CLAIMS BY a spokesman for animal breeders that sheep were “stoned” on a common herb and not suffering from suspected foot and mouth disease were rubbished yesterday by a plant and herb expert on the island.
“Foot and mouth is so easy to detect that if the veterinary tests say it’s foot and mouth disease, then it is,” said Alexander McGowan.
A spokesman for the animal breeders said on Monday the sheep in question had simply eaten a herb known locally as soumaji, which had certain side-effects on the animals that the authorities picked up on.
McGowan said sheep could suffer a form of drunkenness from eating soumaji but said there was no correlation between the symptoms of that condition and foot and mouth.
Foot and mouth disease is characterised by high fever that declines rapidly after two or three days, blisters inside the mouth that lead to excessive secretion of stringy or foamy saliva and to drooling; and blisters on the feet that may rupture and cause lameness.
Soumaji is part of the Rhus family, a genus of approximately 250 species of flowering plants commonly called sumac or sumach, and some species include poison ivy and poison-oak.
Sumac is used in Middle Eastern cuisine as a spice and the leaves contain tannin, which furthers the plant’s use in the leather dyeing industry.
McGowan said it was plentiful in the Paphos area but he also said sheep don’t generally eat it. “Sheep are grazing animals and don’t browse,” he said meaning sheep mainly eat grass while goats will eat from trees and shrubs.
He said however the sheep could eat sumac if it was on the ground. “But it doesn’t form part of their natural diet,” he said. “You don’t see sheep leaping up trees”.
McGowan said the sheep could get stoned if the berries they ate were fermented just as elephants often became “drunk” from eating fermented bananas.
“If the fruit falls off and they eat it, it could cause drunkenness in sheep, depending on how fermented they were,” he added. But this would not cause the type of sores in the mouth and feet of the animals that is seen with foot and mouth disease.
