Sundown silver-star cow magnet

Details

A smooth cylindrical magnet is the shape most balling guns were designed around, which makes this the easy pattern to administer if you are dosing a lot of cattle in a day. It goes over the tongue, down to the reticulum, and stays there. Any ferrous metal the animal swallows afterwards — fence wire, a nail out of a corral rail, staples that came in with the bales — collects on it instead of migrating. That migration is the whole problem. The reticulum contracts hard and often, and a loose sharp object gets driven into and through the wall. Depending on where it goes, the result ranges from a cow that quietly loses condition and production to a fatal infection around the heart. There is no reliable way to diagnose it early and no cheap way to fix it late. One magnet per animal, once. Do it with a vaccination or processing event to save a handling, and keep a record, since there is no external sign of whether an animal has one. Replacement heifers are the usual target; if you have bought cows with no history, giving one anyway costs little. Handle and store them with some respect for what they are. Keep magnets away from pacemakers, phones, hard drives, and cards with magnetic stripes, and store them apart from one another and from a steel bench. Also keep the expectation right: a magnet holds iron and steel and nothing else, so it is a supplement to keeping the yard and feed clean rather than a substitute for it.