Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  A new barn may be more comfortable to work in than an old wooden barn, but it can take several months before the barn is ready for full operation. There’s an illness I’ve seen at most a half-dozen times in my career called new barn pneumonia, which happens only within the first two months cows are in a new barn. It’s a bacterial infection that may be caused by the vapors from fresh cement; the vapors irritate the lungs, and the irritation can cause a buildup of fluid. This buildup allows bacteria to grow, and the cows get sick. The condition is treated with antibiotics and basically letting the barn settle, but if it isn’t diagnosed correctly, it can be a serious problem.

  Many of the regular farm calls consist of herd management; examinations and vaccinations; pregnancy checks and calving and foaling; treating common conditions like milk fever; castration; and, unfortunately, euthanizing. But even those pretty regular appointments can all of a sudden become emergencies. One morning Ike Swarey called because one of his cows hadn’t come up from the pasture. Dr. Kurt went out to the farm in Rosebush, and they found the cow out by the river, lying on her left side and bloated. Those were sure signs of milk fever. She was in really bad shape, and he needed to get calcium in her as fast as possible. Normally you try to roll the cow up on her chest so you can inject her in the neck, but this cow’s legs were out and she was too big to move. He decided to put the first bottle of calcium in her mammary vein. Mammary veins are about as big as a thumb, but they tend to bleed. The most important thing when giving an animal calcium is to run it slowly because the heart is very sensitive to the body’s calcium level, and if the calcium level rises too quickly, it can kill the animal. It’s hard to find the right balance: If the animal is in bad shape, it needs a big dose right away to survive, but if you give it that dose too quickly, it’ll die.

  Dr. Kurt was trying to go slow, but when he was halfway through the first bottle, that cow took a couple of deep breaths; then everything stopped. She quit breathing and lay there motionless. Dr. Kurt remembers thinking, Ah crap, I’ve killed her right in front of the owner. He ripped out the needle, put his knees together, and on his knees started jumping up and down on the cow’s chest. He was doing cow CPR. He jumped on her over and over with his knees. He wasn’t giving up. Over and over.

  Suddenly that cow gave a big heave and started breathing. Ike never said one word. Dr. Kurt couldn’t believe it had worked. He put the needle back into her mammary vein and gave her the rest of the bottle. Then he and Ike rolled her up on her chest and he gave her the second bottle in her neck really slowly. When he finished, they waited a few minutes; then the cow kind of struggled onto her feet. She was pretty wobbly. Those two men walked with her up to the barn. Ike was always quiet; he said what needed to be said, and this time he didn’t say a single word about this. Dr. Kurt packed up his tools and left. He had mixed feelings: First he thought he had killed that cow—but he felt really good about saving her life.

  The next day Dr. Brenda went out there to check up on the cow. When she got back to the clinic Dr. Kurt asked her if Ike had said anything to her. “He did,” she told him. “He wouldn’t shut up. He kept going on and on about this vet who kept jumping on the cow’s chest. He said he’d never seen anyone do CPR on a cow to save its life.” Dr. Kurt was beaming he was so happy. When I heard about it, I thought, Sure, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t give her mouth-to-mouth!

  We’re called out to farms regularly to perform castrations. On the show they’ve actually shown several castrations. And every time the Nat Geo Wild crew is filming this operation, as soon as I start someone always yells, “Cut!” And everybody laughs—except the animal; the animal doesn’t think it’s funny.

  It’s easy to make jokes about this procedure. We had a segment on the show in which three nice young girls brought in their dog, which had an abscess in its testicles—they were swelled up like a bowling ball. As the narrator was explaining to viewers what was happening, they showed me holding his swollen scrotum, and the narrator said seriously that those girls had “left the animal in Dr. Pol’s hands.”

  When we first opened the practice, there hadn’t been a large-animal vet that castrated horses in the area for years, so the word got around that we were here, and that first summer I must have done forty stallions. The reason to castrate an animal is because it makes it easier to handle. It looks a lot more painful than it really is. It doesn’t hurt the animal at all because I give them a good anesthetic before I do my work. And once an animal is gelded, it becomes a whole different animal. On the program a woman brought in a nice Arabian stallion she had rescued, but he was mean. “You can’t turn your back on him,” she told me. Well, when I was done his whole personality was different. Those hormones were gone. “He’ll make a good riding horse,” I told her, and he’ll have a much better and longer life.

  The way Charles describes that is simply, “Take the balls out and the brain comes back.”

  Many horse veterinarians are very brave in my eyes because they do standing castrations. That means they don’t lay the horse down; they just put a local anesthetic in the area and castrate the horse standing right there. They grab hold of the scrotum, pull down, and cut. To me, I don’t want to put myself in danger if something goes wrong. I have been told that many times people cut their hand when they are hanging on to the testicle and the horse moves a little; that scalpel blade slips and you end up slicing your hand. No, thank you. I’ll do it the safe way.

  Usually I do the actual operation by myself. The only time I needed help was when I was castrating a Belgian horse that probably weighed twenty-six hundred pounds. This was a big animal, and honest to gosh it took two vets, Dr. Ashley and me, to do the job. I grabbed hold of the testicles with both hands, braced my feet against this horse’s belly, and pulled. Dr. Ashley put the clamps on, cut off the testicles, and stopped the bleeding. We untied the horse to allow it to get up by itself, which I always do. Eventually it got up and walked away perfect.

  My horses get two tranquilizers. The first one calms them down; the second makes them lie down on their side. They are out cold; that way if anything goes wrong, I can fix it. In my forty years, out of the thousands of horses I’ve castrated, I’ve lost only two. Of course I remember them. The first one was a two-week-old Belgian colt that the owner wanted castrated young because he wanted a nice gelding. I cut off one testicle and that went fine, but when I cut off the second I noticed what looked like a rupture. That’s not good. So I closed it up good and tied off the sac. About twelve hours later, the owner called and told me, “You know that sac you tied off? All the guts are falling out.” I raced back there, and that colt’s intestines were dragging on the ground all around the pen. I immediately put the horse down—once the intestines are on the ground, there’s nothing that can be done—and then I looked to see what had happened.

  The intestines had come out through the first cut I’d made. I had looked at it, but I hadn’t seen any rupture there at all. I should have tied off both. But by that time there was nothing I could do.

  The second horse was a four-year-old cryptorchid pony. A cryptorchid animal is an animal in which one testicle hasn’t descended; it’s still in the belly. It’s inside, it’s warm, it produces hormones, but the sperm is dead. As a result the animal is sterile but at the same time very unpredictable because its testosterone is just way too high. Cryptorchid horses can be dangerous because you never know how they are going to react. This wasn’t a farm call; the owner brought the pony to the clinic and I did the operation. It was quick and uneventful. I can do the procedure in about twenty minutes, which is pretty fast. I told the owner, “This guy has to stay in the pen by himself. Keep him away from the other horses for a week.”

  “Okay,” he told me.

  I warned him again.

  “Okay,” he told me again.

  Four days later he calls and tells me that pony is dead. “Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

  He sai
d, “Well, you must have done something wrong.”

  I went right over there. That horse was in the pen with his mares. The mares were in heat and the pony had tried to jump them and busted his sutures. The intestines had busted through and it killed him.

  “It’s your fault,” the owner told me. “You pay for it.”

  I explained as nicely as I could that the answer was no. I told him pretty strong that it was his fault. If he had listened to what I told him and left that horse by itself in a pen, it would have been healed up. Instead he brought the horse home and threw it back in with the other horses. I don’t get angry too often, but if anybody was the horse’s ass, it wasn’t that horse. Those were the only two animals I lost after I’d castrated them.

  Castration is another small procedure that a lot of farmers now do by themselves, or have their neighbors do for them, to save the money. It’s not especially difficult and generally it goes pretty well. But while I was out one day I got a call from Diane in the office asking me where I was. “By Clare,” I told her. “What’s going on?”

  One of our Amish clients had started castrating a stallion and something had gone really wrong: “Its intestines are hanging out.”

  My cell phone rang; it was that client. “Where are you, Doc?”

  “South of Clare and flying low. Get a clean sheet. Whatever happens, keep those intestines off the ground.” I just floored it and kept going. When I got there, the horse was standing still and about five gallons of its intestines were resting on a towel being held under it by two men. It was a Clydesdale, a very big horse. This was the first time I’d ever seen anything like this. “This is what we’re going to do,” I explained. “It’s going to get a couple of shots. When I give it the second one we’re walking it outside, but you guys hang on to that towel. Now, just go slow.” The first shot calmed him down, and after the second shot we walked the horse out slowly. I was hanging on to the tail a little bit. “Watch out now,” I warned them, “because it’s going to fall.”

  We let the horse fall on its side with the towel underneath. How nobody got hurt I don’t know, but we were all fine. When the horse was out, I started washing its intestines off, disinfected them, and then just tried to push them back in. I couldn’t. The testicles come down out of the belly into the scrotum through a narrow ring, and by this time the intestines were swollen and wouldn’t fit through that ring back into the belly. I had never dealt with this problem and I didn’t have too much time to figure out what to do. I just had to take a chance if I was going to save that horse. I reached inside with my fingers and found the ring, and I cut it. I made a much larger hole, cleaned it up as best I could, and stuffed everything back inside. I put some penicillin straight in the belly because back in college when we did C-sections we’d put penicillin straight in the abdominal cavity and it had worked well. As far as I could figure, a C-section was about the closest thing to this problem that I knew anything about. It had worked beautifully then to prevent infection; maybe it would work here too. I had nothing else.

  I sutured everything shut and we let the horse stand up by itself. “I’m not promising anything,” I told them. “Usually when the intestines are out, that’s it. But keep it on antibiotics and we’ll see what happens.” That horse never went off its feed; it never had colic; it never showed any sign of distress. Two weeks later they sold it at auction for a good price.

  I felt pretty good about that. I figured a combination of experience and luck had allowed me to save that horse, and I felt darn sure I would never have to deal with that problem again. Except that two weeks later the same person called me. “You didn’t do it again, did you?” I said. I thought I was making a joke.

  “Yeah, I did, Doc.” This time it was a four-year-old Belgian. The Amish don’t use an anesthetic or a painkiller when doing a castration, so when this farmer made the cut, the horse just started pushing, and pushed its intestines right out through the ring.

  “I’m on my way.” When I got there I saw that five-gallon pail of intestines under the horse. If seeing strange things bothers you or slows you down, being a large-animal vet definitely is not the job for you. Between the two of us we managed to get that horse down on its side. Then we rolled it onto its back and cleaned it up, and I very carefully stuffed the intestines back inside. “Don’t do it again,” I advised the owner. That horse lived too.

  I had never even seen one of those before and I’d done two of them in two weeks, and those remain the only two like that I’ve ever done.

  The only animal that ever gave me a problem during a castration was a billy goat. One fall a lady made an appointment to bring her goat in to be castrated. No problem. But at the time of the appointment, this fancy-dressed woman came into the clinic and suddenly everybody started looking around. What’s that awful smell? Is it that lady? It can’t be; she’s dressed so nice. She was wearing a very nice dress, but that smell definitely was coming from her. Nanny goats love that smell, it’s like perfume to them, but it definitely doesn’t work with humans. It even bothered me and I’ve worked standing in manure. One by one every person in the front of the office got up and walked into the back room like they had a reason to be there. Diane was the last one to go. As she walked away we looked at each other and she smiled knowingly. After all these years she knew exactly what I was thinking: You’re going to leave me too?

  I had to stand there and take care of the client. Well, this lady had a horse and she wanted a companion for that horse, so she went to the market and bought a nice goat. But she didn’t know the first thing about goats. Goats are in season in the fall, and this was a billy goat, an especially stinky animal. They just pee and flip it between their front legs. They do that so when they mount a female they leave their scent. Billy goats all want their own offspring. Don’t ask me why. So if they find one with their urine scent on her they think, Okay, I already did this one, I don’t have to do it again. But if they smell urine from another goat they think, Wait a minute, it’s my turn, and breed that one. So when they are in season, when they’re rutting, they can smell real bad. I put my oldest coveralls on and went outside. It wasn’t so bad outside. There was a pretty good-size billy goat in her trailer; it had long, curved horns and I couldn’t get anybody to come and help me. I put a rope around those horns and tied him as close to the wall as possible. With goats we don’t cut the testicles off; instead, we just clamp them. So I grabbed one testicle and put the clamp on it, and oh boy. He started screeching, and wow! He did a complete flip, a beautiful somersault, head over butt. I did my best to hold on. I didn’t blame him at all, but at that moment it was every man or goat for himself. I let him get back on his feet and waited until he settled down; then I put the clamp on the other side and got out of there quick. As soon as I got outside I took off my coveralls and went back to work.

  Taking off those coveralls didn’t do any good. When I got inside everybody told me to go outside again. They weren’t as nice to me as they had been to that lady. Turned out that terrible smell had gone right through the coveralls to my regular clothes. I changed my work clothes and threw the dirty clothes in the washer. Inside the clinic that lady was not welcome, but if she happened to run into a nanny goat she definitely would have been more popular.

  People ask me, with all the farm calls I’ve made, is there one that stands out? One that I remember more than any other? And the answer is absolutely yes. No one in my family will ever forget this one. This was on Christmas Day in the early 1990s. Charles was about eight years old and the two girls were teenagers. The whole family was home and Diane was planning a special kind of fondue dinner that we all could do together, when the dang phone rang. Okay, the phone rings, you got to answer it, even on Christmas Day. It was a calving, which meant I had to go take care of it. But the farmer wasn’t going to be there to help, so I decided to take my daughter Kathy with me. Charles and my other daughter, Diane Jr., stayed home. I was hoping it wouldn’
t take too long and we would be back in time to enjoy our family dinner.

  It was a nice December day, the ground was covered with snow, and as we drove to the farm we passed lots of farmhouses all lit up and looking very warm and welcoming. When Kathy and I got inside the barn, I examined the cow; that calf inside her was a big one. There was no way it was coming out the normal way. The only chance that calf had of surviving was for me to do a C-section. Honestly, I haven’t done too many of them in my career. Most of the time it costs the farmer more than its worth, and usually a calf this big is already dead inside the cow and we cut it up instead of doing a C-section. But when I reached inside, I could feel that this calf was plenty alive; it was moving around and felt healthy. I thought, This is the only chance we’ve got. But it’s not an easy operation and I needed a lot more help than I had. I called Diane on the radio and asked her to bring the other kids over. This was going to be the most memorable Christmas they ever had.

  We were all in that barn around the cow, which was lying down on her bed of hay comfortably. I gave each of my kids a job to do. Charles and Diane Jr. were each holding on to a part of the uterus. That uterus was real big and much too heavy for any one of them to be able to hold up alone. I carefully cut open the cow’s belly, reached in, and took out that calf. It was alive and, once I got it breathing, real curious. The kids were just amazed at this, their eyes couldn’t have been bigger, but I reminded them not to let go of anything. I sewed up the cow and she was fine. After she got on her feet I waited until she started cleaning her calf; then we packed up the kids and we went home for dinner.