by John Hicks
We set to and passed a stomach-tube (smooth transparent tubing about the diameter of standard household hosepipe) up the nostril one of the less sick looking heifers sitting in front of us and when we were sure it was in the right place and not entering her lungs, we tipped our bottles of vinegar into her.
This is a story without a happy ending. The one and a half heifers we were able to treat both died. In the words of my trusty copy of Blood and Henderson’s Veterinary Medicine: Treatment is unlikely to be effective but the oral administration of a weak acid such as vinegar may reduce the amount of ammonia absorbed. Sometimes, as a vet, you are on a hiding to nothing. And then the self-questioning begins.
I wish it hadn’t been on Dave’s farm. He and his wife had experienced a string of bad luck since they’d moved there the previous autumn. Nothing that Sid or I had done had made any difference. The final toll was ten heifers dead, and there was the distinct possibility that those that were sick, but recovered, would abort their calves. The only consolation was that it could have been worse. Dave had been philosophical throughout, in the best farming tradition. But understanding the financial pressures some of these young entrepreneurial dairy families were under puts greater pressure on the vet to achieve a good result. I had done all I could, but it wasn’t good enough.
A few days before this incident, I had been introduced, at a school social event, to an English immigrant who had settled on a dairy farm near Dunedin. “You might like to meet John, Ray. John’s a vet from Southland.” Like most vets I prefer not to talk shop and try to avoid veterinary topics at social events. However, the hostess had done her part and started the ball rolling. It was one that Ray soon stopped. “I don’t use a vet. I do all my own vetting.” Short of telling him or her that they are a waste of space, it is the one of the best put down lines for a vet. That was, more or less, the end of the conversation.
I privately seethed later. So what would Ray have done if his heifers started to go down like flies? Given my recent efforts he would have saved himself quite a lot of money by not calling a vet. On the other hand, by involving his vets, Dave had a good understanding of exactly what had happened, the long-term risks and perhaps some peace of mind as a result. He could also have filed a plausible insurance claim. Most vets are proud of their profession, but that is very different from being arrogant. Too many times we end up in hopeless situations, as I did on Dave’s farm, which serve to remind us of our fallibility, something I would never deny. Ray, an arrogant man, was perhaps guilty of judging me by his own standards.
~
I have fond memories of my early years in Otautau. They seemed to be more relaxed until the sheep farming recession of the 1980’s and the dairy farming revival of the 1990’s combined to change the face of Southland farming forever. Jim Turnbull had a “couple” of beef cows down and could I have a look?
It turned out to be an interesting “look”, and I’ve kept the case notes to this day…
It was a glorious February afternoon in 1980 when I drove to Jim’s farm set on flats between the Takitimu mountains and the Fiordland hills across the other side of the Waiau river. High summer: the sweet smell of cut grass wafted through my windows. I breezed past patchwork paddocks: tawny, sage and verdant green: hay bales strewn haphazardly beneath a blazing sun. Above, the russet tussock yielded to the steeper, barer slopes – already shadowing to lavender in the slant of afternoon light. High, high above, the rocky, sunlit summits dreamed in another realm.
I gazed into a large paddock next to the cattle yards while I waited for Jim to turn up. A group of fat Hereford cows reclined at the far end, a picture of peace. Their rich red coats contrasted with the brilliant green of fresh grass resurgent above remnant whisps of hay. I love these scenes, but this was no time for reverie. Jim soon arrived in his Landrover, with a tangle of dogs on the back.
“Gidday, John.”
“Where are these cows, Jim?” I asked.
“Right in front of you!” I looked more closely at the group and realised things were not as restful as they seemed. We drove up to them. Two or three of the cows were in deep respiratory stress and heaving as they fought for each breath. One cow was dead. If it was what I thought it was, I had never seen it before, indeed, it had never previously been recorded in New Zealand. The paddock had, as I had observed, been cut quite recently for hay. The old fashioned English term for the delicate tips of new grass springing up after the hay has been harvested is “foggage”. Fog fever was, from my memories of fifth year veterinary medicine, typically seen in Hereford cattle released onto foggage. It is, in essence, a severe anaphylactic reaction to a chemical component (L-tryptophan) found in such pastures.
“When did you put these cows in this paddock, Jim?”
“I just let them in this morning. I lost six in here last week, but I never phoned you because I just thought it was bloat. A good thing I looked in on them just before I rang you. What do you think it is?”
I told him about fog fever. “…but to confirm it I ought to open up this old girl and see what her lungs look like.”
We drove all the cows that we could move out of the hay paddock and onto some rough grazing. For the most severely affected of the remaining cows, struggling for breath and wheezing, I tried what I could find in my car – antihistamines and even some vials of expired adrenalin. It wasn’t as though you geared up in case you might run into a massive outbreak of a disease previously unrecorded in New Zealand. I was three quarters of an hour from base so, if what I had didn’t work, it would take too long to obtain more.
Jim watched as I opened up the dead cow’s chest with my post-mortem knife and snapped back a few ribs to expose the lungs. It’s rewarding to be able to demonstrate these things to farmers. They have usually butchered meat for the house and have a fair idea of what normal organs should look like. The lungs I showed Jim were not normal – light, pink and fluffy – but heavy, waterlogged, and darkened with congested blood. Some parts had overcompensated and were stretched with emphysema. There was extensive bleeding throughout. It was easy to see that no drugs could have reversed this severe damage nor, by way of confirmation, did they seem to be making much difference to the cows I had treated earlier. However, in the end Jim was lucky and my records reveal that he only lost a couple more cows from this episode.
Hugh Montgomery, one of the veterinary pathologists at Invermay Animal Health laboratory, confirmed my suspicions from the lung sample I sent to the laboratory: Histological examination of the lungs of the dead cow showed severe intra-alveolar oedema with a highly eosinophilic fluid in which were formed hyaline membranes and fibrin balls… Clinically and pathologically this is typical of ‘fog fever’… Hugh later submitted an article about this case concluding: The name ‘fog fever’ is not related to atmospheric conditions, but derives from the British rural term ‘foggage’ for the regrowth occurring on paddocks cut for hay or silage. It is an unfortunate name as there is no fever either, but the alternative is the cumbersome American name of ‘acute bovine pulmonary oedema and emphysema’…
~
It was the very quirkiness of the name “fog fever” that led me to its diagnosis. Acute bovine pulmonary oedema and emphysema (aka ABPE or bovine atypical interstitial pneumonia) is described in modern textbooks – but the academics still haven’t managed to dislodge that inaccurate, but memorable term “fog fever”, and I hope they never will. When diseases of livestock have all been reduced to acronyms: SMEDI, BVD, BHM, BSE and any other combination of capital letters you could possibly think of, is ABPE any help? The surfeit of acronyms favoured by modern pathologists and clinicians merely serves to fog our cluttered minds and pucker our fevered brows. Indeed, I suspect that acronyms are a leading cause of human fog fever syndrome (HUFFS).
Should this powerful plea for retaining the poetry of our language, even into scientific matters, not have convinced you otherwise, I would like to present another moving story of death and dying – not of an animal, but of a
word:
A requiem for swingletrees
On one of the first farms I visited in my new career as a vet, an old Taranaki farmer proudly demonstrated to me his contraption for lifting a cast cow. He had linked his Bagshaw hoist – comprising pipe-metal loops that are tightened across the pelvis (now usually called hip clamps) and provide the means to lift the back end of a cow – to a stout wooden spar with a metal pivot in the centre. To the other end of the spar he had tied a thick rope in a double bowline round the cow’s chest and front legs. When he raised the spar by the pivot with the front-end-loader of his tractor the cow was raised front and back. That was the theory; but in practice his contraption wasn’t very efficient. If a cow isn’t ready to stand she will slump, whatever high tech device is used.
My farmer’s creation was triumph of nostalgia over practicality. How disappointed he was that even I, a recent immigrant from the “old country”, didn’t know what that wooden spar was called. It was, in fact, a sturdy relic from the days of horse power: a swingletree (also, delightfully, a whippletree).
As a lad he had harnessed up the family Clydesdale to a cart or plough using that swingletree, securing the traces at each end to the collar of his massive companion, and bolting the plough through the pivot. This arrangement permitted a straight pull and eliminated the tendency for the plough to see-saw at each stride. Alas, in me, my farmer was dealing with a generation profoundly ignorant of what had once been a major part of his life. The horse, in agriculture, has all but gone. But, more insidiously, an ancient vocabulary is vanishing with it.
And now it is my turn to mourn. For in the very word swingletree I sense a route to Old English that will soon fade into oblivion. William Langland’s pious character, Piers Plowman, one of the first men to walk the pages of mediaeval English literature, would have been able to share my old farmer’s dreams, as would all the generations over more than seven hundred years since; yet I could not. New words may come thick and fast, replacing those we lose – modem, router, i-pod, javascript – but without the historical links they seem disconnected and ephemeral. They weren’t here yesterday and they won’t be here tomorrow. They lack the life force of swingletrees, hames and crupper straps – although I did feel something very powerful was going on when the “motherboard” recently crashed my computer!
Chapter Twenty-one
Music for Cows: Radios for Racing
Music is said to be the speech of angels: in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite. – Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
It is not a good idea to rely on the newspapers for unbiased and useful scientific information. Sometimes, however, it would be nice if it were. I would love to believe the reports I read about music played to animals as a form of relaxation – something that makes cows more settled in the shed, pigs more porky and hens more clucky. It is a touchy-feely subject and I know of no scientific proof that it works. Conclusive proof of well-being for animal scientists tends to be linked to increased productivity, which is a measurable effect: higher milk yields, faster weight gains, more eggs. Happiness per se, is not measurable. But a happy cow, the theory goes, will produce more milk than a sad cow. Currently, cows are not amenable to brain scans; however, someday in the future the technology will be found and we will then be able to monitor their happiness directly.
Usually the type of music recommended to increase milk production is classical in style. To me this is rational. Cows are, in the main, serene animals. They respond to serene owners. The cows in a shed which is soothed by the cheerful elegance of baroque music are likely to release more milk than one blaring with angry rap. But this, could be an indirect effect. The chances are that the staff who listen to classical music are more likely to be at peace with themselves than those revved up by a barrage of violence or hatred.
In fact linkages between the temperament of the staff who handle cows and cow health have been shown irrefutably in studies of lameness. The milker who habitually rushes cows to the shed, anxious that they don’t intrude on his night in the pub, will have more lame cows than the placid farmer who patiently drifts his herd to milking while ignoring the fuming motorist stuck behind him.
An experienced and observant vet will pick up on such subtleties. The farmer whose dogs are open and friendly is generally better to deal with than he who owns the timid, retiring kind – often a sign of abuse. Likewise, if I was to turn up at a previously unknown cow shed and had the choice of dealing with a shed hand emerging from a background of orchestral music or one who stepped from a pit of snarling guitars and adenoidal vowels, I am sure that my prejudices, as you now see them emerging, would be validated.
The post war generation, to which I belong, has seen many innovations and technological advances which have immeasurably improved our lives. However, music seems to be the one area where we have lost ground. My upbringing was largely in the pre-television era. Some of my earliest memories are invoked by the music on the radio to which I was exposed in early childhood. “Listen with Mother” was an institution in the 1950’s. The beautifully enunciated: “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin” was heralded by the delightfully wistful Berceuse from Fauré’s Dolly suite though, of course, I didn’t know this at the time. By contrast, our present failure to enhance children’s emotional development through exposure to music of eloquence and beauty passes un-remarked. Indeed, the absence of anything approaching the sublime in their lives may be one factor fuelling an inappropriate search for it later in life via alcoholism and drug abuse.
Light orchestral music was frequently played on the radio throughout my childhood and my ear gained an appreciation, which in my case later evolved into a passion for serious classical music. If music is the food of love, it was certainly a catalyst in my developing relationship with the lovely young lady I was courting, who would later become my wife. Viv and I both share the same tastes in music. While the psychologists claim that the initial period when a couple are actually “in love” lasts only one year, they neglect the power of great music. Truly great music has the ability to move and inspire the soul, and summon feelings akin to those we feel when we are in love. We are reborn and refreshed. Under the influence of sublime music the sublime is possible.
For anyone raised in Liverpool during the 1960’s, my musical proclivities may seem strange. The “Beatles” must surely feature somewhere? Well yes, they do. I used to cycle every day to school around the side of a large open park named “The Mystery”, cross busy Smithfield Road down a narrower street which passed a fire station and then humped over a railway line – steep for a bicycle – and eventually came out alongside our school playing fields.
As I grew older, I noted that the solid British-Empire-quality, cast-iron signage for this long street regularly disappeared. It was in an accessible position bolted into wooden pegs in a low sandstone wall. “Penny Lane” was obviously a desirable acquisition and soon the city council gave up replacing it. Rathbone Hall, a university hall of residence, was opposite. I suspect that Penny Lane signs now grace the walls of respectable middle-class abodes belonging to some former Rathbone Hall residents. They will endure long after the tatty Che Guevera posters of their youth have peeled away. Penny Lane was my closest link with the Beatles – but their tuneful music was everywhere during my later school years and we all waited for their next hit.
The Beatles were not universally approved. An older generation condemned them as “long-haired layabouts”. The peacefully stable society for which they had fought during two world wars was under threat. At school rigorous attention was diverted from the cardinal sin of wearing trousers without turn-ups to enforcing the “short back and sides” rule. Hair must be an inch above the collar...
Peter Callaghan got away with it for a while by using wallpaper paste, but his scheme fell badly awry one wet and windy day. He was doing his duty as a compulsory supporter on the sidelines for a school first XV rugby match when a pat
rolling master spotted him:
“Callaghan, what have you done with your hair?”
“Nothing sir.”
“Then why is it snaking down over your collar?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, boy. And what is that revolting muck you’ve put in it? Report for detention tomorrow evening with your hair cut and properly washed!”
“Yes, sir.” With which Callaghan was brought down to size (not of the wallpaper variety) and consigned to an hour of vigorous physical exercise after school under the supervision of some vindictive prefect.
But Beetlemania was merely the unimportant outward sign of what some would see as a deeper moral disintegration of society. The birth control pill was transforming sexual mores and the increasing abuses of recreational drugs were more major concerns. Many of the older generation shut their ears to the music of the Beatles because they saw them and their ilk as champions of the new decadence. In vain I importuned my parents to open their hearts: the Beatles were tuneful and inventive. But my pleas were cast on flinty ground. Why? I argued; their private lives were no worse than those of the great composers. Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, Beethoven an alcoholic who died of liver disease, Wagner an adulterer, Erik Satie an alcoholic who dabbled in the occult, Percy Grainger enjoyed a good spanking, Schubert was a hedonistic syphilitic, Smetana a deaf syphilitic, Delius a syphilitic who went blind and, worst of all, Sir Edward Elgar was a Roman Catholic! To this day they remain obdurate: the Beatles pioneered the downfall of decent society. The way things have turned out perhaps they had a point. But, if we look behind the smokescreens, when was there ever a truly decent society? My parents’ generation’s supposedly decent, post-war society accepted the suppression of women, and was indulging in an orgy of institutionalised child abuse that wouldn’t be uncovered for decades. There is always a dark side to human nature whether we choose to acknowledge it or sweep it under the mat.