Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  Many people have brought in their birds, too, mostly to have their nails trimmed or their beaks trimmed. I never thought I’d have to be a manicurist for a parrot either, but you learn how to do what’s necessary. Birds require careful handling. It takes two people to manicure a parrot. If a parrot manages to clamp down on a finger, that finger is gone, so one person has to hold on to the parrot’s head while a second person does the actual trimming. When people bring in their parrots, they always want them to speak to me; they want to show me how smart their birds are. They tell me their birds can understand the meaning of as many as three hundred words. But the truth is that a lot of parrots don’t want to talk to me; they don’t say a word. I understand that; I love animals, I want to help them, but too often they don’t like me. They are in a strange environment, with people they don’t know, and that is filled with scents they don’t recognize. If they do have any memory of being in the clinic before, it is that this is the guy who hurt me before. It’s like taking a child to a dentist—the second time. They may not remember what happened, but they do not associate that environment with anything too good. So I’ve never had a good conversation with a parrot.

  I’ve also worked with many owls and hawks. One time the Michigan Department of Natural Resources brought in an owl with a broken toe, which prevented him from catching anything. They found him hopping around a farmyard, so I brought it to the clinic and started feeding it. Many creatures seem to understand when you intend to help them and they will let you get close. You just have to be deliberate about it. This particular owl was in a sorry state. Somehow his wings had gotten hooked together on his back so he couldn’t fly. The worst thing that can happen to an animal is for it to know it is vulnerable. Every animal has some kind of skill that allows it to survive. When that skill is compromised—they can’t run; they can’t fly—they understand they have become exposed to danger. The fact that this owl couldn’t fly meant he had terrible difficulty catching food or even getting water. He was starving. When I got him back to the clinic, I gave him some water, then put a dish upside down so he could sit on it. Birds don’t like to sit on the ground, they want to be on a perch. Then I started feeding him venison.

  Most of the time I start feeding an animal like this with an instrument that keeps a distance between the food and my fingers; whatever fears the animal has usually will be overcome by hunger. I remember one hawk in particular that I fed meat with a hook for several days, and then I took a chance and held a piece of meat in my hand. He picked it right out without touching me. So I began feeding him out of my hand. He never bit me. I continued feeding him by hand until he was finally strong enough to go to a rehabilitation center before being released into the wild. That animal wasn’t going to bite the hand that was feeding him.

  Most people bring their small animals into the clinic on a leash or in a cage, but probably the most unusual animal we had was a cat that came into the clinic in a car. I don’t mean he was riding inside the car; that cat was in the car. This man came in one afternoon without an animal. “What can we do for you?” I said to him.

  “It’s this cat,” he said. But he didn’t have a cat with him. Then he explained, “He’s caught in the frame of my car.” We went outside. He was driving a big Suburban, which had a metal tubular frame with holes in it. As we stood there, I heard meow, meow, and it seemed like it was coming from the motor. This was a new one for me. I crawled underneath the car, and sure enough, there was a tail hanging down. The cat was right where the axle was attached. I reached through another hole and managed to grab hold of that tail and start pulling.

  That was a very strong cat. And he did not want to come out. Whatever he was holding on to, he was holding it tight. I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn’t pull him out. I said, “Okay, you asked for it.” I got an anesthetic ready and crawled back under the car. I reached in there again and pulled his tail. He didn’t like that and began moving. I saw his hind leg and jabbed. Got ya!

  We waited probably ten minutes. Then I reached in again. That cat was nice and relaxed. I pulled it out by the tail and brought it into the clinic. It was a beautiful Siamese kitten, a tomcat. We castrated him and vaccinated him, and the people took him home. It wasn’t their cat when they’d gotten in the car and heard that sound, but it was now.

  Another afternoon a man came into the examination room carrying a pillowcase knotted at the top. “What’ve you got in there?” I asked.

  “My snake,” he said. “Watch out when I open this up. He’ll jump right out.”

  We’ve actually treated a lot of snakes. Back in the Netherlands I had grown up afraid of snakes. We were always warned to stay away from them because their venom was poisonous. If I was going to be a vet, I had to get over that. In college I’d handled one. I remember it was cold and dry; it felt a little like sandpaper. But after that I wasn’t afraid of snakes anymore.

  At that time Dr. Rachael was working as an assistant. Before coming to Mount Pleasant, she had worked in a zoo in Saginaw and one of her jobs was cleaning the big snake house. So she was not afraid of big snakes. In fact, she used to wrap the zoo’s twelve-foot boa around her body when she was cleaning the cage. It was harmless, she told me. A boa will constrict only if it’s hungry or if it feels danger. She wrapped it around her body and cleaned the cage, then unwrapped it and let it go.

  This man opened up the pillowcase, and vroom, just like he had warned me, that darn snake rose up high above the table. I knew it wasn’t poisonous; I grabbed it by the neck with my left hand and pulled it out of the pillowcase, and it quickly wrapped itself around my arm. There was about six inches of it head poking out. Dr. Rachael looked at me and smiled. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you take it into the office.”

  Into the office? Into the office where Diane was working? Maybe I’d gotten over my fear of snakes, but my wife hadn’t. She was wonderful with almost every animal—except snakes. She was terribly scared of snakes. Why would I do that to her? (Besides the twenty bucks.) Of course, everybody knows the way to get me to do something is to make it a challenge: “I don’t believe you’ll do the sizzle reel for a TV show.” “I don’t believe you’ll dress up as a woman for the local charity dinner.” “I don’t believe you’ll take that snake inside and show it to Diane.” I said, “You got a deal.”

  I walked into the office. Diane was working at her desk. I stood about a foot behind her and asked, “Diane, how do you like this one?” She turned around and that snake was about a foot from her face.

  Here’s one thing I guarantee: I won’t do that again. Oh my gosh, that was the wrong thing to do. She was really scared and really angry. And she didn’t hesitate to let me know what she thought. I definitely regretted that right away—except for the twenty bucks, of course.

  It was a white-nosed snake and it had a snotty nose. For a snake, that can be a serious problem. Snakes don’t cough, since they don’t have diaphragms like humans do; the diaphragm allows us to cough and clear our throats. Same thing with frogs and turtles; if they get pneumonia, the dirty pus comes right out of their nostrils. And it’s what can happen when a snake is in an environment that gets too cold. Snakes need to live in a very warm and moist environment. When a snake gets stuffed up, you just have to clean out its throat and make sure it’s warm enough.

  Out of necessity, I’ve learned how to handle snakes. The snakes in Michigan aren’t poisonous, but you still need to be careful with them. One of the problems I’ve seen several times is sore lips. They don’t have lips like ours; they don’t need them because they can’t talk anyway, but when it is too hot, they try to get out of their terrariums, and they bang their heads on the glass. So they get bruises and sores on the mouth. It hurts them when they eat, so they stop eating and they die. It’s easily treated; disinfect the sores with alcohol or iodine and put a topical antibiotic on them. Then make sure the temperature in the terrarium is comfortable.

  Some sna
kebites can be dangerous but not usually in our area. When the Christian Veterinary Mission sent me to New Mexico to teach basic veterinary medicine to ranchers, they told me a story, and I still don’t know if it’s true. At night, they said, snakes will crawl onto the blacktop roads because they retain the warmth from that day. That sounds right to me. Then, supposedly, when a snake senses the danger that a car is bearing down on it, it will curl up and open its mouth. As the car rolls over the snake, the tire pushes back the upper jaw and some of the hollow teeth become embedded in that tire. The driver doesn’t notice that and keeps driving. But as the tire wears down, those teeth go a little deeper, eventually causing a slow leak in the tire.

  I’m just repeating this story I was told. What happens then is when the person fixing the flat tire runs his hand over it to feel if there might be a nail stuck in it, he gets scratched by the hollow tooth; the snake venom gets into the skin and he suffers the damage.

  I can believe it. It doesn’t take much poison to cause a reaction. While I never saw that happen, I did once have a pretty unusual encounter with a snake—I treated a snake that was partially eaten by a rat. A woman who lived several hours away called and said she had a four-foot pet boa. She fed it live rats. She had put a live rat in the cage with the snake, but instead of watching it to make sure the snake ate it, she fell asleep. When she woke up, the rat had chewed the snake all along its backbone, but the snake was still alive. She had called her local vet, who told her, “No, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want anything to do with it.” “Okay,” we told her, “bring it in; we’ll look at it.”

  She arrived carrying a large plastic container. When she lifted the lid, the stench that came out of it was terrible. I looked, and I had never seen anything quite like this. The rat had chewed the muscle right off the snake, exposing the spines of the vertebrae. The snake was still alive, but it was in obvious pain. In a case like this, you just have to do the logical things; we gave the snake antibiotics and applied a solution that would keep the wound moist while it healed. We showed this woman how to give the antibiotic shots to the snake and gave her the supplies she would need. She left, and we never heard from her again; she didn’t provide us a phone number, so we couldn’t follow up, and she never called. In fact, that is not all that unusual. There’s always a little question in the back of my head—I wonder how that snake did, or I wonder how that puppy did—but sometimes we never find out.

  When I first came to America to become a vet, it was kind of hard going. Diane and I worked hard to be able to have our practice, which was always our dream. When we moved to Mount Pleasant we took a chance and we spent almost everything we had saved. But it worked out; as viewers of the TV show see, it worked out really well. The practice continued to grow; at one time in addition to myself we had four vets working there, as well as the office staff. Diane got a call from the local bank one Friday afternoon several years after we’d opened the practice. Apparently a man had come in and made a large cash withdrawal. After giving him the money, the bank didn’t have enough money for the ATM outside. The bank asked Diane if she would please make a deposit so they wouldn’t run out of money over the weekend. Believe me, it’s a nice feeling to be able to loan money to the bank.

  Where Does It Hurt?

  One morning we were in the clinic when a person came in with a dachshund. It was a nice dog, but it was struggling hard to breathe. Its breathing was raspy and strained. It was looking at me with the saddest eyes: Think you can help me, please? “We’re gonna see what’s wrong and get it fixed,” I told her.

  A common cause of this type of breathing difficulty is that the animal has eaten some rat poison and is bleeding in the lungs. In a farm area, there is always a lot of poison around to control infestation in the barn, and dogs especially seem to love it. There was one month when I treated six dogs that had ingested poison. Dogs, never cats; cats don’t like the smell, either that or they’re too smart. I began my examination by asking the owner, “Could she have eaten any d-CON?” No, he told me firmly. “There’s none around?” Nope. “The neighbors didn’t put some out maybe?” Absolutely not. Okay, I thought, we’ll see.

  There are different tests you can use to make this diagnosis. In this instance I took blood and then measured the clotting time. The blood wouldn’t even clot. There was no question what that meant. I told the owner, “This dog has eaten d-CON. Did you have some behind a counter maybe?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”

  “Well, this is a dachshund; it’s smarter than you.”

  That dog was in serious danger. She had probably eaten the poison as long as a week ago. Her rasping was almost definitely being caused by bleeding in her lungs. She needed a blood transfusion right away. Dogs have about fifty-six different blood types, compared to the six that humans have, but they are not unique, as each of our types is. There is a lot of crossover. There is universal blood on the market, but the problem with commercial blood is that you can’t store it for any length of time. If you don’t use it, it becomes useless. Instead I often use my own Great Danes as blood donors. They’re big; they can give as much blood as we need. For many years, Charles had the sweetest dog, a Dane named Maeson, who knew exactly what she was supposed to do. I’d bring her into the examination room and tell her to sit down. She’d look at me, and I knew exactly what she was thinking: Oh no, not again. But then she’d actually stick out her front leg and turn her head away, as if she didn’t want to watch, like little kids do. I could have 60 cc of blood in thirty seconds when I needed it.

  I always start a transfusion by giving the recipient just a tiny bit of the blood to see how the animal reacts. If it starts breathing heavily or shows any sign of distress, it means it is having an allergic reaction, so then I quit right away. No damage done; that little bit won’t hurt it. It’s a little bit old-fashioned, but it has always been effective, and I like it because it has enabled me to save a lot of dogs. In this case the dachshund did not reject the blood, and as soon as she had her transfusion I could see the difference: her ears perked up a little bit; she began showing some curiosity about her surroundings; her tail even swished a couple of times. It was like a person waking up from a daze and asking, “Hey, where am I? How’d I get here?” That little dachshund survived. She was very lucky; some of them don’t survive. We were able to save this dog because we’d seen other animals with similar symptoms and recognized them.

  It would make a vet’s job a lot easier if a sick animal could just sit down in a chair and describe its symptoms. That would be nice: I’ve got just a little bit of pain in my rumen, Doc. Or, I think I bruised my fetlock. I got this throbbing ache in my loin that won’t go away. It would help if I could just ask, Where does it hurt? Or, do you feel anything when I touch you here? The most an animal can do to let you know how it feels is try to kick you when you touch the wrong place.

  How can you make a diagnosis when your patients won’t tell you what’s bothering them? I never try to convince anyone that animals talk to me. I’m no Dr. Dolittle; even parrots don’t talk to me. But animals do have a way of conveying a message that, to me, is plain to see. So if you’re very careful, if you look and listen and even taste and smell, they will let you know what’s bothering them. It would be impossible to estimate how many animals I’ve examined, but I know what a healthy animal looks like and acts like, and when an animal is behaving a little different or has a problem, I can often pick it right up. I can use my own senses. For example, when I see a cow with its hair slicked down just like Elvis, I know right away that’s a sign of lice. Cows with lice turn in circles, maybe hold their tails funny, and keep licking themselves, which slicks down their hair. I’ll take out a tuft of hair and the lice will be there. We’ll treat the problem, but there’s no way of getting rid of it entirely. It’s just a perpetual fight.

  Lice can do very serious harm too. When I was just getting started, we got a call one day from a farmer who
told Diane that his heifer had been killed by lightning; he wanted me to examine it and write the letter so he could collect the insurance. Sometimes people call and tell me what the problem is, but I don’t usually pay that much attention to them. I listen, but I need to make my own examination. Cows do get killed by lightning; they’re standing out there in an open field and get struck. For insurance purposes it’s considered an act of God so the farmer gets paid in full. But the insurance company won’t pay a penny unless a vet confirms it.

  Before I went out to his farm, I asked Diane if she remembered the last time we’d had a thunderstorm. “Last spring, I think,” she said. If that was true, that cow had been dead for a long time. When I got out to the farm I didn’t even have to do an autopsy. That cow was lying out in the pasture and there were no obvious signs of a lightning strike. In fact, there wasn’t any obvious reason she should be dead. There were no wounds of any kind. So what could have killed her? I lifted up one eyelid—you can tell a lot just by looking at the color of the eyes—and that was all I needed to see. I took my knife and scraped it along the hide, then held up the blade. “Look at this.”

  It was absolutely covered with lice. This animal had been sucked completely dry. The lice had taken all the blood out of it.

  I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I’m not writing a letter for the insurance. Can’t do it.”

  It’s possible he was being honest with me. The cow was out in the pasture, she was healthy, the night before she was eating without any hesitation, and the next morning she was dead. A lightning strike makes sense. But what he couldn’t see was that the cow was very low on blood; the lice on her had been there for a long time. Suddenly for some reason the number of them just exploded and they killed her. It’s very believable that the farmer might not have had any idea she had lice. If he had, he would have called me before he lost her.