Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  One thing you do get used to is getting smacked in the face or the back by tails. Animals use their tails to swat at things that annoy them—vets, for example. We had a farmer who also was a songwriter and a poet, and he wrote in a poem one time that he always wondered how the doggone cow can have eyes in its tail and know exactly where your face is! When a cow starts swishing her tail really fast, she’s telling you to watch out: Whatever you’re doing, she doesn’t like it. A cow tail hurts more than a horse tail when it hits you because it has a lot less hair covering it. A tail can sting you for a few seconds, but the only real damage it can do is if it catches you in the eye. On our farm in the Netherlands my father cut the hair off the cows’ tails, because if the tail dragged on the floor it would become caked with manure, which gets hard and hurts when you get hit with it. A cow always wants to know where you are; again, when you’re standing close to an animal, its tail usually will hit you in the back of your head. Sometimes, though, you’ll turn your head at just the wrong time, and swoosh! It always ticks me off when I get hit with a wet tail. Darn, she got me again.

  At one point farmers used to dock, or cut, cows’ tails because they believed it kept them cleaner. That proved to be of no value, so they don’t do it anymore. Animals don’t need their tails to survive. There are dogs and cats that are born without a tail, and other dogs’ tails are cut off. Our dog Maeson did fine when she lost her tail in an accident with a car door.

  Probably the most common injury vets face is being bitten by a dog. I don’t get bit much anymore, but I did have one associate who, for some reason, dogs loved to bite. Maybe they talk about it—Did you bite him yet? Go ahead, he doesn’t mind. It seems like every time I turn around he’s at the sink flushing it with lots of cold water and an antiseptic. We get a lot of big dogs in the clinic. In fact, of all the different animals we treat in the clinic, the ones I like dealing with the least are unsocialized dogs. They’re scared and they don’t trust too many people, and so they try to protect themselves. Unsocialized animals are the hardest patients for us to treat in the clinic. Sometimes they try to make a break for it, but when they see they can’t get away, they start snapping at anyone who comes close to them. What I usually do is try to look them right in the eyes, get their attention. If you’re looking directly into an animal’s eyes, it rarely will attack you. Rarely, not never. Then you have to be firm with an animal. The pecking order with animals is pretty short; it’s you or it’s them. Let them know that you’re the master and most of the time they won’t challenge for that position. One lady brought in a mutt for examination. She was sitting in our waiting room and the dog was lying underneath her chair. When I walked into the room, the dog didn’t even say hello. He just lunged at me, trying to bite me. Well, that’s not nice. The lady said, “I’m sorry, he’s kind of mean.”

  “Let me have his leash, please.” When she handed me the leash, I told the dog, “You come with me.” The dog resisted; he wasn’t going anywhere. So I held up the leash in the air until the dog was completely off the ground, and I carried him through the clinic, like a fish on a hook, into the examination room. When I finally put him down, I told him, “You sit.” He growled. Okay, so I picked him up again and he swung around a few times. I let him down and told him again to sit. He sat. You can’t let an animal boss you. Once that pecking order is established, everybody is happier.

  At that time we had a student intern from Michigan State working in the clinic, and he didn’t like what I did at all. He told me he’d never before seen a vet pick up an animal on a leash like that. I listened to what he said, and when he was finished, I offered him the leash. “Okay, here he is. You get bit.”

  You have to let an animal know you’re the boss. When clients bring a cat into the clinic in a carrying cage, I’m usually the guy they ask to take it out of the cage. I don’t mind; for some reason cats don’t scratch me very often. Cats are confident creatures; they believe they’re in charge, so you have to show them you’re not afraid of them. If they think of you at least as an equal, they won’t bother you. There was one cat that we kept in the office that treated all of us as his equal. His name was Midnight, and, obviously, he was a black cat. He was a neutered male that somebody brought to the clinic and never came back to pick up. I think they expected us to find a home for him. Usually that’s not possible. If we kept all the cats and dogs people want to get rid of, we would be running a zoo instead of an office. But for some reason this cat stayed. And slowly he gained control of the office. When people came into the clinic he hopped up on the counter and watched them. Midnight wasn’t afraid of anything. Sometimes a dog would bark and Midnight would just look at it from his perch on the counter as if to tell the dog, Don’t waste your bark—you can’t get me.

  Midnight eventually got all of us well trained. When he was ready to eat, he would walk over to the electric can opener and press down on the lever with his paw. As soon as we heard the sound of that motor, somebody would get up and open a can of cat food for him. He didn’t have much patience, though. After pressing down on the lever, he would turn around to see who was responding to it, and if nobody was moving fast enough, he would press it again, and continue pressing it until he was fed.

  Actually, it isn’t just the physical injuries vets have to careful about; there are also diseases that can be passed from animals to humans. When you’re working in the type of generally unsanitary conditions we face every day, it isn’t unusual for infectious diseases to spread and take hold. When you’re standing in manure or reaching inside an animal, you definitely are exposing yourself to a lot of potentially serious problems. When I was starting out, I knew a lot less about protecting myself and took a lot fewer precautions. While I haven’t caught a bad case of any of these diseases, like everybody else, I use all the safeguards I can. We all do.

  The sister of one of our dairy farm clients got all these little red bumps on her chest and hands that itched terribly. Her doctor told her it was an allergy and prescribed cortisone, but that didn’t help at all. In fact, the cortisone actually aggravated it. Finally she came to us. Dr. Brenda and I both recognized it right away. “That’s mange,” Dr. Brenda said.

  I scraped a little bit off her hand and examined it under the microscope. I found the eggs of the scabies mite. “That’s what it is,” I told her. She went back to her doctor, and this time he gave her the right medicine. Within a short time she was fine.

  Humans can get mange from pigs or dogs. One time we had a pregnant lady with a potbelly pig come into the clinic. Dr. Eric examined the pig and told her it had mange, pointing out the spots. “Oh,” she said to him, plopping her belly on the table and lifting up her shirt, “so is this mange too?” He turned bright red and practically ran out of the room. Fungal infections, bacterial infections, mange, salmonella, like that woman with the pet iguana got—these conditions can be transmitted from animals to humans, but most of them aren’t very serious and can be treated pretty easily.

  But there are some diseases that can be dangerous. For example, brucellosis, or Malta fever, is a serious bacterial infection that can be spread through raw milk or meat and sometimes is carried in secretions or even the afterbirth of aborted fetuses. Before we started wearing plastic gloves, it was reasonably common among vets. In cows it will cause abortions; in humans it can cause very high recurrent fevers and muscle pain, and can last for years. We had to be especially careful about poking ourselves with used vaccination needles, which could be contaminated with the bacteria that cause the fever. A live vaccine was created, though, and between inoculating calves and doing herd checks, we’ve basically eradicated the disease in Michigan. We don’t even test for it anymore.

  Swine flu also can occasionally be transmitted from pigs to humans, but usually only to people whose immune systems are already weak—the elderly or very young, for example. Pig flu can be very dangerous, but that’s just part of the problem. Pigs have so many communicable disea
ses that the normal small pig farm has just about disappeared. The big concerns have taken over that business. And those farms are bio-secure. Anybody who works in the barn or with the breeding sows—the pigs that give birth to piglets—has to take a shower before going in and after coming out. It’s like going into a high-tech lab. We still have pigs going to the fair, but they almost never go back home. The pigs and the fat steers and the sheep don’t go home from the fair—they are sold there; the pigs go to slaughter. But because people are showing animals, there are washing stations by every barn and people are urged to use them, because people from the city in particular haven’t built up the kind of immunity to animal diseases, especially those carried by pigs, that farmers have. I’ve never had a problem because I’m around them all the time and I’m careful.

  I’ve been working at the fair for more than thirty years. I make sure the animals that come to the show are healthy, but because of what I do, I won’t be a judge. People make enemies that way. This is a serious competition, and I don’t ever want anyone thinking I favored the son or daughter of a client over another person. So I just check everybody’s animals’ health. On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2012 I had just gotten done checking all the goats when someone came looking for me. “There’s a problem,” he said. “You’d better come look at this pig.”

  That’s never a good thing to hear. One sick pig can infect all the others. I followed the young man into another barn, and what I saw there wasn’t good. This was a single pig that had been raised by a young man. As I examined it, he told me how much he needed the money he was going to get from selling this animal. I wasn’t sure that would be possible. The pig was not doing well. It was a very hot day and he had brought the pig to the fair in an open trailer with the hot sun beating down on the animal. When I checked out the animal, his heart rate was over 150, his temperature was very high, and he was very stressed. “Can you help him?” that young man asked.

  “I can try,” I told him. The pig did not look good. I gave it some drugs that lasted for a very short period of time. Then I told the superintendent of pigs, “You get here Monday morning, six A.M., and make sure this pig is still alive. Otherwise get it out of here before people come and see a dead pig.” We kept treating that pig and it kept getting better. Monday night it was up and eating, and on Tuesday it went into the show ring. By Thursday, when it got sold, it was completely healthy. I had been extra careful about this animal because I didn’t want to take the chance that pig might infect other animals or, more dangerously, humans. But it worked out very well.

  We’ve also been fighting TB it seems like forever, but there are still four types of TB bacteria that have survived: avian, marine, bovine, and human, and then there are varieties in between them. We don’t see much rabies in the practice, but we know the potential for it is always there; we’re always looking out for it, especially among animals that people let loose.

  The little things that definitely are communicable from animals to people that we can never eliminate is fleas, lice, and ticks. Especially fleas. There is no way of ever getting rid of them completely. For animals in very extreme cases, fleas can be deadly. I’ve actually seen a calf become anemic and die from fleabites. They’re more of an irritation than a real danger to humans. They don’t like to stay on humans, but before they leave, they bite. There are some good products on the market now, but nothing works perfectly. There are dogs and cats that are just flea incubators, and no matter what you do to those animals, you can’t get rid of them. When Dr. Sandra first moved here, she found a nice apartment by the lake. It had been cleaned, it had been fumigated, and it had been empty for at least a couple of months. But when she came to work, she told me that she was allergic to something in that place. She showed me some red bumps, and I told her, “That’s not allergies; those are fleabites.”

  She didn’t believe me. She went to a doctor, who told her they were caused by some allergy and put her on cortisone cream and spray. It didn’t work at all. I told her again, “It’s not working because they’re fleabites.”

  That wasn’t possible, she told me. That apartment had been empty for a long time. Fleas couldn’t be living there for so long. But eventually she realized I was right. So she had the apartment fumigated again—and the fleas came back again. You can kill all the fleas, but the next spring they’ll be back. The larvae get into the carpet or the furniture or the curtains and seems it can live forever. Finally I told her, “You know what you should do? Get a dog. That dog will act as a magnet for fleas when he’s in the house. Then you treat the dog with flea products. That’ll get rid of them.” That’s the best remedy you can find. So that’s what she did, and it cleared up that problem. Maybe the dog didn’t like it so much, but with the flea treatments he was fine.

  Ticks you’ve just got to be careful about. Fleas can jump; ticks sense heat underneath them and drop onto whatever that warm thing is. As long as you look for the ticks and pull them off before they attack, they generally don’t cause real problems. All of those little bugs are part of the job we have to deal with.

  We get calls at the clinic all the time asking us how to deal with potentially dangerous animals. A lot of these calls involve a neighbor’s dog. Diane usually speaks to these people. Sometimes they’re hysterical and the first thing she has to do is calm them down. She’s real good at that. One woman called up, and at first Diane couldn’t understand her because she was crying; but slowly Diane figured out this woman wanted to know if I could tell the difference between bat guano, or bat manure, and mouse droppings. She thought she had a bat in her house, she told Diane, and she believed it had gotten into her bedroom, where it had found her underwear and been attracted to it. She was pretty sure this bat was still hiding somewhere in her bedroom, and since she was having her period she was really afraid the bat was going to come after her and bite her. That’s why she was too scared to go to bed at night. She was calling because she had found a little piece of feces that she thought had probably been left by this bat and had put it on top of her washing machine so she wouldn’t lose it before showing it to me.

  Diane takes every call seriously.

  Unfortunately, the woman continued, her boyfriend was having someone over, so he cleaned up the place and threw the feces away. She had searched all over for it, but she couldn’t find it.

  Diane spoke with her calmly, asking her questions, explaining things, and offering some suggestions. It seemed like every time she had this woman calmed down, she suddenly would ask, “But what if it comes after me?” and start crying again. Diane finally convinced her to ask her father, who lived only a few blocks away, to come over and see if he could find the bat. They were on the phone for more than forty-five minutes. The woman promised she would call back if they couldn’t get rid of the bat. The fact that we never heard from her again made Diane very happy—whether they got that bat or not.

  Animals can be dangerous. Animals can kill people. There are a lot of dangerous animals out there—and I have seen them while consulting with the different law enforcement agencies. In rural areas vets are often asked to work with different public agencies. I have been working with various public agencies in the area for decades. Whenever there’s a problem that involves animals, I get called: “Doc, can you come down and help us out?”

  We had a case in 2013 in which an infant was left alone in the living room by his mother for a few minutes. He was in one of those bouncy chairs, so she thought he would be safe. But when the mother came back, she found the child lying out on the balcony. She rushed him to a Grand Rapids hospital; fortunately, his wounds weren’t too serious. There was a pit bull in the house and the police suspected that this dog actually dragged the child out of the bouncy chair, brought it out to the balcony to its nest, and mauled it.

  When the baby’s parents saw what had happened, they panicked. They put the dog in a cage and drove it about fifteen miles out of town, then dumped it by
the side of the road. When the hospital reported the baby’s injuries, the police went out and found the dog and brought it to the dog pound. Because the dog had not been vaccinated, it was put in quarantine. Two days later it came down with parvo, a highly contagious virus. The pound wouldn’t treat the virus because the dog was in quarantine; instead, the dog was euthanized. Well, if the dog had attacked that baby, it would have been euthanized anyway, but as I discovered, that wasn’t what happened.

  Everybody knows that pit bulls have a reputation for being very dangerous. I’ve treated a lot of them, and it may be true that they have more brawn than brain, but they are not bad dogs. It’s the people who don’t take care of them. I’ve learned how to deal with pit bulls: When a new client brings a dog to the clinic, I never just approach it. I give it a little time to smell me, to get used to me. I always talk to the owner while letting my hands hang at my sides. Then I’ll go down on one knee so I can talk to the dog at eye level. And when I do finally reach for the dog, I do it slowly and give the dog a chance to sniff my hand. I’ve never had a problem with an overly aggressive pit bull.

  There have been many cases in which pit bulls did attack people, so at first this looked like it was going to be a pretty simple case. The police brought the dog remains to me as well as pictures of the wounds on the child and asked me to confirm their belief that the dog had attacked this baby. They wanted me to make an imprint of the dog’s jaw so it could be compared to the bite marks on the child. But as soon as I looked at the dog and the photographs, I knew there was something wrong.

  The dog was a pit bull cross; there was a little bit of a boxer in there, so he had a tremendous underbite. His bottom jaw was almost two inches longer than it should have been. “Those aren’t teeth marks,” I told the police. “Those are claw marks.” Then I told them what I thought probably happened. “This baby was crying, I want my mommy, and the pit bull wanted to help him. I know that’s not what people believe, but pit bulls love humans. They can be wonderful dogs. In the right situation, a pit bull will give up its life to protect a human. So I’m guessing this dog heard the baby crying and wanted to take care of it. They do that by touching. The dog’s claws had barely scratched the skin. The wounds weren’t very deep at all.” And the wounds certainly couldn’t be matched to the dog’s teeth marks. If that dog had been attacking the baby, he would’ve grabbed hold of an arm or a leg. And once it had grabbed hold, it would not have let go. Those dogs were bred to grab bulls by the nose, so if it had wanted to hurt that baby, it would have. The fact that the child was found perfectly safe with the dog nearby told me everything I needed to know. As far as I was concerned—and I explained this to the police—that dog was exercising its own motherly instinct; it was trying to soothe a crying baby, and because of that, the dog died. If that infant’s parents hadn’t left it alone, none of this would have happened. In this situation I found myself being the advocate for the animal, not that it did any good.