Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  The new veterinarian was just as scared as we were. We tried everything we had learned without being able to get it out. I was the tallest, so I said, “Let me try one more time.” I lay out flat on the ground behind the cow. Two people were standing by my feet so I could push hard against them. I stretched as far as I possibly could inside that cow—I was inside up to my shoulder—and I just grabbed the calf and pulled it into a better position. Two of us cut the pelvis in half, and we got it out. That was the first cow I saved. We treated the cow for infection, and the cow got up and a few days later went back to the farm. I can remember that feeling of satisfaction so well. That was the first time I felt like I was a real vet.

  Our final year in school we did rounds, learning how to diagnose problems—and learning that sometimes those problems were with the owner as well as the animal. You could call it barnside manner. I remember when I was working in the small animal clinic a lady came in with her boxer. Usually I don’t remember what the client looked like; instead I remember the animal. But this was a very big lady and she was bringing in a very big dog. They were a perfect pair. This dog was so fat that it had no defined neck. She couldn’t even keep a collar on it. The lady complained that her dog must be sick because it wasn’t eating. When an animal stops eating, it often is a sign of a significant problem. Our professor carefully examined the dog and found nothing wrong. It didn’t have a high temperature, he found no unusual bumps, its color was good; everything seemed normal. None of us had anything to suggest: Why would an apparently healthy dog suddenly stop eating? It was a mystery for all the students. And then the professor made his diagnosis: The dog wasn’t eating because it wasn’t hungry. She had fed it so much that the dog finally said, Look, lady, I can’t eat anymore. I’m not sick; I’m full!

  That was probably the one diagnosis we hadn’t considered. The dog was being killed by love. The answer was standing on two feet only a few feet away from us. What we had to do was learn how to look for the most obvious cause. The woman had forgotten the most important lesson: This was a dog; this was not a person. In this case the cure was a simple one: Stop overfeeding your dog.

  In our last year we had to spend six weeks working in a slaughterhouse to learn how to properly inspect meat. All the veterinarians in the Netherlands had to be qualified meat inspectors because we had a lot of slaughterhouses and not enough vets to certify that the meat was safe. Being in a slaughterhouse is not something anybody looks forward to, but it was an important part of our education. We each had a big butcher knife that we used to inspect lymph nodes. As hard as it is for some people to accept, large animals are commodities; many of them are raised to be slaughtered, and the job of the vet is to make sure that meat is safe for human consumption. It isn’t a task anybody can enjoy, but it is a necessary part of the job of a large-animal vet. In my practice farmers sometimes butchered their own animals, and if they had any doubts they called me to come and make sure the meat was safe to eat. I’d walk up to the carcass and stick my nose in it. Most people would say, “Ugh, that stinks.” But fresh meat has a certain smell. Many people may not like that smell, but I learned in the slaughterhouse what normal meat smells like. If it smelled good, it probably was good to eat. Then I’d look at the lymph nodes and make my determination. My motto was, If I don’t want to eat it, I’m going to tell you it’s no good to eat.

  The slaughterhouse was in Utrecht. Each day they slaughtered a different animal: one day cows, the next day horses, the next day pigs. Different people worked on different animals; people who worked on pigs would not work on cows or horses. The people who were doing the slaughtering got paid by the piece, so they worked as quickly as they could. But the organs had to stay with each carcass until the meat inspector had completed the inspection. The workers wanted to get as much work done as possible, while we students wanted to be slow and careful to be sure we were doing a good job. Sometimes we got a little behind. And when that happened those guys had a trick they used.

  They were slaughtering pigs one day and I was doing my job carefully, as I had been taught, checking every lymph node. No one was going to get sick eating bad meat that I had approved. I was standing between two carcasses hanging from a rail, when vroom! Some of the slaughterhouse workers shoved the line forward, and before I could move I got caught between the carcasses, pushed inside a pig. I had to worm my way out. And from then on I knew to stand by the side of the carcasses—not between them—when I did my inspection. That’s how you learn.

  Many people wonder how it is possible to accept the slaughter of animals. People who work with animals—farmers, for example—understand that God made them on earth for us to use. Not abuse; use. In this case it meant finding a way to kill them quick and with no pain. The people who did this were skilled workers. It was just a different skill than you see from a carpenter or plumber. It’s a gruesome job, but they did it in such a way to ensure that at least the animals didn’t suffer. In a strange way I admired them, because I couldn’t do their job. I think every vet will agree that the most difficult part of our job is putting down an animal, especially an animal that has been cared for and loved for many years. No matter how often I’ve done it, I still don’t like it. And many times, tears come to my eyes too. I don’t let people see me, but I do tear up. I also know when I do it that it is the best thing for the animal. I made a promise to myself while I was working in that slaughterhouse that I would never allow an animal to suffer. So when I do have to put down an animal, a dog or a cat or a horse, that animal is first getting an anesthetic. My animals get an anesthetic first. And only when they are quiet and at peace do I give them the final injection. There are others who do it differently. I don’t care; this is my way.

  I was very glad when I finished that phase of my training. You bet. I had gone to vet school because I wanted to learn how to help animals.

  I was not the best student. I have always had a hard time learning from books. I learn best from watching. Show me how something is done and I’ll remember it. Show me a surgery one time and I can do it the next time. What made it even more difficult for me was the fact that I’m color-blind. That made pathology especially hard. I couldn’t make the diagnoses that were based on the color of the tissue. We sat in a dark classroom and the instructor projected color slides on a screen as he explained, “This is pneumonia. You can tell by the color.”

  Not me; I couldn’t tell by the color. For our final exam they showed the slides and we had to identify the disease. I did just well enough to pass. But the next year they put organs on a table—all kinds of organs from all kinds of animals. We had to identify the animal, the organ, and the problem with it. That was easy for me. At the end the professor stopped me and asked, “You know everything that’s here. Last year you had so much trouble. Why?”

  “I’m color-blind,” I told him, “and the teaching is backward. Last year it was, ‘Here’s a color picture of a diseased organ; tell me what you see.’ It was backward for me. But this year it’s exactly the opposite: ‘Here is the diseased organ; what is the organ and what is the disease?’ That I have no problem with.”

  I graduated from the school with my degree in veterinary medicine, a plan for my future, and an American wife. The wife had come first. I had come to the United States in 1961 as a high school exchange student, mostly because it was an opportunity to see my sister again. In 1955 my sister and her husband had moved to Ontario, Canada, because they had an opportunity to farm there. Canada needed farmers. There was just not enough land for farmers in the Netherlands. In those days transatlantic travel was not easy, so when people left Europe, there was always the fear that their family might not see them again. When the notice was posted offering an opportunity to live and study in Michigan for a school year, I paid special attention to it. I looked at a map of North America, and on that map Michigan and Ontario looked fairly close together. I told my parents, “Look at this. I can go to Michigan and you can come visit a
nd we can go see Henny.” I applied for the program and was accepted, and my life was changed forever.

  Like most of my classmates, that was my first time on an airplane. While for many people the concept of going to live in America might be exciting or scary, the Dutch are pretty stoic; we tend to accept things as they happen without showing a great amount of emotion. I suppose I was nervous and excited, but I don’t remember those feelings. Mostly I was curious. It took eighteen hours to fly from Amsterdam to Detroit. We arrived in the middle of August. I spoke a passable British English. We were told that within three months we would be dreaming in English, but for me it was only two weeks.

  I didn’t know too much about America. My sister and her husband lived in a rural area in Canada—many of their neighbors didn’t even have electric power—so I knew from her that life in North America was rough. The land was not as arable as it was at home, so instead of four crops a year they could have only two. Henny and her husband didn’t complain; we had grown up on a dairy farm, so we had learned how to work hard. But they certainly didn’t write to us that life was easier or better in North America than it was in Holland.

  I stayed with the Dalrymple family in the small town of Mayville, Michigan. I was eighteen years old and in the same grade as their daughter, Diane. Some people wonder why a family with a teenage daughter would invite a teenage boy to live in their home, but this was a very different time socially. I don’t remember anybody even questioning it then. Diane and I quickly became friends. I remember my first impression of her: Man, she’s tall. We were very much the same in many ways, but especially in our love of animals. Her family had dogs and cats and chickens, although their neighbors didn’t like the chickens waking them up early in the morning or scratching up their gardens. When Diane was in second grade, her school mascot was a wildcat, so her father went into the woods and caught a woodchuck. For a school parade he decorated a wagon, then put the woodchuck in a cage on the wagon and told everybody it was a wildcat. There is a wonderful picture of Diane’s father sitting on the porch with his pet woodchuck right next to him.

  I had my crippled chicken; when Diane was seven she got a pet duck. Well, it turned out to be two pet ducks. She had won the first little baby duck playing a game at the town carnival. She named her Patrick. Patrick must’ve thought that Diane was her mother, because she just followed her everywhere. There was a trapeze in Diane’s backyard, but to reach it she had to climb up on a sawhorse that her father had built. One day she went to play on the trapeze and accidently tripped over the sawhorse, which fell on the duck, killing it.

  Oh my God, you would have thought she had intentionally killed her . . . her pet duck. Diane was devastated. Her parents didn’t know what to do, so they found another duck and brought it home. Its name also was Patrick. Diane and Patrick used to play tag. She would tap him and run away and he would chase after her and try to peck her. But by the time she got into high school, she didn’t have too much time to play with her duck, so she gave it to friends who raised ducks. She would go over to their pond sometimes to make sure he was doing all right. The first few times he probably recognized her, but then he got too busy being a duck, and she lost track of him.

  How could anybody not find a woman who played tag with her pet duck attractive? But we liked each other as friends so much, it didn’t even occur to us that maybe we were also falling in love.

  I didn’t have any trouble adjusting to the American culture, if you want to call The Three Stooges television show culture. But one of my first memories was seeing one of Diane’s girlfriends, a little tiny girl, driving into the yard in a big Buick. I looked, but I could hardly even see her behind the steering wheel. That impressed me; in the Netherlands everybody had a small car—Volkswagen bugs, for example—and I was more used to watching big people somehow managing to squeeze into these little cars. So watching this little girl drive in, my first impression was, Wow, everything about this place is big. There was so much space. That I liked a lot.

  At the end of the school year I went back to the Netherlands to start vet school and Diane went to college to study education at Michigan State. We wrote to each other every month, and both of us found that more and more the other people we were dating didn’t measure up. During my first year of college, my father was diagnosed with bone cancer. Because he couldn’t get around so well anymore, we had to sell the cows; two of them sold for much more money than we ever knew they were worth. When my father was no longer able to take care of his cows I began to understand how serious this was. My parents had visited America while I was there and met Diane and her parents, so when my father got sick, I wrote to Diane that if she wanted to see him alive again, she had better come pretty quick.

  She came in the summer of 1964. While she was there, my cousin got married, my sister had a baby, and my father continued to suffer and eventually died. Those last months of his life Diane and I sat by my father’s bed late in the night making sure he had his pain pills if he woke up. My father didn’t speak English and at that time Diane didn’t speak Dutch, but they managed to communicate. He was a smoker and she filled his pipe for him when he couldn’t do it any longer. Whatever he needed, she figured it out and got it for him. And when she wasn’t helping him, she was doing chores in the house so my mother was more free to be with him. In hard times like that, you really learn whom you can depend on, who will be there when you need them. That was Diane, always quietly, always without a complaint, she would be there to help. We got close to each other.

  My father died on the day Diane was scheduled to fly back to Michigan. She stayed a few more days for his funeral, then flew home. After that I spent a lot of time going back and forth between my house and the school, trying to help my mother. During that time I learned how to cook, how to sew—I almost learned how to knit—so I became basically a Jan of all trades. And for the next two years, while Diane and I were both still in school, we got to know each other better by mail. The mail was the only way to make a very long-distance romance work in those days. When I came back to America in 1966, we had already decided to get engaged.

  For the next year we made all our wedding plans by mail. For example, Diane would write to ask me what color bridesmaids dresses I wanted: pink or purple. I wrote, “No, I like yellow.” She wrote, “Yellow?” I wrote, “Yes, it’s a color I can see real good.” The bridesmaids wore yellow. It was a very small wedding; Diane was an only child and she had several uncles and aunts. But it was a wedding with a lot of love in it. For our quick honeymoon, we spent three days at a little beach in the Thumb of Michigan; it’s called that because the lower part of the state looks like a mitten—with a thumb. Then we sailed on a boat to Rotterdam so I could get back to school.

  Looking back, that must have been devastating to her parents. At that time it wasn’t so common to fly across the Atlantic. Their only child was going to live in Europe and they didn’t know when they would see her again. But I already knew that we weren’t going to be staying in the Netherlands. There was no need for more practicing veterinarians, and I wanted that feeling that I got when I put my hands on animals.

  That was almost five decades ago. But I still have that feeling. It never went away.

  There was no student housing at the school; the students lived in whatever apartment they could afford in the city. I could never afford too much, so I rented an apartment on the upper floor of the three-story home of Mr. and Mrs. Rietveld, very near the school. Just a few months after I’d moved in, Mr. Rietveld died of lung cancer, so I became the fix-it man for the next few years. If anything had to be fixed, it was my job. Mrs. Rietveld needed shelves put in: “Jan, would you put in the shelves, please.” A switch had to be repaired: That was my job.

  A lot of the vet students lived in the area, and here is something most people don’t think is true: Vet students can be very wild. We were the rough-and-tumble school in the university. We were the young people who were
going to work on farms, with big animals, so we had to be strong. Oh, we definitely were strong. Some of the other students thought maybe because we wanted to work on farms that we weren’t that smart. We were smart enough to know better. Naturally when my friends found out that I had married an American lady, they all wanted to meet her. How do you meet in the Netherlands? With a beer party. I don’t remember too much about it except we started the night with five hundred nice glasses and by the next morning only fifty were left. Even counting some of them twice.

  We lived in my attic apartment, and Diane got accepted as a substitute teacher at the American Air Force base. As soon as we got to Utrecht, she started studying Dutch, which is not a simple language to learn, but within eight weeks she was able to read a Dutch newspaper and even have a conversation in the language. It took her six months to get a full-time teaching job. With the money she was earning, we were able to buy our first car; naturally, our little Volkswagen.

  Our plan was to return to Michigan after I graduated. Animals are animals; they have a pretty good sense who to trust, even if you have a funny accent. I had written several letters to the state to find out what I needed to do to get my license. This was my first encounter with the American bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy won. All these years later, I still haven’t stopped fighting it when necessary. Getting my license required passing several tests and getting letters of recommendation from practicing vets. Diane and I moved to Mayville and I started working with a local vet, Dr. Drysdale, who lived about a half block from Diane’s parents; he didn’t pay me, but he could write that letter I needed.

  Dr. Drysdale was a very nice man. He was a Scotsman, and he looked like a large-animal vet; he was big and tall and very strong. When he made a farm call he never had a doubt he was going to be able to figure out the problem and fix it. When he couldn’t, and that happened, he took it personally. Right from the beginning he treated me with professional respect, sometimes asking me to help him do something even before he knew if I could do it. One of the first farm calls we made was for a calving. At the college we had been taught that when doing a calving you had to get both arms inside the cow. Both arms! The professors warned us, you can’t work with just one hand because then you might rupture the uterus. One time a student who couldn’t get both arms inside had his ass kicked; literally, the professor kicked his butt. Believe me, ass kickings make memorable lessons. Dr. Drysdale had big, thick arms and this was not a big cow, so he was struggling to get both arms inside. After trying for about a half hour, he asked me, “Jan, can you spell me for a minute?”