Village Horse Doctor

by Ben K. Green

  I had answered a call up to Kermit still further north than Monahans and was on my way home in the late afternoon and dropped by to get acquainted with the young doctor. He was a great big, fat, slick-faced kid fresh out of college who had been raised on pavement and had no livestock or agricultural background. I was as polite to him as I could be and welcomed him into the country and told him I would be glad to help him any way I could and would be sure to send him some practice. As I drove away, I was sure that the only practice I could send him that he would know anything about would be dogs and cats and the women that owned them.

  In about three weeks after meeting him, I got a call to come to Monahans to see about a milk cow. I told the people on the phone that they had a young veterinary doctor there and it would be cheaper for them to have him than for me to make the trip. The old man spoke up and said, “We’ve had him five times and don’t think the cow wants him any more, and for what he charges and what we’ve heard about you, you’d be the cheapest by a whole lot.”

  About an hour and a half after that, I drove into the side gate of the man’s house in the main part of Monahans and there stood his milk cow with one side of her head swelled out of all proportion. He explained to me that the young doctor had used some great long words tellin’ him what was the matter with the cow. He said that the words hadn’t helped him none and the shots he had been givin’ hadn’t helped the cow none, and he guessed it wasn’t a common case as what was usually referred to as lump jaw.

  Lump jaw is caused by an iodine deficiency and the jaw bone becomes porous and the flesh around the bone becomes highly irritated and the swelling usually appears on one side of the head. I looked at this old cow a few minutes and she was in real pain and was standing with her mouth open. Her mouth had been open so much and so long that the end of her tongue was dry and sore.

  She was a gentle cow, so we didn’t put a rope or anything on her. I just walked up and talked to her a few minutes and reached in her mouth and took hold of her tongue and pulled it out to one side of her mouth. The reason for this is that a cow or horse can’t close their mouth to bite your arm if you have it blocked open by having their own tongue pulled out to one side.

  As I examined her jaw teeth with one hand, I ran on to something that didn’t belong in a cow’s mouth. I went to my car and got a long blunt screwdriver and after pulling her tongue out the same way, I went back in her mouth and began to prize on something in line with the teeth in the lower jaw. In a matter of seconds out of her mouth popped a golf ball that had been wedged between two teeth in a socket where a tooth was gone. There had been a mass of feed compressed down into the socket under the golf ball, and, of course, the pus began to flow and the jaw began to go down.

  There was a garden hose handy that was hooked to a hydrant so we turned it on and ran cold water through that old gal’s mouth for about ten minutes. After I stuck the hose in her mouth and the water started running through her jaw, I turned her tongue loose and she stood with her mouth open and enjoyed the relief she was gettin’ from the water washing out all that foreign matter. When I quit runnin’ the water, she walked over to the feed trough and began to eat like she was about to starve to death.

  This gave me kind of a sickening feeling for the profession when doctors were being turned out of school that didn’t have common sense or nerve enough to stick their hand in a cow’s mouth to see what was the matter.

  The winters in the Southwestern deserts are the most enjoyable time of the year. There are cold nights and warm, still days and just occasional unpleasant spells of weather. During this time of year, the ranchers weren’t too busy and most of them took time to have their horses’ teeth looked after. It was also an ideal time to do surgery on horses and cattle because there was practically no airborne infections and most recoveries were uneventful.

  I had been doing lots of dentistry on saddle horses and that caused talk around the coffee gathering and everybody went to thinkin’ about their horses. On one of these nice, clear, cold January mornings, we were sittin’ in the drugstore waitin’ for the sun to come up so we could shed our coats and enjoy the desert climate when John Vic came up to me and in his high, whiny voice asked me what ought to be done about blind teeth on a four-year-old horse.

  I explained to him that we could take the baby teeth out where the permanent teeth could come on through, but that the big knots that had formed on the horse’s head over the teeth would not go down after the baby teeth had been pulled and those knots would always show. So we made arrangements for me to remove the baby teeth.

  Within a few days, Charlie Dees called me to look at a grey three-year-old colt that he had gotten from the Allison Ranch. This colt had been stifled (stifle joint dislocated), and I explained to Mr. Dees that there was nothing that could be done for this horse and that he would never be any better.

  John Bennett came in within a day or two. He had a four-year-old dun horse that was known to be mean to buck and had a white spot in his eye, and he wanted to know if I could do something to cause the spot to disappear. I gave him some powder to be blown into the horse’s eye every other day and said, “If anything will take the spot off, this medicine will.”

  In a few days John Vic came to me and told me that he had traded the horse that I had worked on his teeth for the stifled horse that Mr. Dees had and that Mr. Dees had told him that I said that the leg would get well.

  Several days later, Charlie Dees, who was a little old man who wore a smile and a hearing aid and had one leg a little shorter than the other from some injury in his youth that caused him to pace a little when he walked, came up to me on the street. He told me that he had traded the horse he got from John Vic to John Bennett for a horse that had a little spot in his eye. Mr. Bennett had told him that I said the spot would go away, and he just wanted to ask me how long did I think it would take before it would be gone.

  I said, “Yeah, and John Bennett said that I had told John Vic that the knots on the horse’s head would go away. Now, John Vic lied about the knots goin’ away, John Bennett lied about me sayin’ that the spot would go out of the horse’s eye, and if you told John Vic that the horse’s leg that you traded him would get well, or if you told John Bennett that I said the knots would go away, you lied, too—of course, you know whether you said it or not.”

  As I finished my remark, he turned and started pacing off as though he didn’t hear me and said, “Aw wal, didn’t matta’.”

  One hot summer day about noon I got a call from Roswell, New Mexico, concerning some cattle that were dying in the feed lots. The man calling gave me a lot of information about how many different kinds of “shots” they had given these cattle, but they were still dying, though they didn’t have any apparent sickness.

  I told him there were several good veterinarians closer to him than me, and he said that he didn’t know about that because he had tried the most of ’em, and he and some other feed-lot operators had decided that they needed some outside help. He went on to tell me that they had heard that I “worked” on poisons and they would be willing to pay me to come up and look at their troubles. It was about two hundred and twenty miles to Roswell, and I told him I would be there before dark.

  There were several of these big feed lots around Roswell, and they were being operated very efficiently, business-wise, and were using the best of milling and mixing equipment in making their feed-lot rations. There weren’t any sick cattle out of about three thousand that they showed me from the time I got there till midnight, but I did note there would be an occasional steer that did not appear to be carrying as much fill as the rest of the cattle.

  I went to the old Nickson Hotel and checked in and told the several fellows that had taken me over the feed lots that I would see them at breakfast. This was another case of needin’ to be a better detective than doctor, and I decided to go to sleep and forget about it all till morning.

  I spent the next day in the feed lots south of town trying to find some sour
ce of chemical poison that might be getting into the feed through the milling process. Late in the afternoon three steers died within an hour of each other, and these were cattle I had seen the day before that hadn’t shown any signs of illness.

  I hadn’t been wishin’ for a steer to die, but this was sure enough a start because I could “post” them and possibly pick up some indication of the trouble from the internal organs. The steers that had died were two years old and had been on feed long enough to show bloom but weren’t quite fat enough to be termed finished. There was no indication of anything wrong in the liver, spleen, or kidneys, which are the organs that first show damage or presence of poison.

  We went back to the office at one of the feed lots a little after dark and sat and talked for about three hours, and I told these feeders that their outside help up to now hadn’t found anything seriously wrong.

  Early the next morning while it was still cool, I was sittin’ on the curb in front of the Nickson Hotel with Frank Young, waitin’ for the feeders. Frank was an old-time sheriff and had been head of the State Police of New Mexico, but since his retirement from political life, he was in the real estate business with an office in the hotel.

  We were looking out across the courthouse lawn when a middle-aged man started walking across the lawn on feet big enough for a man twice his size, long arms and hands that hung down almost to his knees, and his head was shaped about as round as a hicker nut.

  Frank said, “You see that fellow goin’ yonder?”

  He was the only one crossing the lawn and I said, “Yeah, what about him?”

  “That’s the most ignorant man in the world.”

  “Aw, Frank, I don’t see much difference in the way he looks and a bunch of the other natives around here.”

  Frank was a big, dark-complexioned fellow, and when he laughed his belly jumped up and down. He laughed real big and said, “I don’t care, there’s some difference.”

  “What’s he done that makes you think that he’s the champion of ignorance?”

  “Well, there was a big family of them people living back up in the mountains. They made their livin’ by hard labor, cuttin’ posts and trappin’ varmints, but the youngest one saved his money and got a hold of some good teams, wagons, harnesses and other equipment, and he left here and got jobs doin’ dirt work on railroad right-of-ways.

  “He wanted to come home and visit a few days and he decided he would send a wire and gave it plenty of time to be delivered, so some of his family could come in and meet him at the train. When the depot agent got the wire, he stuck it in his pocket and walked up here on the square, and that one you see goin’ yonder was loafin’ over by the saloon.

  “The depot agent walked up and said, ‘Rufe, I’ve got a wire here from your brother, Eck.’ Rufe took the wire and looked at it a minute and said, ‘Yep, that’s Eck all right. I’d’ve knowed his handwrite anywhere.’ ”

  About that time some of the feeders drove up and we went to the feed lot. I walked around among fat cattle, fresh feed, and hidden trouble looking for symptoms.

  These feed-lot operators had started the practice this year of feeding green chopped feed the first thing in the morning fresh out of the field. Corn was planted in the irrigation fields as thick in rows as it could stand, and with liquid fertilizer added to the irrigation water, this corn grew eight to ten feet high real quick. Before the stalk and foliage had time to start getting tough, it was cut and chopped by a machine in front of a truck that was especially equipped with a feed body on it. As this feed was cut green and chopped, it was moved by a conveyor over the cab of the truck and into this specially built body as the chopping machine and truck moved down the rows of feed. Then this truckload of fresh green chopped feed was hauled up to the feed lot and a specially built auger filled the troughs from the side of the body as the truck drove down the alleys between the different feed lots.

  Fresh green chopped feed going through this process could have some chemical reactions occur between the time it was chopped in the field and the matter of four or five hours before the cattle would finish eating it all. I rode the truck in the field and watched the chopping going on, and then I walked around through the feed lots all morning watching the steers eat this green feed before they were given their mixture of concentrated dry feeds that afternoon.

  The green chopped feed grown under irrigation was juicy and good and had a nice smell when piled up in the trough, and the steers like it. Late that afternoon I took a saddle horse and rode down through the corn for no particular reason that I can give, other than riding around on a good horse through green fields was at least restful and the company of a good horse sometimes improved my thinkin’.

  As I was unsaddling the horse about dark, one of the men working around the feed lot had come back to the feed mill to tell me that he saw a steer dying in the last pen as he had started home. I got in my car and drove down close where I would have my instruments and other supplies with me and this fellow stayed and helped me post the steer.

  This time I was looking harder and thought I’d better do a very thorough job if I were going to find the trouble. I took the paunch, which has separating divisions in it—and it’s generally stated that a cow has three or four stomachs, depending on what you are going to term a stomach, and this assembly constitutes the paunch—and washed all the waste matter and undigested feed out with a hose. As the pressure of the water hit the lining of the stomach, the lining would sluff off and after it dried was brown and had the same thickness and feel as a piece of printing parchment. I had found the trouble—but what caused it?

  I carefully cleaned the rest of this paunch without any more water and stuffed it into some large glass jars that I had in the back of my car and tightly sealed the lid on them. It would be necessary for me to go back to my home laboratory with these specimens to do a good job of analyzing and diagnosing.

  I called the hotel from the feed lot and told them that I was leaving but not to check me out and to tell whoever might be lookin’ for me that I would be back the next night. I reached Fort Stockton by midnight and by morning I had ground this fresh paunch, extracted all the serum and juices with the addition of triple-distilled water, and through a distillation process had about four liquid ounces of a very potent chemical insecticide. Now the problem was, Where did it come from? I had not been able to find it in any of the feeds that I had analyzed.

  I drove into Roswell in the early afternoon and told the feed-lot operators of my discovery. We started hunting for an agricultural chemical insecticide. I finally wound up back in the cornfield, and in the hot, bright sunshine, I got a glimmer of a strange lacquer-looking finish over the leaves and some of the stalks of the corn.

  I cut about twenty stalks of corn and headed back for my laboratory, and after a careful washing and distillation process, I was headed back to Roswell two days later with the same chemical substance in a vial that had been extracted from the lining of the steer’s paunch.

  When I told the feed-lot operators this, they all said that they were spraying the lush tender corn with an insecticide in an oil base that they had been assured was harmless. The very explicit guaranteed instructions on the container stated that this insecticide would be harmless to livestock to graze the vegetation after three weeks from the time it was applied.

  The extracted chemical from the steer’s paunch was sufficient evidence to call the chemical company in on the case. I put in a long-distance call to Michigan, and they assured me that extensive research had been done and that my diagnosis could not be possible. The next morning a staff of scientists landed at the airfield and came to the hotel with the positive intention of having my scalp, professionally speakin’, in the matter of a short time.

  I had investigated the area where they had done their experimentation as best I could from a distance. All of their experiments had been conducted in acid soils with natural rainfall of more than forty inches per year, and with the usual amount of dew and fog at
night that would occur in climates of this humid nature, leaching and dissipation of chemicals from the foliage would occur and it was true that such vegetation would be clear of any chemical residue in three weeks.

  The desert regions of New Mexico had little or no summer rainfall, hardly any dew, and never any fog, and there was no dissipation of a chemical substance in an oil base sprayed onto lush corn, and the heat of the desert sun caused it to dry suddenly and be firmly fixed to the foliage of the corn.

  I ran back and forth between Roswell and my laboratory at Fort Stockton three or four times during the next several days and came up with much proof and evidence. The president of the company had flown in on the case, and he was a high-class business executive who was concerned with the facts, and if his company was liable, he was interested in a peaceful settlement without publicity.

  However, their chemist, so far as my judgment of stock was concerned, was a little on the stupid side. His hairline in front nearly touched his eyebrows and there was a ridge across the front of his head that showed his skull was as thick as my thumb, and whatever he knew he had left at home in his test tubes. Of course, he was in a hot spot and was determined to shed as much bad light on me as possible.

  At a meeting of all concerned parties back at the hotel, I had with me three separate 4-cc. vials of chemicals that I had very carefully filtered under exact conditions. I took them out of my pocket in the midst of a conversation after Mr. Chemist Wizard had gotten unpleasant and set them on the desk and told him that with his vast knowledge and acute observation that I was sure he would be able to tell which of these three vials had its content drawn from a fresh-opened container of the chemical, which had been distilled from the tissue of the steer’s paunch, and I was sure he would have no trouble knowing which vial had been gathered and distilled from the green corn.

  He stood and looked at the vials a few minutes and sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wet his lips and wiped his head with a white handkerchief. By now the president of the company wasn’t too proud of him and didn’t think that he was goin’ to win any blue ribbons anyway, so he insisted that he identify where the substance in each of the vials came from.