A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons

by Julian Norton

  ‘Very good. It’s nice to see someone keen!’ I nodded. ‘Where are you staying?’ I could tell by his accent that he wasn’t local.

  ‘Well, at the moment I’m staying just there.’ He pointed over the road to the place where I had seen the unusual olive-coloured vehicle. ‘But I’ll need to move. I don’t think the farmer is very happy that I’ve camped up in his field. He’s already been round to tell me to move. He calmed down a bit when I explained I was coming to work with you lot at the vets, but I need to find somewhere else to put it before the end of the day.’

  It all made sense now! The enterprising Tom had solved the problem of finding somewhere to stay on a student budget by converting the old army vehicle into some sort of camper van. Usually, the first thing students do when they arrive to see practice is learn how to castrate a cat, while also trying to commit to memory the names of all the practice staff. However, Tom’s first job was to find somewhere to park for the next fortnight. I thought I knew who would be able to help. After I’d finished morning surgery, I made a phone call to Jeanie Green.

  ‘Morning, Jean! How are you today?’

  ‘Not so bad today, Julian. How’s your sweet supply?’

  Jeanie always kept us supplied with chocolates and boiled sweets and would bring in a consignment on a weekly basis, or whenever she perceived our energy levels might be dropping.

  ‘It’s pretty good at the moment, Jeanie, thank you. I wanted to ask if you could help? We have a student here for a couple of weeks. He’s called Tom and he is looking for a nearby farm where he can put his camper van. He’s a nice lad but he can’t keep it in the field opposite the practice. He just needs some water and a space and he’ll pay you. Do you think he could come to you?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Jeanie, without a second thought. ‘Send him round. No need for any money. I’d be happy to help, lad.’

  And so a special relationship developed.

  Later that day, Tom’s large, box-shaped military vehicle rumbled along behind me, down Long Street and to one of the fields on Jeanie Green’s farm. Jeanie came hobbling out of her farmhouse waving her hand above her head, partly to greet us and partly to direct Tom’s mobile home to the correct part of the farm. He pulled in through the green metal gates at the far end of the farm buildings, past the Dutch barn, the elderly grey tractor and various other bits of farm machinery, and into the field with the cows.

  ‘That’s it. You’ll be right in there!’ shouted Jeanie, as she signalled Tom into position near the hawthorn hedge. Tom jumped down from his cockpit, leaping over the three steps that led up to the door, and bounded over to introduce himself again, this time to the quirky farmer. The truck was an incredible-looking vehicle and I couldn’t wait to peer inside, but Jeanie was quite used to strange things and was completely unfazed by it. I was left to scrutinize it myself as the two went off to find the water supply. A few minutes later, Jeanie emerged from the farmhouse wielding three ice creams.

  ‘There you go, lad! Have one of these!’

  We all sat around on bales of hay and tucked in. Tom told us about his peculiar method of transport and its provenance.

  It was an ex-Russian troop carrier that he had converted into a very basic camper van. Tom explained how, amazingly, it could run on either petrol or diesel, or a combination of the two. He could run it very cheaply by calling at filling stations and collecting the mixture of petrol and diesel that had been drained from the tanks of cars whose drivers had inadvertently filled up with the wrong type of fuel. This seemed unlikely to me, but Tom assured me that this was really the case.

  Tom turned out to be just as enthusiastic with his veterinary studies as he was with his mechanical ingenuity, and started to hone some excellent veterinary skills during his stay. He fitted in perfectly at our practice and also with the Greens. He ate tea with them every evening, manfully filling his belly with the hefty meat and potato pies that were Jeanie’s speciality. After his allotted two weeks, Tom had put on about a stone in weight, thanks to Jeanie’s generous hospitality. He said goodbye, never to be seen again. It was sad, because he was a dynamic and interesting character, and I would have loved to have offered him a job, once he had qualified.

  Just as quirky and just as interesting, but possibly less suited to a job at Skeldale, was Angus. He was with us during a spectacularly hot period of weather, the likes of which make it a struggle to cope in the waterproof outfits that we have to wear, to protect our clothes from the dirty environment of a farm. The feeling of sweat trickling down the inside of your trousers is a uniquely unpleasant one. I was seriously considering wearing my shorts, even though I knew it would incur the wrath of my senior colleague. (Not to wear a tie was considered unprofessional behaviour, so the exposure of one’s knees and ankles would surely demand an appointment with the Disciplinary Committee of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons!)

  I had a call to see a bull suffering from heatstroke. I thought it would be an interesting case for a student, so I went to find Angus. I had not seen much of him during the time he had been with us, and this was the first time he had accompanied me. Heatstroke is an unusual condition to affect a farm animal – it is typically seen in dogs if they have been left in a hot car or have been chasing a ball or a frisbee to excess on a hot day. On this occasion, though, it was a one-tonne stock bull that had succumbed. He had been happily mating with cows, oblivious to the blazing midday sun. His vigour had caused him to overheat.

  Angus was lurking in the far end of the operating theatre, apparently engrossed in the detail of the inner workings of a cat.

  ‘Come on, Angus, we have an interesting case to see. You’ll not see many cases of heatstroke in cattle. I’ll meet you in the car park.’

  He didn’t exactly jump at the chance to see this unusual case, but I hadn’t really given him the option to decline my offer. It was some time before he emerged from the side door of the practice, carrying a large bag of equipment – wellies, overalls and so on – which he dumped on the back seat of the car.

  On the way to the farm, as I always did with students, I quizzed him on the possible differential diagnoses for a recumbent bull (that is, the list of all the possible causes). Angus was short on ideas for what conditions, other than heatstroke, we would need to consider. He was also short on ideas for what we should do when we got there. I guessed that this was not something he had been taught at vet school, although I also knew that veterinary students were taught to apply basic principles to every case, so that if they came across something they hadn’t seen before, they could work it out from these principles.

  The twenty-minute journey seemed to last forever. Retrieving any ideas from Angus was like pulling teeth. Eventually, we arrived at the farm and drove into the farmyard. Malcolm, the worried farmer, showed me where to go and I bounced through the field as far as I could, before leaving the car on the near side of a hedge. The bull was lying on its side in the next field and I could just make out its enormous bulk. I jumped out and grabbed my thermometer. This was obviously the first step of the examination – even Angus had worked that one out. As I inserted the thermometer and waited for the mercury to rise, I realized that Angus had not followed me through the hedge. Worried that something was wrong, I asked Malcolm, who had followed us across the field in his tractor, to go back and check that he hadn’t headed in the wrong direction and got lost.

  Moments later Malcolm reappeared through the hole in the hedge, hardly able to speak he was laughing so hard.

  ‘Your mate is just coming,’ he just about managed to splutter between gales of laughter. ‘He’s still getting dressed!’

  After I had checked and rechecked the thermometer reading – it was 106°F, way hotter than normal – Angus eventually appeared. He was dressed from head to foot in protective clothing, not just of the type to keep farmyard muck off, but also sufficient to prevent the ingress of a single ray of sunshine. He was wearing wellies and waterproof trousers (standard) but also a long
, white smock which extended right to his feet and covered his arms all the way to his hands. On his head was a French Foreign Legion-type hat, with a large peak at the front and an overhanging flap at the back to protect his neck. His nose was smothered with a thick layer of zinc oxide paste. He looked as if he was preparing for a trek across the desert, rather than a fifteen-minute examination of a hot bull in North Yorkshire. Trying not to laugh at this ridiculous sight I glanced up at Malcolm who was, by now, bent double with mirth.

  ‘Wow, Angus, that’s some outfit! I’ve not seen many students dressed up like that before. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, I’m fine,’ he replied, rather defensively, from under his hat. ‘I just don’t like taking chances. The sun can be very strong in summer.’

  ‘Aye lad, it can, but not that strong. Not in North Yorkshire anyway,’ gasped Malcolm, before he fell about laughing again.

  After several buckets of water from the nearby stream, the bull started to cool down, and recovered uneventfully. Sadly, the same could not be said for the reputation of our budding veterinarian and Malcolm could never keep a straight face when I brought a student with me to his farm forever after.

  AUTUMN

  Summer always slips slowly and seamlessly into autumn. Other seasons can crash against one another, with a late snowstorm in the middle of May or a seductively mild spell during February, but the month of September is always benign and gentle. If there is such a thing as a quiet time in a mixed practice, it is in early autumn. The cattle are still outside, enjoying the last of the grass, and the lambs have grown and are ready for market.

  There are, however, some weird veterinary conditions that appear only in autumn – odd diseases that do not occur at any other time of year, and have you scratching your head, until you remember, ‘Ah yes, autumn.’ Rye grass staggers is the best example. It is a rare and peculiar neurological disease, which causes grazing cattle to run backwards – actually backwards. Harvest mites, those tiny orange and intensely itchy clusters found between dogs’ toes or on cats’ ears, are only ever seen at the end of August, and ‘fog fever’, a toxic type of pneumonia, only occurs in autumn when cattle are turned out onto the last flush of grass before winter.

  Many of the farms around Thirsk grow cereals, mainly wheat and barley, which turn golden through the summer, and are harvested in the autumn. Much of this is then used to feed cattle. These cattle have been born and reared on the uplands of Northumberland or Scotland and then sold as ‘stores’ at the cattle markets in Hexham, Wooler or Bentham. It is common for farmers to buy a hundred head of these store cattle and feed them, lavishly and lovingly, on the barley that they have grown over the summer. It is a simple system and it works well, but is fraught with the risk of pneumonia. The young cattle are moved to new and unfamiliar surroundings, brought indoors and possibly also mixed with animals that have come from other farms, all at the time when the temperature is dropping and the damp autumn mists are descending on the Vale of York. This is the perfect cocktail for respiratory disease, so as autumn progresses, we are kept busy, injecting cattle to save their precious and delicate lungs from the ravaging effects of pneumonia.

  But still, it is a beautiful time of year and my favourite time of year. A quiet tranquility settles over the countryside, as all its growing and flowering and producing is done for another year.

  Sheep and Simmentals by the River Swale

  I hadn’t had a very good week. Monday and Tuesday had seen me blood testing a flock of six hundred sheep to check them for a viral infection called Maedi Visna. The flock had been accredited free of this disease, but the last routine flock test had flagged up two positive cases. This was disastrous. They had lost their accreditation. As the animals were a high quality, high pedigree flock, it was crucial to be free of Maedi Visna. To restart the process of becoming disease-free and accredited as such, every adult animal needed to be tested and all the results had to be negative.

  Testing six hundred sheep was a long job, partly because they were scattered around several holdings in the area. By halfway through Monday morning, I had finished the first batch and made a start on the second, which was at the main farm. The system there was very good and the handling facilities were excellent, which made the undertaking very much easier than it often was. There were plenty of assistants on hand to catch and hold each animal, so my job was simply to take blood from the jugular vein of each of my woolly patients and write its ear tag number in a book, alongside the number from the side of the tube containing the blood sample. In this way each sample could be matched to the appropriate sheep.

  The handling pen was the same area in which the sheep would have been dipped in years gone by, to prevent sheep scab (a nasty skin disease caused by a mite) and to limit the effects of blowfly strike during the summer. The dipping of sheep is not really practised any more. The strong chemicals that were used have now been banned (unless you hold a specific licence) and it is very difficult to dispose of them correctly. Other, safer methods of control have been developed, but the long and deep troughs, which were previously used to submerge each sheep, still exist at the site of most sheep-handling facilities. Here, the dip was just on the other side of a wooden gate close to where I was working. It had long since fallen into disuse, but had not been drained of the noxious fluid. Layers of dead leaves had fallen onto the surface of the liquid and, partly decomposed, had formed a large and thick mat covering the whole of the dipping area. The recent fall of autumn leaves, made worse by heavy rain, had caused the edges to merge with the surrounding ground and the fetid liquid underneath was perfectly disguised.

  It could not have been a more brilliantly conceived trap and it is not difficult to imagine what happened when I leapt over the gate so I could deposit my first polystyrene box of fifty blood-filled glass tubes safely on the passenger seat of my car. I always liked to put a full box of tubes out of the way to avoid the risk of them being knocked over and smashed. I hurdled the gate and both my feet landed on what I thought would be solid ground. Then, everything happened in slow motion. I plunged, without warning, up to my neck in the foul-smelling black soup of sheep dip and rotting leaves, which bore little resemblance to anything I had been submerged in before. I clambered out, soggy and smelly, to peals of laughter from everyone standing nearby.

  ‘Oh yes, I was just about to say,’ the farmer called from the other side of the gate.

  ‘Watch out for the sheep dip. You’d never know it was there, hidden under all those leaves – which reminds me, we really must sort that out!’

  * * *

  More sheep took up the second part of my week and more testing was required. Wayne, a young farmer who I knew well, had found a couple of dead sheep in one of his fields during the weekend. He had put these deaths down to pneumonia, brought on by the bad weather that had recently affected the area. Heavy rain and strong winds had caused flooding in parts of North Yorkshire. Sheep can easily tolerate cold weather, with their thick woolly fleeces, but they detest rain, in particular persistent, heavy rain, which can permeate their lanolin-coated wool, leaving them cold and miserable. But, when he found another half dozen dead a few days later, Wayne was worried. He usually had a keen attention to detail but he couldn’t work out what was going wrong, so he asked me to have a look at the flock.

  The affected sheep were from a batch of weaned lambs that had been born in the springtime. They were now about six months old and had grown big and strong, on a combination of their mothers’ milk and the summer grass that grew thick and green in the pastures along the side of the River Swale. A farmer who had a holding just three miles downstream from Wayne’s farm had once told me that this land was some of the best farming land in the country. The mineral-rich water that came down from the hills at the top of Swaledale, around Muker, Keld, Reeth and other such lovely places, brought vitality to the fields along the length of the river. In the autumn lamb sales at Thirsk Auction Mart, Wayne’s sheep would always be amongst the bes
t.

  When I arrived, he and his father had already gathered the young sheep into a small paddock adjacent to a holding pen, which would enable me to examine the affected animals and take any samples that I deemed necessary. His lambs did not look as they usually did – some were healthy, but about a third of them were thinner than they should have been and eight out of the group of three hundred had died. The sales were coming up, but it was looking unlikely that any of the lambs would be achieving the top prices to which Wayne was accustomed.

  I launched into my usual questioning, probing for clues. In the recent heavy rain, the pastures close to the river had flooded, necessitating a temporary move for the lambs. However, once the floodwaters had subsided, Wayne had moved the flock back to the riverside. I pressed him for more details on the condition of the fields. They were not waterlogged, he reported, and the floodwater had receded several days before the sheep had been moved back onto them. The land had drained well and was not at all boggy. This was a crucial piece of information, because parasitism by liver fluke was at the top of my list of ideas. Sheep can acquire this nasty parasite from grazing on waterlogged fields, especially in autumn, and we had seen a sharp increase in cases in recent years. In fact, until recently we never really saw cases of liver fluke on the eastern side of the Pennines. However, the increasingly wet weather in summer and autumn, attributed to global warming and climate change, has meant that the condition has now become quite common, rather than a rarity.

  I examined a few of the thinnest animals, but there wasn’t much to see. The next step towards an accurate diagnosis was quite obvious. A post mortem examination was required. I phoned the lab to let them know that Wayne was on his way with three of the recently deceased lambs. We were both anxious to get the answer as soon as possible. We didn’t want any more deaths.