by Dr. Jan Pol
“Over by Gera,” a man told me.
“Okay, thank you very much. We’re going to Gera.”
The town of Gera was dead. We couldn’t find anybody to tell us how to find this pit. It’s got to be in the military preserve, I figured, and we went over there. Then I noticed a dirt road that recently had been widened. Look at this, I thought. I backed up and started driving down this road into the woods.
I kept going for about two miles and suddenly I saw several generators and trailers; before I could do anything, a huge National Guardsman holding a gun approached our car. This guy had to be seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. “Oh my gosh,” I said. It was like we had discovered some secret government operation. I kept my hands right in front of me and walked up to him. I said the same thing to him that I’d said to the police officer: “I’m a vet. My clients’ cows are buried here. I’d like to see it.”
“Can’t let you in,” he told me. Well, okay, at least he wasn’t going to shoot me. I turned the car around and drove back about a hundred yards, then stopped and took some pictures. But a car followed me all the way back to the highway. All right, I thought, maybe the next time we will go to Disneyland.
On the Road Again, and Again, and Again
I’ve spent my life on farms. There’s no good reason to be a farmer; no matter how hard you work, you have to do it again tomorrow; nature is always fighting you and there’s never been much profit in it. My brother, also named Jan Pol, always said that farmers live poor and die rich. But if it’s in your blood, there’s no other place in the world that makes you feel content. My dad had forty acres; we had thirty cows and several Friesian horses, we were raising pigs, we had chickens for eggs, and we grew our own potatoes. Sometimes we had sugar beets. Those were the cash crops. There was always wheat and oats. When we moved into our area, my dad was considered a progressive farmer, and there were people who resented him. They weren’t looking for change. But he had a milking machine rather than doing the milking by hand, as it had always been done. And then he bought a machine that fluffed up the grass; in the Netherlands it’s hard to make dry hay, and this machine fluffed it up so it would dry faster. That was something people had never used, and there was some controversy about it, but when the other farmers saw how well it worked, they all went out and bought those machines too.
My main chore was milking the cows in the afternoon. After school I was always playing out in the field, so when it was time for me to do my job, we’d unhitch the horses and instead of walking them back to the pasture, I’d jump on the first one, hang on to the other one, and ride bareback as fast as I could to the first gate. Then I’d jump off. I was a kid; I never saw any danger. I started riding when I was six; when no one was looking, I climbed up on a wagon and got on a horse’s back and didn’t fall off. Even today I can’t ride in a saddle; give me a bareback and I’ll be fine.
All of our cows had family names. If they were descendants of Dina, for example, they were Dina 3 or Dina 4. I got to know animals very well, especially cows. I learned that there were some milking cows that wouldn’t mind anything—they didn’t mind being bothered—while other cows were just waiting for me to be in the wrong place so they could lift a leg. I had to be very fast to avoid them. If you have a really good look at my nose, you can see that I wasn’t always fast enough.
While every small farm may look different, the feeling of being in a place like this is always the same. If you’ve been lucky enough to grow up on a farm, there is a feeling of comfort and belonging that you get the instant you step into the barnyard. There’s a language that farmers speak; it’s the total of farming history and experience, it’s based in respect for the land and the animals, and if you speak it you’re welcome on pretty much any farm. Because of my upbringing I’ve always been comfortable working on a farm. And when the practice first got settled, I spent almost all my time making farm calls. If you’re interested in wearing clean clothes or smelling good, then you can’t make farm calls. We’ve worked in every possible condition, from the heat of a Michigan summer, when you work up a sweat just getting out of the car, through the blistering cold of a Michigan winter, when the only way to stay on the road during a blizzard is to follow the telephone poles.
A large-animal vet needs four things: the tools to do whatever the job entails, the skills to do it, the ability to ignore foul odors, and a really good washing machine. It’s never a question of whether or not you’re going to get dirty; it’s a question of how dirty you’re going to get. If you work with animals, you are going to end up smelling like animals. I’ve spent my days and many, many nights walking through mud and muck; lying on cold, dirty floors; and feeling my way around the inside of an animal. You can’t ever pick your working conditions; you have to work wherever you find the animal. It seems sometimes that it’s always too hot or too cold, too cramped or too dark, too muddy or too dusty; it’s always too something. One time I had to check a bunch of sick pigs on a farm, and the farmer was keeping them in a lean-to beside the barn. There is one thing I have never understood about pigs: Why did God make an animal stink so bad but taste so good? As I walked around looking at the animals, I suddenly stepped into a hole about two feet deep. It was filled with pig manure and the manure went all the way over the top of my boot. Smells don’t ever bother me—I can stay places nobody else can bear to be—but this was strong even for me.
“I’m sorry,” the farmer said. “I forgot to warn you about that. We were going to put some more beams in here and never got to it.”
What do you do when you’re standing up to your knee in pig manure and the farmer apologizes to you? I just accepted it, took off my boot and washed it inside and out, washed off my leg, and drove home with bare feet because everything else stunk so much. Then I took a long, hot shower and went back to work.
Working in manure, getting it all over your arm when you reach inside an animal—that’s part of this profession. Cows are never housebroken; they go to the bathroom as they’re eating, so every barn has an alleyway behind the row of stalls, which is where cows mostly do their business. Farmers used to clean these alleyways by pushing a metal bucket in front of a tractor. That process grinds the side of the bucket until it has a knife-sharp edge, and as a result accidents—like a hoof being sliced off—happen. This alleyway was a problem because if you didn’t clean it regularly, a couple of inches of manure and urine collected in the alleyway, and it was slippery. Cows would be slipping and sliding all over the place. Several times I almost slipped too. I got called one day to treat a cow for milk fever; when I got there, that cow was just sitting there in the alleyway. She’d fallen and she couldn’t get up. I had no choice; I had to stand in the manure to treat her.
After I was done, that cow tried to stand up but couldn’t get her footing; she kept slipping and sprawling. It was really sad watching this animal struggling to stand. In fact, the US government did a $2 million study of the problem, and after all their work they reported that manure is slippery. Thank you; any farmer could have told them that. “That’s enough,” I told the farmer. “Go get the tractor.” Cows have very strong necks; I mean, you can’t hurt them around the neck. We tied a long chain around her neck and attached it to the back of the tractor. “Just run with it,” I told him. We positioned the chain so her nose would be held up. The farmer started pulling that cow, and it was just sliding along the alleyway with its nose in the air like it was water-skiing, pushing a wave of manure in front of it. When it got to the end of the alleyway, we unhooked it, and the cow stood up and walked away.
There was a man from this area named Don Mensch who came up with the idea of cutting those giant tires from construction and mining equipment crosswise and then in half again so you got sort of a giant curved rubber scraper, which could be pulled behind a tractor. He got a patent on the invention and it took off like crazy; now every farmer in this area uses one to clean the alleyway.
&nb
sp; In this job you get used to bad smells—there aren’t a lot of sweet smells—and like a pig farmer, after a while you just don’t even smell things anymore. But there are terrible smells you never forget. Steve Fox’s family dairy farm had a cow trying to have a dead calf. A couple of legs were hanging out of her, and there was some funky smell. The cow was fine; she was running around. We managed to get a rope around the calf and started pulling it out. Steve Fox was helping me and he said, “That really stinks, Doc, doesn’t it?”
I said, “Man, this is terrible. Dead calves never stink that bad. I don’t know what kind of bacteria is in there to make it rot like that, but it’s awful.” I pulled the calf out in pieces and I had to wash out that rope several times before I could put it in my car.
Maybe the worst one was when a farmer called me to come look at a cow that had a sore foot. I tied up the cow, fixed the foot and bandaged it, and I was done. But as I was going to the car, the farmer said, “Long as you’re here, I want you to check a cow. She was supposed to have a calf more than a week ago.”
Sure. No different than anything I’d done countless times. I got the cow calmed down and reached inside. I felt two feet. Well, when you feel two feet, you pull to see what comes out. I pulled.
That was a mistake. That was the plug that was keeping everything inside her. The cow mooed, and suddenly an entire liquefied calf came out of her. There were pieces of bone, pieces of hide; there were things—I had no idea what they might be, and the smell was worse. It formed a puddle two feet across and six inches deep right behind the cow. We all sort of looked at one another; I think we were all too embarrassed to throw up in front of everyone else, so we sort of swallowed hard; sometimes not throwing up is a matter of pride. I can take it! But I guarantee you if one person had thrown up at that moment, we all would have. But I wasn’t done; I had to go back inside that animal and make sure everything was out. So I reached in and found several small skull bones and pulled them out. Then I gave her a strong antibiotic and she did fine.
Believe me, every large-animal vet—and his or her wife or husband—can tell you stories about the weird things that have gotten all over him or her. For a few years we were giving cows injections of bovine somatotropin, a hormone that makes cows eat more, because when a cow eats more it gives more milk. After a few years the government made us quit, so we don’t do it anymore. The injection had to be given in a little hollow right beside the tail that’s filled with fat. The tail is always covering the anus, so it’s always full of manure. Cows don’t wipe their butts, so many times they get infected and develop a little abscess. One afternoon I was having a conversation with the farmer while I was doing pregnancy tests. As I started checking one cow I noticed a large abscess on her butt, and just as I put my hand in there, that abscess popped and that pus just went all over my face and in my mouth. That farmer started laughing and he couldn’t stop. I said, “Man, that does not taste good.” But I’ll tell you, in all the years I’ve been doing this, not only have I never thrown up once; I’ve never even almost thrown up.
But sometimes my assistants have. And Charles? Well, Charles is certainly Charles. Just like I can remember the day when I decided I wanted to be a vet, Charles can remember the day he knew for sure he didn’t want to be a vet. We each happened to be about twelve years old when we made those decisions. After dinner one night in the winter we got a call from an Amish farmer that his horse was having trouble with the foaling; that’s an automatic emergency, and whatever you’re doing, you go. It was miserable outside; it was freezing cold and we were having an old-time blizzard: the wind was blowing so strong that the snow seemed like it was coming down horizontal. There were drifts almost as big as the car. I told Charles I wanted him to come with me. If I went off the road or got stuck, I needed him to help me. We plowed through drifts; I just put my foot down on the gas and slammed through them. The foal had already been dead for probably a whole day when we got there, but I still had to get it out. I put chains on it and yanked it out, and that’s when the smell that had been trapped inside burst out in one big, foul wave. Oh my goodness, was it terrible.
I looked at Charles and his face turned white and he tried hard to hold it in; then his whole body shook just a little, and then that was it. Out it came. He didn’t say a word; he just turned around and went back to wait in the station wagon. I think at that time any other place in the world was better than being in that barn. That’s the day Charles decided that he wasn’t going to be a vet.
Probably the most important thing about getting to a farm is being able to get there in every type of weather. A large-animal vet’s car becomes an extension of him- or herself. There is only one thing every one of them has in common: They ain’t pretty. They are always dirty and beat-up, sometimes they don’t smell so good, and any vehicle with less than a hundred thousand miles on it is just getting broken in. In Harbor Beach we drove mostly small trucks, but they didn’t last. When I opened my practice I started buying used Buick or Oldsmobile station wagons because they were made so well and would just last forever. They stopped making station wagons in 1996—when SUVs filled that need—but we kept our wagons for ten more years. People still ask me, “Dr. Pol, what happened to your station wagons?” and I tell them, “They finally bit the dust.”
Then we started buying used Jeeps. We have seven of them in the clinic; we use five and have two for backup. They last. The one I’ve been driving on the show has 240,000 miles on it. The springs go pretty quick, but nobody cares about that, but when the back axle goes, that’s a problem. We usually just put another one on.
One time in February a farmer called and asked me to come right out because he had a pregnant cow that was getting ready to freshen; that means that she was getting ready to give birth. Well, she wasn’t due till April, so I knew she was aborting. “Can you get her in the barn?” I asked him.
“I’ll try,” he said. But when I got there she was tied to his tractor in the middle of the snow-covered field. The snow was probably a foot deep. There were tractor tracks, but they were wider than my Jeep’s axle. I just put it in four-wheel drive low and drove right out a quarter mile through the snow into the pasture, delivered a set of dead twins, got back in the car, and drove home. No problem. These old Jeeps get me where I need to go.
My office is the whole back of the truck. Medical doctors carry little black bags; large-animal vets drive large vehicles. All large-animal vets have to carry the whole office with them. Everybody arranges it differently, but the important thing is to put the same tool back in the same place every time, so you can find it when you need it, even in the dark. There’s nothing more frustrating than needing a tool right away and having to search through a pile of stuff to find it. Charles tries to help me. He takes things out and cleans them, but he doesn’t always put them back in the same place. One time he cleaned everything up so well and put everything in so neatly and orderly that I couldn’t find anything. I told Charles, you got to clean out that Jeep because I don’t know where anything is anymore. So we had to take out all these clean instruments and tools and put them all back my way. My way is my way, and it’s different from Dr. Brenda’s way or Dr. Kurt’s way.
Same thing for the tools you carry with you. All vets carry the tools they are most comfortable using. When we were starting here, there was an ad in the Michigan Veterinary Journal from a small local vet who was selling his equipment. He turned out to be an older man with a bad artery in his heart. When he walked fifteen feet he had to sit down. I asked him, “How much you want for everything?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
So it was a contest to see who was the worst negotiator. That was one I could win. “Give me a number and we’ll see,” I said. He gave me a number and I agreed. He had all the equipment from his years of practice spread all over a damp basement. Diane and I told him we would clean it out for him: “If it’s good, I’ll use it; if it’s not, I’ll junk
it.” I love tools, and it was a memorable experience just walking through his storage rooms finding all this wonderful equipment. We mostly built the practice with those tools. Some of them I’m still using; I couldn’t even guess how old they are. One well-made piece of equipment, for example, was a double-action nipper used to cut down a horse’s back teeth. Now, many horse dentists say you cannot do that, that you shouldn’t take more than one-sixteenth of an inch off the teeth; then you have to come back again in three weeks. I’m sorry, I don’t have the time and many farmers don’t have the money.
Normally a horse has smooth teeth, which rub against each other so they don’t grow too long, but as they get older, if a tooth breaks or gets damaged, the opposing tooth just keeps growing and growing and eventually pushes into the gums of the opposing jaw. And then the horse can’t close its mouth, it can’t chew, and it doesn’t eat right. That’s when I use my big nippers. I cut the tooth off right by the gums. For an older horse that means, “I’ll see you in five years; you’ll be fine till then.”
That old vet also had an old-fashioned mouth speculum, a big, heavy, metal contraption that keeps a horse’s mouth open so you can reach in safely without worrying about getting your arm bitten off. If the horse swings his head and hits you with this speculum, it’ll knock you silly, but it does prevent you from seriously injuring your hand. Once the mouth is open, I come in with my nippers, put them around that tooth, and then try to close them. Those teeth are hard; I usually can’t do it just by pushing my hands together. Many times I put one bar hard against my body and then pull with the other one, almost as if I were pulling an oar. That usually snaps the tooth right off.