Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  This old doc had the knives they used long ago to cut a calf apart inside a cow, and he had a tool for spaying mares, meaning taking the ovaries out, which we don’t even do anymore. That procedure was necessary because carriage horses won’t stand still when they are in heat. The tool was essentially a chain that would crush the blood vessels to the ovaries, and they would just fall out into your hand. Never done one of those in my life.

  He also had a lot of old drugs, but most of the pills were outdated or too damp to be used. Diane and I picked up everything, and as we were picking through the boxes and piles, I saw some jars way in the back. Diane picked them up, blew off the dust, and examined them. The vet’s wife had been very industrious, and during World War II she had done a lot of canning. There were cans of maple syrup on the shelves. One was dated 1942, the year I was born, and another one was dated 1944, the year Diane was born. “We’ve got to have those,” I told Diane, and the vet was nice enough to give them to us. We still have them, too.

  A few of my tools have been in the back of many different trucks. There’s a feeling of comfort I get from using those old tools. I know what I expect from each of them and how to use them. In the back of the truck, and on and under the seats, I carry needles and syringes, my thermometer and stethoscope, and the suture material that I use for cows with twisted stomachs; I’ve got bottles of calcium, antibiotics, tranquilizers, and the other drugs I might need; I’ve got topical solutions and some mineral oil to use as a laxative in case a horse or cow is plugged up. I’ve got a cooler with my vaccines and a big plastic cabinet with three drawers where I keep all my different pills and various-size needles. I have a toolbox filled with those things I use for foot problems: knives and hoof cutters and scissors and my surgery kit. I have my calf puller, my chains, and a plastic garbage pail and a stainless steel pail. Sometimes I have my wood bushel basket, a balling gun to give pills orally to cows, two regular nylon lariats, and my halters. I keep the calf cutter under the seat with the plastic fiberglass cane I can use to push cows. When I want to move a cow, I can tap it on the head with this cane, and if it doesn’t want to move, it kicks—but because of the cane it can’t reach me. Too bad, Elsie; boom—she kicks; then I tap her again.

  Most of the time I’ll have whatever I need in the truck or I’ll be able to adapt another tool to the job. Years ago we sold a lot of medicines, and that was very profitable, but now farmers and even small-animal owners can fill prescriptions through a direct mail-order service or one of the large pet supply chains for a lot less than I would have to charge them. I don’t carry a lot of medicine anymore, so naturally that’s what someone will usually ask for.

  Keeping my tools available this way has worked very well for me for forty years. Wasting even a few minutes when an animal is in pain is a terrible thing to do to that animal. Instead, as I have been doing for my entire career, I go out to the truck and grab what medicines I need, then get a dose of it into that animal as fast as I can. And then I do my job. An animal in pain is very dangerous, and until I get rid of that pain, I can’t do an examination.

  Many large-animal vets drive pickups with what is called a Bowie box on the back. This is a fiberglass box made especially for vets. It looks very professional, very nice. It has a whole bunch of drawers, doors, a back door where you store the big items we use; it’s even got a heater in the back. Everything is so neat. They’re expensive, but they last longer than the truck, so you have to take it off the old one and bolt it on the new one. In the ten years I was in Harbor Beach, I went through three trucks and kept transferring the Bowie box. I didn’t particularly like it because it wasn’t good on dry dirt roads. It was always full of dust. Every month I had to vacuum it out because the medicine bottles were so dusty I couldn’t sell them. I didn’t even use the space in the back because when I opened it up there was always a layer of road dust on the bottom. So when I came to Weidman, I decided I didn’t want the Bowie box; I wanted a station wagon.

  At different times I’ve carried more than tools in the Jeep. Usually when a new assistant starts, he or she rides with me for a while so we get to know each other. Spending time together going on farm calls gives us the opportunity to get comfortable with each other. Overall I have been incredibly fortunate in the people who have worked with me. I don’t even have written contracts with them. I tell them at the beginning, “All I expect is that you work hard and you’re here for at least a year,” and we shake hands on it. They have all been very good vets—except one. It was a lady who was here for a little while, and she did not know what to do. I realized pretty quick it wasn’t safe to let her make emergency calls at night, so I always went with her.

  One night she had a calving, for example, and I went with her. I was trying to help her build confidence. This was a big calf that needed a pull. “Okay,” I told her, “there’s nobody here to help you and you have to get this calf out of this cow.” Then I went outside the pen. My hands were just itching to help her, but nope, she had to learn. So I just held on to the top rail to keep myself there. Normally, you begin by tying up the cow so she cannot walk away. Then you get the chains and pull the calf. Most people, when they’re shown how to do it once or twice, pick it up pretty quickly.

  This assistant struggled with it. She managed to get the cow behind the gate but did not tie her up. She was struggling to get the chains on the calf. The problem is that you need one hand to hold the gate and two hands to put the chains on. And she had only two hands. She kept going back and forth, back and forth, but finally managed to get the chains on. Then she got the calf puller and tried to pull the calf. Well, that needs two hands too, so when she grabbed it with two hands, she couldn’t hold on to the gate. Follow me, that cow said, then started walking through the pen with this vet stumbling behind and holding on to the calf puller trying to get that calf out. It took a while for the cow to get bored, but finally she stopped and strained, and that calf popped out. Just then the farmer walked into the barn and saw the live calf lying there. He turned to me—I was still leaning on the rail—and said, “Oh great, we got a live calf. Nice going.”

  I think if I had responded, that vet might’ve hit me! Her problem was that she really knew the material in the books, but she couldn’t translate it to the job. One Saturday night a couple brought in their dog, which had been hit by a car. It had a big cut right underneath the armpit. This young vet was in the clinic while I was on the road. On the radio I told her, “Give the dog an anesthetic and clean it up. I’ll be right there and we’ll sew it up.” But by the time I got there it was already done. “Good,” I told her, “you got a drain in there?”

  She had a drain in there.

  “What stitch is holding that drain in place?”

  “Uh, this one, I think. This one. Maybe all of them.”

  “When do you take the drain out?”

  “Two days.” She knew her stuff.

  “When do you take the stitches out?”

  “Ten days.” Uh, whoops. That was a problem. She couldn’t take the drain out without taking the stitches out.

  As we took the stitches out, I just happened to ask her, “Did you put sutures underneath there to close up the hole?”

  She shook her head. “I just sutured the skin.”

  So when I removed the stitches, I found a big hole under the dog’s armpit. I opened it up and started scrubbing everything down because she hadn’t even cleaned it. I closed the big space underneath the skin. Suddenly this young lady started talking: “Yes, you have to close up subcutaneous spaces; otherwise, you get infection . . .”

  My mouth just dropped open. I said, “If you know all this, why didn’t you do it?”

  She never answered. If it was in the book, she knew it, but she couldn’t do it on a live animal. Eventually she left and joined a regulatory agency, where she has done a very good job. If not for having to work on animals, she would have been a wonderful vet.
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br />   Charles used to ride with me sometimes too; that was a time when I was working so hard that I didn’t get enough time to spend with my family, so I wanted him to come with me so we could spend time together. Charles felt a little different about it; he wanted to know why he couldn’t stay home and watch television. So we compromised—he came with me, but I let him stay in the car when we were at a farm. Diane also sometimes goes out with me on a farm call. She takes care of the business, keeping track of the cattle we test or treat and handling the billing.

  And in addition to that colt I drove home in the front seat, occasionally I do have to transport an animal. I’ve had big dogs and cats in the car with me, and I’ve definitely learned one thing: Never transport a cat that isn’t in a cage. I probably learned that from the people who came in with a cat under their dashboard; it wasn’t happy there but didn’t want to come out either. But there was one animal I didn’t even know was riding along with me. A farmer named John McConnell allowed raccoons to stay in his barn in the winter, and by spring the family made pets out of the young ones. I made a farm call to his place one hot summer day and left the windows open while I did the job. When I finished, I packed up and drove away. I was about a mile down the road when suddenly a raccoon leaped out of the backseat onto my neck.

  “Geez!” That surprised me. That tame raccoon had been hiding in the backseat, just being nosey. The shock lasted a split second, but almost instantly I knew what it was. I looked in the mirror, and sure enough, his nose was right next to my ear. To me it looked like he was telling me, Turn this thing around. I want to go home.

  John McConnell was standing in his yard when I got back. “Hey, John,” I told him, “train your raccoons not to climb in people’s cars, will you?” I opened the door and this thing hopped out and ran into the barn.

  No matter what type of weather we’re driving through in central Michigan, the one thing we’ve always got to watch out for is deer. Deer are pests, but the good news is that they are edible. There are just so many of them running onto the roads and getting hit that in our area they’re known as “Michigan mile markers.” Everybody who has driven Michigan’s roads for any length of time has hit a deer—or much more likely, a lot of deer. When I first got here I was driving pretty carefully—I wasn’t going to hit a deer. In those days I could make as many as twenty or more farm calls in one day, but I had to keep moving. There was one afternoon when I finished doing pregnancy checks and my old station wagon wouldn’t start. It needed a tune-up and I’d flooded the engine. The farmer had a brand-new Blazer, and he told me to drive it back to the clinic and bring it back later. “Okay,” I said, but I was thinking that with my luck I’d hit a deer. So I drove back to the clinic real careful. I examined some small animals, I did a few surgeries, and at nine o’clock that night Diane got in the spare wagon and followed me back to the farm.

  By that time the gas had evaporated and the old wagon fired right up. We started hightailing it back to the clinic because I still had work to get done. In those days on the roads the speed limit was generally whatever you could crank it up to. I was about a quarter mile ahead of Diane when I saw a pack of six deer running full speed across the road. There was no way I could miss them. That’s the only time I’ve hit two deer at the same time. All I could do was yell into the radio microphone, “Diane! Deer!” She didn’t think I was just being affectionate, so she slowed right down.

  Both of them were dead. The only damage to the wagon was a few broken headlights. There wasn’t any sense just leaving the carcasses there, so we put them on the roof and took them back to the clinic. The next day I took them over to the slaughterhouse, and the butcher prepared them for us.

  I do feel sorry for the deer because some of the time they’re not instantly killed. The last time Diane hit one, it was lying in a ditch when I got there, still alive but dying. A police officer came along and shot it, and we loaded it on the car and took that one home too. The saddest thing is when a car hits the doe and the fawn is left standing alone. A lot of times when that happens, the local responders bring the fawn to me. I’ll treat it and an official from the Department of Natural Resources brings it to a deer ranch.

  I’ve been called to just about every type of farm you can imagine, from the Amish farms, where just about everything is done by manpower, to the modern operations, where they use the newest technology. I remember one of the first farms I visited when I started in the Thumb belonged to Harvey and Evelyn Deer, the nicest people, who had very good registered animals. That’s not why I remember it, though. Harvey was a small guy, and when he built his farm he put a stainless steel pipeline inside his barn that was high enough off the ground for him to walk under easily. But I was a lot taller than him, so every time we’d go into his barn, he’d walk underneath the pipe and turn around and warn me, “Watch the pipe.” That first time, every time, I’d remember to duck right under it, but then I’d get busy and I’d be carrying my tools and a pail and we’d be talking as we walked along and . . . bam! Got me again.

  “You okay, Doc?”

  “I will be eventually.” I can’t count how many times I banged my head on that pipe. That is the only time that the cows could have been laughing at me.

  I’ve seen some pretty unusual things in barns, but only one time did I see a cow flying. This was inside a very modern-type barn with free stalls. This cow was way forward in the stall; normally for a cow to get up, it has to rock forward and the hind legs get up first; the problem was this cow had no room to rock forward. She was much too big for us to move her. Normally if a cow is down in a free stall we can take the stall apart and turn the cow around, and she’ll get up. But in this barn the free stall sides had been bolted in place, with steel on the outside. We couldn’t get to the bolts at the wall end. That cow was trapped in that stall. “I got an idea,” I said. “Get the tractor and the chains.” The farmer had a big John Deere, a beautiful machine. I crawled into the stall and put a very short chain around the cow’s neck. Then I got out of there. I told the farmer, “Okay, lift her up.” He looked at me as if he was asking, You sure? “Go ahead,” I said again. He shrugged and put that lift into gear. That cow weighed, I would guess, fifteen hundred pounds, and that tractor just picked her straight up in the air. It didn’t hurt her at all; that neck is so strong, nothing will hurt it. Her butt was barely touching the ground. He lifted her up between the rafters; stretched out like that, she probably was ten feet long or more. He pulled her away from the stall, turned her around, and put her down gently on her butt in the alleyway. When we took the chain off, she got up and walked away. No damage.

  I can still see that cow moving through the air, her head almost between the rafters, and not a complaint out of her. Far as I could figure, that was the only way of getting her out of the free stall. It was made so well, we couldn’t possibly get it apart or give her more room.

  While those modern-type barns include all the elements that make it easier for the farmer, they also can cause unusual problems. The Grahams were one of my very first clients, and I watched their operation grow. They took good care of their animals, so those animals rewarded them. Eventually they had 120 cows producing an average of eighty pounds of milk per cow every day. They were doing so well that they decided to build a brand-new milking parlor. It was fantastic: They put in state-of-the-art everything; I used to call it the stainless steel palace. But after they got it going, they discovered a strange problem: When they milked the cows at five A.M., they got full production, but when they milked them in the afternoon, production was way down. Production fell from about eighty pounds to fifty pounds, which doesn’t pay the bills. They couldn’t figure out what could be causing this, so they called me and asked me to come out there.

  I checked the animals: Their minerals were good, their energy was good, there was nothing wrong with their feet, and they were eating; they just weren’t milking right. At that time there was a problem in several pl
aces with stray electricity running through a barn and upsetting the herd. The Grahams’ farm was only about a mile away from the little town of Rosebush. When we couldn’t find any other possible cause, we suspected that could be the problem. I had a little cut on my finger and I put it up against a metal part of the stall then stuck a finger on my other hand in a wet drain. When I did, I felt the mild electric surge running through my body. Okay, I knew that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  If I felt it, the Grahams’ cows definitely could feel it. Cows’ hooves are very sensitive. If every time they put a hoof down they feel a little tingle, it makes them uneasy, antsy, and they start dancing back and forth from one foot to another. They don’t stand still and give milk. The Grahams hired an expert in stray electricity, and he came over from Wisconsin and tested the parlor for them; his gauges confirmed the presence of stray voltage. The new parlor had been built too well; the ground and the cement floor were too good. It had grounding rods that went six feet into the ground. Its electrical circuits were so good that these rods picked up the stray voltage from the power lines running along the road that they would come right through the grounding rods into the parlor. The old wooden milking parlor had provided insulation for the cows. In the morning, when everybody in the nearby town of Rosebush was sleeping, there wasn’t a lot of power being used, but at five o’clock in the afternoon, when everybody was home and all the appliances were running, a lot of electricity was being generated and some of it ran loose through the ground and into the stainless steel palace.

  The Grahams sued the local power company and won a judgment. Then they asked the power company when they were going to fix the problem. “Fix it?” they said. “We’re not changing anything.” So the problem did not go away. The Grahams eventually sold their entire herd and became an organic farm. They raise turkeys, chickens, and beef, and everything is organic. And they took all that beautiful new equipment out of the state-of-the-art milking parlor and converted it into their own slaughterhouse.