by Dr. Jan Pol
That call was a little unusual; most of the time we don’t know until we get to a farm whether we can save the calf or the foal. In the summer of 2013, for example, we got a call from a beef farmer who had a cow that was struggling to give birth. The Nat Geo Wild film crew actually got to the farm before I did. One of our cameramen asked the farmer’s son, “How tame is this cow?”
“Oh, I can just go right up to her and pet her.”
Okay. So that cameramen squatted down a few feet in front of the cow and started shooting. She looked at him and didn’t like what she was seeing. So she lowered her head, flipped her ears back, and charged. Knocked him flat on his back. He was very lucky he didn’t break his shoulder, although he was sore for a long time. Then the farmer’s son pointed out, laughing, “I guess she’s not as tame as you thought.”
By the time I got there, she was enclosed in a small pen. And she was real unhappy to be in there. Whatever was going on inside her body, she was going berserk, jumping and kicking wildly. I asked the farmer, “How long has she been trying to have a calf?”
“Three days,” he admitted. “We couldn’t catch her.” Suddenly she slammed her whole body into one gate at its corner and almost went right through it. This was a dangerous animal. “Everybody get away!” I yelled. “Get off the ground. Get on your cars. Get on the truck.” After forty years of doing this, there’s no backing away for me. I felt bad for this animal. Three days is much too long to leave any animal in this condition. Something obviously had gone very wrong. I managed to get two ropes around her and cross-tied her in the gates. I tried to work like that, but it was impossible; she was just kicking and swinging me back and forth. It wasn’t safe for anybody to be near her, but especially me, so I tranquilized her. When she had finally quieted, I reached into her uterus and I got one hand on her calf’s shoulder blade. But it was already so rotten I could just about cut the skin with my hands. It was decaying inside her. If we had any chance of saving this cow’s life, we had to work very quickly. “I’m starting to cut, Charles,” I told him. I cut the first piece and yelled to him, “She still breathing?”
“Nope.” She had died right there. The toxins had poisoned her and there wasn’t anything we could have done to save her. Three days was just too long with a dead calf inside.
Nature allows smaller farm animals to have multiple births because so many of the little ones don’t survive, while large animals tend to have single births. Very few large animals have multiple births. Horses, for example, almost never carry twins to term; cows do occasionally. I remember once getting an emergency call from a farmer whose cow had given birth to twins the day before; she wasn’t doing very well, he told me. That didn’t surprise me much. Most cows can’t sustain twins, but as soon as I put my hands inside her uterus, I figured out the problem—that cow actually was having triplets. It was amazing. I pulled the third calf, and the cow was fine. That was just about the only time I’ve seen triplets being born.
Many years ago I was at a large-animal vet convention and I met a tiny female vet with long red hair. I don’t see a difference between men and women in the profession. In my practice everybody gets paid the same and we all do the same work. But this big-time vet came up to her and thought he was being smart. He said to her in a real loud voice, “So you’re in the beef practice?” He didn’t add, “Little lady,” in a condescending voice, but that’s what he meant. When she told him she was, he asked, smartly, “Well then, how do you get the calves out?”
That woman did not hesitate. She told him, “That’s easy. I just crawl right in there and kick them out. Why, how do you do it?” I laughed so hard that man turned and just glared at me. But it was a silly question; in this business it doesn’t make a difference how strong you are; what matters is how smart you are. You have to be smarter than the animals; otherwise, you’re done for. The goal is to get the delivery done any way possible.
Not too long after Dr. Brenda came to work at the clinic, she was on call on Memorial Day. We were enjoying a family picnic when the telephone rang. A big Belgian was trying to give birth to a colt; the front legs were out, but not its head. We talked about it and I made a few suggestions and she went back to the farm. A few minutes later she asked me to come and help. The farm was only about ten miles away, and Charles drove there with me. When we got there we saw about a dozen men leaning against the railing watching Dr. Brenda work, as if they were an audience for a comedy show: The Female Vet Delivers. I don’t know where those people came from on Memorial Day, but they all were just watching and waiting for something to happen. It’s one of the facts of a vet’s life that somehow, anytime we’ve got a problem, there’s always an audience. In this situation none of them had offered any help; they were just there for the story they would tell later on.
The front legs were hanging out of the mare’s butt; they were out so far they actually were hitting me below the knees. I tried to reach inside to grab hold of the head, but it was too big. In moments like this a whole film runs through your mind, reviewing all the different things you can try, all the things you’ve done in similar circumstances. “Okay, Brenda,” I said, “we ain’t got no choice. It’s coming out this way. Let’s get the calf pullers.” All the onlookers’ eyes almost popped out of their sockets.
We put the chains on just below the elbows. I told her, “When I say go, you pull as hard as you can as fast as you can.” When we were all set, I reached in as far as I could and pushed the neck as far back as possible. The neck of a colt is so long that you can bend the head back right against its flank. “Go ahead.” She started cranking, the chains tightened, and slowly that colt began moving. I think the mare helped her, pushing hard to get it out. With all of us working together, it finally came sliding out. A second later the afterbirth came flowing out. Then the exhausted mare fell down for a few seconds, but she got right up; she had her responsibility. She took a few steps and looked at her colt and saw that it was dead. Then she started eating.
So when I hear people criticizing the women in this profession I can hardly believe it. When I was going through vet school, we had only five or six girls in our group of three hundred, but they were as tough as beans. They weren’t as strong as the men; so what? For a large-animal vet that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t wrestle a lot of animals. The women generally were smaller than the men, so there were things they could do that most of us couldn’t do. Because their arms tend to be slender, they have a lot less trouble reaching inside a small farm animal without causing damage. They can squeeze into smaller places in a barn. I’ve always had women working for me and I’ve never seen the difference.
In fact, there are very few times when we just need brute strength, and when we do there are usually people around to help. Gilbert Tinsey and Fred Hazen, who met in college and started farming together, called me when one of their big Brown Swiss was struggling to give birth. Oh, it was a big calf and it was malpositioned. I managed to straighten it out and put my chains around its legs and told them, “Okay, guys, start pulling.” That was a fight. “C’mon, guys, you’re young,” I told them. “Can’t you get this calf out? Pull a little harder.” They worked up some sweat and it took both of them working to get the calf out. A big calf like that is money in the bank; it’s the kind of thing farmers depend on. And then, as I always do, I reached inside the cow and felt around just to make sure that there wasn’t another one. Gil and Fred were starting to walk away—they’d been working hard—when I stopped them. “Guys,” I told them. “Pick up the chains. There’s another one.”
We pulled that one out too. The guys told me later that they weighed both calves and estimated, with the fluids that were in the uterus and everything, that cow lost about 270 pounds giving birth. That was too much. That cow never got up again. She didn’t eat; she didn’t drink. There was nothing we could do to save her. She was just spent. That cost them $1,000 at that time, but at least they got the two calve
s out of it. That’s the cycle of life you see all the time on a farm.
I don’t really have much of a preference as to which animals I work with. I like the fact that horses generally deliver quickly. One of my Amish clients called me on a Sunday and told me his horse was struggling to have a colt. “How bad is it?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“Not much,” he told me.
“Okay, when she starts to deliver, call me and I’ll come right over.”
He didn’t call me till Tuesday morning. “You better come out here right now. Something’s wrong.”
This horse was so tall I had to stand on a bale of straw to work on her. When I reached inside, all I could feel were the hocks of the colt. If an animal is still alive, when I grab hold of its leg it will move it. This foal did not move. It was dead. Worse, it was badly positioned, which is why it hadn’t come out naturally. Sometimes with a malpositioned horse I can push hard on the hocks, then grab a hoof and pull the leg straight. But this one was so big it wouldn’t budge. I was hanging on to the hocks with both of my feet literally off the ground and I couldn’t move it. I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a tough one. So I got my fetotomy knife and cut off the hind legs underneath the hocks. Then I got my calf puller and put the chain around the hind legs and started pulling. I pulled that animal out piece by piece. It was huge. It was four feet tall at the withers, and when we weighed it, it was 148 pounds. I put antibiotics in the mare’s uterus and she seemed fine. In fact, a month later she was pregnant again. That was too much for the owner; he didn’t want to go through that again, so he sold the horse.
The smallest farm animals that I’ve delivered are pygmy goats. Their kids are about the size of my hand. I can easily hold a newborn in one hand. Make a circle with your thumb and forefinger, and that’s about the size of the head. I actually can get my whole hand inside many of those small animals—they stretch pretty well—but there’s not a lot of room in the uterus for me to work. When I needed to pull a small animal, I generally would put my fingers in the fetus’s eye sockets, which allowed me to get a good hold; then I just pulled it out.
When delivering piglets, some vets like to use a special pair of tongs that fit over the piglet’s head or a snare, which allows them to grab hold of the piglet and pull, but those never worked well for me. So I made my own pulling tool for pigs; it is a long metal rod with a hook on the end. Piglets are similar to babies; when they’re born, their heads are bigger than their bodies. And generally pigs come out headfirst. Using this tool I reach carefully inside and hook them in the bottom jaw, underneath the tongue, and gently pull them out with my hand on top of the head. That hook leaves a tiny hole, but that doesn’t cause any problems and heals up in just a few hours. If a piglet was coming out backward I could hook its hind leg and just hang on. I’ve saved a ton of piglets that way, and I’ve never hurt one of them. That was my own invention and it worked like a charm.
While seeing a healthy animal take its first steps always fills me with happiness, part of my job also sometimes requires me to put down animals, to euthanize them. Without question that is the hardest thing I have to do, and it’s no easier now than it was when I was starting out. There isn’t anything about it that’s enjoyable. I’ve never gotten used to it, but I understand that sometimes it’s not only necessary; it’s the most humane thing to do. I can’t stand seeing an animal suffer, and when its quality of life is gone, that animal is suffering. If the animal has a quality of life, I’ll do my best to keep it alive. A gentleman from the South carried his big old dog into the clinic one day to see if there was anything we could do to help. That dog couldn’t even climb up the four steps out in front. He told me he’d already been to three other vets and they wouldn’t treat him: He was too old, they said; let him be. I asked him if they had taken X-rays; they hadn’t. When I did I saw that the hips were not good, but otherwise the animal was in good shape. I put the dog on an arthritis joint lubricant and a painkiller. A week later the owner called to tell me the dog was bounding up steps.
Six months later the dog had a stroke and the owner brought him back to us. It was time then, and we put the dog down. “Thank you,” he told us. “At least we had another six months together.”
I have my own method of administering the euthanasia solution. First I give the animal an anesthetic, and only after it is asleep and pain-free do I give it the second shot. It’s a lot easier for people to see an animal simply go to sleep gently than to die suddenly. The counties all around us have adopted this method. I had a call from some people I didn’t know over in Clare. Their daughter was a vet who lived in Colorado, and she had a horse that was old and suffering from arthritis, and she hadn’t been home to ride it for a long time. They called me because they had heard about my method. The nicest thing you can ever do for people is to euthanize the animal quickly and painlessly. Don’t prolong the agony. I went over there and they told me all about the horse. I gave the horse the first shot and it lay down. Then I gave it the second shot in the chest. They had already dug a hole for it. But two days later I got a card from them thanking me for putting down their horse so humanely.
We were taught how administer the euthanasia solution into a vein in school, but I learned by accident that if you put it directly into an artery instead of the vein, it acts much faster. I like that, because putting down an animal is always hard enough without prolonging it. I learned this when a regular client who operates a horse rescue farm brought a pony to the clinic in a trailer. “He’s a mean bugger,” she told me. When anybody got near him he’d start kicking and biting.
“Where’d you get him?” I asked.
“These people were going to put him down. They didn’t want him anymore,” she said. In the few weeks he’d been on the farm he’d caused a lot of trouble. He was dangerous to both people and other animals. She wouldn’t let kids go anywhere close to him and when he was let loose he went after the other horses, kicking and biting them.
“That’s why they didn’t want him in the first place,” I guessed.
This woman was part of an organization that rescued horses, then tried to find homes for them, but there was nothing that could be done for this pony. They couldn’t give him away because they were afraid eventually he would hurt somebody, and they couldn’t keep him on their place forever because he was dangerous to the other horses, so they wanted me to put him down. He was in the trailer and he was wild. Nobody could hang on to him. We cross-tied him to hold him, but he was still trying to jump. He was so dangerous that I was going to do just one injection. I wasn’t going to risk my own safety for him. I had a good-size needle ready, and as he jumped up I hit him with it in the side of the neck and pushed the plunger. Instantly, that pony dropped dead. Whoa. It was very unusual that it happened so fast. I started thinking about it and I realized, Wait a second, that wasn’t in the vein; it was in the artery. From that time on I began doing the euthanasia procedure differently; I injected the animal in the artery and it was dead within seconds.
With some small animals I use a different procedure. Those small animals can be real dangerous if they get their teeth or claws into you, and because they’re so small you’re forced to get close to them to give them the shot. In one of the segments on the show, a client brought in a beautiful iguana with a big tumor on its mouth. Reptiles can make nice pets; not for me, particularly, but for some people. One of my other clients had a pet iguana. She actually would take a bath with it—at least she would until she ended up in the hospital with a serious case of salmonella.
That was fine for her, but this iguana with the tumor was an old guy that had stopped eating, and the owner had decided to put it down. This iguana turned out to be a mean animal. The owner had brought him to the clinic in a cat carrier, and we couldn’t get him out. We eventually put some sticks through the bars and he got mad and opened his mouth, and as soon as he did I shot the euthanasia solution mixed with an anesthetic directly
into his mouth. It went through the mucous membranes quickly and knocked him out. I’d learned that technique when I had to put down a feral cat.
This was a wild cat that was attacking all the animals around the clinic. It wasn’t a sweet, playful house cat; this was a mean, aggressive bastard with sharp claws. If she could get those claws into someone, she could do serious damage. I finally trapped her in a large cage, but I couldn’t get close enough to give her a shot. Oh, she was angry. When I walked by the cage, she’d fly right at me and hang on the side, hissing with her mouth wide open. Finally I loaded up a hypodermic and when she leaped at me and opened her mouth, I shot the solution right into it. It took her a minute or two, but eventually she was flat out.
I won’t let an animal suffer. Most of the animals I put down are either old or sick; in either case they feel vulnerable and probably wouldn’t survive too much longer anyway. One case I will never forget was an eighty-seven-year-old woman and her daughter who brought in their twenty-seven-year-old cat. That cat had terrible kidney problems and its quality of life was completely gone. But after twenty-seven years the bond between that woman and that cat was so strong that I knew what it was going to do to her. I had no choice; I didn’t want any of them to suffer another day. I euthanized that animal that day, and I never forgot it.