A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons

by Julian Norton

  ‘Well, if you think it’s BSE, don’t talk to me about it! You need to speak to the Divisional Veterinary Manager at Leeds. Not my job, you know!’

  I looked at him in disbelief, as he went on.

  ‘I thought all you vets knew that the correct procedure is to report notifiable diseases to the DVM.’

  And with that he was off. It was half past four in the afternoon, which was the time that ministry vets finished their day. There was no way he was hanging around to point any advice in my direction.

  Disappointed by his lack of assistance, I completed my submission form and posted it through the window of the reception desk before negotiating the traffic through the twinkling lights of the early evening in Thirsk, back to the practice where evening surgery beckoned.

  Two days later, the results came back. The calves, as I suspected, were positive for salmonella. The shaking cow, however, had neither chronic hypomagnesaemia nor nervous ketosis. I telephoned the farm to break the news. The salmonella result was bad – it was a serious disease and there was a grave outlook for the calves without some intensive treatment. But it was manageable with strict hygiene, appropriate antibiotics for the sick ones and vaccination for the rest of the herd.

  In a way, though, the negative result for the shaky cow was worse, because it made a diagnosis of BSE more likely. I called the DVM straight away, as I had been instructed to do, but spoke to one of his deputies.

  I explained the signs and the history.

  ‘What you should do is test it for hypomag and ketosis,’ said the duty vet on the end of the phone. ‘It’s very unlikely to be BSE. We haven’t had a case of that for months now. The epidemic has passed and thank goodness for that. Terrible problem it was, wasn’t it?’

  I sighed and explained again that I had already ruled out the conditions he had mentioned. At this, his tone changed and he reluctantly agreed to arrange a visit to inspect the cow, as was the proper procedure. Only ministry vets were allowed to make the diagnosis of BSE.

  I called Our Lad and Our Lad again to tell them that the ministry would be in contact soon to arrange a visit. I could hear the argument starting even before I had put down the telephone.

  ‘I bloody told you it was mad cow!’

  ‘I bloody told you it wouldn’t be!’

  At least this time, the responsibility of making the diagnosis and upsetting one or other Our Lad wouldn’t fall to me.

  A Leg at Each Corner

  The note next to the appointment on the computer was clear enough:

  Have told Mrs C that vet will not supervise a mating during afternoon surgery.

  The following note, happily for me, passed the responsibility elsewhere:

  See nurse.

  I went in search of a nurse who might be able to help, although I was not confident I would find a willing volunteer. No one could offer any more details either.

  ‘Well, the lady just said she was having trouble getting her bitch in pup, and she wanted you to check everything was all right.’

  Not much the wiser, I set about the afternoon’s appointments – the usual mix of boosters, itchy dogs, poorly cats and the odd rabbit. At three o’clock, there was a commotion in the waiting room. I poked my head round the consulting room door to see two slightly embarrassed dog owners standing at the reception desk. At their feet were two dogs. One was a little Yorkshire terrier, the other a somewhat stout Norfolk terrier. The Norfolk was doing his very best to mount the Yorkie, who was looking casually around the waiting room. She seemed rather bored.

  ‘You had better come through,’ I called, aware of the startled expressions on the faces of some of the other clients.

  ‘How can I help?’ (This was a redundant question, because I knew what the embarrassed owners expected, but I had to ask.)

  ‘Well, we have been trying to get them to mate for the last two years, and it just doesn’t seem to be working. We can’t understand it. We hoped you could help?’

  I looked at the two dogs. The bitch was clearly at the peak of her season and standing patiently, tail cocked helpfully to one side, while the sandy-coloured Norfolk terrier enthusiastically tried to do his thing. If the Yorkie had been human she would definitely have been sighing and rolling her eyes with frustrated disappointment.

  ‘Have you tried her with a different dog?’ I ventured.

  ‘Oh no, we want puppies from these two – they will be perfect, just what we want. She is just so lovely, and he is such a character, and well, just think how cute their puppies will be …’

  But the problem was abundantly clear after just the briefest of examinations. I wasn’t sure how to break it to these two devoted owners. I couldn’t quite believe they hadn’t noticed.

  Norfolk terriers are sturdy little dogs and this one was no exception. He was like a little round barrel with a short leg at each corner. He was doing his very best, but his tummy was in the way, and his legs weren’t long enough. Neither was his penis. He just couldn’t reach. There wasn’t even anything particularly scientific I could say.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, cringing slightly. ‘He isn’t getting her in pup because his penis won’t reach. Look – it’s miles away!’

  The two ladies stared at me in horror. I was having trouble keeping a straight face.

  ‘Oh my goodness, you’re right. What can we do?’

  ‘Well, nothing really. Maybe you should give up on this match – they are both obviously very frustrated, and he isn’t going to manage.’

  Everyone gazed down at the two dogs, who were both oblivious to the fact they were in the veterinary surgery, and the subject of everyone’s attention. They were both still vainly trying to do what nature didn’t quite intend. There was a long silence. Clearly someone was waiting for me to come up with a miraculous solution.

  ‘I know!’ exclaimed Mrs C. ‘Maybe we could stand him on something? Or pick him up – could you do that – pick him up so he can reach? Could we try that now?’

  This didn’t seem like a good idea at all – me standing there dangling a rotund terrier behind a bitch so they could have cute puppies. And all in the middle of afternoon surgery. I politely explained that if they couldn’t mate naturally, it was probably best to abandon the idea altogether.

  It took some persuasion, but eventually the disappointed owners accepted that this, perhaps, wasn’t the perfect union after all.

  Imagine my surprise then, when some months later, when winter had worn into spring, the leaves had appeared on the trees and the dark nights were behind us for another year, Mrs C appeared in the waiting room with a scruffy, sandy-coloured puppy. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Images of steps, boxes or hoists sprang to mind.

  ‘Is that …?’

  She laughed.

  ‘No, you were right about that! After we left you, I drove straight up to see my friend in the Dales. She has a Jack Russell. I opened the car door, and he was straight there – it only took two minutes!’

  SPRING

  As the days begin to lengthen and snowdrops optimistically make their appearance in the hedgerows of North Yorkshire, I get the first sense that the worst of winter is behind us. It is the beginning of the busiest and best time of the year for us at Skeldale. It is the start of lambing time. To anyone connected with sheep, ‘lambing time’ is a season all to itself, just as significant as springtime or summertime. It is all-consuming. Some farmers do not even go to bed during this period, but instead take short snatches of sleep in a chair in the kitchen between checks on the flock. These farmers get slowly more grey, more weak and more fragile as the weeks of lambing go on.

  Lambing time is very intense and it has to be, because each mother and her offspring must be closely supervised and nurtured from birth to the time at which they are turned out onto the spring grass. If lambing were protracted over several months, as calving time often is for a beef herd, farmers would never be able to stay focused. A flock of up to a thousand sheep typically lambs over a period of about four
weeks. The expectant mothers are brought indoors, or at least close to the farm and into shelter. Extra staff (often in the form of veterinary students) are drafted in to help cover night shifts and the multitude of tasks associated with lambing, such as bedding and feeding the expectant mothers. These are jobs that aren’t required for most of the year, when ewes are pretty much self-sufficient in the pastures or on the hill.

  Lambing ewes demand a high degree of supervision during labour. Lambs can vary tremendously in size, and some big ones will not make it to the outside world without a helping hand from a human. The most frequent problems, however, come about because lambs are often born in multiples – twins are the norm, but sometimes triplets and even quads. The lambs and their long limbs often get tangled into a jumbled mess inside the uterus, so that once the contractions start, different bits of different lambs are all squeezed into the birth canal at the same time. This demands intervention, either from an experienced farmer or a veterinary surgeon who can untangle the lambs and deliver them one by one. It is always a source of bafflement to an inexperienced lambing student when they are sure that a lamb is presented perfectly and yet still refusing to budge – because the legs and head they have carefully lined up are not from the same lamb!

  Once the lambs have been delivered in a slippery heap onto the straw, shaking their heads and struggling to coordinate their legs, the work of the sheep farmer is only just beginning. The mother and babies need to be moved to an individual pen as soon as possible. Here they can form a close bond – one that will persist during their time together on the moor. The strength of this bond is critical to the health and welfare of the lambs, as they grow. Sheep breeds are selected specifically for the strength of their mothering instincts, but it is important to keep mother and babies together without distractions for a few days. Sheep are easily confused and the worst scene for a shepherd, on arrival at the lambing shed first thing in the morning, is a group of ewes, all of whom have lambed in close succession during the night, and who cannot decide whose lamb is whose. The lambs cannot fathom out which woolly milk bar belongs to them, and there is always one ewe who claims three lambs, while another, who has clearly given birth, doesn’t want anything to do with any of them. Sadly, they don’t come out with labels on.

  That said, once the lambs have been licked clean by their mum, labelling them up is exactly the next job! Indelible marker spray has been a godsend to sheep farmers. It allows them to spray a number on the sides of both ewe and lambs, so they are permanently identified as a family, exactly like applying a band to the wrist of a newborn baby in a maternity hospital. With garishly bright numbers daubed on their sides, the sheep and lambs do not look quite so photogenic when they are skipping around in the bright green fields when proper spring arrives, but to the farmer, marking them like this makes life much easier. Ewes and lambs are matched up for good.

  The new families stay in their individual pens until it is clear the lambs can suckle properly. Some are particularly dozy and it takes hours of supervision to get them going. Their navels are dipped in iodine to prevent infection, and the ewes are wormed, before they are moved into bigger pens of half a dozen ewes and lambs together. This is a great time for the lambs. They start to make their acquaintance with other lambs and the playing begins.

  Lambing time is condensed into a period of a few weeks not just for the farmer’s convenience, but because of the way that sheep breed naturally. Most native breeds of sheep come into season in the late summer or autumn, when the hormones that make this happen are triggered by the shorter day length. The ewes, therefore, all come into season at roughly the same time, at which point they are mixed with the tups (male sheep). Since the gestation period of a sheep is about one hundred and fifty days (around five months), ewes tupped in November will be due to lamb in April.

  Some farmers choose to tup their ewes earlier in the year than at the end of summer. This is possible with some breeds. Lowland breeds such as the Suffolk come into season earlier, whereas upland breeds like the Swaledale, which have to lamb and survive in tougher conditions on the moors and hilltops of Yorkshire, do not naturally come into season until later in the autumn. This means that their lambs are (theoretically) born in more favourable weather conditions, later in the spring. Nature is clever like that. So, whilst each farm will have a closely defined lambing period dictated by the breed of sheep, in a veterinary practice like ours there will be sheep to lamb from the start of January to the end of April. Add to this the various pre-lambing problems and the multitude of post-lambing complications, and we spend about half of our year dealing with sheep and lambs and their health. This is a good thing though, because we all like working with sheep.

  Lambs’ Tales 1: Grange Farm

  It was always fun going to lamb a sheep at Grange Farm. The farm was in Old Byland right on the top of the Hambleton Hills. Farms at the top of Sutton Bank are all made of stone blocks, rather than the orangey-red narrow bricks of lower-lying farms. The farmhouse was always an impressive sight as I drove up the sweeping track to the entrance.

  The farm belonged to two sisters, Doreen and Kathleen, and their brother Brian. They kept cattle and sheep, and reared turkeys and geese for Christmas. It was part of our family Christmas ritual for my sons and me to go up to Grange Farm, the day before Christmas Eve, to collect a turkey. We would be welcomed into the stone-flagged farmhouse as the best of friends. The boys would be given wine gums to chew on, while I was offered cups of tea and Christmas cake. The kitchen was packed with almost all the locals, chatting and drinking tea as they each collected their own Christmas turkey or goose. The family was well regarded in the local community, not just because of their farming prowess, but also because they were kind folks, living a simple and straightforward life. It was the life of a disappearing era.

  When I arrived to lamb a sheep, there would always be a bucket of warm water, a bar of soap and some clean towels at the ready. I would be ushered into the dark lambing shed, and given a brief and succinct assessment of the problem. As I rummaged around, trying to make sense of the legs and heads, Doreen would stare at me intently with her animated face, hanging on every word of my answer to the question she always asked, as I was midway through the job of lining up the lambs for delivery: ‘Do you like lambing?’

  She knew I did, because I always answered her question in the same way, every time I visited the farm for this particular job, or any other job, for that matter. We didn’t have to lamb sheep at Grange Farm very often, as the siblings were skilled shepherds and rarely needed assistance, so it could have been that Doreen had forgotten my answer to her favourite question. But somehow, I doubted it.

  On this particular day, as usual, I assured Doreen how much I did like lambing, but then she surprised me with another question, taking her usual interrogation to a new level.

  ‘Do you think you are better or worse at lambing sheep than that “Meechy Vet” who lives in Cold Kirby?’

  I was somewhat thrown by this, since I had never been asked to compare my clinical skills with another professional before. I knew the ‘Meechy Vet’ well: Stewart Mechie lived in the next village to Doreen but had only recently started working with us at Skeldale. His lambing skills had not yet been tested on this farm and there was obviously some debate among the farming community about his capability, as if his reputation preceded him. I was sure he was excellent at lambing sheep, but I did not dare to compare myself.

  So, to avoid direct comparison of our skills, I replied, ‘Well, Doreen, I’m sure Stewart is a very capable lamber. He’s from Scotland and he’s done a lot of this sort of thing before. But really, I wouldn’t like to say which of us is actually the best.’

  Doreen promptly misinterpreted my tact and discretion. She thought I was trying to be modest and immediately presumed that I was quietly confirming that ‘yes, the “Meechy Vet” is indeed a good lamber, but not quite as good as I am!’

  Gasps and exclamations came from Doreen, as if she were
the first to learn the exciting news of a ranking amongst the vets at Skeldale! I tried to protest and reaffirm that I really didn’t know which of us was the best at lambing sheep and that it really didn’t matter too much anyway. But it fell on deaf ears. The more I tried to clarify the situation, the bigger the hole became that I had dug for myself.

  Doreen realized she had hit on a potential controversy and continued gleefully, ‘And what about Peter? He likes lambing.’ (He had been questioned about this many times more than I had and Doreen had obviously not forgotten this.) ‘Would you say you are better or worse at lambing than him?’

  And so the questions continued, listing all vets in the practice, both present and past. I quickly gave up my initial plan of remaining noncommittal and fell in line, providing Doreen with all the information she needed to decide who was the best. I could only imagine the rumour and conjecture that would spread around this part of Ryedale when Doreen went on her weekly shopping trip to the local town of Helmsley a few days later.

  I was in an inescapable situation. I had finished delivering two healthy lambs several minutes previously (I was, after all, an excellent lamber – if not the best), and was now cleaning my hands and my wellies, but it seemed the only way to finish the discussion was to agree with Doreen and her ranking system.

  As I collected the swedes that Doreen’s brother Brian had, as usual, produced for me to take home (‘Do you like swedes?’ was his favourite parting question), I pondered the long-term implications of our discussion.

  In years to come, every time a challenging lambing came in from Grange Farm, the message in the daybook would say:

  Bentley – Grange Farm, Old Byland.

  Visit: ewe to lamb. Very difficult.

  JN if possible.