad and ugly. Just awful. It is a scourge.
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