A Wander in Vetland

by John Hicks

  Not content with a practical, reliable means of transport, Giles preferred his ancient MG sports car. When she failed, as she frequently did, he would work through the night to make her roadworthy again. As a last resort he had a vintage Land Rover to fall back on, or even his three-wheeler Morgan. Farmers loved to see him turn up in one of these classic vehicles.

  One of our biggest dairy farmers – in the vanguard of the great expansion of dairying we were about to witness – had purchased over two hundred heifers which he wanted us to dehorn. Horns are a great inconvenience in large herds. Apart from the danger to people handling horned cattle, horns also inflict nasty injuries on other cows. Normally, dairy cattle are dehorned when they are only a few weeks old. It becomes a much bigger task when the animals are adult. We needed two vets to handle this job efficiently, and planned accordingly.

  I duly turned up on the farm at the appointed time in my practical four-wheel drive vehicle with all the gear. It was a bit of a struggle getting to the shed, because the farmer had recently gravelled the track using large river stones. My trusty chariot lurched and scrunched up to the farmer’s shed and I waited with him for Giles to appear. After a while (for some reason Giles’ mechanical bent has never applied to clocks, or if it does, he ignores them) the little green MG screamed into sight and, in a brilliant display of rallying skills, danced over the boulders and pulled up alongside us – late as usual. Pardon me for my punctuality, but it did rather stick in my craw when the farmer turned to me and commented, almost with disdain: “Now that’s what I call style.”

  Once we got going, everything went smoothly enough. Giles risked his limbs, dextrously administering the local anaesthetic nerve block behind the eye socket of each heifer as they moved up the race and into a large headbail. I was stationed beside this to apply the guillotine-like dehorners and staunch any spouting arteries. It was a bloody and tiring afternoon.

  The MG was Giles’ beloved workhorse. While the rest of us just about managed to cram the copious amounts of equipment vets have to carry into our spacious station wagons, Giles travelled light – stowing all his gear in the miniscule boot of his MG. The overflow tumbled over the backseat and he was constantly forced to elbow aside his inanimate front row passengers-of-the-day. Drums of drench, an ancient leather probang, lubricants and stirrup pumps, calving jacks: all jostled for the limited space available.

  Inevitably, the MG fell victim to increasingly long bouts of sick leave and, after many years of devoted service to the farming community, finally succumbed to metal fatigue and lack of replacement parts. She had been repeatedly bellied on gravel roads and pulled out of mud holes by tractors. It may have been a sad day for Giles when he finally bade her farewell, but at last her passengers were spared intimidating glimpses – through holes in the floorboards – of tar seal and road markings flashing by at mind-blurring speed. No longer were they to be frozen on winter journeys to veterinary meetings. The old jersey used as a draft excluder for the gap by the window died with the car. We placed an epitaph in our newsletter to farmers under the heading “RIP” (rust in pieces).

  Giles diligently applied his mechanical skills to our business. He soon became our Mr Fixit around the clinic. As a handyman his ability was, at times, truly dazzling.

  On occasions vets have to evaluate semen from rams or bulls to check that they are fertile. An infertile sire is as useful to a farmer as a tit to a skylark. Obtaining the sample can be messy and dangerous. It is one of many examples where the medical profession holds an advantage over us poor vets. A private room and a few copies of Playboy don’t cut the mustard with your average bull; millions of years of evolution decree that he needs a compliant cow to “get his rocks off”. However, human ingenuity knows no bounds, and bulls at AI centres can be trained to mount dummy cows and ejaculate into pre-warmed artificial vaginas. This method is impractical with untrained animals and in unsuitable facilities. Nevertheless, by some strange lateral thinking and experimentation, man or womankind has devised a way round this: rams and bulls can be electro-ejaculated. A probe with electrical leads is lubricated (vets usually have gallons of lubricant sloshing around in the back of their vehicles) and inserted into the bull’s rectum. When the dial on a rheostat is twiddled, the pulsed current usually induces an unsteady, pulsing erection. This is followed, at an unpredictable interval, by a randomly directed ejaculation. It takes skill on behalf of some poor unfortunate, grovelling around underneath the bull, to track the progression of the twitching tip of the bull’s penis. He or she has to catch the spurt in a polystyrene receptacle. It is important to avoid touching the glans – polystyrene on the delicate mucus membrane seems to be a big turn-off – and avoid receiving a full facial “cum shot”. The semen sample is then checked under a microscope.

  The early days of the deer industry produced many challenges as farmers and vets sorted out what facilities were required to handle these flighty animals. Stags in the “roar”, when they are ready to mate, are notoriously dangerous, yet one of our farmers wanted to find out whether his $12,000 elk stag, Armageddon (not his real name), was fertile. The most practical method of collecting Armageddon’s semen appeared to be by electro-ejaculating him, but for the safety of all concerned it would have to be under heavy sedation. It is also important that the electrical contacts on the probe are in close contact with the rectal lining. Our ram probe was too small, and the bull probe, very likely, too big. We needed a probe of intermediate size. None seemed to be available commercially. Despite checking through all available back numbers of Health Pride, looking alternately under “stag probe” or “electro-ejaculation”, we were unable to find what we were looking for. Perhaps, being crude vets, we were too direct; possibly the item was there, displayed by some towel-clad model to demonstrate how to electro-stimulate away “those tired-looking bags under your eyes”. What were we to do?

  Daryl and I were enormously impressed when, next morning, Giles arrived at work with a stag probe – testament to a night of meticulous wood and metal craftsmanship, and a smidgen of electronic wizardry. A few hours later Armageddon was stretched out on the floor under a heavy dose of “Fentaz”. The stag probe performed to perfection. A good semen sample was obtained and, little though Armageddon may have appreciated his good luck, he was spared execution and able to spend another season with his hinds.

  ~

  My detailed descriptions of such procedures may seem gratuitous, but the majority of a farm vets’ time is spent manipulating animal genitalia. The profitability of most farming enterprises is linked to the fertility and fecundity of their livestock. Perhaps, in my frankness, I have shaken the cherished delusions of tender-hearted romantics about life as a country vet. However, part of the conditioning of young veterinary students involves erasing inhibitions about hitherto taboo topics. A typical example would be our first ventures into the bowels of man’s most stoical friend… the cow.

  Chapter Ten

  Fertility in Beast and Man

  The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks

  Which practically conceal its sex.

  I think it clever of the turtle

  In such a fix to be so fertile. – Ogden Nash

  At last, in my fourth year at university, we were getting to grips with animals in genuine clinical situations. We clambered into the university van in small enthusiastic teams and visited farms where we learned how to rope lame cows so that we could examine their feet, performed caesarean sections, and practised rectal examinations.

  The first time I put my hand up a cow’s backside I was immediately aware of the alarming clamping power of her anal sphincter. She resented my intrusion and was keen to expel the offending arm. My hand floated ineffectually around what could well have been a bag of warm porridge. Of course it wasn’t porridge, a fact which was brought home to me when she coughed. It was an effective manoeuvre on her part. It brought my little rectal foray to an untimely end, and spattered my face with hot shit – much to the amusement of the onlo
okers. I had “lost face” in front of them in a manner far too literal for my liking. What’s more, the cervix, uterus and ovaries, which I was supposed to locate and assess through the wall of her rectum, had totally evaded my cautious efforts to find them. I was aware that if you are too rough there is a risk of your fingers going through the rectal wall and inducing a fatal peritonitis; although we had been told that the chance of this happening is far less in cows than in mares. But how rough is too rough?

  The cows were lined up in their stalls, each with an attendant student. The tutor passed behind the row of rectal rookies, all studiously intent on acquiring this essential skill of bovine medicine.

  “What did you find, Hardcastle?” he asked my neighbour.

  “The right ovary was larger than the left, sir. I think there is a corpus luteum on it, and there seems to be a follicle developing on the left ovary.”

  “Very good, Hardcastle. She was reported cycling about two weeks ago, which is consistent with what you’ve found.” And, turning to me, noticing my soiled countenance, he advised me to “go with the flow”. “Don’t leave your hand in the rectum if she starts to strain. Let your hand slide out and, when she’s finished, gently reinsert it again. Have another try.”

  But my cow was an old trooper, fed up with the attentions of inexperienced students. When I re-inserted my hand she ballooned her rectum. All I could feel was a taut rectal wall. There are means to get round that, too. I refrained from asking Hardcastle because he would probably know and, right at that moment, I felt more inclined to murder him.

  It wasn’t until I started my first job in New Zealand and had been in an intensive dairy practice in Taranaki for several months, that I finally felt confident about the process. I owed this to the patient supervision of Hank de Jong, my first boss. By the time I had completed a season there I truly felt that I could “see” with my finger tips and determine the stage of pregnancy of a cow to within tolerable limits, distinguish a mummified foetus from a healthy one, or establish whether the cow was actually cycling or had stopped and become anoestrus (literally, “without heat”).

  The casual observer might well wonder why farm vetting seems so intrinsically linked to the rectal examination of cattle. Why have vets always got one hand inserted up a cow’s backside? The answer relates to fertility. It may seem obvious, but is sometimes forgotten, that cows need to get pregnant in order to milk. For the dairy farmer, no milk equals no income. If a cow is going to keep milking, she needs to get pregnant once a year. There are a mass of mathematical possibilities and limitations.

  A cow’s pregnancy lasts roughly 285 days. There are 365 days in the year so, unless she is going to calve later next year, she needs to get pregnant within 80 days of giving birth. Depending on her age and health and any difficulties she has around calving time she won’t be on heat and ready to mate till at least 42 days after giving birth, and from then on she’ll come on heat (cycle) at 21 day intervals. But, on average, she’ll need to be mated 1.5 times to conceive. Furthermore, 5% of pregnancies are naturally incompatible and are aborted. The odds really are stacked against the average New Zealand dairy farmer, striving to have all his cows calved in spring, and ready to be mated again before Christmas. He needs all the help he can from those tired vets as they plunge their arms into cow after cow.

  “Could I have a vet out at tomorrow morning’s milking to check 300 cows? They’ve calved more than six weeks but haven’t yet cycled.” In October and November the day books of New Zealand vets are filled with such requests. Sometimes it would be nice to go back to those days as a struggling university student when our tutor gave us useful tips: “As you will have noticed, rectal palpations are quite tiring. It would be unrealistic to be expected to do more than ten to a dozen such examinations at any one time.”

  Ever expanding herds have certainly pushed New Zealand vets well past these boundaries. On the other hand, the number of vets with OOS, elbow, shoulder and back injuries is becoming quite alarming. This work falls on the fewer and fewer experienced vets still willing to do it, as a new generation of veterinary graduates, selected for their training solely on the basis of academic ability, shun the rural lifestyle and the immense physical demands of dairy practice.

  In the early seventies, when we dealt with non-cycling cattle, we were far less sophisticated in our approach. Cows, as we have seen, have a period in their cycle when they are “on heat” – every 3 weeks. Heat lasts from a matter of hours, to a couple of days – depending on the time of year. It is then, and only then, that they are sexually receptive, ovulate, and are able to conceive. Hormones control the whole process. Those inducing animals to come on heat, or oestrus, are known as oestrogens. In my early days in practice, diethylstilboestrol (DES), a synthetic oestrogen, was widely used as an injection for cows both to prevent conception – as when a bull mismated a line of heifers – or to induce cows which weren’t cycling to come on heat, so that they could be mated. DES was also used as a growth promotant in meat producing animals.

  Farmers and vets loved DES. Within a few days of the injections, the cows would be riding each other and “bulling” like mad. They were on heat. There was only one problem: although they manifested all the outward signs of sexual receptivity, and could be mated, the matings were infertile because they were not ovulating. DES only did half the job. However, the hope was that the treated cows would be “jolted” into performing properly and their subsequent heats would be fertile. Sometimes it seemed to work, but there again, “tickling the ovaries” – the mere act of palpating them – also seemed to help. In truth, given time, most well fed cows will start cycling again after calving; it’s just that under modern farming systems time is money and feed is sometimes short. Most farmers haven’t the patience to wait.

  These days there is a far more complete understanding of the complexities of bovine reproduction, and subtler and less harmful drugs have been developed to treat infertility. DES, the drug that my generation of cow vets splashed around with gay abandon, has been banned. It has been identified as a human carcinogen capable of causing uterine cancer in women, and even in the children of women who have been exposed to it.

  If I revisit that early scene where, with varying degrees of confidence, we palpated the ovaries of cattle, I am reminded how much of what we then accepted as fact was, in the light of later revelations, grossly erroneous. Whilst it is possible to identify corpora lutea on the ovaries of cattle by palpation, it has been shown that even experienced operators will miss a large percentage of them. The significance that can be attached to finding a follicle on an ovary has changed completely because we now understand that cows have waves of follicles, sometimes two or three per cycle and not every one is destined to burst and release an egg down the fallopian tube ready for fertilisation. Yet for years some high-powered veterinary practices had indulged in an orgy of “ovary scoring” each spring, categorising the supposed degree of infertility for each cow, computerising the records and allocating individual fertility treatments to each one. These technocrats dismissed those of us who disputed the relevance of such procedures. Surveys have also shown that all those vets who assuredly claimed to be able to detect intra-uterine infections by palpation, or by the even more painstaking procedure of checking each cow visually with a vaginal speculum, were only picking up a fraction of the cows affected.

  The greatest changes in our management of infertility have come from an acknowledgement of the role of good nutrition and the importance of breeding from fertile stock. In the long run, it is not a good policy to breed from sub-fertile animals that have been induced to conceive by chemical interventions. So saying, I condemn Viv and myself as a breeding pair. We should have been culled long ago...

  ~

  During the oil crisis in the 1980s the government introduced measures designed to reduce fuel consumption. The maximum speed limit for anyone anywhere was reduced to a mind-numbingly boring 80 kph. The other novelty was the “car-less” day, the one d
ay in the week on which you elected not to use your car. As a vet, I was exempted and could use my car, even on this forbidden day, providing I was using it for veterinary work. For families in rural areas the restriction was minimal if they owned, as many did, more than one vehicle. It was then simply a matter of nominating a different weekday for each vehicle.

  Unfortunately, Viv and I had only one car between us, and Viv had been caught doing 85 kph as we drove to a meeting in Invercargill. It was supposed to be our car-less day, as stipulated by the sticker displayed prominently on our windscreen. The meeting was held infrequently, and we knew we would either have to break the law to attend it or go through the prolonged procedure of applying for an exemption. What would be the penalty for two transgressions in one hit?

  The traffic cop peered through the windows of our little Mazda, as though looking for contraband. The back was piled to the gunnels with stomach tubes, cartons of drugs, lubricant and all the other accoutrements required of a country vet. It was a pain to unload them just for a trip into town. “I suppose you’re rushing to an urgent veterinary job.” The excuse was being offered to Viv on a plate.

  “No,” answered my honest wife, “We’re on our way to Invercargill. My husband’s got the day off and we have no other means of getting to an important meeting”.

  “All right… I’ll let you off this time for being honest.” His cheerful response seemed to augur well for the rest of the day.