Technically this condition is called traumatic pericarditis, but the name “hardware disease” gives a great clue to the source of the problem. As far as I can tell, this is almost exclusive a problem with cows, which makes sense because they tend to ingest a lot of things they shouldn’t.
But first, a little anatomy
You probably know your heart is a muscle. It lives in a thin sac, the pericardium, which is sort of like a bag with a bit of lubricant. The rest of the space in the chest is mostly taken up by the lungs. If you happen to be a cow, your rumen, the first of your four stomachs, is on the other side of the diaphragm.
When your heart muscle squeezes, it pushes blood into arteries. Then it relaxes and passively waits for the veins to fill it up again. Once it’s full, it contracts and sends the next bunch of blood along its way. Lather, rinse, repeat.
When it all goes bad
If you’re a cow and you happen to eat a piece of baling wire, it will likely stay in your rumen, not really causing a problem under normal circumstances. But if your rumen gets squished (generally due to late pregnancy or labor), that wire can poke through the stomach wall and the diaphragm, right into your chest.
That piece of wire has been hanging out in the rumen and is the opposite of sterile, so it’s no surprise the pericardium gets infected. Too much gas, pus, or blood building up in the pericardium means that when the heart relaxes, it can’t fill with blood — there’s no room to expand. That’s not compatible with life.
How to avoid a broken heart
These days a lot of hay bales are held together with nylon straps, so there aren’t as many pieces of baling wire on the ground. But there’s another way to solve this problem that’s pretty ingenious: magnets. For a couple dollars you can feed a bar magnet to a cow, and the magnet will sit in the rumen, grabbing any stray bits of wire, and keep anything from poking through the rumen. Problem solved!
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