Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  “You guys hold her head,” Dr. Kurt said. “I’ll get the back end and I’ll roll her onto her side. You guys do the head and the feet.” Dr. Kurt planted his back leg and reached down to pull the cow over. And when he did, his kneecap popped out of its socket right to the back of his knee. He went down to the ground in awful pain. He told me later it was the most painful thing he’d ever experienced. Meanwhile, that cow was starting to wake up and was flopping all over the place. Dr. Kurt was yelling, telling the farmer, “You got to get on the radio and call the clinic. Just push the button on the microphone and tell whoever answers that I got hurt and need some help.”

  Unfortunately, this was a traditional Amish. “Oh, we can’t do that,” the farmer explained. “We’ll go get the neighbor.”

  The neighbors were a half mile down the road. The good news was that these cow pens are usually filled with mud and manure, but Dr. Kurt was lying on a clean bed of straw. While he was waiting for help he thought he might be able to put his own knee back in place. So he pushed down hard on his knee.

  Well, that was a bad idea. Apparently the pain was terrible. He didn’t try again. It took a little while before we finally got to him. But that was about the most serious problem we ever had dealing with an Amish client.

  While we always keep the distance between our friends and our clients, as time passes and you continue to work with people, good relationships do grow. We had a special feeling for Ike Swarey and his family, who had been so kind to us when we arrived in Mount Pleasant, and Diane and I were honored when we were invited to his daughter’s wedding. There was no invitation; as is tradition, we were just contacted a day before and told about the wedding. We had been invited to Amish weddings before, but the phone calls had always come too late for us to attend. This time we were invited three days in advance.

  For us it was like walking into a completely different world. While the surroundings were familiar, everything inside was new to us. The wedding was held in a large barn-size structure. Backless benches had been arranged in sections: married women sat on one side; single women sat in another section; married and single men sat separately. Children sat in their own section. The back rows were for the outsiders, the “English.” The bride wore a dark dress and a bonnet; the groom wore new work clothes. Three ministers spoke, and they spoke for a long time. Most of the ceremony was conducted in German, but we were able to follow some of it. Those sermons were very well done, but they were long. After the first few hours, believe me, those benches got plenty hard.

  After the ceremony everyone walked up the road to another farm for the reception. This was a family-style meal; we all sat on those long benches and enjoyed homemade food—and plenty of it. That wedding could still be going on and they wouldn’t have run out of food. There was no dancing and no entertainment, but it was a very warm and welcoming atmosphere.

  When we started filming the TV show, we wondered how the Amish would react to the cameras. It turned out they didn’t object the slightest bit to the crew filming on their farms, but for the most part they didn’t want their faces to be shown. The crew had to come up with a special type of release that allowed the Amish farmers’ backs and hands to be shown. As long as we’ve respected that, they’ve not only been willing to participate; they’ve been fascinated by it. In fact, a couple of them have actually seen the show. They went to a neighbor’s house and watched it. One of them, I remember, was very pleased, pointing at me and scolding in a friendly manner, “You’re going to make me a movie star, aren’t you?”

  Farmers tend to be loyal to a vet they can depend on to be there when they need him, day or night, and whom they trust. Diane and I had picked a good area, and the business was good right from the beginning. My own family background made me sensitive to our clients’ needs. When it was possible I tried to teach my clients how to handle certain things to save money. When I was doing a calving, for instance, I’d show them: “This is how you do it.” I’d teach them so I didn’t have to come for every small problem. “If you need me, you call me,” I’d tell them. “I’ll be there. But there are things you can do by yourself.” Ray Wilson’s son Mike, for example, eventually got real good at calving, so the Wilsons rarely called me for that. It saved them a lot of money and it saved me a lot of time. Good for all of us. But one day in 1984, though, Mike called and his voice was shaking as he asked me to get over there as quick as I could: “I have a calf coming inside out.”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about. It’s a condition called schistosoma reflexum, and it is exactly as he described it. For some reason a calf develops with its ribs bent the wrong way, and its heart, lungs, and intestines outside its body. But because the calf’s heart is beating inside the uterus, it actually grows. When the calf is ready to come out, it dies instantly because it can’t breathe. For a vet it isn’t that rare—I’ve actually had many of them—but for a farmer it is a unique and very bizarre experience.

  Mike and his brother, John, were waiting for me when I got to the barn. This took place just after the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released. In that film the bad guy reached into a man’s chest and pulled out his beating heart. Anybody who saw that film never forgot that scene. When I got there I reached into the cow and I could feel the calf’s heart still beating. I couldn’t resist. “Look at this,” I said, grabbing hold of that heart and tearing it loose. I ripped it out of the animal. Then I stood there holding a beating heart in my hand. And I smiled. “This could be the problem,” I said.

  Poor John went pale. “Darn you, Doc,” he screamed. “What’d you do?” And then he bent over and almost threw up. Mike and I were laughing so hard we could barely catch our breath. It’s that type of memorable, shared experience that long-term relationships are built on.

  Actually, there was no way—no possible way—this animal could have survived, and this was the fastest way of euthanizing it. At that point the animal’s brain and nervous system are not fully formed so it doesn’t feel real pain. For the animal it’s over almost instantly.

  The practice was successful almost from the very beginning. Within the first few years we had outgrown the house and were looking for a bigger place. The man living next door raised racehorses on eighteen acres. He had a little house on the land as well as the horse barns. There was also a cement slab with a septic tank and electricity all hooked up. I took care of his horses for him. He knocked on my door one day and asked me if I wanted to buy his land—that afternoon.

  “I’d like to think about it,” I said.

  There was no time for that, he said. If he didn’t sell that afternoon, he explained to me, he’d have to pay big long-term capital gains taxes. We didn’t negotiate much; we didn’t have time for it. We went to see Donna Murphy again and explained the situation. She immediately drew up all the papers. That might have been the fastest sale in real estate history.

  I pulled up the cement slab, dug out a basement, then put the double-wide clinic people know from the show on the land. I couldn’t afford to build any other kind of structure. We moved the clinic out of the garage and into the double-wide. I planned it out so that the doors to every room were right across from another room, so we could move around comfortably. Six years later we had grown so much, even that space was no longer big enough. We had five vets working and the small-animal part of the practice was becoming more important. So we dug out another basement and put another double-wide on top of it. That’s the clinic people see on TV. Maybe it’s not so pretty, but there’s enough room to get our work done.

  Through the years I’ve watched as too many family farms have disappeared; in a few instances I’ve seen the whole house and barn literally pushed into a hole and covered up. Not only have we treated several generations of animals for the same family, but we’ve also treated the animals for several generations of that family. One time when we were still getting the practice going, an elderly farmer who raised Be
lgian horses had a mare that was aggressive with her colts. There’s no easy explanation for it; it happens. She had killed the first one and had tried to kill another one, but they’d stopped her before she could trample it to death. The farmer wanted me to put that colt down because there was no way he could protect it. That seemed like a waste to me, so I told him, “Okay, then, I’ll take it.”

  The colt was only a few hours old. I didn’t have a van, so I drove over to his place in my station wagon to pick it up. That colt weighed only about 150 pounds, and it was calm. I put its butt on the floor in front of the passenger seat, lifted up his forelegs onto the seat, and drove home. I drove with one hand and held its mane with my other hand. We started feeding it gallons of milk replacer and it grew like a weed. When it was three months old, big enough to protect itself, the farmer came and told me he’d take it back. I’d thought he’d given it to me, but evidently he thought differently, and it was his animal. He held its papers. He paid me a certain amount of money for taking care of his animal, and then he sold it. We never said another word about it, but I continued to treat all his animals, and all his family’s animals. In 2013 a young woman came into the clinic with a small dog and introduced herself, explaining that she was the fifth generation of that family whose animals I had treated. Five generations of the same family and I couldn’t begin to figure how many animals. Maybe five generations is a bit unusual, but I have taken care of three generations of many families. In some cases for those first generations I took care of farm animals, but after the family farm was sold, the family stayed in the area and I began taking care of their small animals.

  When we first moved into the house, we had an Amish farmer build a small cubicle in the garage. That cubicle was about six by ten, and it’s where I did all my routine small-animal examinations, vaccinations, and surgeries; somehow we even made room for a few cages. We kept that garage very clean and had regular appointments, but it was too small. Moving into the new clinic allowed me to expand that part of the practice. I finally had room in the basement to store supplies and the drugs we needed to enable the business to grow. That was very satisfying for me. I like working with small animals because the economics are so different; there is more we can do to help them.

  There are times when the cost of saving a cow or a horse will be more than that animal is worth. If we can’t bring the animal back into production at a sensible cost, the farmer will exchange it. Small animals are different; we will often work with them for their entire lives. In fact, some of the office staff know our clients by their pets rather than their own names; you know, Misty’s owner, or that woman with that funny rabbit. And rather than an economic value, there’s an emotional attachment. Some pet owners will spend much more than they can afford to treat their animal, and admittedly there are vets who will allow that to happen. There’s a balancing act there, and the best thing I can do is be honest about the prognosis and give advice as if I was working with one of my own pets.

  While the small-animal practice consists mostly of dogs and cats, just about the only types of small animals we haven’t treated at least once in the clinic are porcupines and skunks—but as people who watch the show know, we often have to treat dogs that have had an unpleasant encounter with a porcupine. Here’s the short verdict of how that confrontation is going to work out: The porcupine wins every time. Porcupines are nice animals; normally you can pet a porcupine with your hand and nothing will happen as long as you move with the direction of its hair growth. And they don’t like to fight; they’ll run. But when they’re threatened they’ll put their bristles up. They don’t shoot them; instead, they flip their tails. Or a dumb animal tries to bite one and gets a bunch of those quills in his mouth. The porcupine just laughs and walks away; the dog’s owner brings the dog to the clinic.

  Those quills have barbs at the end. If you look at them under a microscope, you can see those sharp barbs sticking out. People bring their dogs in with dozens of those sharp needles stuck in their muzzles, in their legs, their eyes, even their throats, and tell me, “You won’t believe how dumb this old dog was. Can you take them out?”

  Yes, I will, I’ll tell them. It’s painful for them, and it’s probably a little embarrassing too. There’s no easy or painless way of getting them out. We give the animal an anesthetic and pull them out one by one; usually, though, the dogs don’t suffer any type of permanent injury.

  Sometimes I do wonder how such a wonderful animal as a dog can be so darn dumb. I can understand a dog being interested in a porcupine—Hey, what’s that funny-looking thing?—once. But after several dozen needles are pulled out painfully from their skin, you’d figure they’d be smart enough to know: Maybe I’ll just leave that little guy alone.

  Skunks, too, are nice animals. A lot of animals get bad reputations. Pigs, for example, like to live in a clean place and will keep their pen as clean as possible. Skunks also keep their homes clean. If they aren’t threatened, they won’t do anything to bother you. Skunks can be descented by removing the anal gland, though I did hear about a family who had a pet skunk that was not descented. It used to sleep in the bed with them and they never had a problem—at least not until the night their cat jumped up on their bed and landed accidently on that skunk. A week later they were still trying to clean that cat.

  Only one time did I have an encounter with a skunk. My mother had come to visit and we were driving along a country road when I saw one of the biggest skunks I’d ever seen. They don’t have skunks in the Netherlands, so my mother had never seen one. I thought I’d give her a little treat. “That isn’t a cute kitty,” I told her. “Watch this.” So I stopped the car and we got out. “We’ll stay over here,” I said. I tossed a rock, which landed about six feet behind that skunk. The instant that rock hit the ground, two balls of smell shot out in that direction. Then the skunk turned around to see what was going on. I’d always been told skunks can spray only once; then they have to recharge. So I picked up another rock and threw it—and it shot two smaller balls. That guy shot twice, so that was a mythbuster right there.

  The smallest small animal I’ve ever treated was a white mouse that probably weighed about fifty grams—not even two ounces. A little boy brought it in. He was concerned about it, so I was concerned about it. There isn’t too much that we can do for a white mouse, but in this instance I was able to help. “That’s a nice-looking mouse,” I told that young man. When I looked at it I asked him, “What are those things that are crawling on him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Looks like fleas to me. Does your cat like to look at him?”

  The boy nodded. “Oh yeah. Sometimes he even sits on top of his cage.”

  I put a little flea powder on that mouse and told the boy to try to keep the cat farther away from him, and another satisfied client walked out the door.

  The fact is that we’re never surprised by what comes in the front door. We’ve had several people bring in their pet rats for treatment. Believe me, they love their pet rats just as much as other people care about their dogs and cats. Normal people. Every animal and even every rodent has its own unique personality. People get to know and appreciate that personality, and when it’s gone they will miss it. I haven’t treated too many rats because they don’t live very long, and they are susceptible to serious tumors. I had a very nice couple bring in their four-year-old rat, which wasn’t doing so well. Four is already ancient for a rat. This one must’ve had some type of tumor in his brain because it couldn’t walk anymore. It was no easier for me to tell these people that I had to put it down than it would have been for the owners of any other animal. And they cried just as hard at their loss as anyone else who has ever loved a pet.

  We’ve treated only one alligator. I can be pretty sure about that because treating a pet alligator is not something I’d easily forget. A client came in carrying an alligator he kept in a fenced-in pond in his backyard. It was seven years old, he told m
e, but I looked at this animal and it was only two feet long. I asked, “What in the world is going on here? How come he’s not growing?”

  “Because he’s not eating,” the man told me.

  I examined him and he looked to be pretty healthy. “The problem,” I told him, “is that alligators are not supposed to live in Michigan; it’s too cold for them.” That alligator should have been sunning itself in the tropics. The best thing to do, I told him, was to heat the pond or get a rock heater so the alligator could sit on the warm rocks.

  To confirm that, my son, Charles, and Jon Schroder found an animal behaviorist in California. Dr. Jill helps people to understand their animals. I think that’s very important; if you understand your dog, it’s easier to work with it. But the animal has to understand you, too. When Dr. Jill came to Mount Pleasant, she took the opportunity to visit this small alligator. “How do you feed it?” she asked the owner. I hadn’t even asked that question. He dangled dead mice from string in front of the gator, he told her. That apparently was part of the problem. Alligators do not eat off a string; they eat what’s on the ground. She laid that mouse on the ground and yanked it a couple of inches, and pow! It was as if this gator had been introduced to fast food. I do have to admit, though, when I decided to be a vet I didn’t think I’d have to be treating an alligator.