by Dr. Jan Pol
Sometimes an autopsy is the only way of solving a mystery. Another horse I was called to look at was carrying a colt and was constipated. That’s not terribly unusual, but it’s something worth paying attention to. I treated the horse over the weekend: I gave her a whole gallon of mineral oil and about five gallons of water to chase it. I told the farmer, “Okay, let’s see if anything comes out.”
By Monday morning, nothing had come out. That was a very serious problem then. The farmer asked me what I wanted to do next, and I told him, “This is all I can do. Why don’t you take her over to Michigan State and see what they say.”
The people at Michigan State did surgery and found what is called a fecal stone, or fecalith, a ball of stool that is rock hard and blocks off the whole gut. “Okay,” I said when they told me, “now it makes sense.” That was the problem. The farmer brought the horse home and it did fine for about a month. Then it developed diarrhea. So I went back there again. The horse’s temperature was normal. I treated it as an infection and it got a little better. But it wasn’t completely right. It would eat a little bit and then be uncomfortable. Dr. Brenda, who began working at the practice after graduating from Michigan State in 1992, went over there and ran a bunch of fluid IVs. The horse didn’t get any better.
The farmer didn’t want to take the horse back to Michigan State. It hadn’t done any good, he told me. I went back because I’ve got the longest arms in the clinic, and I reached inside and found another one of those big hard balls of manure. I could barely reach it; I used the tips of my fingers to scrape it apart and then pulled out the pieces. Behind the stool the manure was regular. It was just blocked from coming out. After I finished clearing out the hardened manure, I said again, “Let’s see what happens.” It was a real mystery.
A week later they called to tell us that the horse had stopped eating again. It had drunk a little water, but it was getting very weak. They had decided it was time to put the horse down. Sometimes that’s the best course. This animal was suffering, and there was nothing more we could do to treat it. I agreed that Dr. Brenda would do it, but I asked if I could do an autopsy the next morning.
When I opened up that horse, I saw that the intestinal tract had become completely atonic; in other words, the colon, which is normally about eight inches across, was at least twice that size, and it was just full of manure. It was unbelievably big; I’d never seen anything like that, so there was no possible way of diagnosing it. There was no way that the gut could contract enough to move food through it. While I’ll never know for sure, what I suspect happened was that the first fecal stone had extended the intestine so much it damaged the muscle; the muscle could no longer do its job, which is to contract and push the food through, so the food just stayed there. The more the horse ate, the bigger the colon grew. The intestinal tract stopped working and slowly filled up with food.
I also could see that the surgery they did at Michigan State was perfect: There was no infection, no adhesions, no nothing. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It just happened, and there is no way anybody could have diagnosed that problem.
An autopsy will do some good only if you understand what you find. If the cause of death is obvious, like hardware, for example, then that’s easy to understand. But usually in an autopsy you have to determine what’s not normal in the animal and then try to figure out what caused it. One of the sad cases I had was a young farmer who lost eight out of his nine cows, and there didn’t seem to be any specific reason for it. These looked to be big, fat, healthy cows; then, boom, they were dead. When I began doing the autopsies, the one thing I discovered that they had in common was that their livers were yellow. There were a few things that could cause that, so I started asking questions. What I discovered was that the reason these cows were so fat was because they were being fed corn silage and ground corn almost exclusively. The soil in Harbor Beach was so good, it was easy to grow corn, and farmers used it for feed. In steers that’s okay; the bigger they are, the more they’re worth. But in dairy cows that was a bad thing, as he was raising his pregnant heifers with his steers. The heifers tried to mobilize the body fat and use it as energy, but their livers couldn’t digest it too well. They do much better digesting hay. That body fat could be only partially digested, but was also partially stored in the liver, and eventually it just got to be too much. He was feeding them to death. When I told him the reason his cattle had died, he kind of shook his shoulders and said, “This is what we got, Doc.”
I told him, “Well then, get some more hay next year or you’re gonna be burying more of these heifers.” I guarantee you he didn’t make that mistake again the next year.
On one of the episodes of the show I did an autopsy on a pet chicken that belonged to a nice woman who actually had several pet chickens. Some people wonder how anyone could have a pet chicken, but every animal has its own personality, and people become attached to them. To most people it’s just another chicken, but to this woman it was a pet and she loved it as much as anybody else loves a pet dog or cat. She cared enough about this chicken that when it was unable to walk she brought it to the vet. When I examined the chicken, I felt a huge lump in her belly. The way it felt, where it was, made me pretty certain it was a tumor. “There’s no way to cure it,” I told the woman. “She should go.” The kindest thing to do was euthanize the animal. She agreed, reluctantly, but wanted me to return the remains so she could bury it in the chicken’s special place. I asked permission to do an autopsy first.
When I cut the chicken open, I was actually very surprised at what I found. First thing, I didn’t find any tumors. An egg yolk had broken inside, causing peritonitis, a deadly infection. What I was feeling were pieces of egg yolks. Her belly was just filled with dried egg yolks. “There was nothing you could have done,” I told the owner. “Nothing we could have done. No way to cure it.”
“At least she didn’t suffer,” the woman told me, sad but satisfied she had done her best.
Actually, I’ve done many autopsies on chickens. Most farmers in the area keep a flock of chickens. When one dies, it’s okay; the farmer isn’t too upset. It happens; chickens don’t live that long anyway. But when the next chicken dies, the farmer thinks, Wait a minute, this is too many. I don’t want all my chickens to die. They usually call me after the second chicken has died, and they do it to learn how to treat the rest of the flock. In the winter of 2013, a farmer brought in three dead chickens. They had died overnight, and they hadn’t shown any signs that something was wrong. I opened them up and didn’t see any obvious problems. The comb, the fleshy crest on the top of a chicken’s head, was dark red, which can be a sign of oxygen deprivation. As I examined the organs I found small rocks in the crop, where the food collects first, then in the stomach, or the gizzard. It didn’t make too much sense, so I started asking questions.
It was a typical central Michigan winter, cold and snowy. One icy afternoon the farmer threw out some special salt, which he’d bought to melt the ice that supposedly was safe for animals to walk on. Regular salt can irritate an animal’s paws. But no salt is safe for animals to eat. Now, chickens will swallow pebbles and sand and store them in the gizzard to help them grind up food. The chickens thought the salt was pebbles or food and pecked it up, causing salt poisoning. They ate so much salt that their blood became hypertonic, which means it just goes to the periphery of the body, so it seems like it just disappears. That’s why the comb was so dark red; a lot of blood had settled there. As a result there was not enough blood circulating to provide the oxygen they needed to breathe, and that’s why they died.
One of the strangest situations I ever had to figure out started with a call early one morning when a farmer told me he woke up that morning and had three dead cows. “I’ll be right there,” I told him. I actually had been out to his farm the previous afternoon to look at a cow. He hadn’t been there, but when I examined the cow I saw she had a twisted stomach, an LDA, or left displaced aboma
sum, which is usually treatable by rolling the cow. But I couldn’t do it without his help, so I left word I’d be back the next day. Now that cow was dead and this farmer was upset like the dickens with me. Whatever the problem was, he felt I should have figured it out.
As I rode over there, I wondered what had happened. The cow had a problem, but there was no reason in the world an LDA would have killed her. And there were two other dead cows, too. It had been a bad night: All night it was over eighty degrees and very foggy, with 100 percent humidity. The air just felt so heavy. Some breeds of cows don’t do so well in extreme temperatures. Holsteins, for example, are the most comfortable between fifteen and fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. When it goes above that, they get stressed, and when the humidity goes way up, they get really distressed. When it gets up to eighty degrees, they quit eating and milking. When we get several days in a row of very high temperatures, milk production will drop as much as 25 percent. So right away I was worried the heat and humidity might have had something to do with these deaths.
When I got there, I told him, “Let’s open them up and figure this out.” Sure enough, the first one—the cow I had looked at the day before—had a twisted stomach. She wouldn’t eat, and under the stress of the warm and foggy night, she died. When I examined the second cow I found an infection around her heart, what’s called pericarditis. She had scar tissue two inches thick around her heart. Normally the heart is in a sac with a little bit of fluid around it, like a lubricant, so that it can beat easily. Because of the scar tissue, the heart didn’t beat well enough, and in the heavy air the cow couldn’t get enough oxygen and died. The third cow also had a twisted stomach, but this was an RDA—the twist was the wrong way, which is very difficult to fix and causes other problems. The extra stress had killed that cow too. So this farmer lost three cows out of sixty, which was too many, and all three deaths were caused by the combination of high humidity and high temperature.
That farmer got even with me in his own way. He went bankrupt and never paid his bill.
There are times, unfortunately, when an autopsy reveals that we missed something. I had a pretty ordinary case in which a cow had a calf and did not get rid of the afterbirth. That happens; a retained placenta usually isn’t an especially serious problem. I went over there and found a very sick cow. She had a 104-degree temperature and a very badly infected uterus. I put the cow on antibiotics to treat the uterus. I told the farmer to keep her on the antibiotics for the next three or four days, and hopefully that would clear up the problem.
She died two days later. That didn’t make sense to me; that uterus should not have been so bad that the cow died. I did an autopsy and I saw the real cause of her death right away. “Oh my gosh,” I said. “Look at this.” I held up a piece of wire that I’d found in her stomach. “Who would have thought?”
This farmer fenced in his pasture with woven wire, squares of wire that come in a roll and can be as much as six feet high. A lot of times people use it to keep deer out. It’s not like barbed wire, which cuts anything that touches it. Woven wire doesn’t have sharp edges; it just makes a barrier. When it’s in good condition it’s not dangerous, but when it gets old and rusted, it breaks off in six-inch pieces. These small pieces are cow killers. They are the worst; they are just long enough to get into the stomach and just sharp enough to go through the stomach wall into the heart. If a farmer mows hay in that field and doesn’t know those pieces are there, they can get picked up in the bales of hay. This is exactly what happened. The cow had swallowed a piece of wire that was hidden in her hay. She had a bad uterus, but when she was straining to deliver her calf, the pressure pushed that piece of metal through the wall of her stomach into her heart, killing her.
I had missed it; it was completely masked by the infection in her uterus, which could have caused those symptoms. There really was nothing anybody could have done, although it does make me a lot more wary when I see anything similar. Fortunately, there is a way to avoid most of that hardware problem. While farmers try to be careful, it’s surprising how many small pieces of metal are just lying on the ground. So when the farmers start chopping hay or corn, the machine should have a big magnet in it, and everything that’s chopped up goes right over that magnet and any metal in the feed sticks to it.
There are times when you don’t have to do a full autopsy to get the answer you need. In addition to everything else that we do in the practice, sometimes we get brought into a legal situation and are asked to do a forensic investigation. CSI: Weidman! That’s us. In the afternoon of a very hot summer day in about 2003 a man went to the casino on the other side of Mount Pleasant. He left a long-haired German shepherd under the canvas cover in the back of his pickup. He didn’t think he was going to be inside very long; he was just going to make a few bets and then go home. It turned out to be his lucky day, he thought. He couldn’t lose. But while he was inside, a guard walked by his truck and saw the dog having seizures, so he opened up the truck and pulled the dog out. After a couple of more seizures, the dog died. The casino called animal control, which blamed the death on the owner for leaving it in the boiling-hot truck bed, and wanted to bring charges against him. They brought the animal to the clinic so we could determine if hyperthermia was the actual cause of death.
The dog’s body was lying in the garage. Dr. Eric began making preparations to open him up. Dr. Eric loves working with small animals, especially dogs and cats, so this is what he does at the practice. I asked Eric, “Did you take its temperature?”
“No,” he said. “The dog’s been dead more than four hours.”
“Let’s do it anyway,” I said. Four hours after its death, that dog’s temperature was 114 degrees. One hundred and fourteen degrees. Oh my goodness. Granted, the animal’s long hair acted as kind of insulation to hold in the heat, but geez, that’s twelve degrees higher than normal. Of course the dog died from that heat.
The prosecutor from Isabella County told me, “I’m gonna get that guy. He’s going to be in jail for three months.”
I asked, “Why? That guy was stupid. He forgot about his dog ’cause he was winning. Just take all his winnings away plus extra. Give him that big fine and make it that for five years he can’t have a dog.”
The prosecutor went along with my suggestion and they told me that the owner was really upset about not being allowed to have a dog. If you’re used to having a dog in the house and suddenly you’re not permitted to have one, it can be very tough. I wouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t have a dog in my house for five years. So I thought that was a much worse penalty than three months in jail.
There have been times when even an autopsy hasn’t helped figure out why an animal died. Those are the most frustrating cases of all. When I was working in Harbor Beach, all of a sudden milk production went way down. It wasn’t just one farm; it was happening all over the state. And then cows started dying. This went on for almost three years. We didn’t see too much of it, but even a few cases were too many. Every vet in Michigan was getting called for these cases, but there was nothing anybody could do about it. Nobody could figure out what it was. The autopsies didn’t show anything unusual. No matter what people tried, it kept spreading. Finally a farmer in Battle Creek who had a PhD in chemistry noticed that the mice and rats in his barn were dying. Like rodents do, they were eating spilled grain. He sent them to the lab at Michigan State; they autopsied these mice and rats and didn’t find anything. But then they used a sophisticated process called color chromatography, which breaks down a sample into all of its chemical components. They found a mystery chemical in the fat that they couldn’t identify. Finally they had an expert from New York look at it; fortunately he had seen it before.
It was a chemical named polybrominated biphenyl, PBB, a fire retardant that was used in children’s clothing at that time, and in the same family as polychlorinated biphenyl, which is a toxic substance. But the question was, How in the world was a chemi
cal used primarily for making kids’ clothing fireproof spreading among cows in Michigan? It took some detective work, but the state finally found the cause. A chemical plant near Saint Louis that was manufacturing the chemical was also making a mineral called calcium phosphorus, which went into cow feed. They put them in the same color paper bags, but the fire retardant was called FireMaster, while the feed was NutriMaster. So they ran out of bags for FireMaster in that factory and some smart aleck told them, “Oh, let’s just put them in the other bags. It won’t hurt.” They started shipping this PBB out to Michigan in NutriMaster bags.
It wasn’t the fault of the people selling the feed, but it was a serious problem. It was the kind of chemical that could affect humans who drank the milk or ate the meat of cows that had been feeding on it. The officials were especially worried about it causing cancer and birth defects. The rats that ate it did develop cancer. The officials knew the chemical was showing up in people when it was identified in the breast milk of a woman who had just given birth. As soon as we were told what to look for, we began testing animals. We had to take fat samples from cows before they went to market, and if the samples contained more than three parts per billion of this chemical, the cows had to be destroyed. Unfortunately, we found quite a bit of it.
Thousands of cows had to be euthanized. The problem was that because this chemical was a fire retardant, incinerating the bodies would only have released it into the air. So the bodies had to be buried. The state dug a large clay-lined pit up on a military base in Kalkaska County. Being curious, I wanted to see it. I decided to take my whole family up there with me.
Some families go to Disneyland; we drove up to Kalkaska to see where these cows were being buried. I went to a local police station to find out exactly where this pit was located. I told them that I was a vet and many of my clients’ cows were being buried here and I wanted to see it. “Well, sorry, Doc,” they said, “this is a state matter. We can’t tell you.” Okay, they were honest. I stopped at a local gas station and asked, “Where are they putting all these cows in the ground?”