Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  My life changed forever the day Dr. Van der Eyck drove into our yard. “Come with me,” he said. I was tall and very thin, but that morning the most important thing was that I had very long arms.

  As long as I can remember, I have been helping animals giving birth. There are some animals that take care of their young as soon as they are born, but not pigs. Sometimes animals are born with the afterbirth over their faces, and if it’s not cleared away pretty quick, they die. A cow will lick its offspring to help it breathe, but a sow doesn’t do that. The little piglets come out, and they’d better find their own way to mama’s belly and start nursing, because the mom is not going to do anything to help. A lot of the piglets don’t survive; that’s one reason pigs have so many of them in each litter. When I was as young as six years old, my job on our farm was to sit behind the pig waiting for her babies to come out, and when they were born I cleaned them up until they were breathing on their own. I was handling newborn piglets all the time. Yes, it was slippery and there was some blood in there, but it was not dirty. It was the miracle of life in my hands; it was a very natural process. This was my job; I never even thought about it.

  Dr. Van der Eyck was a typical large-animal vet; he was a big, strong man, with thick, muscled arms. We had to go to my brother’s farm, he said. My brother had married and had his own farm about a half mile away. He’d bought some gilts, young female pigs that have not had their first litter, and one of them was about to give birth. The problem was that this gilt was having great difficulty because her pelvis was too small. That isn’t uncommon in animals, and usually the farmer or vet will reach inside the animal and help. Dr. Van der Eyck’s hands and arms were way too big to go through the pig’s pelvis and grab a little one, though. So he soaped up my arm and told me exactly what I had to do.

  I lay down in the straw behind the gilt and slid my hand inside its pelvis all the way up to my armpit. I reached deep inside the sow and began pulling out her piglets. In pigs it doesn’t make any difference if the piglets come out headfirst or butt first. Some of them I couldn’t pull all the way through, but I got them to a place where Dr. Van der Eyck could reach them. One by one they came out. And I had helped them. Oh, that feeling was fantastic. It was so much fun, and from that time I knew that I wanted to work with animals for the rest of my life.

  Vets are specialists, and we specialize in every aspect of animal health and well-being. People have a special doctor they see for every part of their body; we have eye, ear, and nose specialists; heart specialists; orthopedic doctors; hand and foot doctors; and even dentists. The vet is all of those things for an animal. In fact, almost the only thing we don’t do for animals is psychoanalyze them.

  So we had to learn how to treat the whole animal. Utrecht University’s School of Veterinary Medicine is the only vet school in the Netherlands. It’s a six- or seven-year course that emphasizes what are known as large animals, basically farm animals. Pigs and goats, for example, are considered large animals. The emphasis in all of our courses was on keeping livestock healthy and productive so farmers could make money. The school was very difficult. In the Netherlands, if you graduated high school you were entitled to go to college. We paid only room and board; there was no tuition. But because of that system they made the school very, very hard to weed out people.

  On my first day there were three hundred new vet students sitting more than one to a seat in a classroom built for one hundred people. By the second year more than half of them were gone. Of the dozen friends I started with, only two of us made it into a regular animal practice. The others went into teaching or into research, became slaughterhouse directors, or worked in other places, but only the two of us became practicing vets.

  People had come to the school for different reasons. Some of them were there because their fathers had been vets, so they became vets. There were students there who didn’t even like animals very much, and we even had a few students who were allergic to them. You could see by the way they handled animals that they were indifferent; to them it was a job. Not for me. For me, it was a calling.

  The veterinary school was spread out over several long blocks in the city, with stables on both sides of the road where they kept the animals we worked on. We had departments of Surgery and Internal Diseases, we had Obstetrics and Technology and Anatomy and even a museum, where they displayed all the abnormal animals. The small-animal clinic was outside this area. We had only five minutes between classes, and the school was so big it was impossible to walk from one place to another, so as soon as a class ended we all hopped on our bikes and raced to the next classroom. The classrooms were mostly amphitheaters with our seats arranged in a semicircle looking down at the podium.

  Our first two years were exactly the same as premed and predental; we wore jackets and ties to class every day, and we learned all the parts of the body. Many body parts are universal; they may not look exactly the same in two different animals, or even between people and animals, but they perform similar functions. We started by learning the bones. They had piles of bones in the lab and we just grabbed bones and with the help of a professor and our books we learned the names of every hole and point and surface of every bone—in Latin. It was all memorization, and oh, it was boring. We had to learn every single bone. Those first two years we never even touched a live animal.

  We also dissected animals, large animals and small animals, front quarters and rear quarters; they even had a freeze-dried cow cut in half lengthwise and crosswise so we could see how everything was working. Today an artist does that same thing and puts it in plastic and then sells it to a museum for millions of dollars. We didn’t know we were looking at art. But what I learned from that is that bodies are put together so fantastically, it is beautiful to learn how it all works.

  The second year was the hardest for me because we studied organic chemistry. I managed to stumble through it, but after that we got separated from the medical and the dental students and started studying veterinary medicine, which is when it became fun for me.

  At one time, I remember, we needed a microscope for microbiology and I couldn’t borrow one. I wrote to my father and told him it cost 600 guilders, which was about $175. You bet that was expensive for a Dutch dairy farmer. So my father sold a cow to pay for my microscope. I used that microscope for years, and I still have it. I wouldn’t sell that, ever.

  Our third year, most of our classes focused on animal care. We still had to learn about plants and spore technology; we had to be able to recognize what we were looking at under that 600-guilder microscopes and know what it meant and what to do about it. But mostly it was theory and textbooks.

  It was in our fourth year that we began actually working with live animals. At Utrecht our teachers taught respect for animals; animals were creatures of God and it was our job to take care of them. But they were clear that these were animals, not human beings, and we shouldn’t mistake them or treat them as equal to humans. It was never, Oh, poor baby this. No, a cow had a calf, not a baby. Dogs had puppies, not babies. A horse had a foal, not a baby. But, oh my gosh, if you ever mistreated an animal, you would be branded with that forever. The animals were not there to be hit or abused; they weren’t there for us to take out our anger. As I learned in my career, sometimes for your own safety it becomes necessary to show an animal who’s the boss; but that was rare and never, ever abusive. We learned to take care of them to the best of our ability, while never forgetting that they were animals.

  And we learned that we weren’t there to save every animal. On the farm every animal is worth money and the farmer has to make a living off that animal. And to do that the farmer has to take care of it. If you don’t take care of the cow, it won’t produce milk; if you don’t take care of the horse, it won’t pull for you or ride for you. We were taught all the time that on the farm the animals have to fill certain needs, so the farmer who doesn’t take care of them will be out of business.

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bsp; We didn’t spend too much time in that school studying small animals—dogs and cats and even smaller. But in my practice I’ve learned there is a financial balance that needs to be considered where pets are concerned too. I am sorry to admit that there are a few small-animal vets who will shame people into spending money for tests and treatments they don’t want or can’t afford, when the outcome—sometimes it’s a sad outcome—can’t be changed.

  Having grown up on a farm, I was more comfortable being around live animals than many of my fellow students. I knew that when I was examining an animal, for example, the most important thing for me to do was to let that animal know where I was at all times. Animals will defend themselves when they are threatened, and they are threatened by anything unusual or unexpected. For that reason I learned that as I moved around an animal I should keep talking in a calm voice or touching the animal as much as possible to make sure that it knows that I’m not a danger. My brother told me a story about an animal trainer who worked in a circus. This man always kept a colorful bandanna tied around his waist underneath his shirt. When a new horse came to the circus, he would walk by its pen and throw the bandanna in there with the horse. The horse would find it, smell it, and probably play with it a little bit. A short time later the trainer would walk up and he would have the same smell as the bandanna. The horse would say, Hey, I know this guy. I don’t associate anything bad or dangerous with him. C’mon in, everything is fine.

  And just as important, I learned that the one thing a vet should never do, under any circumstances, is turn his or her back on an animal. I remember one time we had an animal trainer come in to do a demonstration of this for us. In those days they were still catching wild animals to sell to zoos. He had three tigers in a six-by-six, ten-foot-long traveling cage. He walked in front of that cage and those tigers backed up; they were practically on top of one another to get away from him. He was about fifteen feet away from them. “Now,” he told us, “watch this.”

  He turned his back on them. He hadn’t even finished completing his turn when all three of them hit the front of that cage so hard the cage moved. If that door had popped open, I don’t know where I would have run. But it was a message not one of us ever forgot: You turn your back on these animals and they will get you. Every matador knows that—and so does every farmer or rancher. Most of the large animals I have dealt with are bigger and stronger than any person—but they don’t know it. These aren’t pets; a cow is not a sweet, docile animal. It is an animal that can kill a person without even intending to, without even knowing it. When I’m examining an animal, I’m always in a place where I can very quickly jump over a gate or a fence or get behind some other kind of barrier. And there have been times in my career when an animal has helped me get over a fence.

  But for many people their careers as vets begin the day they stick their hands inside an animal’s butt for the first time. The concept of it probably makes people much more uncomfortable than actually doing it. Mostly it’s very warm inside a cow; the temperature is about 102 degrees. On a very cold day in a drafty barn, it will keep you warm. It’s not uncomfortable at all. And the cow doesn’t seem to mind.

  One time the Nat Geo Wild TV crew was filming me doing pregnancy tests, and when I finished I asked if any of them wanted to try it. A few hands went up, but they went up pretty slowly. And everybody looked around to see who else had his or her hand up. I told them, for many people, putting your hand up a cow’s butt is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And when they went back to their homes and people asked them what they were doing, they would be able to tell them very nicely, well, there was this cow . . .

  In class when they taught us how to do a rectal exam, some of my classmates were pretty nervous. I’d done it for the first time when I was twelve, but many of my fellow students had never done it. In the Netherlands, vets didn’t use plastic gloves; they would take off their shirts and go in bare-handed. When you were done your arm was green; believe me, we came home dirty. Thank goodness by the time we graduated they let us use gloves.

  Our instructor would give the cow a tranquilizer and stand on the animal’s right side. “Okay,” he told us, “get your shirt off and reach in there.” Some students were pretty tentative, but that cow didn’t feel a thing. She was just standing there chewing her cud. Once your hand was inside, the instructor would guide it to all the different organs, through a hole in the cow’s side. The instructor wanted us to know what everything felt like in a healthy animal so we would recognize problems: “This is what the uterus feels like. Now follow it to the end; here’s an ovary.”

  If you were right-handed, you were taught to use your left hand, so your more coordinated hand was free to give a shot to the animal if necessary or make a note or do whatever else had to be done. I always close my eyes when I do a pregnancy test so I can see with my fingers. My fingers tell me exactly what is going on in there. Many years later I tore some muscles in my left arm when a cow pulled away from me, so for three or four weeks I couldn’t work with my left hand. One day I was doing a pregnancy check with my right hand and the farmer started laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked him. And he told me my left hand was moving whichever way I wanted my right hand to move, as if it was telling my right hand what to do. After many years of doing the same thing thousands of times with one hand, my brain was trying to adjust to doing it with my other hand.

  Most times cows give birth without too much difficulty. Farmers usually take care of normal deliveries because it would be much too expensive if they had to call a vet for every birth in the herd. So vets get called only when there is a problem, which means that most of the time we deal with difficult births. We studied all types of problems in school: Often the calf or the foal was positioned wrong and couldn’t fit through the pelvis, or it had died already and was rotting inside. We had to learn how to manipulate it so it could be delivered or, when it was necessary, cut the dead foal or calf up into pieces so we could get it out.

  The farmers who lived near the vet school knew that if a cow was delivering and had any problems, they could call the school and a vet would come right out with two or three students. For the school it was a teaching opportunity; for the farmer it was a way of getting good professional treatment at a very low cost, as well as getting some good entertainment. The farmers knew that we students didn’t know what we were doing, and they would stand on the side, watching, with big smiles on their faces. The more we struggled, the more they enjoyed it. I remember one of the first times I went out on one of these lessons, the cow was trying to deliver but the calf wasn’t moving. Our professor reached in there first. Okay, he knew what was going on. He told one of my classmates, “Get in there. What do you feel?”

  It was a uterine twist, a condition in which the whole uterus is twisted around like a plastic bag. We had all read about it, we had watched the lecture, but this was the first time any of us had to actually tried to fix it. We approached the problem with all the confidence of students: The best way to deal with that is to lay the cow on its side, hold on to the uterus, and roll the cow over. You’re actually untwisting the problem. Sometimes, though, it’s possible to shift the calf inside the cow.

  “Okay,” our teacher said to the first student, “get it out.” That student began shifting his body, moving around, but nothing was happening. The sweat started coming down his face. A minute went by, two minutes. “Okay, get out of there. Next.”

  The next student stepped up. “You feel the twist?” Yes. “Get it out.” Two minutes, he started sweating. “Okay, get out. Next.” When my turn came, I felt pretty confident I could do this. I remembered my lessons: If the twist is to the left, then you have to flip the uterus to the right in order to get the twist out. I took my shirt off and reached in; the twist was to the left, I decided. I thought this through and started applying gentle pressure. But that thing didn’t move. I had to push a little harder. That thing still didn’t move. Now I was get
ting more determined and a little anxious. I pushed harder. I was determined to be the student who solved the problem. Now I was really starting to sweat. “Okay,” the teacher said, “two minutes. Get out.”

  The farmers were shaking their heads. This was a great show for them.

  The teacher reached inside the cow again, but this time he did a little of this, a little of that, and within a few seconds took his hands out and stepped back. “Okay. Now feel. Is it straight?” We all reached in. The uterus was straight. We had no idea how he had done that until he explained, “If it doesn’t go one way, try the other way.” We had all thought the twist was to the left, so we were trying to twist to the right. If we had twisted to the left, it would have easily been straightened. It was a good lesson for all of us, and a good laugh for the farmers.

  Eventually we all learned how to work inside an animal. Before those days, cowhides had been pretty valuable, especially calves’ skin, so we were even taught how to cut the hide off a dead calf while it was still inside, before we had to cut the calf into pieces to remove it from the cow. Now we use an instrument that is known as the Utrecht fetotome, which is basically two handles held together by a piece of thin wire, which is used to cut apart a dead animal trapped inside the uterus. We never do a C-section for a dead calf, because it would kill the cow; instead we work inside the cow and cut the calf apart to save the cow.

  One night, I remember, a cow came in with a calf that was way too big to fit through the pelvis. The vet in charge right then had just graduated ahead of us, so we all knew him very well. I was with three other students. Somebody had been working on this animal trying to get the calf out, but the cow was all swollen inside. We started cutting and got part of the calf out; then we got a hook on the calf’s pelvis and pulled, but the cow’s swelling was so bad, we couldn’t pull the calf out.

  If we couldn’t get the remains of that calf out, that cow was going to die.