A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons

by Julian Norton

  This was the problem that faced Billy (and me) when Mrs Taylor brought him to the surgery, one cold and gloomy November afternoon. Billy was a more reluctant patient than Butch had been. Mitzi ran in to greet me in the waiting room and then scuttled back to see Billy and Betty. She ran backwards and forwards several times as Billy, on his lead, made very steady progress towards the consulting room. At the last moment, he put on the brakes and sat down. Betty continued walking, unaware that her little dog had stopped, and Billy slid slowly along behind her, leaving a long stain as his dirty bottom smeared along the floor.

  Finally, both dogs and Betty were in the room and the door was safely closed.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Taylor. It’s nice to see you. What can we do for Mitzi and Billy today?’

  ‘Well, it’s poo, poo, poo, poo, poo!’ explained Betty. ‘It’s all under there!’ She pointed under his tail. ‘It’s all STUCK there! I can’t get it off. He’s been in the shower and in the bath, but it’s all STUCK ONTO HIM. Yuck!’

  The problem was clear enough. I donned latex gloves and checked Billy all over, leaving his messy tail until the end of my examination. Despite his outward gloomy appearance, he was generally very healthy and I wasn’t too concerned about that. It was the hairiness of his bottom, the stickiness of his poo and the difficulty that Mrs Taylor was having in cleaning him that seemed to be the predominant issues.

  I explained what was needed. I would take Billy into the kennels, soak off the poo, clip the hair off his backside and give him a bath. Soon, he would be clean and happy. I set about the task with gusto. Many vets would have passed this job to a nurse, but I loved this sort of thing. The results would be instant and Billy would very quickly feel much better. It is not a glamorous job, but somehow it is very satisfying.

  As predicted, within half an hour, Billy was rushing back to see Mrs Taylor, with infinitely more vigour.

  ‘Oh Billy!’ Betty exclaimed. ‘You are lovely! What a lovely bum!’

  I could think of nothing more to add.

  Mitzi was still jumping up and down. I thought she had just come along for the ride, but no. She was covered in warty spots, which Mrs Taylor was finding irksome.

  ‘I keep catching them on my comb, you know, when I’m brushing her. Can you take them all off?’

  It seemed a big job for an elderly dog. None of the warts carried a serious prognosis and they were certainly benign. However, Mrs Taylor was determined that I should remove them. I agreed, but arranged for her to come in another day – I hadn’t expected that this appointment would take so long. It had been long-winded but very entertaining.

  Two weeks later, Mitzi’s warts had been removed and it was time to take her stitches out. Betty telephoned to explain that her car had been taken to the garage and she couldn’t come to the practice. She asked if I could visit. Since the day was relatively quiet, and knowing that Betty was alone and would probably enjoy the company, I agreed to call round, on my way home for lunch.

  When I arrived, Billy was relaxing on a cushion, looking out of the window. He leapt up and barked loudly as I came through the front door. Mitzi, who was deaf, only realized something was happening when she saw Billy become animated. At this point, she resumed her usual bouncing behaviour. It was difficult to keep her still as I removed the stitches, which were dotted about all over her body. I thought this was all I had to do, but Mrs Taylor had one more job for me.

  ‘Do you know anything about televisions?’ she asked. ‘I can’t make this thing work at all!’

  The television was stuck on the Al Jazeera channel. It had been like this for the last week, according to Betty. She had been watching it anyway.

  ‘I just can’t work it out and I can’t even understand what they are saying!’ she laughed.

  Once she started laughing it was hard not to laugh too, and soon we were both in hysterics at the whole situation – a dog with a newly trimmed bottom, a geriatric poodle who wouldn’t stop bouncing up and down and a television that was broadcasting foreign news in a foreign language, which neither of us could understand or fix.

  * * *

  A few weeks passed. All three of the Taylor family had been healthy for a while. When I saw Billy’s name on my morning appointment list, I presumed it was a return of his ‘poo, poo, poo, poo, poo’ problem, but Betty looked anxious. Mitzi burst into the consulting room as she always did, followed by Betty with Billy bringing up the rear.

  ‘Is it the usual, Mrs Taylor?’ I enquired.

  ‘Julian. I’m very worried about Billy.’

  He looked the same as ever to me. He sat gazing around benignly on the examination table, considering routes of escape – if only he had the energy.

  ‘I’ve discovered a lump. It’s under his tummy and I think it’s cancer.’ Betty looked distraught.

  ‘Okay, let’s have a look. Whereabouts is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s under his tum. Right under there, growing out of his skin.’

  It wasn’t immediately obvious where the lump was. I peered under his belly, around the soft part of his abdomen and around his ribs. These were the usual places for skin tumours to grow on a dog, but I couldn’t find anything.

  ‘It’s underneath,’ Betty explained, ‘and I just noticed it today. It’s very hard and I think it has grown very quickly.’

  These were all features of an aggressive tumour. Poor Billy, he didn’t deserve a serious tumour on top of his sensitive bowels.

  Finally, I found the rock-hard mass, attached to the middle of his chest, right over his breastbone. Hard lumps like this are often aggressive sarcoma-type tumours originating from the hard connective tissue of the body. It felt about three centimetres long and about two centimetres across and was covered in sticky hair. This suggested the lump was discharging fluid. If a lump is oozing, the surrounding hair clumps and sticks to it in a tangled mass.

  ‘It doesn’t look very good I’m afraid, Betty.’ I agreed with her suspicion that the lump could well be cancer.

  ‘Ah, poor Billy!’ She tried to reassure the worried dog as she stroked his fluffy head.

  I decided to snip away some of the hair, to make it easier to see the lump underneath. After a few snips, I noticed a sticky feel to my fingers. This lump had a very strange type of discharge. I was becoming more and more convinced it was going to be something really nasty. Then I noticed a distinctive minty smell emanating from the lump. The sticky appearance and minty aroma quite quickly changed my gloomy outlook to one altogether more positive.

  ‘Mrs Taylor, I think it’s a sweet!’ I proclaimed with a grin. ‘It’s just a mint, I reckon. Billy has sat on a sticky mint and it has glued itself to his fur. It’s not a tumour after all!’

  It was hard to say who was more relieved.

  ‘Oh Billy! It’s a sweetie. It is. Oh Billy. A sweetie, stuck under his tummy!’

  At which point, Betty and I both fell around laughing. It was the second time in a month.

  ‘Well, Betty, I’d have felt a complete idiot if I’d put him under anaesthetic only to surgically remove a sweet!’

  For a second time too, Billy’s problem had been cured, not by tablets or surgical skill, but by my trusty scissors!

  Our Lad and Our Lad

  Away from the moors and towards the Vale of York, where the River Swale meandered its way towards the Ouse and then the Humber, and where a damp coldness persisted all winter, there was a dairy farm run by two brothers. When I first started work at Thirsk, I would visit every week or so because, although the farm was very well run, they had a steady stream of minor problems and were very keen on calling the vet to check that everything was in order with their stock. The damp air associated with the nearby River Swale seemed to bring a fair share of health issues to the herd, ranging from pneumonia in the young stock to problems in adult cows such as mastitis and lameness.

  The brothers didn’t get on, and they avoided conversation with one another at all costs. One brother would call the vet to see a cow or a cal
f that was sick, but would never dream of mentioning it to his sibling. When I arrived to see the case in question, the other brother would always be surprised to see me, but taking advantage of this serendipitous event, would rush off excitedly to get a completely different cow out of a field for me to examine.

  The herd was medium sized, with about eighty cows, all of which were milked in a side-by-side milking parlour. This type of parlour, although quite old-fashioned, was commonplace in Thirsk at that time. It allowed about eight cows to be milked together, standing in pairs next to each other. The cows stood up on a concrete step about half a metre high. This allowed the farmer to attach the milking cluster to the udder, without bending down too far and thus saving his back from extra wear and tear. However, for the vet, it made the job of carrying out an examination per rectum completely impossible without something to stand on. During a fertility visit to a dairy farm that used this system, the most critical piece of equipment was not a scanner, a rectal glove, or a bottle of ‘lube’, but a plastic box to use as a stool.

  The thing that amused me about visits to this farm was the way the two brothers referred to one another. They both called the other one ‘Our Lad’. It was not particularly unusual in this part of the world for siblings to refer to each other by this affectionate term, but here they also used it when talking about the other brother to a third party, such as me, and very little affection was involved. It became quite confusing, trying to work out who was talking about whom, and to whom. At times, I thought I should just join in and call them both by the same name, ‘Our Lad’.

  The only time I heard them addressed by their real names was by their mother, when she emerged from the farmhouse with a tray of hot drinks, or to mediate in an argument between the two of them about the course of treatment for a cow.

  One wintery day, with frozen fog hanging low in all the hollows, I was called by Our Lad to visit some sick calves. Days like these are beautiful, especially when the watery winter sun is out, and only the tops of the trees emerge from the wispy low fog. My car tyres cracked the ice that was covering the many puddles on the track to the farm. The calves were suffering from a nasty condition called ‘scour’, which is the colloquial term for diarrhoea. It is fairly common in young cattle during winter. In these short, dark days when cattle are inside to protect them from the cold and bad weather, they are in greater contact with one another than when they are out at grass. They are also usually on deep beds, kept clean by adding new straw on top, which is very warm and cosy, but does result in an increased chance of infection. The incidence of scour rises as winter progresses but, once animals go back out to the fields in spring, the likelihood of this disease usually dissipates. Today, Our Lad was understandably quite worried. Meanwhile, his brother, Our Lad, was not at all worried. He was more involved with the older cattle, and obviously they would never discuss an emerging problem between themselves before I arrived.

  I checked the calves and took the necessary samples to drop off at the lab on the way back to the practice. In those days, there was a VIC (Veterinary Investigation Centre) in Thirsk to deal with this sort of thing. It was fantastic to be able to call in, drop samples off in person and speak, face to face, with the experts who worked there. These labs were run by MAFF (the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), now known as DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), and were (and still are) critical in disease control in food-producing animals. Nowadays though, due to government cuts and restructuring (more cuts), the lab is on its last legs and barely does any testing at all. Today we are reprimanded for delivering samples in person, because it contravenes the regulations.

  The calves looked poorly. They all had high temperatures. Most of them were very, very loose and some were actually passing blood. I immediately suspected salmonella as the cause. The faeces test would tell me the answer, but first I had to speak to the brothers together to explain my theory. If I was right, then there was a real risk to human health on the farm, as well as to all the stock. They would need a coordinated hygiene strategy, with disinfectant boot dips and thorough cleaning of kit, housing and people. In short, they would have to work together on this one.

  After I had finished running through the hygiene rules I had enforced, pending results from the lab, there was a stony silence that seemed to last minutes.

  The silence was broken by Our Lad.

  ‘Okay, while you’re here, Vet’nary, Our Lad has a cow for you to look at.’

  I was only mildly surprised. I had already scrubbed and disinfected my wellies, to rid them of any salmonella bugs that might be lurking in the crevices after being in with the calves, but this was essential before going to see one of the adult cows anyway, as we didn’t want to spread infection.

  ‘Our Lad thinks this cow is a mad cow. Well, it’s not a mad cow I’m sure, but Our Lad thinks it is,’ said Our Lad.

  ‘Okay, let’s have a look,’ I offered, trying to take a neutral position.

  Cases of ‘mad cow disease’ were few and far between by this time, at the end of the 1990s. Most suspicious cases had been killed and incinerated so, in the early part of my veterinary career, as the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy – the technical name for mad cow disease) crisis was reaching its end, I didn’t see many. Our Lad and Our Lad, though, had both seen a few cases during those dark years, but although they were quite experienced at recognizing them, there was clearly some dispute today.

  The ‘mad’ cow was standing in the collecting yard, shaking. I walked her around, to see how she moved. She walked in a twitchy, shaky way and was obviously unsteady and unsure on her feet. Some of this might have been due to the slippery ice on the ground, but I felt sure she was shaking more than she should have been, even given the treacherous terrain.

  ‘Can we get her into a crush or a cubicle to examine her?’

  I wanted to say ‘Our Lad?’ after this sentence, but it didn’t seem the right thing. I need not have worried, because Our Lad had already sprung into action.

  ‘Let’s get her into the parlour.’

  The trembling cow was persuaded into the parlour and up onto the concrete platform, where she would usually be milked. This was a big step for a shaking cow and the effort clearly took its toll, so that her whole head and ears were shaking as well as her body. I took my thermometer, stethoscope, rectal gloves and blood sample tubes so I could examine the cow properly and take the right samples. Given that one brother thought this cow had mad cow disease, and the other brother thought differently, my diagnosis would be more pressured than most.

  She was showing many of the classic signs, but cases of BSE had declined dramatically over the recent months and I did not like to jump to this terrible conclusion. I came up with a plan that would, hopefully, lead me to the right diagnosis and at the same time placate the feuding brothers.

  I explained what I had in mind. ‘I’ll get some blood samples to check for nervous ketosis and to see if her magnesium levels are okay.’

  The faces of both brothers looked confused, as neither of them had heard of ‘nervous ketosis’ and didn’t know why magnesium levels were relevant to this cow.

  Nervous ketosis is a version of a condition called ‘slow fever’, with which both farmers were very familiar. It is a condition seen in cows shortly after they have calved, when the body tries to metabolize its fat reserves to provide energy. It comes about if the body’s adjustment to producing large volumes of lactose-rich milk is not a smooth one. The amount the cow can eat can’t keep pace with the increased need for energy, and the result is that the body calls on its fat reserves. This works very well, up to a point, but if the demand is too high, it can lead to the build-up in the bloodstream of chemicals called ketones. Usually, this ketosis causes the cow to stop eating (the worst thing she could do at this point) and become dull and lethargic, but in severe cases they can develop crazy behaviour – madly twitching their ears and sometimes frantically licking metal gates and other stran
ge things.

  Magnesium deficiency usually leads to an acutely serious and often fatal condition called ‘staggers’. The cow becomes wobbly (hence the name), then collapses, convulses and dies if she is not treated quickly. However, sometimes a cow can have a low-grade magnesium deficiency, which makes her tremble rather than convulse. It was a long shot, but worth checking, for thoroughness if nothing else and, although both ‘Our Lads’ looked unconvinced, it got me off the hook of coming down in favour of one sibling instead of the other.

  I explained that I would take the blood samples to the lab, along with the faeces samples that I had collected from the calves. The results would be back within a couple of days, and should tell me everything I needed to know. If the samples from the shaking cow were negative for ketosis and the magnesium was normal, I would have to call the ministry to report it as a suspected case of BSE. It was their job to make the final decision.

  I bade them both farewell, after another thorough cleaning under the tap with copious volumes of disinfectant. Luckily, my journey back to the practice took me right past the veterinary laboratory, where I called in to hand in the samples.

  As I was filling in the required paperwork, I caught sight of the senior vet who worked at the lab. I attracted his attention and sought his advice on the shaking cow.