by Dr. Jan Pol
Every accident creates a different kind of challenge, and you have to be able to adapt to the situation. Sometimes that means being creative, finding different methods to help the animal. In another episode of the show, a farmer brought a two-day-old calf with a broken leg to the clinic. I could feel where the fracture was, and I set the leg, wrapped it in cotton padding, and then rather than using a solid cast, I taped bushel-basket staves around it to keep it in place. I’ve been using bushel basket wood for a long time with great success. I’ve got as much of it as I need; it’s wide and thin; and it doesn’t bend much, but it curves around the leg easily.
The splint can be left in place for several weeks, it stretches with the animal a little, water doesn’t hurt it, and after the leg is healed the farmer can just take it off and the animal is fine.
Broken legs are very common with cattle, and unlike in horses, in cows they often can be fixed well enough for the animal to live a long life. A local farmer was trying to load an adult cow in a low trailer, and the cow hit her front leg on the edge of the trailer and broke it. “She’s a good cow, Doc,” the farmer said to me. “I’d like to save her if we can.”
I’m always going to try. We gave the cow an anesthetic, laid her down, and set her leg with basket staves. I had to use a lot more cotton and tape this time, because this was a big animal. She did fine, though. Her leg healed up a little crooked, but that cow had a solid leg to support her and lived a full life.
There was one calf that we healed that turned out to be special. There was a good client of mine who pulled a Jersey calf one day. When it was about a week old he had put it in his truck to take it to the county fair for the calf parade. He thought that calf would lie down in his truck, but it didn’t; instead, it jumped out of the truck and broke a front leg. Some people would have killed that calf—it cost more to fix it than it’s worth—but these are nice people. He brought it to the clinic and asked if I could do something with that leg. We set the leg just like usual, and when it healed he told me if I wanted that calf I was welcome to it. Yes, I wanted it. So I took it.
Elsie, as we named her, was about the tamest animal you have ever seen. She grew up to be a big, pretty girl. When she was a year old, my daughter Kathy took her to the county fair, and little kids rode all around on her. The second year, as she was walking around the ring to be judged, Elsie just decided to sit down and relax. So she did, right in the ring. Nobody was going to get her to move until she wanted to move. So she just sat there looking around at everybody and maybe wondering why people were laughing. We milked her for four years, but by then the kids were in high school and couldn’t give her the attention she needed. I was busier, too, but most important, Diane said we had to sell her because her milk was 5 or 6 percent butterfat so we were all gaining weight. We sold her to a Jersey dairy farmer who we knew took good care of his animals.
One of the more interesting segments in the show started when a woman brought in a little Schnauzer named Zeke, who was limping so badly I thought for sure he had a broken leg or a displaced hip. “He’s mean,” she warned us. “Be careful. He’s really mean.” Well, I know how to handle animals, but she was right—this was a mean little dog. That dog tried to bite anybody and everybody who pointed a finger at him. Maybe he was mistreated as a pup—who knows what happened to him?—but he didn’t like anybody getting too near him. It’s okay to have sympathy for animals, but being sorry for an animal goes away pretty quick when it keeps snapping at you. Even after I gave him an anesthetic he was fighting it; he did not want to lose control. Finally he was out, but even then he was causing trouble; when animals are under anesthetic they can’t control their bladders, so as Charles was carrying him upstairs from our X-ray room, Zeke let loose on him.
That little dog didn’t know how lucky he was; there are a whole lot of people who wouldn’t have put up with that attitude, much less spent their money taking him to the vet. I didn’t care about his attitude; I’ve been nipped by bigger dogs than him, and I didn’t have to live with him. The first thing I did was take X-rays. But when I looked at his leg and his hip, I was surprised; everything looked okay. He was much too young for arthritis, so that wasn’t causing the limp. I needed to take a good look at him.
“Next time you see him,” I told the woman, “he’s gonna be bald.” Zeke was covered with long and thick hair, which had matted and knotted all over the place. I thought for a while it might even be wrapped over his butt, preventing him from defecating. I had actually seen that before. That wasn’t it, though. I had to cut through his hair; the woman told me Zeke had bitten his groomer more than a year earlier and no one had been able to get close enough to him to cut his hair since. I definitely could believe that.
Charles and I started trying to clip his hair. At first we were using regular small animal clippers, but they didn’t do any good; the hair was too badly matted, so I put them down and used cow clippers. And when I got most of the hair cleared away from his leg, I discovered the problem: His hair had been wrapped so tightly around his back leg that it had literally cut through the skin. He had a big, open hole in his leg. I had never seen anything like that before. I cleaned up the wound and stitched it up.
A lot of vets will improvise; most times there isn’t only one way to solve a problem. I like to say that if you never try to do something, you’ll never be able to say to yourself, Hey! It worked! So as long as it isn’t going to hurt the animal, sure, I’ll try anything that seems to make sense. Some people brought a Great Dane in with a broken leg. It was a bad break and I had to put a pin in it to hold it together. The pins we had were too small, so I called the local hospital and told them, “Hey, I need some human pins for a dog.”
“For a dog?
“Sure, why not?”
“Okay, Doc,” they said, “we’ll fix you up.”
They gave me a whole tray of huge pins. I put one of them in the dog’s leg and told the owners to keep him quiet.
The dog came back a week later. The pin was bent; that dog actually had bent the steel rod in his leg. “You let him run too much, didn’t you?” I said.
They told me that he’d gotten away. It was frustrating. I couldn’t take that bent pin out, so the leg healed with it in there. As I told them when I checked him for the last time, “As long as he doesn’t try to go through airport security, he’ll be fine.”
The danger to an animal doesn’t end when the damage is repaired. There are a lot of problems that can take place during that healing process. We used to have a Jeep Wrangler, and Charles’s dog Maeson, my blood donor, loved to ride in that car. Maeson had come to us from a couple in Lansing who just couldn’t keep the dog in town. She just wanted to be outside. One day I put her in the car and slammed the door just as her tail came whipping around, so it got caught in the door. I opened the door right away and the back end was flattened just a bit. That’s not the most unusual injury, and while it can be painful for the animal, it isn’t life threatening. And the loss of part of a tail doesn’t affect a dog at all. A dog’s tail doesn’t have an important function; we cut the tails off hunting dogs to make it easier for them to move in the brush without getting their tails bloody. I treated Maeson’s tail and bandaged it, but she wouldn’t leave it alone. She kept licking it, preventing it from healing. She did serious damage. I had to cut pieces off it three or four different times. She just wouldn’t leave it alone. From then on to the end of her life, when she was mad at us or if she was left alone too long, she’d start chewing on that tail. She definitely showed us!
Through the years I’ve seen some memorable and unbelievable things. Several years ago I got a call from a young farmer who was trying to work a small dairy farm with very little help. “Doc, can you come right away, please?” he said. I happened to be close by and I raced right over there. I got there within five minutes and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The free stalls in his barn were divided by metal pipes. One of t
hose metal dividers had come loose; either it rusted off or hadn’t been properly connected, but as a result there was a pipe close to a foot long sticking out of the cement. This cow had slipped or fallen onto that pipe and ripped her belly wide open. But what was amazing is that she was pregnant and actually performed her own C-section. Her uterus had opened and her calf had come out. The calf was lying right beside her, completely healthy and awake, and shaking its head, while the cow was lying beside it. She wasn’t bleeding, but she was hurt bad. I asked him, “What do you want me to do?”
He shook his head; he didn’t know.
There was nothing I could do. Her insides were torn apart, her intestines were lying on the ground, and her uterus was split. There was no way of stitching up that cow. And even if I tried, there was no way of preventing infection. I had to be blunt with him: “Go get me the gun. You want meat; you got meat.” People ask me if I feel bad when something like that happens. The answer is of course I do. I feel bad for the animal and especially for the farmer. Farming is a hard business, and it has gotten a lot harder since I’ve been in practice. For the small farmer especially there isn’t a lot of profit to be made, and every dollar makes a difference. This was a hardworking young guy who was doing his best to work a living out of small operation. There wasn’t a lot of extra money to buy another animal or pay vet bills. But you know what? All I can do is try to help them keep their animals healthy and fix them when they get sick or hurt.
But the reality is that accidents happen and sometimes there is no way of saving the animal. At one farm we were doing regular pregnancy tests. This farmer’s barn had no stalls; the heifers just lay down in the hay wherever they wanted. To do the checks, we ran the heifers behind a gate. We’d done four or five without any problems at all, but this one cow just wasn’t interested in cooperating with us. She just would not be caught. We started running her to one side, which meant she had to turn the corner in order to get behind the gate. This younger guy was running beside her, but instead of turning the corner she ran straight into the cement wall. She broke her neck. Her body twitched a few times, but there was nothing that could be done for her.
That time there was no question about what killed that animal. But sometimes we do everything we can do and the animal dies and we don’t know why. Many times I’ll ask permission from the owner to conduct an autopsy. I don’t charge; I want to know what happened. Many times, an autopsy gives closure to people. After the death of an animal, people often wonder if there was something they missed or something else they could have done that might have saved their pet. In the summer of 2013 I had a man bring in a dog that had been fine in the morning, playing happily, and late in the afternoon it suddenly collapsed. It was alive when he got to the clinic, but it died before we could do anything. The owner needed to know what happened, for his own peace. The first thing I did was flip up the lip to look at its gums. The membranes in his mouth were pure white. That meant the dog had died by bleeding out; his tissues weren’t getting any oxygen. But why did that happen? I started feeling around its belly. The belly wasn’t swollen, but I wasn’t surprised when I felt a lump. “Feel this,” I told Dr. Sandra. Dr. Sandra was real smart coming out of vet school, but like a lot of young vets starting their career, she wasn’t too sure of herself yet. Cases like this one helped her get the experience she needed. When I pushed a little on that lump, it almost disappeared. That was strange. “Let’s do an autopsy,” I said. Even after practicing all these years, the way the body works, and why it stops working, still fascinates me.
I did the autopsy. The lump I’d felt was in the spleen, and when we’d manipulated it we’d busted it. So the whole spleen was just mush. It had been what is known as a splenic hemangiosarcoma, a blood tumor, in the dog’s spleen. It had broken and the dog had died in less than an hour. There was absolutely nothing the owner could have done. In some cases, it’s possible to do surgery for this, but the outcome rarely changes. We would have had to remove the whole spleen, and even if that was successful, most of the time the sarcoma has spread to other organs, so after surviving a couple of not-so-great months the animal will die anyway.
It isn’t at all uncommon for people to feel guilty when their animal dies. It makes them feel a lot better to know that there was nothing else they could have done, that what happened wasn’t their fault. For farmers, it’s very important for them to know the cause of an animal’s death, because they need to make sure that whatever it was doesn’t affect the rest of their herd. When Dr. Ashley was working with me, we got a call one day from a farmer in Clare who wasn’t a regular client. He normally used a vet farther away for some reason. That’s okay; people form relationships with a vet, and when they trust that vet there is no reason to change. But suddenly he called us. Four of his forty cows had died in one week, and some of the others were showing signs of distress. Could we get right over there? Dr. Ashley and I got there as quick as we could. I liked working with her; she was a fast worker and a hard worker; some people said she was one of the few people who could keep up with me. She had very small, strong hands so she could work inside an animal. She stayed with us at the practice for ten years before moving to North Carolina and opening her own practice. We walked through the herd, and a lot of those cows were just breathing heavy. It was obvious they were struggling. The farmer took us to the body of the last cow to die, and I cut it open. That cow’s lungs were almost solid; there was barely any lung tissue left. “You got pneumonia,” I told the farmer. Pneumonia is pretty easy to recognize. The lungs lose all their elasticity and the animal can’t breathe. Sometimes a small strip is still functioning; if the cow’s lungs are a foot deep, there’s not more than four inches, sometimes as few as two inches, working, and it’s impossible for the cow to get enough oxygen from that little piece of lung, so it dies.
Once we had learned what was killing the cattle, we had to figure out what to do to stop it. We had just heard that there was a new vaccine for this pneumonia. We hadn’t used it yet and didn’t have any. We called the manufacturer on a Saturday and told them we needed it overnight if possible. We got the vaccine pretty quickly and vaccinated the rest of the herd. We also had the farmer open the barn a little more, change the climate inside, and put the surviving cows on an oral antibiotic. He didn’t lose any more animals.
Back in Harbor Beach we did a lot of autopsies, especially when we hadn’t been able to diagnose the problem. Dr. Hentschl encouraged it because we all learned from them. We were Quincy, Animal Coroners. With farm animals we’d usually seen them before, so we knew what their symptoms were, and we’d remember the causes. The next time we saw that set of symptoms, we had a pretty good idea of what the cause might be. And if it was possible to treat it, we had a good head start.
Sometimes the symptoms are obvious. When a cow has diarrhea, for example, we know we have to test for bovine viral diarrhea, a virus that can be deadly. A lot of farmers will send a calf’s ear notch to be tested to make sure it is negative for the virus; if the test is positive, the calf probably is going to die at a young age.
But a lot of other things are much harder to diagnose. Sometimes during the autopsy we found an abscess just hanging on the liver. An abscess can be caused by different bacteria, and when it’s on the liver or lungs, it can be very difficult to diagnose. The body tries to keep it under control by fighting it with white blood cells, which make pus, and in turn that pus produces toxins that go through the body, causing the symptoms. Suddenly the animal doesn’t feel good, even though there are no obvious reasons for it. The first few times I saw an abscess I had no experience in recognizing it. But as time passed I would see a sick animal, I would treat it, it would die, and during the autopsy I would find the abscess. And after I had seen enough of them I suddenly got smart. Okay, I thought, now when I see these symptoms I know what I’m looking at. And sure enough, another farmer had a big fat steer that just was not in good shape. After examining it I told him, “This
steer has a liver abscess.”
“How do you know?” he asked me.
Well, I certainly couldn’t see through the animal’s skin. “The symptoms,” I told him. “There’s no temperature, but the animal is dull; yes, it eats a little and drinks a little, but the manure is pasty instead of normal. That’s not good. My suggestion is to butcher her and see if the meat is good.” They took the steer to the slaughterhouse and butchered it. They had to throw away the meat, though; they told me there was an almost football-size abscess hanging on the liver.
A lot of time when diagnosing an animal there isn’t that much you can tell just by looking at it. Sometimes after you open up an animal you discover things like cancer of the spleen that make you wonder how in the world this animal lived so long. Early one spring an Amish farmer asked me to look at one of his horses, which had no obvious symptoms, but according to the farmer, it just “wasn’t right.” It wasn’t eating; it had a little temperature; it was a little lethargic. The symptoms were so general and vague that there could have been a long list of possible causes. We put it on antibiotics to see how it responded. The next day it was dead. “Doc,” the farmer said, “I just want to know what’s going on.”
This was a big animal. It was lying out in a field, and I started hacking away at its hindquarters. As soon as I opened the horse up I saw what had happened; this horse had died of peritonitis. I’d considered that diagnosis but couldn’t find any reason for it. And even as I looked at the horse’s body, there still didn’t seem any reason for it—until I cut open the large intestines. It was just full of tapeworms. Coincidently, as I was doing the autopsy, it started snowing. Tapeworms in horses are white, short, and wide, just about the same size and color as the snowflakes. There were white spots all over the horse, a weird mix of tapeworms and snowflakes. What had happened was that one of those tapeworms had made a hole in the intestine, and bacteria had leaked through and killed the horse. It was very unusual, but obviously it was something I’ve never forgotten.
