Animals Don't Blush

by David R Gross

  “You want me to lead her for a while, Frank?” Hank asked. “Emily can follow and help keep her up.” He looked over to his wife who was standing just inside the gate.”

  “Certainly,” Emily said. “Please take my chair for a while, Frank. You’ve been walking her for an hour already. Hank and I will keep her up.”

  “You sure?” Frank asked. “My knee is getting a little sore.”

  “Of course. Please, go sit down.”

  “Keep her head up, Hank. She’ll try to lower it before going down,” Frank instructed.

  For the next two hours, various neighbors took turns leading Patches and following with the rope. Twice she managed to go down, but when she did, several people, including myself, rushed in to keep her from rolling, and we got her back on her feet.

  At about three in the morning, I walked through the gate pulling on yet another rectal sleeve. I waited until they brought Patches around to me. Hank was on her head again.

  “Hold on to her head and stand on the same side of her as I’m on, Hank. I’m going to do another rectal and see if anything is happening.” As I put my hand in her rectum I noticed a tiny bit of oil.

  “This is good, there’s a little oil in her rectum. It’s getting around the impaction. That’s a good sign.” However, the impaction seemed to be in the same place and was just as firm as when I had first palpated it. I withdrew my arm. “Well, the impaction hasn’t broken down or moved. Since the oil is moving around it some, I’m going to try something else, a soapy water enema, and see if we can move it that way.”

  I prepared a gallon of warm soapy water, placed an old stomach tube through her anus and into the rectum, and pumped in the enema. She evacuated everything in the first five steps as they took her for another circuit of the corral. I did another rectal when they brought her back around.

  “No change,” I announced. “Let’s try it again. This time I’m going to try to hold it in with my arm and work it forward.” I filled the bucket again, and this time took the tube in with my arm as far as I could reach.

  Without saying anything, Frank Tomkins took charge of the bucket and pump. I nodded at him, and he pumped the contents of the bucket into the mare.

  “OK,” I said. “I’m going to pull out the tube but keep my arm in and see if I can break up the impaction.”

  Some soapy water leaked out of her anus and onto my shirt, but most stayed in. She suddenly started to sink down, hind legs first.

  “NO, no, ... get her moving,” I shouted. Frank slapped her on the rump repeatedly while Hank pulled on her halter rope. She sighed and started walking with me holding the base of her tail and maneuvering my left arm and hand inside her, massaging the impaction. After two laps around the corral, I started laughing.

  “What the hell are you laughing at, Doc?” Frank asked.

  “I just had this mental picture of my mom in a rocking chair, smiling and proudly thinking, ‘My son, the doctor.’ I don’t think what I’m doing at this moment fits her image of me.”

  I felt the impaction starting to break up under the prodding of my fingers. “Ah, I think we’ve got it,” I said. “It should move through now.”

  I removed my arm, inverting the sleeve. “Keep her up, and we’ll see if she passes anything.”

  Three laps later, Patches defecated soapy water and feces. A cheer went up from the assembled.

  “Let her go, and let’s see what she does,” I said.

  As soon as Hank unclipped the halter rope, Patches went to her hay trough and started munching.

  “Great,” I said. “I haven’t yet had a horse die while eating. I think she’s going to be fine.”

  ***

  Two days later, I was in the office reading a journal article about aortic valve stenosis in German shepherd dogs. The author said it was possible to diagnose the condition by hearing a systolic murmur on top of the dog’s head. Dick poked his head through the door.

  “Hank Randall is here. He paid his bill and has something for you.”

  “OK,” I said getting up and walking into the reception area. “Hi, Hank. How’s Patches doing?”

  “Great, Doc. She hasn’t missed a meal. Emily is very happy and relieved. She’s very attached to that mare.” He reached into the briefcase on the counter. “Got this for you,” he said, handing me a ten-by-fourteen-inch poster board.

  It was a cartoon. In the right foreground, a woman with gray, curly hair and glasses was sitting in a rocking chair, smiling contentedly. To the left, filling most of the scene was a cloud containing a caricature of me, long sideburns, Resistol hat, cowboy boots, with my arm inside a caricature of Patches. The mare has her head turned, looking at me with an evil grin on her face. At my feet was a medical bag with a syringe and stethoscope hanging out, “D. R. Gross DVM” printed on the side. Over my mom’s head was the caption, “My Son, the Doctor!”

  Hank had never met or seen a photograph of my mom, but his caricature of her was right on, the hair, the glasses, even the expression.

  As I write this, I’m looking up at that framed cartoon hanging on the wall of my office. The bottom left-hand corner is signed, “Hank R.” The colors have faded, as have we all.

  Chapter 25: Castrating

  “Dave, I don’t know what I have to do to make her happy.”

  Dr. Schultz had recently started addressing me as Dave. I couldn’t bring myself to address him as Marcus; he would always be Dr. Schultz. We were in the office organizing our day’s work for maximal efficiency and minimal mileage. This organizing activity was a daily but futile exercise since the schedule inevitably altered to accommodate emergencies.

  “Uh, I’m sorry, Dr. Schultz. My mind was elsewhere. What did you say?”

  “It’s Cheryl. She’s not speaking to me again. She’s giving me the dreaded silent treatment. I have no idea what pissed her off this time.”

  Uh-oh, how do I stay out of this?

  “Well, did you miss a birthday or anniversary or something?

  He thought for three or four minutes while drumming his fingers on the top of his desk. Three or four minutes of finger drumming is a long time. I said nothing.

  “No, her birthday, all the kids’ birthdays, our anniversary, no I haven’t forgotten. I can’t think of anything.”

  Dick saved me.

  “Doc Gross, I just got a call from Fred Homer. You were supposed to be at his place at eight this morning, and it’s almost eighty-thirty. He wants to know if we need to reschedule.”

  “No, Dick,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

  ***

  Castrating calves is not a complicated procedure. Sometimes instead of incising the scrotum, the bottom portion is just cut off. Usually the spermatic cord is clamped with a hemostat or in larger animals with an emasculator. Then the cord is cut or scraped with a knife until it breaks, or the testicle is just pulled until the cord breaks. Lambs are castrated using the same techniques, although I have witnessed sheepherders grabbing the testicles in their teeth and chewing the spermatic cord or just pulling back until the cord breaks. The key is speed; get it done fast.

  There is also the rubber-band technique, one I have never approved of. This method uses an applicator to apply a tight rubber band around the scrotum on top of the testicles. The blood supply to the testicles is interrupted, all the tissues distal to the band die, and eventually, everything sloughs off.

  All these techniques sound brutal, and they are, but when done by experienced people, they take only moments, except for the rubber band method, and the animals rarely, if ever, have any discernable lasting adverse effects, psychological or otherwise.

  During the forty-fifth reunion of my veterinary class, one of my colleagues, a veteran large-animal practitioner, told me the story of a new client who had purchased a few acres outside of town and was determined to be part of the back-to-earth movement. He insisted that a recently purchased bull calf, a 4-H project for his daughter, be castrated using general anesthesia. In fact, both father and
daughter insisted. My classmate, who also happens to be a past-president of the AVMA and highly respected in the profession, explained he would have to charge the same as he would to perform surgery under general anesthesia for any animal. The client acknowledged the rationale and agreed. My colleague anesthetized the calf, completed the procedure, and monitored the calf until it recovered, all without incident. The bill was over four hundred dollars, and the client paid it, his conscience clear.

  When I joined the practice, Dr. Schultz charged a dollar a head to castrate calves. Most clients thought that charge was rather excessive and did the job themselves.

  ***

  I was back on Fred Homer’s place. Being a beet farmer, only recently into the dairy business, he was not familiar with all the husbandry skills necessary for running a dairy farm.

  “I know most folks castrate calves themselves, but I’ve never done it,” he told me. “Thought I best have you do it this time so’s I could learn.”

  “No problem, Mr. Homer. It’s not very complicated. How many calves do you have for us to work on?”

  “Got fifteen of ’em saved up,” he responded. “Come on. I’ll show you where they are.”

  I had everything I would need in two stainless buckets, so I followed him to a steel-pipe corral behind the implement barn.

  “Here we are,” he said, opening the corner gate for us to enter. The corral was about forty feet square but with no chute or other mechanism for catching and holding the fifteen Holstein calves. A shed roof covered the corner of the corral opposite the gate. Most of the calves were small, between 120 and 170 pounds. One big guy was closer to four hundred.

  “Nice corral,” I said. “Have you given any thought to how the two of us are going to catch, hold, and castrate these critters?”

  “Uh, no, I kinda thought you’d have a way to do that,” he responded.

  “OK,” I said. “Do you have any extra gates we can use to crowd them together?”

  “Nope.”

  I shook my head. This fifteen-dollar call, plus mileage, was likely to take most of the day, and a four-hundred-pound bull calf could hurt somebody, probably me.

  “Well, how about some extra steel poles, left over from building this corral?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think there are three or four of them left. They’ll be in the barn. Want to have a look?”

  “Yes, please. How long are they?”

  “Twelve foot, as I recall,” he said.

  I paced off the distance between the two posts holding up the high part of the shed roof over the corner. It was a little over ten feet.

  “That might work,” I said. “If the posts are actually twelve feet long, we can lash them inside these posts and make a small triangular catch pen to hold the calves. Chasing them around the whole corral will not be very productive. Have you got something to tie the poles to the posts with?”

  “Baling wire?”

  “Yeah, that should work. Let’s get the pipes.”

  There were four twelve-foot-lengths of pipe. We carried them to the corral. I herded the calves into the corner we were going to close off and held them in there while Mr. Homer wired three of the pipes in place to form a triangular holding pen. It was close, but there was just enough room with the calves crowded into the corner to grab one at a time, move him to a clear area, throw him down, and hog-tie and castrate him. I went back to my truck for a braided pigging string and a throw rope.

  “OK, Mr. Homer. Have you ever thrown a calf and hog-tied it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “OK then, let me do the first couple; then you can try it. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I put the pigging string, coiled, in my mouth and grabbed the closest calf. Reaching across his neck with my left hand I grabbed his right ear and then reached my right hand over his back grabbing the loose skin at his flank. I pulled him against me, then lifted and pushed with my right knee, and slammed him on the ground away from the milling herd of calves. I slipped the loop of the pigging string over one front leg just above the hoof, then using my right leg brought both of his hind legs up, wrapped them tightly three times, and threw a half hitch around the front leg. The calf was restrained.

  “Very impressive, Doc,” smiled Mr. Homer. “You do some rodeoing, do you?”

  “Nope,” I responded, “just observation and a little practice.”

  I retrieved my instruments and made quick work of turning the bull calf into a steer calf. Then I used a marking crayon to put a yellow stripe on his back. “That’ll identify the ones we finish with,” I said.

  After throwing, tying, and castrating the second calf, I let Mr. Homer throw and tie the next one. He fumbled a bit but seemed to get it done. The calf kicked loose just as I made the first incision, and I had to retie his legs. After that, Mr. Homer got the hang of it pretty well, and none of the others he tied got loose.

  I castrated the eleventh calf and then suggested he do the rest.

  “We’ll save the big fella for last.”

  Homer was hesitant making the first cut through the scrotum, nibbling at it.

  “Make it bold,” I said. “You’re going to take out that testicle anyhow; don’t be afraid to cut into it. The trick is to get through the skin of the scrotum fast, in one cut, but hold the testicle in your left hand and slice away from your hand. Good.”

  He managed to get the first testicle out and applied the emasculator.

  “Up higher,” I instructed.

  “There?”

  “Yeah, now close it hard and hold it for a couple of seconds. Good! Now take the second one.”

  He was more certain of himself the second time and reasonably expert by the time he did the remaining small calves.

  Only the four-hundred-pound calf remained. I put my throw rope around his neck and tied him to one of the posts of the shed roof.

  “He’s way too big to try to throw down. I’ve got another way to handle him.”

  “OK. I wondered how you were going to throw him down. I certainly wasn’t gonna try it,” said Mr. Homer.

  “Let’s turn the rest of these loose and give them some feed,” I suggested. “I have to get another rope from the truck.”

  I helped Mr. Homer remove the pipes we used to make the catch pen, and he went to fetch a bale of hay. I retrieved an inch-thick cotton rope from the truck and tied a bowline loop around the big calf’s neck while Mr. Homer spread a bale of hay out for the other calves. Most of them commenced nibbling without an apparent care in their world.

  “Well, Doc, I’m going to be real interested in how you handle this one.”

  “Watch and learn, Mr. Homer. The trick is to be just enough smarter than the animal.”

  I used the free end of the rope to tie a half hitch around the calf’s chest, just behind his front legs and a second half hitch around his abdomen just in front of his hind legs. Then I took a couple of steps until I was directly behind him and leaned back into the rope. The calf sank gently to the ground.

  “Here, keep some tension on this, Mr. Homer, while I turn him on his side and tie up his legs.”

  “Doc, you are something. Just full of tricks, aren’t you? That’s just real impressive, not as much as the cow with the milk fever, but pretty impressive.”

  I reached over, grabbed his flank, rolled the bull onto his side, and hog-tied him. As I made the first incision into the scrotum over the down side testicle, the calf bawled and struggled loosening the pigging string and kicking wildly. I jumped back and, in the process, somehow managed to slice through the skin directly over the last joint of the third finger on my left hand, cutting through the extensor tendons. Angry with myself, I retied the calf, cinching the pigging string down very tight and throwing three half hitches to hold him. When I stood up, there was blood all over the calf’s legs, my shirt, and flowing freely from my finger onto the ground.

  “That doesn’t look so good, Doc. Seems you cut yourself pretty bad.”
/>   I inspected the damage. “Looks like I did. Be back in a minute after I put a bandage on it.”

  I went to the truck, cleaned the wound, put a sterile gauze pad over my self-induced laceration, and wrapped it tightly with adhesive tape. Needing waterproof protection for it, I tried to fit a surgical glove over the hand but couldn’t get the glove over the heavily bandaged finger. I squeezed the finger keeping pressure on it until I figured the bleeding stopped, then removed the bandage, and inspected the dry wound. I applied some antibiotic mastitis ointment to the wound and bandaged it with a significantly smaller bandage. This time I was able to get the surgical glove over the finger. I returned to the fray, irritated with my clumsiness.

  “You OK, Doc? Looks like you got the bleeding stopped.”

  “Yeah, it’ll be fine,” I said. “Let’s get done with this.”

  I completed the castration and turned the calf loose. He joined his brethren eating what was left of the bale of hay.

  I had to re-bandage the finger several times during the day. Seems I washed my hands or got them wet more often than I realized, and once the bandage got wet, it was useless.

  That evening Rosalie remonstrated, “Dave, you need to have Joe Lufkin look at that and suture it up properly. The end of your finger is pointing down; that’s not right. Let’s go to the emergency room and have it taken care of.”

  “Naw, it’ll be fine,” I insisted. I’m going to bandage it with a tongue depressor to straighten out the finger; it’ll heal just fine, no problem.”

  ***

  I’m looking at the permanently hooked last joint on the third finger of my left hand. Of course, the cut tendons didn’t miraculously realign, and the end of my finger never did straighten out, although the incision healed quite nicely. I can press down and straighten the finger, and the hook has full strength when I pull back on it. Over the years, I found it quite handy when pulling calves and foals. I can hook that crooked finger into one eye socket and my thumb into the other and have plenty of strength to straighten and pull the animal’s head forward into the proper position in the birth canal.