Genital warts on bulls

[Eastcoaster]

Curious to find out some opinions on young bulls with warts on there penis. Has anyone experienced this problem? Can it be corrected? Are you taking a big risk using such a bull?

[perfecho]

Had the issue once that I recall, vet nipped it off, cauterized it and left for about two weeks before breeding, think everything worked out well.

[forage]

Sell, sell, sell Best answer

[perfecho]

Possibly clarify if it is Wart"s" or (1) wart..........

[Eastcoaster]

We are taking a bit of a gamble with him. He just came through our local bull test station here and is a nice looking bull. They seem to be having more cases of warts in the bulls going through there, maybe because they are checking for them more thoroughly. I feel that there were bulls that came through there before,and maybe still, with the virus and no problems seemed to stem from it. i understand that they build an immunity to it and loose the wart over time.We bought him at beef price , maybe test for breeding a few early animals and if he shows signs of trouble breeding we'll butcher him.Just the one wart about the size of the end of your thumb is what we seen.

[newguy]

We had one once and cut a wart off sent to U of S and had a vaccine made. Then used on bull. Some say just clip a wart then take pliers and rub wart back into open wound and it does the same as making a vaccine. Assuming bull has warts somewhere else to cut off and use.

[forage]

Once a again don't dick arround , these warts do spread to your females.The bull is not worth the risk.

[SADIE]

Wow---guys---it is time I step in a little bit.

My years in the beef cattle business and 20 years of practicing veterinary medicine genital warts are not that big of an issue.

1)Please if there is evidence that genital warts on a bulls penis spread to the females please give me reference of the documentation.

2)genital warts are often found during routine semen testing. Most can look big and invasive and most stem from a small neck attacting to the penis itself. Any disection on the penis tissue causes alot of blood flow. you do not want to disect(remove) or pull off just before breeding season. You do want to re-examine that bull on a semen test to see if the manual "pulloff" or the disection "scapel" caused enough immune response for the animal to set up a reaction and have the wart removed itself.

3) I prefer that each case like this be taken to your own veterinarian for advice and proceedure. IMHO and experience it was never a big issue in bulls for breeding and easily solved. Not many needed to be salvaged for slaughter.

Cheers

[Eastcoaster]

Thanks Sadie. We are taking the route of letting it be and testing him on some hiefers now. We are going to watch him closely and hope for the best. The scare is coming from our bull test station where there is some polictical things going on as they seem to want to cut the numbers of bulls going to the final sale by about 50%. I suspect some of the ones offered for sale in the final auction have the warts or at least are infected with the virus.

[forage]

Sadie the question of day is are there many different varieties of warts and which ones spread. Why I am asking is we had a purchased bull that was placed with 35 cows that had been selected for that breeding program. We never notice that the bull had wart growth on penis and when the cows were preg tested in the fall every one of the cows developed vagina warts both internal and external. The test vet recommended we check the bull and sure enough he had numerous warts.This was and isolated bunch of cows as we never had any in the rest of the herd. To eliminate the problem we treated all the cows and sold the bull. Problem solved.