Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  That was the Christmas farm call none of us have ever forgotten.

  A Life-and-Death Business

  No matter what other animals we kept, we always had a Great Dane. And of all those dogs, the most memorable was Maeson. I don’t favor one dog more than the others, but Maeson was a remarkable animal. She was my blood-donor dog and she loved to be around the clinic, but she really belonged to Charles. They loved each other.

  It didn’t start out that way. Charles was sixteen when we got her; somebody didn’t want her anymore and gave her to us. That first day she wasn’t very friendly to him at all. When he went near her she growled at him and bared her teeth. The next day Charles told her, “Look, if you’re going to live here, you and I have to get along. So why don’t you go for a ride with me.” He had to go to the post office, and he opened the door of the Jeep for her. She hopped in, she looked at him, she must have decided he was okay if he was taking her for a ride, and that was it. After that they were inseparable. She followed him around the house; she went everywhere with him; she slept in his bed with him. He was her person, and that was it.

  But what she loved best was to be with him in that Jeep. All he had to do was jangle the car keys and she’d be standing at the door, ready to go. He’d put the top down and take the doors off, and she’d sit in the passenger seat and she wouldn’t move. He’d leave her there while he ran his errands, and when he came back she’d be sitting and waiting patiently for him. Okay, she also loved beer and fireworks. You couldn’t open a bottle of beer without her being right there ready to share. Once she actually took a bottle in her mouth, gripped it with her teeth, tipped her head back, and drank from the bottle. Honest to goodness. And if fireworks were exploding, she couldn’t help trying to grab the burst. And somehow she seemed to know when a person or even another animal needed her help, and whatever help she could give, she would give it with a wagging tail.

  When Charles went off to college, she missed him terribly. He couldn’t take her with him and she loved being on the farm too much anyway. All of her friends were there. But whenever he’d come back, she instantly became his dog again. The problem with animals is they get old too quick, and they get sick. When Maeson was nine, Charles was home for Christmas vacation. After he went back to California Maeson started to get dopey. When she didn’t get better after a few weeks I did a blood test. She had leukemia.

  When I told Charles, he asked me to keep her alive until he could get home in March. I did the best I could; I gave her transfusions, I tried different treatments, and she had her good days and bad days but she survived. Leukemia is usually a tough cancer for animals to survive; it’s fast acting, but I think she just decided she was going to stay alive until Charles got home.

  Finally, he got home. She perked up and they spent a good week together. It looked like she was not sick after all. One day they drove into town and stopped at Wendy’s for burgers—there was no reason for her not to eat anything she wanted—but mostly they just hung out together. We had a birthday party for Charles and Diane Jr. that week and she licked ice cream off the plate, but none of us could bear to discipline her at that point. Later that night, as they got ready to go to bed, she decided she wanted to go out. That wasn’t too unusual; sometimes she liked to spend a few minutes outside before settling down. It was snowing outside when Charles opened the door to let her out.

  This time she didn’t come back. She knew it was time, and I guess she felt she had said her good-byes. Charles went out into the storm looking for her, and he found her walking down the driveway, walking away. She made it through the night, but the next day she wouldn’t eat or drink, and she wouldn’t make eye contact with anybody. At night he brought her to bed with him, but she wouldn’t stay there. Instead she lay down in front of the fire in the living room. Charles brought his blanket and pillow in, and that last night he slept there with her.

  The next day we all said our good-byes, and then we put her down at home, where she was so deeply loved. I cried too.

  There are few places where you have to deal with life and death on a daily basis more than on a farm. We even breed animals and fight for them to live knowing that they are meant to be slaughtered. Saving lives and putting down animals are part of the business: the best part and the hardest part, respectively. I couldn’t even begin to estimate the number of animals I’ve delivered, or euthanized. But I’ll tell you, even now, even after doing it for more than four decades, delivering a live animal—it can be a calving, a foaling, a C-section on a dog, it doesn’t matter—when they come out alive and take their first breath, the feeling is almost euphoric.

  When an animal is born, whether it is born naturally completely healthy or if we help it survive a difficult birth, the first thing it has to do is breathe. Just take that first breath. That’s not as simple as it sounds. Sometimes when an animal is born, its nose and mouth—sometimes even its windpipe—is covered or blocked by a layer of mucus, which prevents it from breathing. When you see little bubbles coming out of its nose, that’s a very dangerous sign. When a calf comes out the first thing I do, right away, is douse it with a big pail of cold water. I just dump it right over it. Believe me, that gets its attention. I’ve done it that way my whole career; I’ve also taught the farmers I’ve worked with to do it. Most of the time the cold water dissolves that mucus. But if the animal is still having trouble breathing, I pick it up by its hind legs and start swinging it around. It doesn’t look so nice, but when I do it, I can see the mucus running out of its nose and mouth. The centrifugal force makes the mucus fly right out of the animal. Then I put it down and hit it hard with a flat hand on the chest. I’m not going to hurt it; you can’t break a calf’s ribs with your bare hand. But all of that usually gets it breathing. That sounds traumatic—cold water, swing it around, hit it in the ribs—but it works for me to get them going.

  We used to do the same thing with puppies—we’d swing them till they started breathing—but unfortunately puppies are slippery, and one time one of my assistants was swinging a pup and it slipped out of her hands and scooted across the floor. It was absolutely fine, although maybe a little bit disoriented: That was some fine hello to the world. Other vets use their own methods to clear the breathing passages. I’ve seen people hang a calf over a gate, head-down, and just start slapping it. It doesn’t matter; whatever works is the right way.

  I remember my first delivery in the United States. This was before I had my license, while I was still riding around assisting a vet. We had a lambing and Diane decided to come along with us. That vet reached inside the ewe and came out with a cute little lamb, but it wasn’t moving. I went to work on it; I started rubbing it down, reaching into its throat trying to clear the windpipe, just doing anything I could think of. I hadn’t yet developed any system. And as I was working, he pulled out a second lamb, and this one he gave to Diane to work on. She went to work on it, although she really didn’t know what to do. But all of a sudden I heard the first little throat-clearing cry—coming from Diane’s lamb. As Diane has been reminding me ever since then, “Mine survived.”

  There is no right way or wrong way; when an animal is struggling to breathe, you do whatever you can think of to clear all its air passages. You’ve only got a very few minutes. I’ve had people complain about my method. They see me swinging a cute little lamb or puppy and they think I’m torturing that animal. The fact is that sometimes it is absolutely necessary. If an animal is born with its airways clogged with mucus or with part of the afterbirth covering its mouth and we wait too long for its mother to clear it, it may die. That happens with deer all the time, but we don’t see it too often because other animals will drag away the remains.

  Those first few moments of life are the most beautiful thing in the world. I can never forget the first time I was really aware of it. I was young, very young, and I was with my mother in the kitchen. One of our horses was due soon. My father and my brothers had been workin
g with the horses; they’d unhitched them and turned them out in the pasture. My mother was looking out the window. One of the mares was just grazing; suddenly she lifted her head and lifted her tail, fluid started flying, and her colt came flying out right afterward. My mother took me outside to see it. I couldn’t believe how amazing it was. The mare turned around and started licking it; it sort of stumbled to its feet, and that was it. One minute and that colt was born into the world.

  At college we had to attend five normal births of horses to graduate. Our problem was that mares give birth so fast that we could never get there fast enough to see one, much less five. By the time we even got notified, it was too late. The professors knew it and the stable hands knew it. So as soon as it looked like it was close, we would call each other and race over to the stable on our bikes. We never, ever got there in time, but the stablehands let us sign the paper that proved we were there. The truth is that I never saw a horse give birth until I was working in Michigan, and even then it was just by accident that I was there when it happened.

  I’ve seen and assisted at several thousand births, and as many times as I’ve seen it, it still amazes me. Foals are born very fast; calves can take a lot longer. Sometimes the calf’s head pops out first and you can see it shaking its head while the rest of its body is still in the birth canal. Then when it finally does come out, the cow gets up and starts working; she licks it off. Then sometimes she’ll also give it a little butt with her head: Come on, wake up, get going. Calves will sit up pretty quick, shake their heads to clear their nose and throat; then within several minutes they’ll try to get up on their feet. It is so funny watching them taking those few off-balance, wobbly first steps. But pretty soon they’ll be standing there on all four legs, their whole body shaking while the cow is pushing them to get moving. Within a short time, they will be walking on their own.

  When you look at nature, it becomes obvious that it’s humans who are born fairly premature. A baby can’t do anything for itself. It can’t even crawl. About all it can do is suck. If a human was born and no one was there to help, it would just lie there and die. Not animals. Animals somehow get up and manage to find their way to their mother’s nipple and start nursing.

  It doesn’t matter what animal it is; it will figure it out. Even a stud colt, which is pretty much dumber than a rock, will try to find the milk source. It may need some help, but it gets there. Donkeys are supposed to be dumb animals, but within an hour after being born, the little donkey is racing around, bouncing off the walls. When you see this small donkey, whose ears are bigger than the rest of its body, running around its mama, it’s the cutest thing you have ever seen. Sows have multiple piglets and every one of those little ones will fight their way to the sow’s milk; sometimes they go between her hind legs, sometimes around them, but they will get there. Two hours after piglets are born they’re nice and pink, just lying there grunting and having the best time.

  When it comes to giving birth, nature does an amazing job; most of the time we don’t have to do anything to help. It’s only a very small number of births where a vet’s assistance is needed. This just might be the most important part of a large-animal vet’s job. I had a professor in college, Professor Vander Kaay, who told us all the time, “A veterinarian is only as good as he is an obstetrician. If you don’t get that calf out, you’re no good.” In school we spent a lot of our time working on malpositioned calves. Calves are supposed to come out head first with the head resting on the front legs. And probably 90 percent of them do. The others are turned around or their legs aren’t in the right place. After you’ve done it often enough, when you reach inside an animal and feel any part of the fetus, you should be able to know instantly what it is—and you’d better know where it is supposed to be.

  If a calf or a foal is malpositioned, meaning it’s turned around, or the head or a leg is turned back instead of forward, or twisted so it can’t come out, it will die. And if it dies and we don’t get the remains out of the mother, she will die too. Those remains will become toxic real quick and kill the mother. If the animal inside is still alive when we get there, the first thing we try to do is reposition it. Most of the time medical doctors do not reposition; instead they do a C-section. They cut open the mother’s belly and take out the baby, then sew up mama. Usually it’s fine. It doesn’t work that well in a barn. I don’t like doing C-sections; one, because we’re not in anything resembling a sterile environment, and two, because it puts way too much stress on an animal. Some large animals won’t survive the procedure. So instead, we stick our hands inside the uterus and start manipulating the fetus, trying to put all the parts back where they’re supposed to be. After doing it all these years I’ve learned which parts can bend and how much. For example, while you can move a calf around quite a bit, you can’t turn it around completely in the uterus. It’s impossible. So when we’ve got it as straight as it is ever going to be, we pull. And we keep pulling. Repositioning an animal can take a lot of time and a tremendous amount of effort, but when it is successful and you see mama licking that little one, there is such an incredible feeling of satisfaction, I wouldn’t begin to know the words to express it. That’s really a life we’ve saved.

  I have a client who was the son of my very first Amish client, and I remember that first summer he was trying to get his own farm going. He called me one day in August when it had to be one hundred degrees, easy, asking me to get over there as fast as I possibly could. One of his cows was in trouble. He only had a few livestock, so losing even that one was going to make a significant difference to him. I soaped up my hands and my arms, reached inside, and began feeling around; I closed my eyes and saw with my hands exactly what was going on. The calf was still alive, but its head was twisted underneath its front legs. I knew how to fix that. But every time I tried to put him in position to be born, he would turn his head the other way. “This is a bull calf,” I told the farmer. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t want to come out.” Then I went back to work.

  That sweat was pouring down my body, I was soaked, but I just kept wiping it away. That calf seemed healthy enough, but just as stubborn as all get-out. Or, in this situation, not get out. It took me quite some time to maneuver that calf into a position to be born; then we hooked up the calf pullers to his front legs and started working; we just pulled him right out. Welcome to the world, sonny. He turned out to be a big, healthy bull calf.

  I can remember several of the easiest deliveries I’ve ever assisted. In recent years a lot of people, including Diane and myself, have begun keeping a bunch of chickens around just so we can have fresh eggs. Some people had a chicken that was trying to lay an egg but couldn’t do it. They had watched the show, so they called me. I told them, if it’s in there and it’s big, then you put mineral oil around it and make it smooth and slippery; then see if it comes out. If it’s still not coming, just break the egg inside, but make sure you pull out all the shells. Hopefully the next one won’t be as big.

  Unfortunately, a lot of deliveries aren’t so simple and they don’t have a happy ending. Nature has a way of weeding out the weak and the sick while letting the strong and healthy live, improving the herd. For example, if an animal’s pelvis is too small, that animal has a lot less value because it’s going to struggle giving birth. I remember that after pulling a good-size calf from an Angus I told the farmer, “Her pelvis is way too small.” A month later he told me the calf was doing fine but that heifer was going to slaughter because her pelvis was way under normal size for the breed, so she was never going to be a good breeding animal.

  Sometimes there is nothing that can be done to save the calf or the foal, and then the only thing that matters is to save the life of the mother by getting the remains out of her. That can be real complicated; there is always a reason the animal was not born naturally, and that reason sometimes makes it hard to get it out of the mother. One afternoon Dr. Ashley and I came back from a farm call and I was told that Dr. Br
enda and Dr. Wendy had taken a student with them to deliver a colt out of a Percheron mare. They had left more than an hour earlier and nobody had heard from them. A Percheron is a big, strong horse, a draft horse. It shouldn’t have taken that long. “Okay,” I told Dr. Ashley. “Let’s go.”

  Dr. Brenda was completely frustrated. The mare was down, it had been tranquilized, but the colt was dead and its remains were in a terrible position. Dr. Brenda was lying on the ground trying to move it around, but it was just jammed in there. She was exhausted. Dr. Ashley and I lay down and took over from her. No way one person could have done this. We worked inside the horse together; I had both arms in and Dr. Ashley had one hand in there; we were just trying to bring the body around so we could get it out. I started by cutting off the head, and when I did all the blood came out. The two of us were lying there in it, but we couldn’t stop working. The front legs were far back, and working together we managed to bring them around to the front and then were able to pull the remains of the colt out. One person working alone never could have gotten that colt out.

  We’ll do whatever is necessary to save the mother. If necessary we’ll break the dead animal’s legs or twist body parts around. It’s dead; we’re not hurting it. But if that doesn’t work, we have to cut it into pieces while it’s still inside the animal and get the remains out that way.

  Different vets use a variety of tools to do that cutting; I use a tool called the fetotome, which I brought back from the Netherlands; it’s essentially a thin wire running through two tubes. You wrap the wire around whatever piece you want to cut, then pull the handles to tighten that wire. It’s quick and so easy to use, even Charles can do it. We got called to a farm where they were raising what they called Michigan Texas longhorns, and the first thing they did was warn us that they were not very tame. We could see those long horns for ourselves; those horns were literally about the length of a car. The calf was dead, they told us; they just wanted us to save the cow. They’d been nice enough to catch her and put her in a pen. When I reached inside the uterus, I felt the front legs, then the neck, and then the head, which was way underneath the legs. If they had called me when the calf was still alive, I definitely could have gotten that head around and saved it, and we also would have had more room in the uterus to work; but because the cow had been straining so long, the uterus had contracted, so it was squeezed very tight around the remains. But they hadn’t called me in time, so our job was to get the remains out of the uterus quick before they became toxic. Charles has become real good with the fetotome. It took him only about twenty seconds to cut off the head. There was nothing to it. I put my hand on the vertebrae, where we cut the head off so it wouldn’t scratch the birth canal. Then we pulled out the rest of the remains by hand. Then the cow was fine and healthy enough to breed again.