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Plants Poisonous to Livestock. A Review

Department of Botany, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with poisonous plants in relation to livestock, and emphasizes the present status of our knowledge concerning situations as they occur in veterinary practice in the United States. There are many poisonous principles found in or on plants which are potentially disastrous to livestock, but which have not yet been troublesome because of certain deep-seated protective feeding habits. With few exceptions, animals will not become poisoned by plants unless forced to do so by some unusual or artificial condition of husbandry. The important corollary of this statement, which can not be adequately developed in this paper, is that control of plant poisonings of stock is to be sought not in removal of the plant—an often costly and always temporary expedient—but by change in management.

Minimum standards for the successful elucidation of a problem involving one or more poisonous plants include: Description of management conditions which have led to poisonings, the kind and age of livestock affected, a competent veterinary description of symptoms and lesions, a competent botanical determination of the plant, proof that the plant identified is the etiological factor, both by demonstration that it has been eaten in sufficient quantity and by experimental creation of the symptoms, an experimental determination of the lethal dose in terms of percentage of the animal's weight or other basis, extraction and identification of the poisonous principle to kind at least (i.e., alkaloid, glycoside, etc.) and, finally, a preliminary investigation to determine if there is variation in toxicity of the plant with geographic location or with stage of growth.