HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H01084 10/17/01 "PASTURE BLOAT DISEASE IN FFMC" =================================================================== Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 15:50:28 -0500 From: David Havird Subject: Swollen sheep A class of mine is reading MADDING CROWD. We were discussing the "troubles in the fold" and a student wanted more information than the notes provide about what's physically wrong with the sheep. All I could do was to highlight the note (this is in the Oxford World's Classics edition) that the sheep are "suffering from a bloated stomach filled with gas caused by eating too much green food such as fresh clover" and acknowledge that I myself am a city boy. Can any of you throw further light on the phenomenon--why clover? exactly why the condition is potentially fatal--and on the remedy, or point me to a handy secondary source? DH David Havird Associate Dean of the College Department of English Centenary College of Louisiana Shreveport, LA 71134-1188 (318) 869-5085 or 5240 ========== Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 16:55:09 -0400 From: jgould@andover.edu (John Gould) Subject: Re: Swollen sheep David, When I was teaching FFMC to a class here at Andover, this question naturally arose. I asked our vet what was going on. I no longer have the information -- actually, she told me more than I needed to know or remember -- but she was very familiar with the "blasted" sheep, and had indeed dealt with it. Perhaps a local vet can do the same for you. John Gould ========== Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 07:45:20 +1000 From: David Cornelius Subject: Re: Swollen sheep David, Clover is a leguminous plant which provides good fodder when eaten in small quantities. Cattle and sheep love it and tend to over eat. This apparently produces an excess of stomach gas - methane, I think. I recall instances of dairy cattle breaking into the clover paddock and suffering bloat. Gabriel's method was similar to the one used to rescue them. I imagine it is similar to the feeling one gets if one overeats. You will probably find something on the net under sheep or cattle bloat. Regards, David Cornelius ========== From: "seth lachterman" Subject: Re: Swollen sheep Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 18:00:16 -0400 Dear David, The disease is known as "Pasture Bloat Disease" and there is a discussion of this phenomenon (and the role of clover) in the following URL: http://www.zyworld.com/Richard_Janes4/Bloat.htm Any agricultural site can shed more light on this topic. Seth Lachterman ========== Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 17:17:42 -0500 From: David Havird Subject: Re: Swollen sheep Thanks a million to you, Seth, and to others who've responded so quickly. David ========== Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 15:17:34 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Re: Swollen sheep I'm a city person too, David, but my father who owned coal mines in Australia when pit ponies were still in vogue, once told me how some of his horses broke through a fence, got into the clover and gorged themselves until their stomachs ruptured and they died. In the old sixties film of FFMC I remember Gabriel (Alan Bates wasn't it?) poking what looked like a tube with a short pointed end into the sheep's abdomens to relieve the gas. Betty Cortus ========== Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 19:36:50 -0500 From: Bill Morgan Subject: Re: Swollen sheep David, Just one more tid-bit to add to what Seth and others have told you: the instrument that Gabriel uses to pierce each afflicted sheep's side is called a trochar and canula. One piece is a long dagger-like knife; the other is just a piece of pipe or conduit. I'm not sure which is which, but my minimal knowledge of Latin suggests that the trochar is the knife. There used to be a set in the Dorset County Museum--back in the Bygones Room--but last time I looked I couldn't find it. cheers, Bill Morgan ========== Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 22:53:35 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Swollen sheep It's still at the DCM, Bill, I saw it last summer. I was trying to figure out how it worked. It's not a very large instrument -- two-three inches long maybe? and I think the best analogy is with the Epi-Pen (epinephrine auto-injector). You press the casing of the trochar against the gut to fix the point of penetration and then plunge in the blunt head of the pricker which is really more like a hypodermic needle than a knife. The plunging is limited by the rim of the trochar (much like an acupuncture needle) and looks as if it only penetrates an inch or so into the gut and thus, I suppose, punctures the membrane and releases the intestinal gas. That's how it looked to me but if there are any sheep farmers out there maybe they can improve on my ovine dabblings. Cheers, Rosemarie ========== Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 10:54:30 -0400 From: "Keith G. Wilson" Subject: Re: Swollen sheep I remember staying in a village in mid-Wales in the early-1960s and getting to know an elderly shepherd, who carried around with him, in an old tobacco tin, primitive veterinary devices that he still occasionally used in isolated hill emergencies. Among them was a small contraption for dealing with bloat. My memory of it was that it was close to what we are familiar with from FFMC and what Bill describes below: a pointed metal spike that fitted into and protruded beyond a surrounding metal tube. After the spike was plunged into the critical point, it (the spike) was raised within, or perhaps even removed from, the tube, and the tube pressed down on the area around the hole that had been created, through which the air escaped. I never actually saw this being used, but the shepherd assured me that he did still use it. One of the reasons that I registered it all so clearly was that I had recently read _Far From the Madding Crowd_ for the first time, courtesy of which I, a London-reared boy who barely knew a sheep from a goat, was able to earn entirely unwarranted respect from the shepherd (who was almost as suspicious of anyone raised in a city as he was of the English) for my apparent familiarity with what he was describing. Keith Wilson Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5 Tel: (613) 562-5770 Fax: (613) 562-5990 e-mail: kgwilson@uottawa.ca ========== Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 16:57:49 -0400 Subject: Re: Swollen sheep and asphyxiated Gabriel From: "Philip & Andrea Allingham" Still on the subject of the expiring sheep in *FFMC*, why do they leap just before they expire? I confess the image on the mind's eye Hardy creates through this peculiarity is one of gigantic kernels of popcorn jumping in the popper. While the sheep are plagued by lethal indigestion (fatal doses of methane as a clover by-product), in the opening instalment Gabriel nearly expires (the subject of the initial plate in the serial version in *The Cornhill Magazine* for January, 1874) from carbon monoxide poisoning by neglecting to open the ventillation louvers in his sheep shack. As Gabriel comes to the rescue of Bathsheba's sheep by deflating them, so in the opening number Bathsheba rescues Gabriel: is there a pattern here? Philip V. Allingham, I/S English Curriculum & Instruction, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University: "Those who can, do; those who can't,...." ==========