Often, we might have chanced upon this sight - bovine animals grazing garbage. In our haste, or perhaps due to the commonality of this sight, we rarely stop to do anything about it.
Therefore the case of 52-kilograms of plastic waste recovered from the stomach of a cow at Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (TANUVAS) in Vepery might not come across as a surprise to most of us. But the quantity is indeed shocking. TNM was allowed to see the retrived plastic trash that will now be preserved in formaldehyde for further study. We were shocked to find black plastic bags in full, aluminium foil, Maggi and ParleG wrappers amongst many other indistinguishable items piled up in the human-sized mound placed on a gurney.
The accumulation of this plastic must have taken place over a period of two years opines Dr S Balasubramanian, Director (Clinics) at TANUVAS.
‘Suffered from severe stomach issues’
The cow, that has given birth to its third calf less than a month ago, was brought to TANUVAS by its owner P Munirathnam, an employee of the Ambattur Housing Society. Munirathanam, residing at Thirumullaivoyal, had purchased the cow just six months ago at a santhe (market) in Vellore along with three other cows. “I haven’t been receiving salary from my employer for the past 40 months and so to manage my family, I had to seek other ways,” says Munirathnam, whose first son is now studying medicine in Russia.
Munirathnam also tells us that the cow was pregnant at the time of purchase and looked huge and healthy.
When the cow could barely feed its own calf with milk, Munirathnam was worried. “It was constipated, had trouble urinating and kept kicking its underbelly with one of its legs. There was absolutely no milk either. I knew something was wrong,” he says. As advised by the local veterinarian, Munirathnam took his cow to the Vepery hospital.
“The cow had just given birth but we knew something was wrong with its stomach. We proceed to take blood tests and x-ray scans and these tests revealed that a surgery was required,” says Dr Sivakumar who performed the surgery with help from Dr Velavan, Dr Sivasankar, Dr Selvaraj, Dr Nagarajan, Dr Arunama, under-grad and post-grad students.