"It's Not a Toomah!!!"

A little Arnold Schwarzenegger humor to go along with my case of the week...

I was pregnancy checking heifers at one of my herd checks this week. As I've mentioned before, during herd checks, we always have to keep our eyes peeled for other things either happening with the animal we are currently working on, or other animals in the pen.  As I was checking this particular heifer, I noticed something hanging down from her udder. At first I thought it was just her tail that I caught out of the corner of my eye, but then I looked a little closer. Yup- it was attached to her udder and was hanging down between the front and back teats on the left hand side of her udder. It was a firm mass that almost appeared to be an extra teat, but was much more pendulous, hard and even had a portion of the mass that was black and rotting. It didn't seem to bother her as I was examining it, and it didn't feel attached to anything much deeper in the mammary tissue.

The mass hanging between the two teats

Now, as a review for those who do know, and info for those that may not, cows have 4 teats. Sheep, goats and horses have 2 teats, pigs can have up to 14, dogs-10, cats-8.  As the fetus develops, the teats start as buds of epithelial cells that continue to develop into teats. Normally there are more buds during development than will actually be there when the animal is born. The other buds normally regress. It is quite common in cows, however, to find extra teats. These are buds that continued to develop and form teats. Even if there is an extra teat there, it may not have the mammary tissue, or milk producing glands to go along with it.  Because the extra teats can be problematic at milking time and can still end up diseased, they are often removed as young calves.

This mass had some resemblance of a teat, but did not look like your typical extra teat, which looks identical to a normal teat. Also, we remove all extra teats on this farm as calves, when we are vaccinating them 8 months prior to the current age of this animal. So I decided I should remove it. There was talk of putting a castrating band on it, but we always worry about tetanus, other infections and breakage of the band before the mass has been removed. Also, dealing with the udder of a cow can be quite bloody, as there are lots and lots of blood vessels going to the udder to allow milk production when the animal starts to lactate.

As a side note, a cow will pump  about 500 gallons of blood through her udder a day to make one gallon of milk. That's a lot of blood for cows making 11 gallons of milk a day!!!!!

Because she was just a heifer and not lactating yet, and because it was a beautiful day, I opted for surgery. We sedated the cow and I blocked the area around the mass with lidocaine.  Because it was between the two normal teats, I had to be careful not to cut too deeply or cut into the tissue of the normal teats. As I could tell from examining it, it was not deeply attached to the rest of the mammary tissue and was quite easily removed. I sutured her up with degradable sutures and she looks good as new!

Final suture layer

Back to a normal looking udder!

The inside of the mass

And of course, I HAD to cut into the mass to see what it was. It did have elements of being a teat. There was a little teat canal in the dark, black, rotting tissue, but the rest of the mass was firm with edema. I'm not sure if she was missed as a calf, or if this is something that developed after we had already checked them for extra teats, but it would not have been something to leave for when she was a mature lactating cow, and there were thousands of gallons of blood pumping through her udder. If it were to catch on something and rip off, she could very well have bled to death. I'm glad we did the surgery and with a little time and allowing the area to heal, we may never be able to tell she had a "toomah" in the first place!!!!