What do you feel for when you do a rectal palpation in a cow?

Answer 1

A rectal palpation on a cow or heifer is done for three main reasons:

1) Checking for pelvic area in heifers to be used for the breeding herd.

2) Checking for cystic ovaries in cows that are not coming up pregnant

3) Checking for pregnancy status as well as gestation stage of the cow's calf.

For all the above, a producer and a veterinarian, depending who is doing the rectal-palpating, must be able to know bovine reproductive anatomy and have a bit of practice in order to know what to feel and where to expect to feel it. Note that the cervix is not felt for anything more than just location in respect to the uterus and onwards to the ovaries. The cervix is needed to be felt if the cow is being artificially inseminated which, in this case, is not being done. The uterus cannot be accurately felt via rectal palpation because of its malleability in the cow's abdomen in respect to the malleability of the rectal wall: both consist of the same malleability and texture. The one doing rectal palpation can't feel the uterine wall unless they can feel the fetus or feel the artificial insemination gun tip as it is guided from the cervix into the uterus. (For a vet checking reproductive connection in a heifer, a probe needs to be used to test, for example, whether the vagina is connected to the cervix, or the vagina and cervix to the uterus.)

Pelvic area can be done by hand or with a instrument called a Rice pelvimeter. The pelvimeter is inserted into the rectum and determine the height and width of the inside of the pelvic opening. By hand, the same measurements are taken, only it's more of an estimate of what size the pelvic opening should be versus the quantitative measurements taken with the Rice pelvimeter.

When feeling for the ovaries, it is done so in terms of size and texture. Cysts can be felt which can lead a veterinarian to pronounce the cow cystic. A veterinarian locates the ovaries by first feeling for the cervix (which feels like a rubbery cylinder) then moving forward deeper into the cow until the spherical-like ovaries can be felt.

Pregnancy checking involves feeling for the fetus inside the uterus and the size of the fetus in order to determine how far along the cow is. This can be done by hand, or with an ultrasound machine where the probe is inserted into the rectum and used to see, through ultrasound transferred to the image machine, the embryo or fetus. This is a technology gaining more ground in the dairy industry than the beef industry, however it is also used somewhat in the latter. The "old-fashioned" hand-feel rectal palpation is cheaper and often as accurate with experience as ultrasound.