by Dr. Jan Pol
It’s cruel for people to keep an animal alive to make themselves feel better, however good their intentions are meant to be. Clare County Animal Control called me on a very hot summer day when they discovered a woman who was keeping forty horses. She was trying to save these animals, but what she was really doing was torturing them. She had these horses in twelve-square-foot pens made from gates. She had hay but no water; she had to pump the water out of a pond into a tank. There were a few pine trees on the property, so there was no shade. When I got there my mouth just dropped open. She had old racehorses; she had crippled horses, old mares—it was unbelievably sad. One of the horses was blind, and he was alone in a pen. A blind horse can function if he has a buddy he can depend on; he learns how to stay with him. But this guy was alone and afraid; he had no life. The lady was there and I just lost my temper. I don’t have much of a temper, but when it goes, I have a hard time controlling it. I said, “What in the world are you trying to do with these animals?”
She said, “Oh, I’m trying to save them so they can live longer.”
I got right in her face and I told her, “These animals should not live longer. They have no quality of life. You are not doing these animals any favor.” I was so angry. We had some people come up with trailers for the horses that were salvageable, and the police took this woman away. Then one of the animal control officers asked me what we should do, and I told him, “Get the backhoe.” We ended up putting seven horses in the ground that day. When she was tried for animal abuse, I ended up writing a letter to the judge; he sentenced her to three months in jail and prohibited her from owning animals ever again.
I’ve seen that same thing too many times. I had to put a twenty-four-year-old Belgian mare down that had so much arthritis I could see the pain in her eyes. It couldn’t be put on painkillers because it got terrible diarrhea. A young girl looked at me and told me proudly, “I saved this horse from slaughter two years ago.”
And I looked right back at her and said, “Well, you didn’t do it any favors.” I know that was a callous thing to say; I know she meant well, but keeping that animal alive in that condition was not what anyone would do for a living thing she cared about.
But that’s the kind of thing that happens when people attribute human qualities to animals. They’re not human; they’re animals. I guarantee that no one cares about animals more than I do. But they are not the same as human beings. Animals can be trained, and most animals have some type of memory, but they cannot reason. There are animals that can use tools; crows will use a stick to punch into a wormhole in a tree, chimpanzees will put tables and chairs on top of each other to climb high enough to reach bananas, but you can’t teach an animal to reason or understand why one and one makes two.
I love Disney movies—I love The Lion King; I get tears in my eyes every time I hear the music—but the animals are portrayed as human, with human emotions and human desires, and animals are not humans. Bambi is a good story, but it attributes human emotions to deer. Deer generally don’t know enough to get out of the way of a speeding car, much less process emotions. That’s why I have no problem—and I hope God doesn’t hold it against me—putting down an animal when its quality of life is gone. Animals know when it’s time. They walk away and they don’t come back. They want to be alone. They’re not afraid; being afraid of death is a concept they don’t understand. What is interesting is that when I have to put down an animal, the other animals will stand nearby watching, but they don’t express any response beyond curiosity. There’s no sense of sympathy or sadness; those are human emotions. Instead, it’s What the heck is that guy doing? How is it going to affect me? And most important, when am I going to get fed?
Of course it’s painful for anyone to watch an animal being euthanized, especially an animal that he has taken care of and loved. It’s painful for me too. We had a wonderful Dane named Neena, and she was deteriorating, but she still liked to roll around and play, and as long as she was happy I did everything possible to keep her alive. She loved sitting out in the sun. When she was having trouble walking because of her arthritis, I would actually pick her up and walk her outside. I did that one day and I came back a half hour later and said to her, “You ready to come back in?” Instead of looking at me as she always had done, she looked away. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. It was time and we both knew it. It was hard. There was so much love in this dog. We said good-bye and I put her down. When I gave her that shot and she closed her eyes and put her head down, I could almost see the pain leaving her body. You think that didn’t hurt me terribly? But that’s what I had to do for that animal.
Believe me, I love my animals. We’ve had at least a dozen Danes. They’re all buried out in the back and I can tell you where each one is. We all get attached to animals—not just little animals, but horses and even cows. Every single animal has its own personality, and people can become real attached to any animal. Farmers have favorite cows, and they also have cows they don’t like—and those cows won’t like those farmers right back. Even dairy farmers, who look at everything from an economical point of view, sometimes make exceptions for their favorite cows. While some farmers have no problem eating their own cows if something happens to them, I’ve known farmers who become so attached to a cow that they won’t sell it and when it dies or has to be put down, they bury it on the farm. Dairy farmers have to touch their animals twice a day, often for years, and they form a bond, if not a real friendship. A few dairy farms have cow graveyards out back beyond the barn or in a field.
People who grow up on a farm understand that large animals are a product, and at least some animals are raised to be slaughtered. That’s just the way life is. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. One time I had a calf that was being born with its hind legs forward, and the tail was already out of the cow. Normally in those situations I can push the tail back in and bring the hind legs around so the calf is in the right position to be born. It takes two hands to do it, but it isn’t that difficult. But this time I pushed the calf in and I felt the entire uterus completely tear off. It just fell into the belly. The farmer looked at me and asked, “What happened, Doc?”
“I can’t believe it,” I said, surprised and very disappointed. “The whole uterus tore off and everything is down inside.” He asked me what we could do. “Take it to slaughter,” I said. “That’s the only thing we can do.” That decision was made for me. That animal would not have survived, and if the owner got it to the slaughterhouse right away, at least he would salvage the meat. Whether it is unavoidable or by choice, you still have to learn to accept it. That’s not so easy sometimes. When Charles was four years old we had a Dane that got prostate cancer, and I had to euthanize him. I did it while the kids were home because I wanted them to learn to deal with the reality of life and death; as a result, Charles still remembers it because it was our first Dane.
But eventually they learned how to accept it. When our kids were growing up, we had them raise sheep for their 4-H project. We bred and raised our own. We had a ram and ewes and every year we took the offspring to the fair, knowing they would be sold for meat. It might sound cruel making children raise an animal knowing it is going to be sold, but it makes them respect the whole circle of life and take nothing for granted. One year Charles practically raised two female sheep by himself; their mother wasn’t that interested, so he bottle-fed them. They were very tame and became more like pets than a project. He really bonded with those sheep, and that year it was especially hard for him to bring them to the auction. Fortunately, the people who bought them wanted them for breeding purposes, so they took them home to introduce them to their new boyfriends.
Making the decision to end an animal’s life usually isn’t difficult. There are times when it’s just the right thing to do. I had clients who bred and sold Belgians, beautiful big draft horses. They had a four-month-old colt with great bloodlines that just wasn’t walking right. After examining the horse I realized it had se
rious neurological problems. Its senses hadn’t developed completely. I’d seen this only a couple of times before, and I knew there was nothing that could be done to fix it. That horse was stumbling around, falling down, and bumping into things. He was probably more of a danger to himself than to people. I told the owners that the kind thing to do for that animal was to put him down.
While the owners understood and accepted it, their teenage daughter had a more difficult time. She had become pretty close with that horse. I talked with her for a little while and explained the whole situation. Eventually she agreed it was the right thing to do. A few weeks later she called and asked if we were hiring; she had planned to go to nursing school but had decided she wanted to work around animals. We did hire her and she worked in the office for almost seven years. She still comes around to visit with her own child.
A lot of the time we’ll euthanize an animal because it isn’t going to survive anyway and it would be cruel to prolong its suffering. One of the worst things I’ve seen in my career started on a Sunday night in the early spring when Dr. Rachel got a call from the state police. They were on a farm and needed help. An Arabian mare had just given birth to a colt and couldn’t get up. Dr. Rachel went out there, and when she realized what was going on, she called me right away. We had a bad situation. The mare was so emaciated, it didn’t have the strength to get up. The colt had died because the mare had been too weak to push it out. Neighbors had seen that horse struggling and called the police. Dr. Rachel put the mare down. But that was just the beginning.
While she was working on the mare, another two-year-old mare fell down and started floundering around. It was also too weak to get back up on its feet. Dr. Rachel eventually counted twelve horses, and the only food she could find was half of a round bale of hay. These horses were starving to death. I went back with her Monday morning. By then animal control had arrived and intended to take all the horses. It was probably the worst pen I’d ever walked in. There was liquid manure in that barn that went over the tops of my boots. I had to climb on the gates to move around. Two more horses were already down in the muck and couldn’t get up, so we had to euthanize those animals. The other horses were running free. It was obvious nobody was caring for these animals. Animal control took them away and there was a big story in the newspapers.
The strongest horses were in a little bit better shape because they had been at the top of the pecking order, and whatever food there was, they got most of it. But none of them had been cared for at all. None of them even had a halter on. Eventually we needed to put them in a trailer. Some of them I had to tranquilize on the fly; as they ran by me, I popped the needle in their rear, and when they had quieted down I could put a rope on them so we could drag them into the trailer. But one of the young mares just refused to go. Tranquilizer or not, she wasn’t moving. Finally I got frustrated and pushed her from behind—and when I did she kicked me hard. Oh yeah? I thought. I’m trying to help you. I’ll show you. So I booted her right back, right in her butt. It didn’t hurt her, not a bit, but it definitely got her attention. Oh, you mean me? Oh, okay. Then she jumped right into that trailer.
We took those horses that had a chance of surviving to a good, clean farm, where we could give them care. There was one gray stallion we thought we could save, but three days later he just laid down and died. About six horses survived. But even most of them had been in that muck so long without having their feet trimmed that the outside wall of the hoof had grown all the way underneath and around. So they weren’t walking on the bottoms of their feet, but instead on the sides. It was as if your fingernail had closed completely over the top of your finger. They started trimming their hooves. Every three weeks I had to go the farm, stand behind a gate, and tranquilize them so the farrier could work on their feet.
Eventually I had to testify in court, and that owner went to jail for three months. When he came out he managed to find himself a lawyer, and he sued me and the county for taking his horses. He claimed we had shut down his business. His business? I asked his lawyer, “That’s his business? Did you ever ask him how many horses he’s sold for a profit?” Within a week they dropped that lawsuit.
I think we ended up euthanizing five horses. We didn’t have any choice; they were in such bad condition they could not have survived. But there are other situations when we had to do it because the animals had become dangerous to people. I don’t blame the animals; animals aren’t born to be vicious, but when they are taught that behavior, it’s almost impossible to change it. And then you have to do something about it. I had a good client whose son had brought home two Rottweilers and done nothing to tame them, so they terrorized anything they came into contact with. “We’ve got to put them down,” my client told me. “They’re not safe and if they attack somebody I’m going to be in big trouble.” These were very big and very dangerous dogs. The male probably weighed as much as 150 pounds, the female maybe one hundred pounds. When I got there they were in a small, rickety pen, and as soon as we got close, they bared their teeth, started snarling, and got ready to attack. I got the tranquilizer ready; as soon as the owner opened the gate, the male just flew at him, and I harpooned the dog with the tranquilizer. Same thing with the female. I have no idea how these dogs got to be this way, but they were dangerous and had to be put down. Eventually they would have hurt somebody.
There are times when we just get lucky, when people are prepared to have an animal put down and we’re able to save it. We had a woman drive up to the clinic with her horse in a trailer. She was practically crying as she led him out into our parking lot. “We were riding and the horse fell down on its front knees,” she told me. “He couldn’t get up for a long time.” She’d brought him back to the stable and put him right into the trailer. She expected there was something majorly wrong with his muscles, she told me, and the most important thing was that he didn’t suffer. He’d been a good horse and she wanted to be good to him. I checked that horse over and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. No way was I going to put it down in that situation. We took blood and discovered that the horse was low in vitamin E and selenium. I treated the horse and she took it home. That horse had some good years left in him.
I remember another farm call I dreaded. When we got the call I drove out to the barn, thinking, I’m going to have to put this horse down. This old man was thirty-three years old and had very bad arthritis, especially in his legs. When I got to the barn, he was lying in a very well-bedded stall. I told him, “Get up, come on, come on,” and with only a little bit of effort he got up and looked at me like he was wondering, Okay, now what do you want me to do? It turned out I had gotten to the place a little earlier than the scheduled appointment; his owner was a state trooper and a few minutes after I’d gotten there she came speeding down the road to meet me. She had owned this horse since he was foal, she told me, and he was an important member of her family. She’d lived a large part of her life with this animal and now she was dealing with saying good-bye. Not easy for any of us.
We talked about the horse so I would understand their relationship, and as we did I could see she was not ready to give up. Instead of trying to talk her into it, I honored her wishes. After so many years, it’s easy to tell when people need a little more time, so I gave her the painkillers and explained how to use them. I knew this wasn’t kind to the animal, but sometimes, as in this case, it just felt like it was the right thing to do. I warned her that it wasn’t going to be long before he was not going to be able to get up anymore. And when that happened he would start struggling. Then it would be time. But she needed those last few days. I got back in my car and drove to see my next patients, two dogs that had gotten too curious about a porcupine. And the truth is I felt very good about what I’d done.
The case I will never forget was an eleven-year-old black lab that a woman brought in. I took a look at it and thought, Holy moley, what is that thing hanging off it? That dog had a fifteen-pound tumor hangin
g from its back and off to the side. It had started as a small fatty tumor and kept growing and growing and got big in a fairly short time. That dog looked like a hunchback. When you see something like that, people get prepared to say good-bye to the animal. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
After examining the dog, I said, “Sure, we can take it off him. That dog is healthy. You can still enjoy him.” I cut the skin open and reached in with my two hands and took the tumor out. It was like a big, ugly ball. The skin had been stretched around the tumor, so I cut off a piece of skin probably a foot long and six inches wide, clamped some blood vessels, put a drain and some antiseptic in there, and sewed the dog up. The drain came out four days later, the stitches came out two weeks later, and that dog was running with that lady again. You can’t imagine how good something like that makes me feel.
I’ve seen the whole cycle of life countless times. People ask me if I can identify any of the animals I’ve delivered, and the answer is there have just been too many. If an animal had unique markings at birth I might remember it, but generally, no, I can’t. And as far as I know, I’ve never had to put down an animal I helped bring into this world. I sure hope I never do.
Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow
One day more than twenty years ago, my friend Ike Swarey was hauling a wagonload of manure. One of the four horses pulling the wagon was being trained, and it was still a little skittish. Somehow the manure splattered and that horse lay down and didn’t want to get up. Ike smacked it so it stood up, but one of its back legs got caught in a rope. Ike tapped that back leg to make the horse pick it up; instead, that horse kicked him right in the middle of his face with its heavy metal shoe.