by John Hicks
The Beatles remain a mere footnote in my story of musical appreciation. I was always impelled to follow that which fed my soul and which has led me on a life-long journey of exploration. “Mull of Kintyre” didn’t quite do that for me, but my early encounter with Fauré triggered something that I fear has been denied to today’s children raised on a diet of commercial radio. Music which so beautifully expresses feelings of poignancy, joy, excitement, sorrow, and yearning has been denied them as the English speaking world largely seems to have turned its back on classical music and prefers to embrace each new day with the pap and yap of commercial radio. It’s one thing to choose to atrophy your temporal lobes in the privacy of your own home, but quite another to afflict all and sundry. I certainly was not prepared to tolerate it in my own work place.
For several days after my appointment as senior vet at Otautau I put up with the radio that our receptionist played in the clinic. I frequently returned from my rounds as “Humpy” or “Woody” or “Boggy” or some other “----y” announced the winners of the “----quizznite”, or a crass trumpet fanfare heralded a commercial for farmers (deep gravely voice) or twittered on about the new washing powder available at “xzy, jingle, jingle” – repeated three times.
In my opinion the playing of commercial radio in shops and waiting rooms is deplorable and so, politely, I asked our receptionist to desist. She had the grace to do so most of the time, but occasionally I would arrive back from my rounds and there was an important horse race running and the two to one favourite was backing a trifecta [or whatever] at the Trentham derby and they’re off in that staccato manner that anyone not interested in racing can’t understand but finds intensely irritating because it keeps on rasping away without a pause so that you cannot ignore it… last furlong to go and it’s Smegma from Borborygmi… Smegma from Borborygmi… Smegma from Borborygmi and Smegma takes it by a length from Borborygmi then followed two lengths back by Butcher’s Fart with Mindless Spree the favourite finishing last… But at last it winds down and you are ready to collect your winnings on Smegma or some other silly effing name before race two and the cycle is going to begin again. Racing! And we’re off …
“For goodness sake turn that thing off, S~, how many times do I have to tell you? How can you serve customers while you’re listening to that crap?”
“Orrrh John! Just because you aren’t interested in racing. My uncle’s got a starter in race five.”
S~’s love affair with the radio suddenly ended when the clinic’s radio mysteriously died and no-one was able to revive it. After that the reception area remained unpolluted by radio. Of course, we could have purchased a hi-fi system and filled our rooms with music, but whenever the topic was resurrected there was considerable debate as to exactly what music should be played. We never reached a consensus. Silence reigned! It seems the pleasure to be derived from listening to music you enjoy is likely to be outweighed by the displeasure incurred from being compelled to listen to something you hate.
~
Over the years I have seen many young vets start on their daily rounds entombed in cars reverberating to thumping, jarring rhythms. That is their own look-out, but I’m sure that we’re not that different from dairy cows and they would be happier and more productive if they were exposed to classical music. Unfortunately, compulsory exposure to music, even of the highest quality, defeats the object. Perhaps we should reverse our thinking and adopt recent anti-smoking tactics and condemn undesirable listening habits. If the link with poor mental health could be established we could then legislate for warning signs to be placed on CDs of degenerate music: “C & W music may be intellectually debilitating”, or “Rap kills”.
At the same time the use of earphones would be mandatory to protect the rest of us from the dangers of passive listening. It is socially unacceptable.
Before my pen gets too carried away on this wave of hyperbole, I have to remind myself that some of my best friends enjoy heavy metal (despite me imploring them that lead and mercury are toxic) and one, even, speaks favourably of Johnny Cash. To misquote Mrs Campbell: what care I so long as they don’t play it in the milking parlour and frighten the cows.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Holistic Approach
Prevention is so much better than healing, because it saves the labour of being sicke. – T Adams (1618)
By the early 1990s many North Island dairy farmers were attracted to Southland by cheaper land. The first wave established Southland’s potential as a Mecca for dairying and the trickle of farms converting from sheep into dairying became close to a flood. It wasn’t all plain sailing for these new pioneers as they adjusted to a new life. Moving farm is not as straightforward as moving house. Thousands of cows were trucked down from the Waikato and Taranaki onto Southland’s green pastures. Many cows arrived lame and injured from their long journeys until the trucking firms became aware that a careful driver generated fewer insurance claims than a careless one. A fast driver with a good record for turn around times was, in the long run, an expensive liability. A slow, smooth driver delivered his charges relatively uninjured. These dairying families were coming to newly built milking sheds, newly fenced paddocks and newly established lanes for movement of stock around the farm. Some arrived to find the milking shed wasn’t finished, the fencing was only half done and the river gravel used to metal the lanes was totally unsuitable and injuring their cows’ feet.
It was not unusual for vets to be called to attend a dozen or more lame and injured cows that had just come off a truck. You might arrive to find them in a paddock with no yards and therefore no means of restraining them for treatment. What are you going to do? You’re the vet, I’ve called you out to do the job, so get to it. Usually some unsatisfactory compromise could be sorted out which would reinforce the fact that you were not half as good as their old vets back home. We used to use old Whatnot. Have you heard of him? Best dairy vet in the Waikato. Of course, you’re not used to dealing with dairy cows down here are you?
Perhaps we were unduly sensitive, but being told you’re second best before you’ve even begun is either irritating or depressing – depending on how your day has been. I got out my deer pole – that surprised him, he’d never seen one of those before – and I was able to inject the injured cows in the paddock. Cows are not stupid. They are well aware of man’s never-ending quest to stick needles in them; so I had to run after one or two to get within range, but my pole gave me a longer reach than they were accustomed to – possibly further than old Whatnot’s prodigious span. A few minutes later and six cows were sleeping in various parts of the paddock. Of course it was far more time-consuming to do it this way than if the farmer had the proper facilities and so his fee for my services was inevitably more than old Whatnot would have charged. We heard all about that too.
Our work was changing. We spent more and more time with stressed dairy farmers adjusting to new farms, new neighbours, new financial pressures, new schools for their children – and us, their new vets. It was good for veterinary business, but something of the old harmony was gone. The whole rural community, once reassuringly immutable, had been destabilised.
In early June each year there is now a “gipsy day”. On this one day of the year a large number of dairy farmers play “musical farms” and move to occupy another property. For twenty-four hours the roads are a madness of plodding cows and desperate stockmen. School rolls change overnight and vets re-align their lists of clients and wait to see which of the new mix of gentlefolk and psychopaths will emerge to seek their help.
All this time, as Sid drove on his rounds, his mind was awhirl with the calculations so necessary to his advisory work. He would arrive back to inform us that we could expect trouble on X’s new conversion.
“There’s 1200 kgs of dry matter over the farm and he’s got 425 cows going onto 200 hectares and they’re only about condition score 4. I think he’s asking for trouble at this time of year. He’s going to have to buy in supplements. What do yo
u reckon, John?”
The trouble with geniuses like Sid is that they fail to recognise mathematical dyslexia in people like me. I could never have asked the question, still less given an answer. I may well have observed that the cows were thin, that the stockman wore a lean and hungry look, that his dog cowered when his master looked his way and that there was quite a lot of ragwort in some of the paddocks – I would even write a newspaper article about that. But putting it in numbers? Given the same situation Giles would have noticed the new raceways were poorly engineered with insufficient drainage fall which could cause lameness, that there was insufficient vacuum reserve in the milking plant X had installed and that with his hi-line system he was asking for mastitis. Daryl would have found out that X was a bit of bastard really, but he was a keen hunter and he (Daryl) had already arranged to go out and give the whole herd copper bullets the next day.
Working as a team the four of us, with our disparate skills, were able to offer a comprehensive service to these assertive new dairy farmers. For the first milking season after their move there were often meaty animal health issues for us to get our teeth into as they and their cows adjusted to their new farm.
DD was one of these new dairy farmers and some, like him, seemed to have continuing problems, even though we had corrected some basic trace-element deficiencies. It took a couple of years of detective work to get to the bottom of it.
Firstly, he seemed to have more than his fair share of calves born dead, or dying soon after birth. Later in spring some of his cows became sick and some died. All our post-mortems and tests failed to reveal a common cause. There is little to observe in the carcases of cows dying from metabolic diseases, and cows that die in the night die unseen, with no tell-tale symptoms. No doubt some of these deaths were metabolic. We found nothing remarkable on autopsy, save the odd liver abscess. Since these are quite a common finding, we did not attach much significance to them.
As summer hardens into autumn, the dairy farmer takes note of his least productive cows. He cannot afford to carry passengers, and he requires that every mouth eating his grass needs to turn it into milk as efficiently as possible. He draws up a list of cows he needs to cull. They include those which have chronic untreatable diseases such as mastitis or arthritis, cows which have failed to get in calf and cows which, for some reason, are thin and fail to milk as well as they should. DD had a lot of these. They went for slaughter, their trimmed remains lingering in manufacturing grade meats exported to far away places. But many of DD’s culls did not even make it to the world’s pizza parlours and hamburger bars: many were failing to pass meat inspection. The killing-sheet reports revealed another piece of the puzzle. These cows were rejected because they had liver abscesses. More to the point, DD was not alone. It was quite a common problem for the whole dairy industry in the south of New Zealand. What was going on?
Sid was concerned about DD’s heavy reliance on brassica crops to feed his cows through winter. Those of you who abhor cabbages, broccoli, kale, or swedes will perhaps understand why they can, sometimes, be regarded as noxious. It has long been recognised that brassicas contain principles poisonous to livestock and must be fed with care. As a cattle feed they are low in fibre, low in trace elements such as selenium and copper, and they are full of polyunsaturated fatty acids that reduce the availability of fat soluble vitamins such as vitamin E. None of these things excuse children turning up their noses at a helping of these useful vegetables; but if they were the sole component of your diet, well that would be a different matter. DD’s cows, like many others in Southland, were fed nothing but kale for several weeks before they calved.
Sid tested some of them for vitamin E: a very expensive test and seldom used for this very reason. DD’s cows registered the lowest detectable levels. Calves born to such cows were bound to be deficient in this vital nutrient. We had a possible explanation for the unexplained calf deaths.
Sid’s next stroke of intuition came from his interest in the workings of the rumen, the vast vat that is the first of the four stomachs of a cow. Here a seething multitude of micro-organisms break down the ingested vegetation in a process akin to garden composting. And, just as for the garden compost heap, the mix of fibre to greens is important. If fibre is lacking in the diet, the process veers out of balance. If the rumen contents become too acid, they set off a chain of undesirable consequences. The acids eat at the lining of the rumen and the vague and fluctuating symptoms of this digestive upset manifest as a general malaise, lack of appetite and diarrhoea: a vague syndrome known as “acidosis”. The acid damage to the rumen wall renders it permeable. Bacteria-laden fluid can now leak into the circulation and colonise other organs of the body.
The liver is the first major organ to receive the inflow of blood from a cow’s stomachs. Normally, this blood is enriched by molecules of broken-down nutrients, ready for the Krebs’ cycle biochemical processes in which the liver specialises. Unfortunately, in these acidotic cows, the blood also bears a cargo of pathogenic bacteria. The immune system struggles to eliminate these bugs, and the white cells in the blood, losing their fight, die in millions – forming the pus we had seen as liver abscesses. The body tries to wall this battlefield of dead cells and bacteria behind walls of fibrous tissue. Internal abscesses like these cannot be drained like a skin boil, neither can antibiotics reach the bacteria within their enclosing walls. Occasionally the walling-in is effective; the bacteria are contained, and the cow recovers – her blemished, battle scarred liver revealed only at slaughter. More usually, the bacteria periodically burst through the abscess walls and invade more liver tissue, causing further debilitation. They may even spread into the abdominal cavity causing a localised, or even a generalised, peritonitis. Such cows suffer constant cycles of ill health, yet they occur at intervals so far removed from the initial faulty diet that its role in their illness or death is not obvious. Liver abscesses have causes other than acidosis, obscuring the link with the faulty diet even further. These days every cattle farmer realises the importance of feeding extra fibre, in the form of hay or straw, to balance out the diet when they are feeding brassicas.
We knew it would take time for DD’s herd health to recover. Some of these cows could be sequentially debilitated by their liver episodes for years before they finally succumbed. But DD was still not entirely happy. Even the young cows, which should have benefited from his improved winter feeding regimen, were not milking as well as they should. Further blood sampling suggested that his cows always tended to be slightly dehydrated. By this stage we had been working with John Scandrett, a farm consultant who was an expert in soils and was looking at DD’s effluent disposal system. He obtained a flow meter and monitored how much the cows were drinking. The answer, in short, was not enough.
The reason, as we found out, was that the water was iron rich. This encouraged the growth of unpalatable bacteria. The cows did not like its taste. When DD installed a UV purifying system and clean water was filling his water troughs, his cows increased their milk output almost overnight.
In the veterinary world, many of the simple, one-fix problems have been solved. The dramatic improvement in herd health throughout much of New Zealand following the widespread use of trace element supplements created an unrealistic faith that other tonics could solve complex problems at a stroke. In comparable situations to DD’s, other farmers have wasted years tipping expensive and ineffective supplements down the throats of their stock. Unravelling the reasons for his poorly producing herd was a fascinating journey involving teamwork with other experts from whom we all learned a great deal. Along the way there were many frustrations, usually associated with the costs of the investigations, particularly when they seemed to be going nowhere. In the end the findings were of benefit to many other farmers and farm consultants.
In agriculture, as in many other fields of human endeavour, the giant strides are few and far between. Progress is often by the small, unheralded steps of competent people working cooperatively.
/> ~
Larry, the manager of a sheep farm, had taken delivery of several hundred lambs from a high country station. He planned to fatten them on his rich low-lying pastures. It had been a wet spring and, although it was muddy, he had plenty of grass to feed their hungry mouths. The lambs disembarked from the stock trucks and into his muddy yards where they were weighed and drenched for worms. They were a bit thin, but he fully expected them to pile on weight before too long. He flung open his gates and loosed them in large mobs and watched with satisfaction as they tucked into the best feed they had ever seen.
The wet weather continued. The lambs, which had at first picked up, were now less perky. They started to lose condition. Some started scouring and some died. Larry brought in a few of the dead lambs and from some of them the laboratory grew a nasty bacterium, Listeria ivanovii. Bacteria of the genus Listeria can cause severe gut infections (and are frequently associated with food poisoning in humans). They are also responsible for abortions in animals and women. But, of the species ivanovii, not a lot was known – except it was suspected to be a problem in wet conditions.
