Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  How Ike had bent over so far I don’t know, but there was nothing anybody could do for him. By the time they got him to the hospital he was dead.

  It’s not only the animals that get seriously hurt or even killed working on a farm or a ranch. Being a large-animal vet is a dangerous job. I’ve never been afraid of an animal, but I’ve always been respectful of their capabilities. While I’ve never known an animal that set out to hurt a person without a cause, I have seen people get hurt. I’ve been hurt myself. Animals are bigger and dumber and stronger than they can possibly understand. In any physical confrontation between a human being and a large animal, that animal is going to win. If you put an animal in a position where it feels vulnerable, it will defend itself any way it can: It’ll kick or butt or bite, it’ll try to trample you or hook you with a horn or scratch you with a claw, and if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, there isn’t much you can do about it. A lot of times when we’re treating sick animals, they don’t feel like being pushed or prodded; they don’t want anybody forcing open their mouth or sticking them with a needle. So they react. Every animal has its way of defending and protecting itself. Pigs will try to run over you and then chew your arm or a hand. Goats will sharpen their horns so the tips are like daggers and try to catch you with that knifelike point. Animals don’t want to hurt you; they want routine; they want the same things done the same way every day. So anytime there is a change, they become alert and anxious and get ready to defend themselves. Horses will run away, and cows will attack, especially if a calf is nearby. People don’t think of cows as aggressive animals, but I guarantee nobody makes that mistake more than once.

  Sometimes the animal doesn’t even have to feel threatened; it can push you or run you over without even being aware that you’re there. Those accidents happen. On the show one time we were moving some cows around in a small fenced-in area. Next thing I knew, poor Charles was trapped between two cows. That’s not a sensible place to be, and we had to move those cows pretty quickly to make sure he didn’t get hurt. In the practice we’ve all been bitten by dogs, scratched by cats, and pecked by birds. We’ve been chased, knocked down, and run over by cows and horses and pigs. But mostly we’ve been kicked. Believe me, if a large-animal vet says he or she has never got kicked, that person doesn’t work. Everybody gets kicked—everybody. The first time I got kicked I was only four years old. We had a nice young colt in the pasture and I wanted to pet it. I walked up to the colt and reached out at it—and it kicked me on the inside of my thighs. I was wearing shorts and it left me with two black-and-blue hoofprints. I started bawling and ran back home. I told my mother what had happened, and she turned me over on her knee and gave me a spanking. That colt didn’t know me, she said, he was protecting himself from a stranger. That’s what animals do, she told me, and it was a lesson I never forgot.

  I have been kicked too many times to remember them all. The worst was when I was doing pregnancy tests for a very good client. He forgot to warn me that one of those cows liked to kick people. I chased that cow into the barn and was walking behind her. I wasn’t even touching her, but the next thing I know she lets fly with her hind leg and gets me square in the pubic area. Oh my gosh. It hurt; it hurt bad. I couldn’t get up; I was squatting in the holding area, moving gingerly from one foot to the other, waiting for that wave of red-hot pain to subside. Meanwhile, nobody knew what to do. I heard my client whispering to his wife, “Should we go help him?”

  “You go ahead,” she told him.

  “I’m okay,” I said, but I said it in a wheezy, high-pitched voice and without a lot of conviction. It took me about five minutes before I could stand mostly straight up. As soon as I could, I went over to that cow and kicked her in the butt as hard as I could. The pain in my foot took the other pain away!

  She turned her head and looked at me, probably thinking, Are you talking to me? In response, she tried to kick me again. This time I grabbed her tail and cranked it around a few times; and then it suddenly occurred to me that I was having a fight with a cow. “Forget it,” the farmer told me. “We’re shipping her out because she kicks us all the time too, when we’re milking her.”

  I was black-and-blue in that area for a week, and I definitely walked a little funny. Well, maybe not so funny to me. Like every other large-animal vet I know, I’ve been kicked all over my body; I’ve been battered, bruised, and bloodied, and both of my knees have been bent almost all the way back. Horses will warn you before they try to kick you because they have to shift their weight to the other foot, but cows can kick at any time without a warning. As long as you’re standing to the side of the animal, though, it’s harder for it to get you.

  I get bloodied all the time; the closer you get to an animal, the safer it is; if you’re close to an animal, you can feel it moving so you know what its going to do, making it much less likely you’ll get in its way. Being close also makes it hard for the animal to kick out at you or get up any momentum, but it also means that you’re continually catching your hand or your foot on things and getting cut. Usually those cuts are minor—put a Band-Aid on them and forget about them. The only time I went to a doctor for a cut was when I sliced off the tip of my finger when I was trying to trim a cow’s hoof. I was holding it, and just as I moved the knife down, she moved up. The hoof slipped out of my hand and I sliced into the tip of my finger. The blood started squirting out. I looked at the farmer and said, “Well, I always wanted to finger-paint.” I put a bandage over it and finished the job. That bleeding wouldn’t stop, though, so I went to the doctor’s office. “I can suture it,” he told me, “but it probably won’t hold.” He put four sutures in there to hold that fingertip in place, but eventually it just dried out and fell off. I still have feeling in the finger, but the top of that finger is pretty flat. But this is a profession where you’re constantly getting little cuts and bruises that you just have to ignore. I’ve got little scars everywhere, but the worst-looking scar came from a very minor injury. I was doing pregnancy checks and a cow backed up, and my arm moved over a partition and I scratched my arm on a metal burr. It barely even bled. I took off the plastic glove I was wearing and cleaned the scratch good, and pretty much forgot about it, but when it healed up it looked like I’d been in a knife fight.

  I have a small painting hanging in my house that one of my clients did for me; it’s painted on barn wood and it shows a rancher standing outside a pen, watching a very angry bull tied to a post with a thin rope. The vet is holding a large syringe and obviously getting ready to give that bull a shot while the rancher is saying to him, “Hey, Doc, I just had a sobering thought. That rope only cost three dollars.”

  Well, I know that feeling. We try to be careful, but there is only so much we can do to protect ourselves and still do our job. I can’t even remember all the times I’ve been hurt. One of my clients was a nice young couple trying to make a living on a small farm, but they just didn’t have enough money to take good care of their few cows. They hadn’t dehorned their cows—either they couldn’t afford it or they didn’t know how—but for me the result was the same: Those cows had sharp horns. I went out there on a Saturday evening to do a calving and successfully pulled a big healthy calf from a heifer. That big cow was down in the little dirty pen and I needed to get her up. I carried what is called a Hot-Shot, an electric stimulus sort of similar to a Taser. I hit that cow with it, and it got up—it got up real quick and charged right at me. I started backing out of that pen, but suddenly I felt two hands on my back; the woman who had been helping me wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. I was stuck there for a few seconds—too long. When that cow swung her head, I wasn’t completely out of the way, and her horn caught me right in the middle of my palm. It ripped open a big, deep hole. I used paper towels to try to stop the bleeding.

  It was after eleven o’clock at night when I got home. Everybody was sleeping. I went into the clinic, cleaned the gash, and washed it and sewed i
t up by myself. One-hand stitches are generally pretty loose, so a day or two later we took out the stitches and Dr. Brenda redid it nice and tight. The only evidence is a half-moon scar in the middle of my hand.

  Another time I was examining a cow that was coming down with milk fever but was still on its feet. I put a rope around her neck and wrapped it twice around a beam, as I often do. The problem was that this was a round beam. I was standing in a manure patch, holding on to the other end, when the cow decided to walk away. Pound for pound, cows are much stronger than horses, and when she started walking there was no way I could hold on to that rope. I let go, and because I had no footing I couldn’t move quickly enough. That rope whipped around the post and snapped back and hit me right in the forehead. I was lucky it didn’t hit me an inch lower and rip out my eye, but it opened a long thin wound in my forehead, which started bleeding, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. The blood was dripping down and I was pushing paper towels against it, and finally I got it to stop. “You all right?” the farmer asked.

  “Of course,” I told him, although I was pretty angry at that cow. I grabbed the rope again and tied it really tight this time and treated her. I went back to the clinic and Dr. Ashley closed the wound with several stitches.

  Usually on every farm there is one cow you have to be extra careful around; otherwise, she’ll kick the daylights out of you. Angus cows, for example, are the dickens. They’re mean. One thing I know for sure: You should never turn your back on an Angus cow. But there also is the other type of cow, the friendly cow that comes right up to you and practically demands you scratch her head. Those nice cows are the ones you have to be extra careful about: Back in Harbor Beach my colleague went to treat a Brown Swiss with milk fever. Brown Swiss are big, nice cows. He was bending over and examining this cow when another cow came up right behind him and nudged him; she wanted to be petted. Without looking, he reached behind him and swatted the cow’s face. Oh yeah? That cow put her head down and literally butted him up in the air and over the bars of the stall.

  We spend a lot of time working in awkward positions or trying to hold big animals, so it isn’t unusual to strain or pull a muscle or a tendon. I was giving pills to a cow one morning and she tried to butt me; as she swung her head, I was trying to hold it, and then she suddenly turned the other way and I started slipping. That was it. I could feel the triceps in my left arm ripping. My arm was hanging there, completely useless. I couldn’t pick it up. It took it about a month to heal and I had to do all my pregnancy checks with my right hand.

  I’ve had to have only one surgery. I was doing pregnancy checks at Fox Dairy in 2006 when a big old cow came running into the parlor straight at me. I put out my hand to stop her. My arm was rigid in front of me, my elbow was locked—and she ran straight into it; my hand popped back and pushed my rotator cuff out of place. Oh my, that one hurt. Felt like my shoulder just got yanked back. She wasn’t trying to hurt me; she was just being pushy. It didn’t matter; the damage was done. My arm just fell right down and I couldn’t lift it. I was almost finished with the pregnancy checks and I didn’t want to have to come back, so I supported my left arm with my right hand and just pushed it into the remaining cows to do the checks. When I pulled my arm out I had to catch it; otherwise, it just fell. At first I figured it was like so many other injuries I’d had, that if I just gave it a few days I’d be fine. I went back to the clinic and tried to work, but my arm was just lying useless in my lap. As much as I didn’t want to, I knew I had to have it examined.

  The MRI showed I had damaged my rotator cuff. The doctor wanted to wait until the inflammation went down before deciding what to do. I struggled with it for two weeks. The pain went away pretty quick, but I didn’t get much strength back. In the meantime, I ended up treating a prolapse, meaning the cow’s uterus is outside and has to be pushed back inside. It was a big, big pile of bloody mess. We pulled the cow’s hind legs back and I just started pushing with both hands. How I got the uterus back in I’ll never know, because I didn’t have any strength in that shoulder.

  When the two weeks were up, the doctor told me to hold my hands out in front of me. When he pushed down on my left hand, it didn’t offer much resistance. “Okay” he said, “let’s do the surgery.”

  I spent six weeks with my arm in a sling. Diane and I had moved into a new house at the time, and I was helping get settled. I never thought I’d miss sticking my arm in a cow’s butt, but I couldn’t wait to get back to work. It reminded me how much I love what I do. Sometimes when you do your job every day you forget how much you enjoy it, so this was a good reminder.

  The one animal I never take my eyes off is a bull. Bulls can’t be trusted, simple as that. When I’m working with a herd and there’s a bull in that herd, I’m starting with three strikes against me: I’m a stranger, I work with his ladies, and most of the time I smell like blood. As far as a bull is concerned, I’m just a moving target. I’m not scared of them, but I watch them because I know what they can do. You’re a bull. Fine; you stay on your side and I’ll stay over here on my side. Way, way over here.

  I always tell people who work with animals that the most important thing to do for their own safety is to always let the animal know where they are; conversely, when there is a bull in the yard, I always want to know where it is. I’ve never been in a situation where I feared for my life, but I have been helped over gates by bulls many times. We had an Amish farmer who was moving, so all his cattle had to be tested for tuberculosis. I had a young female college student helping me at the time. We tested the cows and had to examine the bull. He was in the pen with a long chain on his nose ring, so I grabbed hold of the chain and wrapped it tight around a post and then handed the end to this student. I hopped into the pen and injected the bull with the serum, and just as I got done the student helper yelled, “I can’t hold him.” The bull pulled the chain out of her hand. I didn’t hesitate a second: I took one, two big jumps, and then I took a six-foot jump and went over that fence. It was about the closest call of my whole career; that bull helped me a little: He pressed his head against my boot and pushed it against the fence as I went over it, and that boot came right off my foot as I jumped for safety.

  Bulls are serious about hurting you. They’re nasty sons of guns. They don’t want anybody encroaching on their territory. A bull’s job is to protect his ladies, and that’s what he’s going to do. A bull will kill you by knocking you down, kneeling over the top of you on his knees, and crushing you with his head. A bull will crush every bone in your body. There was a farmer outside Grand Rapids whose herd was being tested for TB, and he went out in the pasture to get his bull. When the farmer didn’t come back, his people went looking for him and found his body. The bull knew this guy—this was the person who fed him every day—but the bull must have felt threatened and attacked him. This was one of those rare cases when the animal did bite the hand that fed it.

  Back in Harbor Beach one time, I was on a farm treating a down cow with milk fever. I was walking toward the cow carrying a bucket filled with calcium in warm water. I took a few steps and heard Rrrrrrrrr . . . and I thought, Oh my gosh, here comes the bull. Actually, I thought a lot of four-letter words.

  I did not know there was a bull in the herd, and he’d caught me out in the middle of the pen. The only thing between us was the down cow. I thought, Okay, to get me, you’ve got to come over that cow. We had started to play ring-around-the-Elsie when the farmer, who was there watching with his fourteen-year-old son, shouted to me, “Oh, he’s just a young bull. He’s just loud.” Sure, but I noticed he was shouting it to me from outside the pen.

  “You get that bull,” I told him. “You get that bull out of here right now or I’m leaving.” Truthfully, right at that moment, as long as that cow was between me and this bull, I wasn’t going anywhere. “Get the bull out of here and shut the door.”

  I have to give him credit: He hopped into the pen and chased th
at bull away. He put the bull on the other side of the barn and shut the door. It was like a garage door or a store security door, made of metal and about eight feet high and twelve feet wide, and it rolled closed. Okay, I thought. Okay, now I can take care of that cow. And just as I finished, that bull came through the door. He knocked it right off its rollers with his head and pushed it up. I got out of that pen real quick. The next morning the farmer called back to tell us the cow hadn’t gotten up yet. Another vet in the office was going to go out there, and I warned him, “Don’t go in the pen until somebody is there with a pitchfork.”

  When he came back, he told me, “Somebody’s going to get hurt with that bull.” Several weeks later we read in the paper that the bull had gone after the farmer’s son. The son got his leg broken and suffered a bunch of cracked ribs, but he was lucky, he was still alive.

  There was only one bull that I ever liked. I had a husband and wife who did dairying, and they had a four-year-old Holstein bull that was a pet. A Jersey bull is meaner than a junkyard dog, but the Holstein bulls can be okay. When you walked into their barn, this bull just came right up to you. He never bellowed at anybody and was never threatening. But before he let you go to work with the cows, he insisted that you scratch his head. He was firm about that: You want to work with my ladies, you better scratch my head. It turned out that he wasn’t a very good bull. When we did pregnancy tests, none of the cows were pregnant. He was just too big and friendly and he couldn’t care less, so they had to buy a younger bull to get the cows pregnant. But it was very hard for them to sell him because he had become such a nice pet.