Timber Tongue a disease of the past that hasn’t entirely disappeared
Sometimes I might get a call, or might be shown an animal as an incidental case, while out doing something else.
“She has gone off the grub lately and she’s back in the milk”. As usual, I would carry out my routine examination of the animal, taking the temperature, listening to the rumen, checking for displacements, lungs, heart, mastitis and metritis etc. Such an animal might have a slight temperature and may, or may not, have a slight pouch under the jaw.
A pouch under the jaw could be caused by a few things, like a malfunctioning heart, liver fluke, or a disease we call “timber tongue”. Having listened to the heart already, and finding no abnormality, I would proceed to examine the mouth. With Timber Tongue, the tell-tale signs are usually yellow spots on the surface of the tongue which is hard, and hence the name.
This condition is not particularly common these days but it still occurs from time to time.
Back in the day, it was a fairly common occurrence, because of the diet animals had in those days. Silage was unknown, hay was the staple diet in the winter. Hay usually contained dried stalks of whatever was in the meadow like docks etc. Chewing these stalks, the animal was liable to nick its tongue, or the inner surface of the mouth.
Having punctured the surface, a bacterial agent called Actinobacillus Lignieresii, back to the old Latin names again, would then be free to invade the underlying tissues and multiply like wildfire, leading to a massive swelling with hard fibrous lesions. These bacteria normally live in the mouth and the upper digestive tract causing no apparent harm to the animal, but when the surface is cut, they cause untold damage.
Obviously the animal would have a fever in the beginning, and this would settle down to a more chronic temperature as time passed. The poor animal would not feel like eating, because of the intense pain it had in its tongue and mouth.
The tongue is used a lot more than we may think in the eating process, shifting food around so that it can be crushed and ground by the teeth.
When the tongue is rock hard, the animal cannot eat properly and, while it is hungry, and producing saliva at the thought of all the food in front of it, this saliva ends up running out of the mouth in a dribbling fashion. The soft tissues that are affected under the jaw swell, and the associated inflammatory fluid causes the classic jowl under the jaw in these animals.
It is not uncommon for the bacteria to produce granulomatous lesions in other areas of the animal. Lesions in the associated lymph glands are often picked up in the meat factory and submitted for further analysis to differentiate them from TB lesions.
Nowadays, it is far less common to find lesions due to Actinobacillus Lignieresii in the factory, because there is far less occurrence of timber tongue on farms. This is due to the almost total use of grass silage as winter forage in this country.
Veterinary surgeons throughout the country have their own preference in drugs used to treat Timber Tongue. But the best success comes when you, the farmer, calls for prompt treatment for your animal. Don’t leave it until you have something else veterinary to be seen. There is no vaccine available for this disease so the only prevention available is to make sure all stalks are removed from feed.
