by Ben K. Green
The peculiarity of this horse’s sickness was what kept driving her when she couldn’t reach me and the phones didn’t work. Her husband had told her that the horse was acting peculiar, and he thought that he had been bitten by a mad fox. The possibility of more livestock and the family pets being in danger had caused the rancher’s wife to come in at a pretty reckless speed.
It was about noon, and when I started to say I would be out there after dinner, she said, “No, you won’t. I’ll beat you back and we’ll have dinner after you’ve seen this sick horse that J. C. is so worried about.”
When she took off in a cloud of dust, I had no doubt that she would beat me to the ranch because I wasn’t that excited or in that big a hurry. I went by the drugstore and left word where I was going in case somebody else looked for me.
It was high noon when I drove up to the corral where all the ranch hands and some of the neighbors stood watchin’ a good-lookin’ dapple grey horse that was standing in the middle of the corral close to a water trough with his feet all spraddled out. This was a narrow water trough about twenty feet long, the top of which was eighteen inches from the ground so that sheep, cattle, and horses could all drink out of it.
We had a few howdys as I walked into the corral and J. C. told me that if I didn’t think it was safe to go near the horse, not to take any chances. The horse could see the water at the top of the trough and he was standin’ with his nose about two feet from the edge of the trough suckin’ and makin’ all the motions and noises of a horse drinkin’ without knowin’ that he didn’t have his mouth in the water.
I asked one of the cowboys to pitch me a lariat rope and I walked up to the horse and slipped the rope over his head. When I tried to lead him, he ran backward as though he was goin’ to choke and I gave him slack. One of the cowboys spoke up and said, “He’s mad if I ever saw a mad horse, and as many dead foxes as there is in the mountains and around the water troughs, he could’ve sure been bit by one.”
I didn’t let his palaver bother me too much, and by rubbing around on the horse’s head, I finally got his attention so that his eyes weren’t so badly fixed on the ground, and in a few minutes he led up on a loose rope.
I saw some loose boards lying against the bottom of the fence and told J. C. to lay one of those boards across the open gate, which he did, and as I stepped over the board and the horse saw it, he ran backward the full length of the rope.
I asked how long they had been riding this horse. J. C. said that he was just an average kind of horse and they only used him for an extra and he had been runnin’ out all summer until just a few days ago. I said, “You’ve been pasturin’ your extra horses over there at the foot of the mountains, and the runoff from those little summer flash floods we’ve had in the mountains has caused some loco-weed to come in the flats, and this horse has a fair case of loco. When you rode him yesterday, you got him hot and ‘brought it out’ on him, so to speak, and he hasn’t been bit by a rabid fox.”
This brought on some volunteer talk from the cowboys who had been riding the other extra horses that were brought in with his horse, and they had seen signs of boogerin’ and fright from common objects in their horses since they had been riding them the last few days.
Loco is a weed that grows in the semi-arid regions of the Southwest. The early summer growth of loco, which is tender, is readily eaten by horses and it affects their nervous systems and causes them to be more apt to shy from man-made objects. After a horse has apparently recovered from the symptoms, he may still show signs of nerve damage when he is ridden or worked and after he is hot. Most apparently gentle horses won’t step over a rope or cross a plank laying in their pathway and are inclined to booger from almost any kind of a shadow on the ground.
When a horse has eaten as much as 30 per cent of his body weight in loco over a period of time, he will develop extreme nervousness, stagger when he tries to move, and will continue to lose coordination through a prolonged illness until he dies. This dapple grey horse was an in-between case: he had too much loco to be useful but not enough to kill him; and if he should recover sufficiently to be used again, he would still do things that would cause him to be referred to as locoed.
J. C.’s wife, true to her word, had a big dinner on the table by the time we finished with the horse. At the dinner table lots of hearsay rabies stories were told by the cowboys. After dinner, I vaccinated the family pets, dogs, and cats and went back to town.
I was in the back of the drugstore talking to Roger Gallemore when Blanche came through the front door in a loud pair of shorts and pullin’ on a long cigarette and callin’ to me in a loud tone of voice. In a tone that easily could have been heard all over town, she went to tellin’ me that there was something bad wrong with her Pekingese house dog; it was actin’ strange and she just knew it was about to go mad.
I had vaccinated this Pekingese dog at six-month intervals for about three years, and I knew there was no possible chance that it had rabies. When she lowered her tone of voice and started blowin’ her cigarette smoke, I told her that the only possible way that her house dog could be takin’ rabies was that she had bitten some of the children and some of the children had bitten the dog. She left the store cussin’ me, and said that as crazy as I was gettin’ I must have been bit by some’n myself. This was the kind of thing that made me popular.
I had eaten a big dinner and was lyin’ on a pallet on the porch when Rafael rode up on a mule, bareback with a blind bridle on him. He said, “Dok-tor, I theenk my other mule ees sick in the head. I hate veery much to disturb you from your siesta, but we must do something for my mule.”
Rafael lived about two miles out of town on an irrigated farm, and I told him to head back home on his mule and I would be there in a few minutes. I waited long enough for Rafael to get home on his mule, and I drove up at about the same time that he got to the mule corral.
There was a nice little three-sided ’dobe barn with a loft in it that opened out to the south. Rafael’s mules were the small, good kind of little Mexican mule and were well broke and gentle. The corral fence had been grown by planting yuccateae cactus close together and training the branches across each other. It was a very typical desert fence, really a wall of cactus thorns, and would sure hold any kind of livestock.
The little mule had run and fallen into the fence and had cactus stickers all over one shoulder, and from the time Rafael had left home until the time we got back to the corral, he had rubbed that shoulder raw on the front post of the barn. Rafael was very excited and his wife and several young children had been standin’ outside the fence and hollerin’ and chunkin’ the mule to try to get him to stop rubbin’.
The little mule was slobbering at the mouth and had a wild look in his eyes. When a small spotted Spanish goat started across the corral, he ran at him and picked him up in his mouth by the neck and shook him like a dog would shake a rabbit. Rafael started through the gate with a garden hoe to beat him off the goat. I pulled him back and shut the gate and explained to him that the mule had the disease of the “mad-dog bite.”
He turned and, in a high tone of voice, told his wife and children in Spanish to go back to “la casa.” I was explaining that rabies was caused by the bite of a skunk or dog or some such animal when he began to wave his hands in the air. He took off his hat and whipped his legs and burst into a fit of Spanish that was akin to an unknown tongue.
When he finally got control of himself, he explained to me that there had been a momma skunk with some kittens in the hay in the loft of the barn and that they were “mucho bonito” and that he and the children had watched them. About two weeks ago he had seen the momma skunk come down out of the loft into the feed trough where the mule was eating and bite the mule on the nose. The mule had snorted and whirled out of the corral and slung the skunk loose from his nose and Rafael said, “You know sometheeng else, that skunk and those kittens have disappeared since that day.”
I went to the car and got a .30-.30 rifle an
d shot the mule through the heart. You never shoot a rabid animal through the head if you might want to send it off, because you would damage the brain.
I explained to Rafael about sending the head to Austin, and he said that the presence of the skunk, the word of me, the Dok-tor, and how the mule acted was all the proof that he needed. I cautioned him that he must kill the goat and burn or bury it, and he said that he would do that when he dragged the mule off.
This was the only case of rabies that occurred in a domestic animal during this several weeks’ rabies scare, and it was caused by the bite of the skunk. It would be hard to estimate the true benefit that was derived from the extensive vaccination campaign that was brought about by this scare, and the circumstances may have prevented an outbreak of rabies in domestic dogs.
The fox by nature is a coward and relies on his cunning for survival and not on his ability as a fighter. In his rabid condition when he started into civilization in his subconscious state he was still not a fighter. I seriously doubt that the foxes that were dying over the country ever bit any domestic livestock. And so, the worst part of the so-called rabies epidemic was in the human mind.
HORMONES
In my early years in Fort Stockton more ranchers tried grazing sheep on irrigated fields, and due to the war, everybody wanted to produce as much livestock as possible on the acres involved. Considerable interest had been manifested in the possibility of treating ewes to cause them to bring two lambs a year. Hormone therapy was something which had been talked about in the livestock industry but on which very little research had been done. Little knowledge was available pertaining to the treatment of domestic animals with hormones.
I wrote several laboratories that I thought might have information that had not been released, but their response was disappointing, and what information they had to offer did not apply to range conditions.
I began my first attempt to develop a satisfactory hormone preparation by using hormones in injectable form that were compounded in sesame oil. I injected four different pens of ten ewes each. These sheep were all of the same breeding and age. Two pens were injected with two different natural hormones; the third pen was injected with an artificial chemical hormone; and the fourth pen with a blended hormone.
One of these pens of ewes that were treated with artificial hormones became highly nervous and went off their feed and drank unusual amounts of water. Some of them got in bad enough condition to make me think that they might die, so I “posted” one of these ewes and found that the artificial hormone had had a very harsh effect on the reproductive organs of the sheep and had caused severe hemorrhage in the ovaries and extreme contractions in the tubes of the reproductive organs.
Another pen of ten ewes that were treated with pure estrogenic hormones showed little or no reaction and gave no indications of being ready to breed. Since these ewes were doing exceptionally well and were fat, we slaughtered one for mutton and I examined the reproductive organs. There had not been even a slight reaction. Repeated treatment on these ewes with natural estrogen finally caused them to breed, but the repeated treatments would have been too expensive and too time-consuming to be practical.
The ten ewes that were treated with blended hormones produced a false cycle and in a few days (three to seven days) had a reoccurring fertile cycle and we turned the bucks in. When I determined that these ewes were all with lamb, I treated fifty ewes with the same blend and turned them out under range conditions. These fifty ewes produced forty-eight lambs, which is 96 per cent, and the ten ewes that had been kept in a small lot on feed produced twelve lambs, two of them having twins, which is 120 per cent.
All these sheep were dry ewes that had missed a spring lamb and had been cut out from the main herd at shearing time, and they produced lambs in the early winter and were grazed on irrigated fields. These ewes all showed some age and were broken-mouthed and normally would have been sent to market in the summer after they were sheared. Their lambs weighed around ninety pounds at Easter marketing time and the ewes were also fat and could be shipped with the lambs. This was a good trick in that it got a lamb from an old ewe at an ideal time of year and she was still marketable without any loss from having produced this last lamb.
Dry ewes have always been a loss factor in range sheep, and these experiments pointed to the possibility of making a better market for old ewes that could be bred and grazed on irrigated fields and also on Panhandle wheat pastures.
The following year Othro Adams bought a good number of dry ewes out of the wool from a rancher in the Glass Mountains. He and I went out and “hormoned” these ewes and left them there a few weeks to breed up. This gave him time to cut some more irrigated alfalfa hay before he moved these ewes onto the fields to lamb and graze until time to ship to the Easter market. This would be about the right time to get livestock off the alfalfa to start another season of cutting hay.
My hormone research received wide acclaim. I named my blended product Ewetone and shipped it in large quantities to a number of states.
Young range sheep are hard to get a good percentage of lambs from the first year that they are bred. Ranchers referred to breeding “yearling ewes,” but, actually, these so-called yearling ewes were almost two years old, and under semi-arid range conditions, such young ewes rarely bred and produced more than a 60 per cent lamb crop the first year.
With little additional experimentation, the blended product Ewetone was being used on hundreds of thousands of young range ewes. After treatment, they produced from 85 to 100 per cent. Range ewes are bred to bring spring lambs, and treatment with Ewetone was not to change the lambing time but to increase the lambing percentage.
I produced the blended hormone product in a sesame-oil base in my laboratory and packaged it for small flocks in the Eastern states in 1-cc. ten-dose vials, and for the Western range-sheep trade, I packaged it in 50-cc. amber vials with hypodermic rubber stoppers. This was a very stable product and required no refrigeration or special handling and was easy to administer.
I was working in my laboratory when Cleo McKenzie, who had ranching interests scattered around but at that time had his main operation around Tunis Springs, came in and began to tell me about a horse that had a big knot “rise up” on his shoulder point. He said he had taken his knife and stuck the blade through a little piece of wood so it wouldn’t go too deep into the knot on the shoulder of the horse, then he jobbed it right quick to open it, and the pus and corruption just flowed. He had taken his knife out of his pocket and was showing me about how thick the block of wood was on the blade and about how much of the blade was left that he used to open the knot. He went on to tell me that he had had to open it two or three times more, and he wondered if I could give him something to put on it.
This home practice was common among Western ranchers, and it was often necessary to overcome what had been done to the horse. I was fixin’ him up a package of healing powders, and since I didn’t want anything counteractin’ these healing powders, I asked Cleo to let me see his knife again. He very unsuspectingly handed me his knife. With the other hand I handed him the healing powders and said, “You can have your knife back when the horse gets well.”
As the drouth moved in and became more severe, the ranchers in the drouth area were constantly selling off the older ewes, and finally only the young ewes were left on the ranches. In one of the most severe years of drouth about three hundred thousand young ewes in the Trans-Pecos Region were treated with hormones to ensure a good lamb crop. There was no break in the sunshine, wind, and dry weather.
When sheep have baby lambs, they need to be in good enough condition that they come into their natural milk flow and have full bags, which causes them to claim their baby lambs. If a ewe is poor due to drouth or other conditions, she will have her lamb and then walk off and leave it. It seems that the instinct for survival is more pronounced than the mother instinct.
When lambing season started on these last treated ewes, the drouth had reached its wo
rst stage, and these young mother sheep had their lambs on barren ranges with no grass or weeds and only dead brush to survive on, and most of the lamb crop was lost. For the next several years of the drouth no one was interested in treating what few sheep they had, and the sheep that they hung on to, hoping for rain, they didn’t really care whether they brought a lamb crop or not.
Some of the mountain regions of New Mexico hadn’t gotten quite as dry as the Trans-Pecos and I had begun to spread out, advertise, and travel some of that country and sell my hormone products for sheep and cattle. Cattle are much easier to get to breed and calve than sheep and there was the need in the range industry for a hormone product that could be used to cause cows to calve at a particular time of year, which would enable a rancher to make the best possible use of his range and have calves of uniform size at shipping time.
With the experience I had had in developing a hormone product for sheep, I took several short cuts in testing various blends of hormones in treating heifers of breeding age. After a few trial-and-error experiences, by the end of my first year of research, I had Cowtone ready for commercial use.
Breeding cattle does not present too much of a problem and the big advantage to be had by the use of Cowtone on heifers was in setting their calving time with the first calf and causing them all to calve within a short period—thus making calves uniform at the time of shipment the following fall. By starting heifers to breed at a particular time of year, with good range management as to when to put the bulls out on range and take them off, they could very well be controlled to calve at the same time of year for the rest of their productive life.
Bert Kincaid was back from service in the Second World War and was drenching sheep for intestinal parasites on a commercial custom basis. He and I had overlapping interests in the livestock medicine business that caused us to work together a good deal. In need of business and work, we began to solicit large herds of heifers in New Mexico of breeding age to treat with Cowtone. We made trips into Clovis, Fort Sumner, and on up into the mountain regions of New Mexico.