by Ben K. Green
We were driving back along the pasture road with lots of scenery and no conversation when I noticed a draw that was a solid patch of brown for a mile or so; it was a sudden contrast to the green vegetation around it. I asked him to stop the pickup. When I pointed to the brown patch, you could see the expression on his face change as it dawned on him that he had forgotten to tell me that these weeds had been sprayed with chemical weed poison.
He told me all about spraying the thistle in that draw in order to try to get rid of it; this was the only place on the ranch that any of it grew. He went on to explain that the spray was guaranteed to be completely harmless to all livestock.
Well, in my practice, I had discarded years back the idea that any chemical was completely harmless, so we drove over into the middle of this brown patch of weeds. There were tender green weeds and grass coming up underneath the taller growth that had been killed with spray. Any cattle grazing the younger growth would have to eat some of the dead weed along with each mouthful of green feed.
We drove back to the ranch headquarters and I asked to see the spraying machine. It was a good, clean, well-kept machine with no corrosion inside the tank. It seemed that this was going to be another case of being a detective instead of a doctor. I asked him where the containers that the chemical came in were. He said that he bought so much of it that he had asked for a fifty-five-gallon drum because of the savings in price.
We went into the back of a shed where the empty drum was kept. This iron drum lacked being empty by about one and a half inches of brown juicy stuff in the bottom. As I reached over to tilt it and shake that brown juice around, the iron drum came apart and the bottom fell out and that dab of brown stuff poured out onto the ground. It had eaten the bottom of the drum out.
I caught about half a pint in a glass jar before it all got away and told Mr. Doyle that we had probably found the trouble. He began to repeat how harmless this spray was and how many other people he knew had used it without any ill effects.
I told him I thought we ought to talk to the dealer who sold him this spray, and he said he bought it from a ranch-supply company at Safford, Arizona. I didn’t think that I would have to come back to this ranch, so I drove over to Safford in my car and he went in his.
The man at the ranch-supply company was very cordial and glad to see us at first, and evidently hadn’t heard about the yearlings that had been dying. He opened the conversation by asking Mr. Doyle the kind of results he had gotten on the weeds that he sprayed. Before Mr. Doyle could answer, he began to tell what good results everyone else had gotten from that spray.
I asked if I could see a can of the concentrated spray that they had been using on the weeds. He turned around and pointed to a bright five-gallon can, and I walked over and began readin’ the label. I wasn’t exactly tryin’ to trap the man, but I needed more information, so I asked: “Was the same label on the fifty-five-gallon drum that you sold Mr. Doyle?”
He hastened to explain that Mr. Doyle was the only customer who wanted a fifty-five-gallon drum and they had emptied enough cans to fill up a drum, then delivered it to him at drum prices. I asked him if he had such an empty can around. By this time he had begun to get a little bit cagy and asked me “Why?” I said I wanted to see if the can was lined.
He was beginning to look pretty serious and he said that he had never thought about whether or not they were lined. He said further that the company had been giving credit for returned empty cans, and he had wondered why they were valuable.
Mr. Doyle said, “I’ve lost some cattle and if you’ve got an empty can, I want him to see it.”
He shuffled around in the back of the store and came up with a can that had been returned for credit. I held the can up to the light and peeped through that small hole in the top; there seemed to be a lining or interior coating of some kind in the can.
We took a heavy pair of tin cutters, cut the can open and, with little effort, slipped a plastic liner loose from the inside of the container. The ranch-supply man was very much ill at ease, and Mr. Doyle was on the verge of getting mad.
He and I walked away and talked awhile, and I asked him if he thought it would be necessary for me to do any more research on the case. He told me that he owed the ranch-supply company enough to be able to get a settlement before he paid his bill and he felt that he didn’t need any more information. However, in the event that the case should come to trial, he would have me subpoenaed, and I knew this would entitle me to reasonable pay and mileage.
While we were talking he asked, “How much do I owe you for this call?”
I told him what my fee would be, and instead of giving me a check on the ranch-supply company, like most people would, he said, “Go on back to your car, and I’ll go back in the office and get your check for you now.”
I don’t know what this little settlement cost the ranch-supply company, but I imagine that the price of steer yearlings broke them of the habit of saving cans for return credit.
RABIES
About two o’clock one hot July afternoon, I was sittin’ on the south porch of my office lookin’ out across the desert, watchin’ the heat waves rise up from the rock and sand and play on the scrub growth of greasewood and black brush that made their leaves and limbs appear to be movin’, when an excited young mother of three slid the tires and kicked up the dust in front of the office and called to me in an excited tone of voice. I stepped down from the screened porch and pulled my hat down to shade my eyes from the glaring sun and she immediately started on her story.
She had a nice big collie dog in her backyard and one of the children had had a little fever. She had called Dr. Oswald and as he walked through the fenced yard to the house, he saw the big dog lying in the cool drip next to the house under the air conditioner. After he checked the baby’s fever and talked to the mother awhile, he said, “I believe that dog out in the front yard has rabies. Have these children been playing with him?”
She almost went into a panic as she said, “Heavens, yes! They all play with him.” Then she had dashed from her house to my office to ask me to come and destroy the dog.
In times of drouth, when the natural feed for foxes, wolves, coons, skunks, and other small animals of prey get scarce, they will change their eating habits and will consume whatever can be found around the edges of civilization. It was not uncommon at this stage of a drouth to see foxes come into town at night to prowl the garbage cans. Other wild animals that weren’t so easily seen moved into town and to ranch headquarters to the feed and water troughs that were kept full for the livestock.
This concentration of wildlife will cause enough exposure to the skunk population, which is the principal parent host of the Negri rabies infection. It seems that dogs, wolves, and foxes are the most readily bitten species that will transmit the rabies to domestic animals and man.
The Edwards Plateau and the Trans-Pecos Region was practically all net wire fence and sheep ranches, and the ranchers and government trappers had had drives and had trapped and killed wolves until there were no more left in the country. This left the transmission of the disease to domestic animals to the foxes, dogs and skunks.
There had been considerable talk about some isolated cases of rabies in foxes that had been killed. Their heads were sent to the state laboratory in Austin, but no cases had been diagnosed in any other livestock at the time this episode broke out in the yard from the sudden diagnosis of a medical doctor.
I followed the woman back to her house in my car, and as we came into the yard, the old dog looked up from his shady place and wagged his tail. She rushed into the house and stood behind the screen door and told me not to take any chances of him bitin’ me too. As I got to within about four feet of the dog, the odor I smelled was a common one any practitioner could recognize.
As I rubbed this beautiful collie dog on the head, I noticed that his hair was bad. When I opened his mouth, I saw the lesions and sluffing that were causing the slobbering that Dr. Oswald had mistaken
for rabies; he had a very advanced case of sore mouth and it could not have been taken for rabies by any person who was familiar with the disease. I turned to the woman and told her that she had fed this dog on either dry or canned commercial dog food and he had not been getting any fresh meat, that he was suffering from a dietary insufficiency, which I could cure by injections.
She was trembling and her voice was shaky, and she said she couldn’t possibly take the chance with her children. She told me to destroy the dog right there or take him with me. She said that she wanted his head sent to the laboratory at Austin the fastest possible way and that expense was secondary. This was an old dog. His teeth were bad but there was no good reason for destroying the faithful family pet. I tried to talk her out of it but had no success.
I put the dog in the back of my car and took him to my office. Now, I never prided myself on being a small-animal doctor and did not want to encourage any small-animal practice, but at the same time I felt it my professional duty not to start a hysterical epidemic of rabies in the human mind, which is the most damaging.
My first inclination was to save the old dog and I was reasonably sure that I could, but I would have half the mothers in town on me by morning if I didn’t get that head on the way to Austin. Since this was an old dog whose days of usefulness were about spent, I very painlessly did away with him and very expertly severed his head.
To be sure that I had the proof and evidence in the proper place, I carried the head up to Dr. Oswald’s with the usual containers and ice necessary to pack a rabies specimen for shipment. On the front porch of his office, I had him watch me put the head in a dry metal container and then put that container in a larger metal bucket and pack ice all around it. I very carefully sealed both buckets and had his secretary address the package to the state laboratory in Austin. I said to Ozzie, “Let’s go put this on the airplane”—which was to leave Fort Stockton airport in a matter of minutes—“and then stop somewhere and get some coffee.”
I had concealed my feelings and he thought that this was a social visit, so he watched the bucket being loaded on the plane without suspecting that I was building a case.
It was then about four o’clock, and from that time until midnight I had twenty-three calls from all parts of the surrounding country asking about the rabies epidemic. I said that I didn’t know we were in a rabies epidemic, but I knew if we were, it would have to be from some other source than that old sore-mouth dog that spent his life in the yard playing with babies and living on a deficient diet.
At eleven o’clock the next morning I got a wire from the state laboratory stating that there was no evidence of rabies and the head was negative. I took the wire by to show the mother of the little children. She was rather silent about the affair and by now was in better control of her emotions.
Then I went to Dr. Oswald’s office and waited until he wasn’t busy and, in the presence of his secretary, I gave him a damn strong cussin’ for practicin’ veterinary medicine and for exciting an epidemic. But the word was already on the wind and the horror of human hydrophobia was already vividly pictured in the minds of the nervous, excitable intellectuals and the stupid, superstitious of the population. By dark that day I had vaccinated forty-seven dogs and three house cats for rabies, and I wired the laboratory in Kansas City to send me another three hundred doses of rabies vaccine.
I was careful in conversation over the phone and in talking to people who were concerned about the seriousness of the disease. At no time did I discourage anyone from having an animal of any species vaccinated, and since the vaccine itself had reached a high state of perfection and there was less than one half of one per cent breaks in vaccination, it clearly showed that mankind had made tremendous progress with the disease since the nineteenth century when Louis Pasteur vaccinated himself with the first effective treatment and proved by risking his own life that there was hope for a human being bitten by a rabid animal and that mankind could take steps to protect the domestic animal from rabies.
The mayor of McCamey called me that night and asked if I could come to McCamey early the next morning—all the dogs, cats, and other pets were being brought to the city hall, where he wanted me to vaccinate them. I had enough vaccine on hand to carry me through the McCamey scare, and as I drove back to Fort Stockton I realized that the vaccine I had ordered from Kansas City could not have arrived yet, and I expected to be behind with my treatments by morning.
There were some people with dogs at my office when I got in that night, and I explained to them that I would get fresh vaccine by plane the next day. The plane landed at eleven fifteen and by one o’clock I was again vaccinating dogs at my office.
About midafternoon, I received a call from an oilfield driller at Grand Falls, about forty miles north of Fort Stockton. He said he had a cow that a mad dog must have bitten and she was slobbering at the mouth and falling into the fence; he wanted to know how quickly I could get there.
Cattle and horses are subject to two different forms of rabies. “Mute” rabies is manifested by an animal who stands quietly with his jaws open and can’t swallow, but in most cases he is not wild or excited and is no trouble to handle. Mute rabies could easily be mistaken in a cow for a case of a bone or a stick hung in the throat, and mute rabies in a horse could also be mistaken for some mouth or throat trouble.
There are known cases where a stockman has stuck a hand and arm into the jaw of a rabid cow and contracted rabies and died because of some slight scratch or open wound on his hand. In one such case a dairyman had been conscious and had been able to give instructions to kill the rabid cow.
The symptoms of rabies as they appear in other animals is commonly referred to as “active” rabies in horses and cattle, and the behavior of such affected animals is characterized by extreme nervousness. They will rub huge patches of hide off their shoulders and legs, and both cattle and horses will bite their forelegs and their sides. An active case of rabies in a cow will cause her to fight and run headlong into fences and anything else in sight. Horses are rarely known to paw with their forefeet but will kick at the slightest motion or touch from behind, and there have been cases in veterinary medicine where horses and mules have actually chased people and bit at them as slobbers flowed from their mouth.
When a human has been bitten by a rabid animal, there is only one thing that can and must be done: vaccination should be started as soon as possible and never later than five days after the person is bitten. This treatment consists of fourteen separate injections given every other day in the muscles of the belly wall; they are extremely painful and many times cause such side effects as nausea and other discomforts.
When I drove up to the oil driller’s place at Grandfalls, they had the cow in a high corral fence made out of railroad crossties stuck in the ground that stood side by side and were tied to an iron pipe at the top, and this made it a big, stout fence. A crowd of people had gathered and were peepin’ through the cracks at this “hydrophobic” cow. Nobody wanted to take the chance of opening the gate, so I crawled over it.
As I crawled over the gate and saw the cow slobbering, I knew it could not be a case of mute rabies and that I needed to look for the other symptoms of active rabies besides slobbering. She was a half-breed brindle Jersey cow that might weigh seven hundred pounds. She was extremely thin and her eyes were set, so to speak, in her head like an animal that is going to die, and streams of slobbers were pouring from her mouth.
Nobody offered to come in and help, but in my experience I had never seen a cow with active rabies in this seemingly far advanced stage of slobbers that had not rubbed the hair off her sides and shoulders and did not offer to bite the fence or bite her foreleg or gnaw at her side, and this cow apparently hadn’t knocked a hair off from any nervous irritation.
I pitched a rope around her horns and threw the end of it over the fence so that some of the fellows who were watchin’ could draw her head up to a post and tie her. I wasn’t too scared, but I thought I ough
t to have her tied down even though in my opinion there was no evidence of rabies.
I took another lariat rope and slipped it around her hind legs, and since her head was tied to the fence, some of my audience got brave and came in to help me pull her hind legs out from under her. This would lay her flat on the ground on her side, so I could tell more about her mouth.
I went to the car and put on some rubber gloves and got a probing instrument about eighteen inches long and a wooden axhandle that I carried for such cases as this. I stuck the flat end of the axhandle in the side of the cow’s mouth and then turned it to where it would hold her mouth open about four inches wide.
I very carefully and gently began to feel with the probing instrument for some swelling or foreign object in the back of her mouth and the upper part of her throat. You learn to almost have eyes at the ends of your fingers in the practice of veterinary medicine, and as I felt around, I found no hard object and an enlargement that I was pressing on didn’t give to the pressure sufficiently to have been in the flesh.
I lifted her head up with another short piece of wood into a position where I could see down in her mouth. I detected something green, and with rubber gloves on I went behind the axhandle just a short way into the jaw I took a hold of a huge flat leaf of a prickly pear cactus that was imbedded and held in place by the spines of the cactus and jerked it out of her mouth and thereby “cured” another case of rabies.
Most of the people in the ranching regions of the Far Southwest didn’t have telephones, and many times trips to the nearest telephone were almost as long as trips to town. One rancher who lived in the Davis Mountain region sent his wife about twenty miles to phone me to come see about a sick horse. She was unable to get me on the phone, so she went another twenty miles and that ranch’s phone was out of order. Then she drove on into Fort Stockton, which made it about a sixty-five-mile trip.