Village Horse Doctor

by Ben K. Green

  I got there real quick and the sow had just that minute died from being overfat and gettin’ too hot tryin’ to have her pigs. Mrs. Lancaster was just sick about the whole deal, but when I put my hand on the sow, I realized the pigs were still alive.

  As I did a Caesarean, I told her we might save the pigs if we didn’t waste any time. She just thought that would be marvelous and had never heard of such a thing; but if we could save them she would raise them on the bottle. By the time I handed her the first one, she had gotten some big beautiful bath towels, any one of which was worth more than the pigs. As I handed her four of them, she wiped the little things off. While they wiggled and squealed, she just beamed; she was tickled pink to be the mother of four little pigs.

  Then she asked, “What can I put them in where they will be clean and cool?”

  There wasn’t a clean place outdoors nor a cool one, and in a reckless tone of voice I said, “Why don’t you put them in the bathtub”—not thinkin’ that she would put them there. But she did take the pigs into the house and put them in a deep bathtub, where the little things couldn’t crawl out!

  She fed them on a bottle, and I think bathed them as often as she did the children and raised four of the cutest squealing little pigs you ever saw. They were pets and were the most spoiled things that were ever in or around a house, but were in the house more than out. Of course, the trouble with pet pigs is that they grow up to be hogs, and the thought of eating one of the little dears was entirely out of the question. She hired a man with a pickup to come and get them when she was gone, so the parting wouldn’t be too painful, and she sent them to a boys’ ranch where she just knew they would have a good home.

  A stock farmer from up on Pecos River east of Imperial came into my office one day and described the condition of a small herd of cattle—some were sick and others weren’t doin’ too good.

  He was a fellow for whom I had done lots of practice, and without going to look at his cattle, I told him from his description his cattle had been drinking crude oil out of a slush pit that some oil company had failed to fence in. The cattle that had gotten the biggest amount of it would eventually die, I said, and some of the others would recover, but it would be slow and he would have a bunch of poor cattle on hand for a year or so.

  I explained to him that if he wanted to have a case against the oil company that I would have to go and do a post-mortem on a cow and firm up the evidence so that I could help him collect damages from the oil company. We discussed this and he said it was a slow process to get damage money out of an oil company that had your land leased and he believed that the short way would be to sell ’em.

  I said, “Well, I would send them to San Angelo or Midland to one of the stockyards and get them out of the country.”

  He didn’t commit himself as to how he intended to sell them, and I didn’t charge him anything for the advice because I had actually done no real work on the case. At the time I supposed that that would be the end of it.

  Several days later Charlie Baker, who was sheriff of Pecos County and bought and sold cattle on the side, came to me and said that he had a bunch of cattle that he had bought so cheap that he felt like he stole them. Being the sheriff he ought to be ashamed of a deal like this, but he said it was a grown man that sold them and took his money, so he guessed it was all right, but the cattle weren’t real good and he thought maybe they needed some mineral supplement or maybe they were wormy. He wanted me to go look at them and see what I thought they ought to have.

  I said, “Charlie, I’ll be glad to look at the cattle. Where are they?”

  “Well, I bought them from old So-and-so (this happened to be the man I had advised to sell ’em) and he’s lettin’ me keep them in his alfalfa field since he’s already got his last cutting for the year until I find a place to put ’em.”

  I was practicing medicine. I wasn’t referee’n cow deals, and I was in no position to divulge what information I already had, so I told Charlie that I would meet him at the field right after noon that day and we would look at the cattle. There were twenty-eight head of these cows and yearlings and they were good-quality Hereford cattle as far as breeding was concerned, and the ages of the cows were good, but every cow and every yearling showed marked signs of having drunk oil.

  I had to tell Sheriff Baker that the bargain he got he needn’t feel too guilty about since these cattle would slowly dry up on the bone and a few of them would die and the others would not be thrifty for at least another year.

  Charlie turned pale and looked surprised that his good constituent would have sold him these cattle when he surely must have known what was the matter with them. I reminded him when he was tellin’ me about the deal, he said that the fellow sellin’ the cattle was a grown man and he guessed it was all right. I said, “You know, the fellow buyin’ the cattle was a grown man too.” He let out a weak laugh as we walked to the car.

  On the way to town he told me that he had sold that fellow some cattle that weren’t “just right” about a year before this. As we drove along, he got reconciled to the deal and said, “I guess he has evened the score and I don’t believe that I’ll be mad at him for it.”

  I said, “Charlie, that’s big of you, but you still got the cattle.”

  “Oh, I’ll send them to Midland to the auction and get rid of them.”

  We stopped at the Stockton Pharmacy and had a drink together and he paid me for my call.

  In about ten days I got a call from Monahans, Texas, and the man said on the phone that he wanted me to come look at a bunch of sick cattle. Well, this was a common sort of a comment when somebody called me, so I said, “Sure,” and told him when I would be there.

  It was late afternoon when we drove up to his pasture, and sure enough, there was this same bunch of oil-sick cattle. I was still in no position to let on that I had ever seen the cattle before so I explained to him during a careful examination in his presence what had happened to the cattle. By now the mucous membranes from the inside of the mouth and tongue had begun to sluff off and as we looked into some of their mouths, I explained to him that this same condition was present in the stomach and intestinal tract and that some of these cattle would recover, but most of them were slowly going to die off. I couldn’t tell him and wouldn’t ask, but I could see as I looked at the cattle that there were already five missing since I had first seen the cattle three weeks prior to this time.

  I told him, as I had told the rest of them, that these cattle ought to be shipped to an auction and announced in the ring that they had drunk oil and let the purchaser be aware and pay what he wanted to for them. He agreed with me that that would be the fair thing to do and he would just take his loss and forget about them.

  A few days after this, a man called me from Pecos and said that he had bought a bunch of cattle and before he put them on feed, he would like them vaccinated for shipping fever and do whatever was necessary to them that I would suggest so they would get the most good out of the feed he was going to give ’em.

  When I got to Pecos, here was the same bunch of cattle with three more missing. I still had no professional right to divulge the history of the cattle, so I went into detail and we caught some of these cattle and looked into their mouths and I explained to him about oil poisoning. He immediately decided that he had better not put them on feed as that would be an expensive way to watch them die. I told him that they should go to a public market with an explanation at the time they were auctioned and sell them for whatever they would bring.

  This fellow was a good operator and willing to take his loss rather than to misrepresent the cattle so he sent them back to the livestock market and had the auctioneer announce from the stand that these cattle had drunk crude oil, and he wanted anybody who bid on them to have full knowledge of their condition.

  Three days later, a cow trader that was “a wire cutter and a speculator” called me to come and look at some sick cattle that he had pastured close to the Pyote Air Base. He was a pretty
sharp old boy and had lied, stole, and cheated until he was fairly well fixed financially. When we drove out to see the cattle, he had them standing next to an oil well with an open slush pit and he told me, “These cattle been poisoned on drinkin’ that oil and I’ve got to sue the oil company so I’m gonna have to have you to testify.”

  I said, “These cattle drank oil at Imperial, were sold to Fort Stockton, were sold to Monahans, were sold to Pecos, and were sold to you, and you’re the only man that has bought them with the understanding that they had previously drunk crude oil, but you are crooked enough to know how to try to make a lot of money out of ’em and when you file your case against the oil company and call me as an expert witness, I’ll be able to tell the court (as I pointed to the slush pit) that it was not this oil that poisoned the cattle—and to further add to your overhead, get your checkbook out and pay me thirty-five dollars for this call.”

  Needless to say, I lost the wire cutter and speculator’s practice.

  COMMON PRACTICE

  Late one afternoon, Mr. Lee called me from Iraan and said that the cowboys had brought the best stud he ever owned into the ranch headquarters, and he was bad sick and had been down on the ground and there were patches of hide gone from various parts of his body where he had rolled against rock and he had beat his head against the ground until his eyes were swollen too, and he asked how soon I could get there. The ranch was seventy-five miles away, and I told him I would be there as soon as I could drive it.

  I drove into the ranch just at sundown. The stallion was about fifteen hands high with good conformation, and it was easy to see why Mr. Lee was uneasy about him. I didn’t have to examine him very much before I knew that he had a mesquite-bean impaction that would be extremely hard to remove.

  Mesquite trees make a long pod that is filled with a sweet sorghum-like-tasting pulp and little oblong hard beans that are high in food value. In the late summer and early fall when mesquite beans begin to ripen, cattle and horses and sheep all will eat them. Sheep have to wait for them to fall on the ground, and at this stage the beans are fairly mature and if they are not eaten will lay on the ground all winter without rotting and are good for feed anytime livestock find them.

  Horses and cattle, but especially horses, will pick the beans off the trees after they begin to turn sweet, and as long as there is grass to be eaten along with them, the beans will cause no serious problems and are ideal feed for horses to fatten on. In time of drouth when there is no other green vegeation to be mixed with mesquite beans, horses will eat such enormous quantities of them that they will form an impaction, and a mesquite-bean impaction is real trouble.

  As the horse develops fever from this digestive-tract impaction, the fever tends to dry the moisture out of the impaction even more; and as this occurs, the fiber begins to swell, and if some form of treatment isn’t given, a mesquite-bean impaction is usually fatal. There are other cases where mesquite beans when eaten, especially by the small pony breed of horses, will cause founder and leave crippling effects after recovery in the feet of the ponies. Flocks of sheep will stiffen from the protein saturation in the tissue around the joints from a solid diet of mesquite beans. All ranchers look forward to a good fall mesquite-bean crop to put the final hardening fat on large livestock before winter.

  Mesquite-bean impactions do not respond to the therapeutic action of internal purgative medication, and if over-stimulation of the spasmodic muscles of the intestinal tract is induced by medication, many times the large intestine and colon will rupture and hasten death. The only right way to relieve a mesquite-bean impaction is the hard way, and I mean by that you go into the rectum of a horse with a rubber hose and a pump and a tubful of water and moisten and water the impaction, and after you have stripped off to your waist, reach into the rectum of the horse and actually dig the mesquite bean impaction out with the aid of the water that you are pumping in.

  We put this stud in a chute where he couldn’t lay down and put bars behind him where he couldn’t back up on me and bars in front of him so that he couldn’t move about, and by about ten thirty that night I had removed more than a tubful of the bean impaction and had gone far past the colon. Then I started medical treatment.

  We saved the stud, and for the next five or six weeks, I had from one to as many calls as I could answer through the day and night for horses that were valuable and could be treated because they were gentle. There were lots of unbroke range horses that could not be treated and many of them died.

  There was very little treatment that we could give sheep except to move them to pastures where there were no mesquite trees. Cattle belong to the ruminant family and have more than one stomach, and impactions are rarely if ever a problem. There may be an occasional case of bloat in cattle, but the losses from mesquite beans are minor.

  I had just gotten in from one of these mesquite-bean cases and it was late afternoon and I was cleaning up a little in my laboratory when the phone rang. It was a fellow at the Walker oil field about forty miles east of Fort Stockton. He was callin’ me about his family milk cow that had calved in the early part of the day, and he said that she was awful sick and thought she had milk fever. This was another one of those hurry-up-type calls because the condition becomes critical so fast that time is important.

  In an oil field that is already developed and has settled down to production, there is a class of employees that live in those camps after the boomers have passed on—pretty stable citizens. One or maybe two families keep a good milk cow and furnish fresh milk to the rest of the people in the camp, and these pet milk cows become pretty important.

  Only the best milk cows will have milk fever because they deplete their body supply of calcium during the previous milking period. When a new calf is born, nature is partial to producing milk for that baby calf, so that the purest available calcium in the cow’s body is contained in the white cartilage walls of the milk glands that come out of the body and go into the cow’s bag. When the calcium is robbed from these tubes, they collapse and the disintegration that sets in is referred to as milk fever. It is actually a condition instead of a disease, and the cow is sure to die unless you can hastily replace this calcium.

  It was after dark when I got there. This good cow was lying stretched out on the ground almost lifeless and no more than an hour from certain death if she received no treatment. Her breathing and heart ratio were so unstable that I had to spend about fifteen minutes of very precious time with heart stimulants before I dared to slug the jugular vein with calcium gluconate, an excess amount of which would have stopped this cow’s weak heart. She responded to the hypodermic heart stimulant, which, of course, also raised her fever but enabled me to administer calcium gluconate intravenously.

  As I worked on this cow, I was aware of a very medicine-like odor that I knew I had nothing to do with, so I asked what it was that I smelled on the cow. It was late October and by this time of night the onlookers had built a fire in the corner of the corral and the neighbor women had gathered to see what was goin’ on and worry about the cow and get in a little gossipin’. When I asked what I smelled on the cow, one of these good neighbor women spoke up and said she bathed the cow’s bag with Watkin’s Liniment.

  After a good forty-five minutes of hard medical practice, the cow showed a very favorable reaction and the men and me took her by the legs and rolled her over on the other side to encourage circulation on the side she had been lying on. She got a tremendous reaction from the calcium and started tryin’ to get up.

  Well, being a pet cow she was easy to help, and we got her on her feet. She stood there for a few minutes, gained her balance, and walked over to the water trough and drank a lot of water, which was the natural thing for a cow to do that had just started to develop a tremendous flow of milk and had also been dehydrated by temperature.

  I leaned back against the fence, and as the cow bawled for her baby calf, I had a real good feeling from saving that fine milk cow. About that time the old lady tha
t had furnished the liniment flipped her apron up and wrapped both hands in it as she passed me goin’ toward the corral gate and in a very firm voice said, “Well, we’ll never know whether it was the liniment or the doctor that done it!”

  About daylight one fresh fall morning, I went out to the irrigation valley north of town to see some sheep that had bloated in the night while grazing on some fresh cut-over alfalfa stubble. This was a common occurrence and the treatment was simple, but the cause was interesting in that it was not covered by any source of veterinary literature and was gradually learned by me and the farmers in the irrigated valley.

  In the early fall when the days are still warm in the desert and the nights get very cold along after midnight, sheep will graze and fill up and lay down on dark nights and it’s likely that they may not leave their bed until sunrise the next morning. However, when the moon comes up late after the chill of the night, this sudden change from warm days to cold nights causes a chemical reaction in the tender growth of alfalfa and the sugars of the plant turn to acid and are not transposed again until up in the morning hours of warm sunshine.

  During this moonlight period of acid vegetation, sheep will come off their bed ground in the moonlight and graze the alfalfa and develop severe cases of bloat within the matter of a few hours. Most of the farmers grazing alfalfa late in the year learned to pen their sheep on dry feed during the moonlight nights and this prevented those early daylight calls for bloat.

  I heard a young veterinary doctor had moved in over at Monahans, which was about fifty miles north of me, and I just thought to myself that if he was real good, I would be glad for him to have the north end of my territory up and down the Pecos River, which would better enable me to take care of the rest of my practice.