by Dr. Jan Pol
The first call came from Tom Murphy. For some reason his regular vet couldn’t come and he needed help pulling a calf. That’s an accurate description of the job, grabbing hold and pulling it out of the cow. I didn’t even have my calf pullers unpacked, but I went on over there. I couldn’t charge him for that—we’d used his tools and it didn’t take long—but when I told him there was no charge, he admitted he’d never heard those words from a vet. Instead, he took me around the area and introduced me to some farmers. Fortunately he didn’t say to anyone, “Use this guy; he doesn’t charge you.” Then I began unpacking and waited for the phone to ring. One of the first calls came from a farmer named Jim Graham, who asked, “Are you a veterinarian?”
“I am,” I told him.
“Can you do pregnancy tests?”
“Sure,” I told him.
He asked, “How many?”
“All of them,” I said, as if that was ever a problem.
It wasn’t that they had confidence in me or had heard anything good about me; I was filling a void. There were no large-animal vets in the area, and he needed a large-animal vet. The Grahams had artificially inseminated their herd and just wanted to do a health check. I had been doing pregnancy tests for ten years in Harbor Beach, so this was nothing new for me. After you’ve done enough pregnancy checks, you can pretty much figure out when the calf is due, which is important for a farmer to know. I reached inside the animal, closed my eyes, and told them, “This cow is pregnant this many days.”
They knew when the cow had been inseminated, so they could determine how accurate I was. After the first few cows, they could see I knew what I was talking about, which built their confidence in me. When I had finished the job, Jim Graham asked me to go to his brother’s farm. The fact that there was a new vet in town was big news in a small farming community. I never had to take out a single ad; the word of mouth was more effective than a notice in the newspaper. After more than three decades, the phone still hasn’t stopped ringing. It turned out there was a tremendous need for a large-animal vet in this area. That first year I castrated forty horses.
It wasn’t always easy. I have an accent. There are certain words I pronounce funny. In Harbor Beach there was no problem at all because a great number of our clients were originally German or Polish, so I sounded like their uncle. When we settled in this area, there were times when I could feel the mistrust because I was a foreigner. There were farmers I told, “If you don’t trust that I’ll do my best for your animals, I’m not interested in working for you,” and there were people who, once they heard my accent, never called back.
But there were more people who didn’t give a dang what I sounded like; they just wanted to be sure I was honest and that I knew what I was doing. One Monday morning, for example, we got a call from a beef farmer. People who raise beef cows don’t call us as often because they have different needs. All their animals had to do was produce calves; the farmers raise those calves until they’re ready to be sold, and then the process starts all over again. This farmer told me that his heifer had been trying to have a calf but couldn’t give birth. When I got there I saw that the calf had been dead for a couple of days. It was big, still inside the heifer. “You have these options,” I told him. “I can get the calf out and it’ll cost you a couple of hundred dollars and she’ll never have another calf again. She may not even live because of all the problems. If she lives you’re going to have to sell her because she isn’t going to get pregnant again. But right now she isn’t sick. She has a normal temperature and there is no evidence of infection. Ship her out right now and take what you can get and call it quits.”
He looked at me strangely. “What do you mean?”
I repeated what I’d said. This animal no longer would have any economic value to him. If he wanted to waste his money I’d do the procedure, but even if she survived it wasn’t going to change anything.
“I think I’ll ship her out,” he said. The next day he sent her to the slaughterhouse. Later I learned he had told his daughter that this was the first time a vet hadn’t tried to take him.
Word got around: This guy is honest. The next question people wondered was, How good is the new doc? One of my first clients was a farmer named Ray Wilson, who called and asked me to come over to do some pregnancy checks. Ray ran his place with his sons, John and Mike, and his son-in-law, Paul Hoover. As I learned, the Wilsons were known for being determined, straightforward people. You always knew how you stood with the family; and if they liked you there was nothing they wouldn’t do for you. They had hearts of gold—but if something was wrong, they would let you know that, too. Mike Wilson once broke his wrist punching a cow. That cow did not want to get out of Mike’s way, so he punched it. He sort of forgot that you can’t hurt one of these big animals. The cow probably didn’t even feel the punch, although it might’ve gotten a good laugh watching Mike jump around in pain.
Ray’s herd had been artificially inseminated, but none of them had settled, which is the farmer’s term for getting pregnant. I started asking questions, especially, “What are you feeding them?” A lot of problems start right there. “A lot of corn silage, some hay, grains,” Ray told me.
“Okay, what kind of minerals?”
Turned out he didn’t give his cows any minerals “because this guy who sold us a liquid silage additive said it already had everything in it so we didn’t have to feed them anything else.”
“Really?” I replied. “Who pulled your leg?” Because they were feeding their cows so much corn silage, I told them to get some dicalcium phosphate, which would supply all the minerals the cows needed. They added that to the feed on Wednesday, and on Friday the first cows were in heat. That fast.
I was feeling pretty good about my diagnosis, at least until the phone rang Sunday morning. “That mineral, that dical,” Ray asked, “can you feed it free choice?” Meaning Can you just put it out and let the cows eat as much of it as they like?
“Sure, you can feed it that way.” Cows will eat only what they need. I’d met Ray only once, when I’d been out to his place, but I could hear the confusion in his voice. “Why?”
“It says on the bag that it’s for mixing purposes only.”
“What’s the matter, Ray?” I asked.
“Well, we have a dead cow this morning.”
“I’ll be there.” That was the worst possible news a new vet could hear. If my prescription had been responsible for the death of Ray Wilson’s cow, it would take me a long time to gain the trust of the local farmers—if I ever did. My professional reputation was definitely on the line.
I got there as fast as I could. There was a big, dead cow lying where it had fallen in the barn. It was possible that was my future in mid-Michigan lying there. I was upset, but I also was very curious. There was no obvious connection between the mineral feed and this cow’s death. But something had killed it. When I see a dead animal, the first thing I do is lift up its eyelids. This cow’s eyes were pure white. She had bled out. But why? I asked him, “When was she in heat?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Look at this, Ray,” I said, showing him her eyes. “She bled out inside.” There were a lot of possible reasons for that. I just took a guess. “Did she slip maybe? Did she fall?”
Ray didn’t know, but he permitted me to do an autopsy. When I opened her up I immediately found a blood clot two feet long, six inches thick, and a foot wide in her belly. As I examined her I found she had been in heat, but it was clear she had slipped and done a split. A tiny blood vessel had busted in her groin area and didn’t clot, so she’d bled out inside her abdomen.
“Well, look at that,” Ray said. From that day on Ray was confident I knew what I was talking about. I have taken care of that family’s cows ever since that day.
That first year I couldn’t afford to hire any help or turn down any work, so I just kept going and going. It was j
ust me and Diane; she answered the phones and made all the appointments, and I raced around. One day I made twenty-two farm stops, and one of those included fifty pregnancy checks. Today, because farms are larger and farther apart, that would be almost impossible, but at that time there were as many as four farms every mile, so I could get it done.
There were things that happened that first year that I’ve never seen again. There was no way to explain it; things just happened. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it helped spread the word that there was a new vet around. I did the pregnancy checks for Jim Graham’s neighbor, Bob Neeland. When I was at his place in May, he asked me to look at a cow that was due to have a calf that month, but nothing was coming. I checked her; everything looked okay. “It’s just a big calf,” I told him. “She’ll have it.”
Next time I saw him was at the fair in August. He said to me, “You’d better come tomorrow, Jan. Remember that cow you pregnancy checked in May and said she was due any day?”
I didn’t, I admitted.
“Well, she’s finally trying to have that calf.”
“What?! My gosh.” Either this was the longest pregnancy in history or something was wrong. When I checked the cow the next morning, the first thing I saw was a calf’s foot hanging out of her, and it was completely covered with long hair. I reached in and felt around, and, oh my gosh. What a big one. I figured out pretty quickly what had happened. The fetus’s brain had not developed. Without a brain that fetus couldn’t tell the mother, Okay, it’s time; I want to get out of here. So instead of being born, the body just kept growing. The calf had been growing for almost three extra months. By that time the body was much too big to get out whole, so to save the cow’s life I had to cut the remains into pieces. With Bob’s help I got that calf out in sections. Unfortunately for me, the hair also had kept growing, and as I pulled out the pieces, strands of long black hair had stuck to me. By the time I got finished I was covered with black hair from head to boot. I looked a lot more like a werewolf than a vet. Bob didn’t know whether to laugh or take my picture. It was the kind of situation that we were laughing about twenty years later: the day Dr. Pol became a werewolf.
I had to keep proving myself every day. The word had spread that I knew what I was doing with cows, but that had nothing to do with horses. One farmer, for example, used me to take care of his cows but wouldn’t let me touch his expensive quarter horses. He had a special horse vet for that. But I was on the road one Saturday afternoon when Diane called me on the CB and told me to go right over to that farmer’s place. He had a very sick colt and his regular vet was gone. I didn’t like that too much; if that colt hadn’t been in trouble, he would have waited for the vet he knew, and if I treated it and it died, I would get the blame.
This was a stud colt about six months old, a beautiful and valuable animal. But it had colic so bad there was nothing I could do. It was much too late. I looked that man right in the eyes and said, “I can treat him, but it isn’t going to make any difference. It’s not going to live.” “Do whatever you can,” he said, and I did, but a few hours later that colt was dead.
I wanted to know why. I opened him up and he was just full of large roundworms. I could pick them up by the handful. I asked the farmer, “Why didn’t you worm him?”
“We worm ’em all the time,” he protested. I could see he was doubting I knew what I was talking about. He’d probably never had this problem with his regular horse vet. But he couldn’t doubt the evidence.
“Well, it looks like this one got missed.” Sometimes I wonder why God made certain animals so stupid. Stud colts have the dirty habit of eating their mothers’ manure. Unfortunately, it’s infested with worm eggs. So if the mama has a low level of worms and he eats her manure, he’s going to be infested like crazy. That’s what I suspected happened in this situation. By the time I had gotten to the farm, there was no way that colt could have been saved. Once the autopsy confirmed what I’d told the farmer, he began to think, Maybe this young guy does know something.
Those first few months I felt like I was always being tested. The only thing a farmer wants to know about a vet is, Does he know what he’s doing? and Is he honest? I got called one day to go out and check a bunch of heifers getting ready to be shipped out. This was a pretty big farm. In those days they would get a good cow—a cow that was giving a lot of milk—and give her hormone shots. Instead of producing one egg, there would be multiple eggs on her ovaries. Then they would flush those embryos out of the uterus and implant them in recipients that would carry them to birth.
I didn’t do the actual transplants; that was a time-consuming job done by experts. All I was asked to do was check the heifers and certify that they had been vaccinated. Those heifers that had been vaccinated had a tag and a three- or four-digit tattoo on an ear; without that tattoo they couldn’t be shipped. Checking heifers is a pretty boring job, but I was happy to have the work. As I went through the herd I found a heifer with a tag—but no tattoo. When I showed it to the farmer, he told me, “Well then, we just got to put another tattoo in there.”
I knew what I was being asked to do. He wanted me to help him out. Chances were pretty strong there was nothing wrong with that animal and we could have gotten away with it, but you either have principles or you don’t. My integrity was on the line, and I didn’t see any room for a compromise. “No,” I told him, “no, we don’t.”
He nodded. “Okay.” I’ve always felt that if I had done as he had suggested, he would’ve labeled me a cheat and put me off his farm. Instead, he never said another word about it and he and his family became very good clients.
The relationship between farmers and a vet has to be good; we may not be friends, but there needs to be a mutual level of respect. If a farmer doesn’t trust his vet, it’s better for both of them if he finds someone else. We need each other, so we have to work together. A large-animal vet isn’t like a doctor who treats one patient at a time; I’ll work with an entire herd. Most of the time, in fact, I won’t even recognize my patients. Only if an animal had suffered some serious injury or disease that I treated will I even remember them.
When we first got to Mount Pleasant the phone rang all the time in the middle of the night. There was nobody but me to respond to it. At that time there were many more small farms in the area, so the phone rang often. When you’re a small farmer with only thirty cows, losing one of them is a big deal; when you have three thousand cows and you lose one, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. There were nights when I made a call at one A.M., then raced twenty miles to make another call at three A.M. In a one-man practice it wasn’t unusual at all to be out two or more hours in the middle of the night, then be up early and on the road again the following morning.
I knew there were a lot of Amish farmers living in the middle of Michigan, but I didn’t know what that meant. We hadn’t had any Amish living in the Thumb. A person’s beliefs never made any difference to me, I respected them all as long they were earnest about it, and professionally there is no such thing as an Amish cow. A cow is a cow; it has the same four legs. Even though to the Amish I was an “English,” an outsider, there were never any restrictions put on me when I was working on an Amish farm. If they had a sick animal, I’d treat it no differently than I would any other animal. These people took good care of their animals: “That’s my cow; you get it better. That’s my horse; make sure it can work.”
The first Amish farmer to call me was a man named Ike Swarey, an open-minded Amish who spent hours explaining his faith to me. I learned a tremendous amount from that gentleman, and it helped me a lot at an important time. The main thing about the Amish is that they intend to be self-sufficient. What was surprising to me is that there are as many different branches in the Amish community as there are in the Protestant Church, or in Judaism, and they follow somewhat different rules. Some groups are very conservative; they won’t even use buttons on their clothing. They make all their o
wn clothes and close them with hooks and eyelets. The more conservative Amish will not use anything self-propelled. They won’t drive a car, for example. They can use a power mower, but only the type that has to be pushed. They don’t use modern farm equipment; for example, they use horses to pull their plows and the hay baler. It has never been that unusual to have an Amish client arrive at the clinic in a horse-pulled buggy and tie his horse to a tree, although many of the traditional Amish now have friends and neighbors drive them in a car. (I’m always concerned about them when I see a buggy on the road, and there have been a number of accidents.) Among the Amish in our area, there actually are still working windmills that are used to pump water. When I visited Amish farms the Amish women would not talk to me because it wasn’t their place, and before they got to know me the men weren’t overly conversational either. Other Amish are a lot more modern; they use diesel engines to power generators and run their farms on electricity. Ike Swarey was one of the modern Amish.
The biggest misconception people have about the Amish is that they are stoic, quiet people. That’s not accurate; most of our Amish clients smile and laugh pretty easily, and generally they have a real good sense of humor. In addition to being good farmers, a lot of them are very talented craftsmen. They hand-make beautiful furniture. In the work they do they are careful, cautious, and good. They work hard and long until the job is done.
They don’t use modern technology. No TV or radio, though some of them do have cell phones. That was a problem for us once. Several years ago my assistant Dr. Kurt Kiessling went out to an Amish farm to examine a pregnant horse, and after he had done that the farmer asked him to look at two heifers that weren’t doing well.
Dr. Kurt was a fine vet and he didn’t have any trouble discovering the problem. One of the heifers had a twisted stomach on the left, so he wanted to roll the cow. That farmer had never helped roll a cow, so while he and his son wanted to help, they weren’t quite sure how to do it. Making things even more difficult was the fact that this cow did not want to lie down, so Dr. Kurt had to give her two injections of a tranquilizer. By the time she finally lie down, she was basically pinned up against the wall, which meant there was no room to roll her to the right. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Dr. Kurt explained. “I’m going to stitch her stomach in place and then we’ll move her away from the wall on her back. Then she’ll roll the right way.” But when they pulled the cow away from the wall, the farmers pulled her the wrong way. It made the situation just a little more difficult.
