Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  It isn’t that unusual to get a call from a farmer telling me he has an animal that is down and not getting up. I hear this all the time. “I don’t understand it, Jan. She was fine last night, but when I went out to the barn this morning, she was just lying there and wouldn’t get up.” A down animal obviously means there is something wrong and the vet needs to get out there and figure it out while there’s still a chance to save the animal. There’s an old saying on the farms: “A down horse is a dead horse, but a downed cow doesn’t mean as much.” That’s usually accurate.

  A horse’s primary means of defense is running away; horses don’t fight unless they have to. So when a horse doesn’t run, or can’t run, it’s in trouble. There are a lot of things that I can look at that might tell me the problem. For example, we’ve had several cases of West Nile virus: A horse is normal at night, but flat out on the ground the next morning—and still eating. If you put hay in front of it, the horse will lie on its side and start chomping on it. Well, we know what that means: encephalitis. The horse is paralyzed. It can’t stand; if you got it up, it would just flop over. By the time a horse with encephalitis goes down, it’s too late. If the farmer happens to notice the horse is acting a little abnormal before it goes down, we treat it with massive doses of cortisone. That fights the swelling, and some horses can be saved. But after the infection sets in and the brain swells, there’s nothing that can be done. It’s sad, but the only thing we can do is put the horse out of its misery.

  But horses do go down for other reasons. A nice local lady had an old Belgian that had helped her get over a serious problem. She called Diane one day and told her I needed to come quick, that her horse was down. The two of them were close, so I dreaded what I was afraid I was going to have to do and the impact it might have on the woman. I went out there and began examining the horse. There was no paralysis, no sign of anything serious at all. That suggested one thing to me: “He doesn’t want to get up,” I told her. “I think he has some arthritis, but he can get up fine.” That horse needed a good talking-to; I put him back on his brisket and made a lot of noise to get his attention. Then I slapped him on the butt and pulled his tail. Okay, okay, I’ll get up. That horse just scrambled to his feet so the crazy vet would go away and leave him alone.

  A down cow doesn’t mean the same thing at all. Some people see a cow lying there and not getting up and assume there is something terribly wrong. When examining a down cow, if there is not something that I spot right away, the first thing I’ll do is grab hold of her ears. That’s my natural thermometer. If those ears are warm, her blood circulation is okay. But if they’re cold, the next thing I’ll do is shine a flashlight in her eyes. If her pupils don’t shrink, that means she is low on calcium and probably has milk fever. Milk fever is a pretty common condition; it happens after a cow has had a calf and starts making milk. The milk gland takes calcium out of the blood to maintain the consistency of the milk. But calcium is used to conduct the electrical impulses between nerves and muscles that result in movement. When there is not enough calcium, cows can’t move those muscles, so they go down and stay down. Untreated, the condition can be fatal. It can be treated successfully by giving the cow large doses of calcium, though. Within a short period of time the cow will go from near death to perfectly okay. When I opened the practice, we were always treating cows for this—and it isn’t something that can wait even an hour. Regardless of what other problems might be going on, I’ll correct that imbalance first and then start looking for other possible causes. As long as a cow is crawling, it has a chance to get up. Cows have thick skin; they’re not going to do any damage by moving along the ground. But smart farmers realized that they could save valuable time and money by treating milk fever themselves.

  I hate seeing an animal down; not only is being vulnerable like that scary for them, but I think it also embarrasses them a little. The advantage for me is that it’s easy to get close enough to them to try to diagnose the problem and help them. You don’t have to catch a down animal. But I always put a halter on them and tie it to a back leg. I don’t want the animal suddenly trying to get up and hurting me, or hurting itself.

  Many times the first thing I have to do when I make a farm call is catch the animal and restrain it enough to allow me to conduct my examination. That can be very time-consuming, frustrating, and dangerous. When an animal feels vulnerable, it becomes much more defensive and it’ll strike out at anything it doesn’t know. Like me.

  Catching and restraining animals was not something we were taught in school. They told us at school that when we got to the farm, the cow better be tied up. The horse better be tied up. The pig better be in its pen. Maybe that was true in the Netherlands, but I learned pretty quick when I started working for Dr. Hentschl it didn’t work that way in the Thumb. Most farmers have small pens that prevent an animal from moving too much. They’re too narrow for them to turn around in and not long enough for them to get up any speed. What we try to do is funnel the animals from larger pens into those smaller pens. But if they’re not in a pen or tied up when I get there, we’ve got to figure out how to get them under control.

  I’ll never run after an animal; I’m not going to do any fifty-yard dash. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good; the slowest animal is still faster than me. And if I did catch up with one of them, what was I going to do to make it stop? Can’t run away from them either. They’ll catch you every time. Before I go into any fenced-in area with an animal, I’ve already figured the quickest way out. You can’t go to the middle of a pen and be sure you’re going to get out of there alive. They’ll get you. I always stay close to the fence, and if they come at me I hop over it. But if for some reason I can’t, with large animals you can usually just do a quick sidestep; cows and bulls aren’t especially agile. If you do a sidestep, most animals will just keep going straight and miss you. Most animals aren’t vindictive: they don’t want to hurt anybody; they just want to get away from you.

  So one of the first things I had to learn when I got to America was how to rope an animal. Back in the Netherlands I had seen all the American Westerns, but that didn’t make me any kind of cowboy. I can throw a lariat, but as anyone who has seen me try on the show will agree, I’m not exactly Wild Jan Pol. I just make the loop as big as I can and get as close as possible before tossing it. Then I get ready to toss it again. I’m pretty good with cows because they don’t move too quick; horses are a lot more difficult because their reaction time is a lot faster than a cow’s. When a horse sees that rope coming, it’ll move; cows will just stand there wondering, Now, what the heck are they doing to me?

  One of my favorite moments in filming the show took place when I had to rope a Texas longhorn that needed to have a calf pulled. It was a beautiful animal; the points of its horns were at least six feet apart. I made myself a big loop and threw it. It landed over one horn, then settled over the second horn. That wasn’t the toughest part, though. The toughest was acting like I wasn’t surprised. And I will never forget what I was thinking: I really hope they got that one on film, because it isn’t going to happen so easily a second time.

  There are times when I trick the animal; I’m still smarter than most of the animals I deal with. One Saturday morning I had a farmer ask me to come out right away because his beef cow needed a calf pulled. This was an angry cow with big horns, and she was dangerous. She was roaming around in a very large fenced-in area. Every time I got into it, she came toward me. I couldn’t help her if I couldn’t catch her and tie her up. And I couldn’t get close enough to get a rope over her head. So what I did was stand on the wooden fence and pester that cow: Come on, you dumb cow, get over here. I picked up a couple of small pebbles and tossed them in her direction. Finally she got real irritated and came running at me. As she came running past, I dropped the loop over her head and pulled it tight. Gotcha! Oh, she was mad. She started bucking, but we were able to lead her into a much smaller pen, where she couldn’t turn around
. I put another rope on her and tied both ropes around posts. She still had fight in her and pulled so hard she almost strangled herself, so we had to loosen the ropes. And when she finally got calm, I pulled the calf, which was dead. I told the farmer, “Listen to me. This cow does not leave this pen until Monday morning, and then she goes right to slaughter.” Then he told me that this cow had actually killed another heifer that had just given birth, trying to get her new calf. She just wanted a calf. That animal was no longer controllable, and when that happens there aren’t any options.

  About a year later that same farmer called again. Another one of his cows was having trouble giving birth and he needed me to come right away. “Where’s the cow now?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s running along the river with the rest of the herd.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You call me when it’s caught and I’ll be right there.” I never heard from him again. I can only do so much; if a farmer doesn’t want to help me, I don’t mind just walking away.

  The most important thing to remember when trying to catch an animal is that the potential for danger is always present. That’s true for every type of animal. Most people believe cows are docile creatures, for example; people think they are all like sweet Elsie the Cow. That is definitely not accurate. Cows are big and incredibly strong; pound for pound they are much stronger than horses. In fact, one of the most fortunate things for people who have to work with cows is that cows have no concept of how strong they actually are. Also, there also are some wild cows. I have actually seen cows jump over a gate without touching it. Just about the first thing I teach young vets coming to work with us is that they should never turn their backs on any animal at any time for any reason.

  I’ve never had to rope a pig. It hasn’t been necessary. Everybody has seen funny movies of people falling down trying to grab on to a pig; one thing I know is that pigs don’t want to wrestle. But if a pig is loose, there’s no use chasing it. In Harbor Beach we used to let a pig run until it stopped on its own. Then we would slowly approach it, talking to it softly, and when we got close we would put a plastic pail over the pig’s head; that got it confused and it just stood there. Then we used four-by-three-foot boards to direct it wherever we wanted it to go. I learned from Dr. Arbaugh’s experience that maybe that wasn’t the best way to do it either. Dr. Arbaugh was trying to restrain a pig one day and put the pail over its head. Pigs don’t look like they have necks, but they do have enormously powerful neck muscles. When the pail went over its head, that pig tried to throw it off, and he rammed his head up. The edge of the pail caught Dr. Arbaugh right underneath his nose; it knocked all his front teeth loose. He had to have several teeth basically reimplanted, and he was in bad pain for several days.

  I’ve had some run-ins with big pigs. There was a gentleman in the next county who wanted six pigs castrated. “How big are they?” I asked.

  “About a hundred pounds or so,” he told me.

  I told him I needed a fifty-five-gallon drum. When I got to his place, I saw that this farmer’s “or so” was about a hundred more pounds. These were big, strong animals. They should have been castrated months earlier. As soon as they saw me, they started running. Who knows, maybe they figured out why I was there. It wasn’t hard to catch them. We put the barrel at the end of an alley and ran the pig into it headfirst; as soon as he was completely in the barrel, we picked the barrel up so he was basically standing on its head. Then we just grabbed the hind legs and spread them and I cut off the testicles. It’s not especially painful for the animal. When I was done, we threw the barrel down and the pig backed out and took off—fast. We got all six done real quick.

  It was a little strange, though. As I was working, the farmer asked me to keep the testicles clean. Okay, that’s not so unusual, except when I asked him what he was going to do with them, he told me that he was going to cook them. “They’re delicious,” he said. And then when I was done he invited me to stay for dinner. I didn’t get out of there as fast as the pigs did, but I was still pretty quick.

  Goats are easy; most of the time it’s not difficult to catch goats. We probably dehorn an average of a thousand goats a year. Goats usually don’t run away; they are very curious. When you walk through a herd of goats or sheep, they’re all nice to you because they want to know what you’ve got in your pockets, or if you have something in a pail for them. If you want to make friends with a goat, give it something to eat. And goats will eat anything. There’s an old joke, “Do you know goats helped settle the Sahara Forest?”

  “It’s not the Sahara Forest. It’s the Sahara Desert.”

  “Oh sure, now.” Goats are generally easy to handle, and once you have them, they stand still. Their attitude is, Okay, you got me—go ahead and do whatever you’re going to do. But years ago, before farmers began dehorning their goats, they could be dangerous. I remember having to deal with a goat whose horns were at least a foot and a half long, and that goat scraped them against a rock wall to sharpen them. Those points were like daggers. Unfortunately, there was a horse on the other side of that rock wall, and one day that horse just looked over the wall to see what was going on and that goat poked its eye right out.

  Sheep will run. Sheep are herd animals. Their only defense is being in a group and running as a group. One sheep may just stand there; a flock of sheep will run around you or, if necessary, over you.

  I certainly remember the most unusual animal I’ve ever had to capture. Somebody called one day and told Diane in a nervous voice, “Could Jan come over pretty quick? There’s a very big bird looking in my kitchen window.”

  A bird looking in the kitchen window? Well, that wasn’t so unusual; we have birds on trees or even sitting on the sill that seem to be looking inside. But when Diane asked the caller to describe the bird, she said, “It’s standing on the ground and looking in the window. It’s about seven feet tall.”

  “Uh, okay. What kind of bird is it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you.”

  My son, Charles, was just a little kid at the time. We got into our Jeep and drove right out there to see this seven-foot bird. It turned out to be an emu. Some farmers had just started raising them. Emus are tall birds; they don’t fly, but they run and jump. I’ve actually had several emus as pets. I like them a lot—they’re silly; they make me laugh. I had never handled an emu before, but this poor guy—or gal, because you can’t tell the difference—was pretty sad looking. It was pretty obvious it was hungry; that’s probably why it was looking into the kitchen. It was a little skittish; I walked up to it very quietly and put a sock over its head. I pushed it a little and it squatted down. Just like ostriches, they think when they put their head in the sand, nothing can happen to them. It’s an odd kind of behavior. Maybe they think if they can’t see you, you can’t see them. But they’re seven feet tall—you can’t miss them! It just means they can’t see the danger. I picked the bird up and carried it back to the car. “Hold him down, Charles,” I said. As we drove, every time that bird tried to raise its head, Charles pushed it down.

  We put it in with the horses. The horses looked at it nervously. What the heck is that thing? At first it just ran away from the horses, but then it got comfortable, and later it came and ate out of our hands. Another time I got a call from the animal control officer. Another emu had gotten loose in Clare and was running along the highway. Somebody had called the dog pound—I guess because they didn’t know whom else to contact. The dogcatcher went out and spotted the bird but didn’t know how to catch it. “So,” he said to me, “what are we going to do?”

  “I’ll get it,” I told him. By that time I had learned a little bit about emus. When they feel like they’re in danger, these birds stand up straight, but when everything is safe, their bodies are horizontal to the ground. Straight up, danger; bent over, safe. So I started to approach the bird. It looked at me, wondering if I was a danger. It wasn’t sure, so it
started moving away from me. Right then, instead of standing straight up, I bent over at my waist as far as I could. The bird tilted its head—What the heck is that guy doing? Then it decided, Okay, I guess everything is fine, and it bent over. We stood there for a minute, bent over and looking at each other. Then I slowly walked toward this bird, staying horizontal until I got close enough to put a dog lead over its neck. “Come on,” I told it. “Let’s get out of here.” I led it to the car like that.

  When she was safe, the dogcatcher asked me, “What was that all about? Where’d you learn to do that?”

  I told him, “They taught me.”

  Some vets use a tranquilizer gun to get control of animals. Not me; I don’t even have one. Tranquilizer guns are gas-propelled guns that can shoot a vial with a needle point as far as fifty feet. I know they can be effective, but they’re not for me. If I carried one every time a farmer has a cow that’s running loose, he would expect me to use it. I’m just not going to tranquilize animals other people have not been able to catch. That’s not my job.

  There are times, though, when tranquilizing an animal is the only way to contain it. One time, eight beef cows got loose in Claire County and ran into the woods. People think cows are slow, lumbering animals that might not even be able to survive in the wild. That isn’t true; cows will fool you, and those cows adjusted to being in the wild pretty quickly. They were able to elude people trying to catch them. Those cows lived in the woods for months. People were trying to shoot them with tranquilizers but never got close enough. Finally some people drove them out of the woods, where a hunter was waiting for them. That time he shot them. He put all eight of them down.