January 15, 2021 12:00 pm
Scour occurs when the gut becomes compromised and calves lose proper functioning of the intestine, resulting in diarrhoea and loss of fluids. This is the most common health problem affecting calves, especially in the first six weeks of their life.
There are two forms of scour associated with calves: Nutritional and infective.
Nutritional scour can be caused by stress factors, dietary changes or change in the management routine. Nutritional scour could then progress to infection based when the calf accumulates pathogens.
Scour symptoms such as runny white or yellow faeces, reduced feed intake, weight loss, sunken eyes due to dehydration and weakness can be easily recognised in calves but determining what is causing the symptoms is much more difficult.
Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest - vigorous, funny, angry, blithe - beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon s last is vividly alive. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames & Hudson) is a judicious selection from the magnificent six-volume Complete Letters of 2009. Had he not been a painter, Van Gogh could have made his name as a writer, as his correspondence shows. Impassioned, often heartbreaking, furious, funny and tender, these letters form a unique testament from a pivotal figure in 19th-century art. For my third choice, I am going to flout the rules by picking a book to be published in January 2021: Billy O Callaghan s Life Sentences (Cape) is a superb and moving novel of