Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

  If I do have to tranquilize an animal, I’ll find a way of jabbing it myself. There was a woman nearby who owned a farm around here with her two sons, and they had a real mean bull. She was one of the few women around running her own farm. A few years before, her husband and his friends had been caught tearing up a golf course with a four-wheel drive. He was afraid that he was going to be sued for damages and lose the farm, so he signed it over to his wife. He must not have been so nice to her, because three months later she kicked him out.

  Usually what we do with a mean bull is put a ring in his nose and attach a chain to it. But this was one tough bull. If you wonder where the word “bully” came from, this could have been the guy. My problem was I couldn’t get close enough to him. “So how can we catch him, Doc?” the woman asked.

  “Just watch me,” I said, but then I added, “Pick me up if he gets me first.”

  He was watching me too. I walked slowly into the pen. There were several cows there and I was careful to keep them between the bull and me. Cows don’t bother me: I push them a little bit; they push me. I kept moving, using one cow, then another as a shield. Finally I got close enough to his butt so that I could suddenly reach over and hit him with the tranquilizer. He turned fast, but I was gone already. I got myself out of there. Then we watched and waited. Five minutes later he was getting woozy. Another five minutes and he was sleeping peacefully. I walked right up to him and put the nose ring in, put the chain on it, and walked away. Then I saw something I have never seen before. Didn’t know it was possible, in fact.

  That bull must have been awfully mean to those cows, because when they saw he was down and not moving, they went after him. Oh, were they angry. They butted him with their heads; some of them climbed right over him. Man, they beat him. I said to the lady, “I guess you’d better go and help that guy before they kill him.”

  “I think so too,” she said, but I also thought that maybe she was glad those cows had the chance to get a little even. Who knows, maybe she was thinking about her own life. Anyway, she and her sons chased the cows to the other side of the barn and locked them out.

  When I was in the pen with that bull, we never took our eyes off each other. The way he was looking at me, it was pretty clear he was curious but didn’t trust me at all. His body language was warning me to stay away from him if I knew what was good for me. If you pay attention, animals will tell you how to handle them. You can look an animal in the eyes and pretty much tell what it’s thinking about you. The look in its eyes will tell you whether that animal is angry, afraid, or friendly. You just have to be experienced enough to understand their body language. A few months after I started to practice, I was doing a health test on the Murphy Beef farm. At that time they had a herd of heifers. We got a few of them in the pen, and I remember jumping into that pen and trying to run them into the head gate, where they would be easier to handle. I was flapping my arms and yelling at them. This one heifer turned and looked at me once, then twice, and the next thing I remember is being smashed up against the gate. A couple of men reached in and yanked me out of there. “Doc, didn’t you see that?” one of those hands asked.

  “See what?” Mostly I was seeing stars.

  “When they give you one look sideways and then another one the other way, get the hell out of Dodge, because they are going to charge you.”

  That’s exactly what she did, and I wasn’t ready for it. That was the first time I was hit by an animal. After that I got a lot better at reading animals: When a cow gets angry, she will swish her tail really fast; that’s her way of telling you, Just go away and leave me alone. Horses will talk to you with their ears and their body posture, but the ones you have to watch are horses that snort and open their nostrils. That means they are not interested in being examined or treated by you.

  Just like large animals, small animals will make their intentions known if you look for the signals. Except for cats; cats keep their own secrets. But I’ve found that as long as you can maintain eye contact with most animals, they will rarely try to bite you or charge you—except Chihuahuas. I don’t know why, but I’ve just never been successful in understanding a Chihuahua.

  The way I work is to get the story from the animals and the people, do my examination and make a diagnosis, explain what the prognosis is going to be, and then install treatment. There are a lot of different things I look for when I start my examination. While I pay attention when people tell me what they think the problem might be, sometimes it goes in one ear and doesn’t stop till it’s going out the other ear. “Well, yeah,” I often tell them, “you could be right. But I think it could be something different.” Then I make my own diagnosis. People want to help, but they miss a lot. Or sometimes they play down the symptoms because they don’t want to admit that their pet is seriously ill.

  A lot of people know about me and Pol Veterinary Services in Weidman, Michigan, because they’ve watched the show, so they call the clinic to ask questions. I can’t legally do very much on the telephone, but I try to be helpful. I had a call from an Amish farmer who lived at the end of our practice area. “Doc,” he told me, “I have a cow that’s off her feed. What can I do?”

  Well, that doesn’t tell me too much. “Do you think it could be hardware?” I asked him. Had she swallowed something?

  “It could be,” he said, “’cause they were pasturing. But it could also be pneumonia. She’s been acting strange and her production is way down.”

  From this description it could have been anything; the symptoms of a variety of problems, including hardware, pneumonia, and a twisted stomach are very similar. Sometimes the animals run a temperature, sometimes they don’t. But this is typical of the way people describe their animals’ condition. After asking him a few more questions, to which he gave me the same types of general answers, I told him, “If it was me, I’d put a magnet down. Then I’d put her on antibiotics and see how she does for a couple of days.” Hardware is very common. Putting a magnet down doesn’t cause any damage in case the cow’s problem is something else entirely. It won’t make the cow any worse. The magnet is just dropped down into the second stomach, the reticulum, which is a small stomach that holds mostly water. Usually it’s about six inches across, but it can contract real fast to as little as two inches. If there’s hardware in there—a little piece of wire, for example—when that stomach contracts the wire could go through the wall, and that hurts, and the cow stops eating. But if it is hardware the magnet will pull it right out.

  Two days later he called again. “Still not good. Can you come out? I’d hate to lose her.”

  When I got there it was easy for me to diagnose the problem, but there was no way he would have been able to. The cow had a twisted stomach on her right side; that’s a serious problem. Normally I would have told him to send the cow to market, but because he had given her antibiotics, she couldn’t go. Surgery wouldn’t have helped her even if he could have afforded it. When you do this surgery, only one in four animals survives, and this animal wasn’t going to be a survivor. If the farmer had been just a little more accurate in describing the symptoms, I never would have suggested he give that cow antibiotics. That’s why I never depend too much on what people tell me. The cow’s problem was completely different from what I thought, but I never just walk away without trying to do something. “We’re going to roll this cow,” I told him, which in some situations can resolve that problem. I’d done it before and it had worked some of the time. So we pulled the cow down with ropes and let it lie on its back for about five minutes. I could hear the gas in the twisted stomach being released, which is a very good sign.

  The most important question I always ask is, What is this animal doing differently? Animals like doing the same things the same way every day; when they change their behavior, there is definitely a reason for it. One of the things they told us at Utrecht was to use all of our senses when we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. L
ook at it, touch it, listen to its heartbeat and its breathing, smell its breath, even use your sense of taste. By this time I’ve examined enough animals to know what a healthy animal looks like, feels like, sounds like, and smells like.

  Obviously the first thing I do is just look at the animal. I know what a healthy animal looks like and what it feels like, so if something is changed, hopefully I’ll see it or feel it. Usually by the time someone calls me, the animal is pretty sick. When people get that sick, right away they go to a doctor, but until an animal begins showing symptoms, there is no way of knowing it isn’t well. So we don’t get the chance to treat a problem early. When you look at a sick dog, for example, you can see that it doesn’t feel good. Its eyes are not clear; its heartbeat isn’t good; its color is bad. Then I’ll run my hands over its body, feeling the lymph glands, the resiliency of its skin, seeing if I find any lumps. In big dogs I’ve found lumps as large as six inches across. All these things taken together usually will allow me to make some kind of preliminary diagnosis.

  Usually. Sometimes the symptoms are so general I can’t make a good diagnosis. This lady once brought her rat in, and I ran my hands over it, and every milk gland, both sides, was swollen. Rats are notorious for tumors, but these weren’t tumors; there actually was fluid in the nipples. The only thing that was logical was a false pregnancy, which we see quite a bit in dogs. But I’d never seen a rat with all the milk glands swollen. That was the symptom, but the cause of it was almost impossible to diagnose. I could have run a lot of tests, but there was no guarantee I’d be able to identify the problem, and even if I could, it probably wasn’t curable. So there wasn’t much I could do for it. I suggested she use cold compresses and wait. Later on the same lady came back with another rat and told me that the sick rat hadn’t gotten better so she’d taken it to another vet, who told her they were tumors and killed it on the spot. Whatever the cause, those weren’t tumors, but he didn’t know what to do either; it was a rat, so he killed it.

  I’ll always smell an animal’s breath. Cats and dogs often have stinky breath, but it’s a normal stinky. But with small animals, when their kidneys aren’t working right you can smell the urea, which can tell you a lot. You can also smell if its teeth are bad, if there is an abscess or sores in the mouth. All of those things have different smells, which you can pick up.

  One problem that can usually be determined from smell is ketosis, a metabolic disorder that can cause a variety of problems in a herd. Some people can smell the presence of acetone in milk; it’s like a dirty sweet smell. Not everybody can smell it; for some reason women are more sensitive to it than men. In fact, on family farms when both the husband and wife did the milking together, it would most times be the woman who picked it up. I had good clients like that: The wife would detect and tell her husband, “Call Jan; tell him we got ketosis.” If only one of six cows in the milking parlor had it, she could pick it out. But for a long time I couldn’t. Believe me, I tried; it’s a valuable skill to have. Then suddenly I was doing a check and smelled a cow’s breath and said, “Wait a minute. That’s ketosis.” There was no reason I know of that I suddenly became sensitive to it, but that’s exactly the way it happened. Now I can smell it.

  Mastitis is a very common infection of a cow’s milk glands that causes a high white cell count and spoils the commercial value of its milk. The fewer white blood cells in the milk, the longer its shelf life will be; the longer it can stay on the shelf, the more valuable it is. So farmers are always looking for ways to lower the white blood cell count. If mastitis spreads on a dairy farm, it can be financially disastrous because the farmer can’t ship any milk. When I was working in the Thumb, a lot of dairy farmers used an old type of milking machine; these machines weren’t much more than a bucket and a very thin galvanized line that supplied the vacuum, but for the amount of milk cows were giving, it was sufficient. But over a period of years farmers had learned how to increase production so much that those small lines just were no longer good enough. There wasn’t sufficient airflow. The farmers just didn’t know it, and as a result mastitis became pretty common. Several of those farms actually were in danger of going out of business.

  There are different ways to diagnose it; sometimes when you feel the animal’s milk glands, they are a little harder than usual, or when you look at the milk you see some flakes or the milk is watery rather than pure white. But a lot of times there are no obvious symptoms; the cow just seems lethargic. An old farmer back in the Netherlands told me once, “If you think the cow has mastitis but you can’t see it, go ahead and taste the milk.” So that’s how I diagnosed it in the Thumb. I would squirt just a little bit of milk on my hand and taste it with the tip of my tongue. I didn’t drink enough of it to make me sick. But I could taste the difference from normal milk; the milk tasted a little bit salty. I could tell right away what it was.

  We convinced the farmers that they had to upgrade their milking machines; then we treated their entire herd. The farmers were able to begin shipping milk again, and they were able to stay in business.

  I learn a lot by listening too. An animal can tell you a lot just by the way it’s breathing or the way its heart is beating. There are times it’s obvious. A farmer named Dave Livermore called the clinic and asked me to get right over to his place because one of his young alpacas was choking. I raced right over there. It was a little guy and it was struggling to breathe; the breaths were shallow and strained. It was obvious that something was stuck in its esophagus. I asked him, “What kind of grain you feeding it?”

  “Oh, I give them pellets,” he said.

  I figured. Pellets basically consist of different dehydrated grains, which can include corn, oats, barley, and soybeans. The problem is that those pellets are hydroscopic, meaning they attract and hold water. Sometimes an animal eats some pellets too fast; the animal can’t produce enough saliva when it swallows and the pellets expand and get stuck in the esophagus. I felt around the neck until I could figure out exactly where these pellets had gotten stuck. When I found a hard spot, I pinched it as hard as I could, crushing it; the alpaca swallowed and I could feel the grain just disappearing into the alpaca’s stomach. I didn’t even have to put a tube down its throat. Within a minute that alpaca was breathing evenly and easily again.

  I told Dave that he shouldn’t be feeding just pellets; he also needed whole oats. All he had to do was mix the oats with the pellets and he’d never have this problem again.

  An animal’s body is supposed to sound a certain way. Sound will bounce around the body in a very recognizable way, and when that sound changes, it tells you something has moved. Something is different. This is sort of a human sonar system. For example, sometimes cows go off their feed and there is a drop in their milk production for no obvious reason. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told, “I don’t know what’s wrong, Jan. She just isn’t herself. And she’s not producing like normal.” In those instances, while listening with a stethoscope on the left side, I’ll put my fingers near the stethoscope and flick the spot, then listen for a certain sound, sort of a ping. If I hear that sound, it tells me that this cow has a twisted stomach on the left. That’s not unusual; giving milk is a hard job. It requires getting a lot of nutrition. Sometimes when cows are eating a lot of high-energy foods, their abomasum, or fourth stomach, tends to flip over; instead of being on the bottom of the cow, it gets displaced and floats out of position and gets stuck there.

  Basically, this fourth stomach is the closest of a cow’s stomachs to the human stomach. It’s filled with different acids and gas, which normally might cause it to rise. But it stays in place below the much larger rumen, just like a balloon doesn’t move if there’s something heavier on top of it. If for any number of reasons the rumen gets small, that balloon will roll out from underneath it and the gas will make it float upward. Usually it displaces to the left, which is easier to fix than if it displaces to the right. There are different methods to f
ix this displacement. I learned the roll-and-stitch method: You put the cow on its back, which will cause the abomasum to float up, but this time it’s actually floating up to the bottom. You suture the stomach in place against the body wall so it stays there, and then you roll that cow over until she is sitting back on her chest. It can take several strong people to roll a cow. Don’t try this at home. Cows can’t figure out what the heck you’re trying to do, but whatever it is, they don’t particularly like it. The stitches hold the abomasum in place until the rumen can get filled up and blocks it from floating again, and about a week later you can take the stitches out.

  There are a lot of good tests and tools that we can use to help diagnose an animal’s problem. I love new tools, and when a good one comes along we’ll get it right away. When I got started there were only a few reliable ways of diagnosing an animal, but now there are so many do-it-yourself tests that let us check for all kinds of different conditions. For example, when a cat was lethargic and not so responsive, we could only guess, Maybe it’s feline leukemia. To confirm the diagnosis, we had to send a blood sample to a lab, and it took as long as a week to get the results. Then the SNAP test was invented. All we do is put a sample of the patient’s blood in a little plastic container with porous paper in it, add a reagent, and snap! The reaction of the blood and the reagent on the paper will tell me whether the blood is positive or negative for feline leukemia. Instead of a week, the test takes about eight minutes, and it costs a lot less. There are similar tests to confirm a lot of different diseases.

  In the clinic we have an X-ray machine, ultrasound machine, a blood chemistry machine, a surgery laser, and a therapy laser; we even have a gas anesthesia machine. And we now have a very good microscope with a camera on it. For certain problems, each of those machines is very good. But for me, even though there are things I can’t do under a microscope because I’m color-blind—I have to get the slide ready and ask someone else to look at it for me—there still is nothing better than the microscope. My main use of the microscope is for intestinal parasites. I had a call in the middle of the winter from a young man living about sixty miles away telling me, “My goose is sick and my local vet won’t even look at him.”