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Abstract
Extract
Bowie is a disease of young sheep of some parts of the South Island, and occurs on restricted areas usually of the unimproved high country. The name has been derived from the most frequent and obvious abnormality, which is an outward bowing or bandiness of the fore legs. It is not, however, invariably the fore legs that are affected in this way, for in some lambs the hind legs are bandy, and in some the “bowing” is inwards instead of outwards. The condition has a superficial resemblance to the deformity in rickets in some species, and, indeed, was at one time thought to be rachitic in origin. Fitch (Citation1954), however, showed that the disease is not a form of rickets because it occurs in a season of the year when solar irradiation should provide an adequate level of vitamin D, because blood calcium and phosphate levels in affected animals are within normal limits, and because there are fundamental histopathological differences between the two diseases.