Treating Lump Jaw, Start to Finish! (Not for the Squeamish!!)

where we last left off i just weaned the calves off of the cows and while i was doing that i noticed that i had a cow in here that's got a pretty severe abscess on her jaw i've been referring to her as lump jaw now so if you hear me call her that that's why normally lump jaw presents itself as a smaller lump it almost looks like the cow has a chew in or something and it won't be maybe a few weeks and that abscess will go away on its own this cow however is probably the most extreme case i've had in my herd and i think that she is bad enough to where we're going to have to actually lance this and drain it to help her heal up a little faster you can see how swollen her face is and i think it's making it hard for her to eat because she's losing body condition as well so we've got her separated from the herd we're going to drain that abscess right now and we'll give her her own feed ration in here where she doesn't have to fight anybody to get it and i'm hoping that we can put some body condition back on her and get her feeling good again so without further ado let's get her in the chute and get started [Music] i probably should mention although i think it goes without saying this video is going to be gross this procedure is not pretty and if you're squeamish at all i'm going to say probably you don't want to watch this so i'm going to give you a fair warning right now hey make a turn make a turn okay now that we've got her in the chute we can see a little bit better what is wrong with her if you can see [Music] i know i'm sorry you can see [Music] down there on her jaw there her chin it's really swollen well it's not swollen per se but she's got a big pus pocket there is what it is and it's putting a lot of pressure on her face and i'm sure it's uncomfortable so the way to tell if these are ready to be lanced is you want to feel it which she doesn't want me to of course but basically if that abscess feels hard or firm it's probably not ready to lance yet but if you feel like a soft spot almost like a uh like a water balloon that's um very tight i guess would be the best way to describe it and then it's ready to go so i felt hers a little bit before i picked up the camera here and i can determine that it is ready to lance so we're gonna have to restrain her head a little bit better so that i can get in there with a scalpel and do it i don't want her to jerk her head or something as i'm lance in the abscess because she could really hurt herself that way and me we don't want to forget that but um the best way to do this is to get her backed up in the chute kind of as far as we can and then i'll put a halter on her and get her head tied up and we'll kind of see if she can move and if i'm satisfied with the fact that she can't then we'll go ahead and do it so i've got this pipe in front of her that'll help keep her from being able to move forward on me but what i really need to get her to do is just to back up where i can pinch her with the body squeeze and then i think i don't know getting the halter on there is going to be a kind of a trick too because her face is so swollen it's not really going to tie up normally how it would but we're going to we're going to have to figure it out [Music] good so far i'm sure this is not i feel very good to you okay we might not tie this up need to tie your head up okay so the first thing i'm gonna do is kind of figure out where i'm gonna pierce her skin and i think right here is a good soft spot so make sure there's we're lucky there's no mud or anything but i'm still going to get some iodine up on there and just sort of try to kind of sterilize the area best we can and now we are ready for a scalpel it should probably go without saying that you don't want to do this with a pocket knife you want something sharp and like the scalpel that i'm using it's not very long because what you really don't want to do is stick that up in there too far and hit her her jaw bone or something like that we just want to only pierce the skin and i think we better do it because you can tell that she's not comfortable all right so what can happen like what just happened if there's something sort of clotted in there i can stop the flow and so you just kind of got to sit here and babysit it and um hope that you keep a good oh man that's splattering all over me you guys be glad you're only seeing this on camera because this smells really really bad i guess there's no point really in washing my hands just yet because we aren't done i don't think poor girl okay [Music] okay so now that we've got a lot of that drained um it's still i know it still doesn't probably look like we got it all but i'm sure there's a lot of inflammation in her face still i think she looks better already um but still she's gonna get some antibiotics we're gonna give her a treatment of this and then get her out of the chute and put some food in front of her and i'm sure she's hungry and is ready for me to be out of her face so we'll just try to get this done as fast as we can [Music] i hate giving shots on this side okay so if you guys are wondering why i'm giving her so many shots and it's all the same antibiotic but the reason is that you don't want to give more than 10 cc's on one injection site and for this antibiotic she needs about 40 cc's so unfortunately for her that means four different injections this is the last one [Music] all right so we got her abscess drained i think i got all of it i i could not get any anymore to come out of there but she does still look you know kind of like she just got her wisdom teeth pulled but i think that's just inflammation so what we're gonna do is we'll fast forward a week and see how she's doing [Music] well we didn't quite make it a week about three days after the initial training i noticed that she had some blockage in her chin that had to be removed what you got going on down there are we gonna have to get you in the shoot still kind of skinny i certainly wouldn't say that this is uncommon but definitely something that shouldn't be ignored yuck good morning it's been about two weeks since we lance and drained that cow so let's run down to the pen here and see how she's doing [Music] after the initial draining two weeks ago i did have to come back in a couple days later and remove some dead tissue but other than that it's really just been rnr for her in here i think her body condition looks a little bit better now probably still not as great as it needs to be but she's definitely on the mend as you guys can see she looks a ton better in fact i think she is probably ready to go back out with the rest of the cows being as her water's full and her feeder bunk here is full i'm gonna just let her stay in here for the rest of the day to finish this stuff up but other than that i would say she has pretty much made a full recovery now if you've made it this far through the video then chances are that you didn't just come here to see the gross part and you're actually interested about treating lump jaw or just learning more about it so i think probably the question that most people are asking is how is this cause and is there any way to prevent it i want to try to explain this in the simplest way that i know how and this is basically the way that i understand it as well for a lump jaw to occur the first thing that has to happen is the cow has to um scratch or otherwise cut the inside of her mouth this could happen from from what i read a sharp blade of grass i find that kind of hard to believe i would say more likely it's going to be a seed head possibly a fox tail maybe a stick or even a nail or a wire if she might encounter something like that once there is a cut inside of her mouth she then also has to have a certain type of bacteria present there now i'm not going to attempt to say the name of the bacteria and i'm not sure that it's really all that important but there is a specific kind of bacteria that will cause this so basically at that point you have your cut you have your bacteria the two get together and they make an infection the cow's response to this infection is to basically surround the infection and encase it and therefore prevent it from spreading to the rest of the body this manifests itself as that big pus pocket that we saw so when i gave the cow antibiotics earlier that wasn't an attempt to try to treat the pus pocket itself because the pus pocket has blocked itself off from blood flow from the body and that is how it keeps the infection from spreading that injection was more to just sort of help her immune system and help fight anything else that might be going on because when she does have that abscess i always think that it's more likely that she could get dragged down from other things now if left unattended these pus pockets will often burst on their own but usually that's not going to happen until the pus pocket just gets so big and uncomfortable that the skin can no longer contain it which is really kind of a gross thought my biggest question and i'm sure that is a question that you guys are going to have as well is what are all those chunks that come out of the abscess well what that is is dead tissue and i think that's just a result of the infection usually you'll find that stuff because as the abscess is draining it'll kind of plug that hole up so it's a good idea to pull that stuff out and make sure that that abscess has a chance to drain completely now i am certainly no vet and this is really not intended to be an instructional video just more of a what i did video but if you guys have any questions i'll do my best to answer them just leave them in the comments below well the cows are fed i think number 11 is ready to go back in with the main herd and i guess that means i can go to work thanks for hanging out with me today guys and i hope i'll see you again on farmer tyler ranch [Music] so [Music] bye

Channel: Farmer Tyler Ranch

Views: 3,752,294

Keywords: Lump jaw, Abscess, Draining, Draining an abscess, How to lance an abscess, Lance, Farmer Tyler ranch, Our Wyoming Life, Stoney ridge Farmer, Treating lump jaw

Id: hi5A_IWWNRo

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020