by JULIAN EARL
The ring was approximately half a metre away from May’s large body – lying flat out on the straw. Had she lain down in a slightly different place, the ring would have been pushed deep down into the straw by several hundred kilograms of Shire horse. Not wanting to disbelieve my good luck at finding a gold ring in deep yellow straw at night, I suggested he didn’t shout too much in case May stood up and trampled the ring deeper into the straw. But May just lay here, slowly blinking, recovering from her ordeal, until within the hour she had recovered enough to be up on her feet again, munching on hay, and I recovered from the fright of losing my wedding ring.
May proceeded to recover completely, and lived many more years. Just as I have – largely because I have never had to explain to my wife that I nearly lost my wedding ring inside a horse’s rectum.
Chapter 16
Planning for health on farms
How to untangle a health disaster
Back in the day, flock and herd health plans were a relatively new idea and farm assurance schemes were not yet a marketing twinkle in Mr Supermarket’s eye. Then, vets would approach farmers with the concept that prevention might be better than cure, and if we were lucky, they would listen and take the idea on board.
At this point, I ought to explain that a flock health plan, or similarly a herd health plan for cattle, is a method of approaching a flock or herd as a single collective unit. Although the animals on a farm are individuals, and can have their own personalities shown to the people who regularly work with them, generally all individuals in a flock or herd are exposed to the same threats to their health and welfare. They receive the same diet, are exposed to the same infective agents, the same parasites, managed the same way and so on. The sensible approach is to regard the flock or herd as a unit and plan for their vaccinations and diet and management procedures collectively. There is little point in feeding a flock on the basis of the fattest or thinnest individual because they should all have the same needs.
In contrast to what is popularly believed, sheep do not live just in order to die at the first available opportunity. If we really believed that, we would not bother with sheep at all. In fact, I would suggest that in reality, sheep are extremely tough. They survive in conditions where few other animals could, and the reason they are found dead unexpectedly, as any sheep farmer or vet can attest, is because they are so tough. Like many prey species, they are thought to have evolved not to show pain, injury or illness because that could single them out from a flock to a watching predator. However, if they don’t show signs of illness, then they may well not be treated by farmers or vets as early as would be best, and the illness then progresses until death is the only outcome. This means that prevention being better than cure is never truer than it is for maintaining health in sheep flocks, and prevention has to be applied to the flock as a whole, not to an individual or two.
One hill farmer, let’s call him Mr B, had a small herd of beef cattle housed in the large stone barn, plus a flock of around 250 sheep grazing the spring grass on the hillside below the barn. My initial contact was in the February because of a worrying number of ewes aborting their lambs. Many infectious causes for this phenomenon exist, and investigation is always necessary to identify what is happening. Specifically, he had lost thirty lambs in the previous three weeks and was starting to become concerned. Investigations rapidly demonstrated an outbreak of Campylobacter abortion, an outbreak that fortunately petered out shortly after the problem was identified, which always helps.
However, a couple of weeks later, Mr B was on the telephone again, with more problems: he had had several ewes die at the start of his lambing season and another visit to the farm was called for. It was quickly apparent that several ewes were suffering from so-called twin-lamb disease and they were not likely to survive. Twin-lamb disease is a misnamed problem seen where heavily pregnant ewes, usually those carrying multiple lambs inside, do not receive enough energy from their diet, and their metabolism starts to fail in several ways, threatening the survival of both the ewe herself and the lambs she is carrying. Discussion about his feeding was in order and Mr B revealed that he had had a problem when he fed the outdoor flock with their concentrates. He commented that when he drove out on his quad bike with the bags of feed, the ewes would charge across the hillside towards the bike and he had seen a couple of lambs get knocked over and trampled in the rush. In further defence of sheep, not only are they not determined to die – they are not as stupid as their reputation suggests. They have been shown to learn as fast as dogs can, but as the lamb-trampling here demonstrated, sheep have an all-powerful flocking instinct: one sheep might do something not in its own best interest because it is automatically following the crowd – not unlike humans, to be honest.
So, I asked the farmer what he had done about this minor stampede every day. The answer was blindingly obvious and logical: he had stopped feeding the sheep. I suggested that this might not have been the best idea when his sheep were heavily pregnant, and so he amended his ‘nutritional plan’ accordingly.
However, once the lambing season started in earnest, Mr B then reported that many lambs were weakening and dying soon after being born. So back to the farm I went. The lambs were certainly weak and no amount of colostrum (the first, extremely rich milk that a newborn animal needs and the most important meal an animal ever eats), nor warmth, nor nursing would revive them. It was not immediately clear whether their fading away was an ongoing complication of the health problems sustained by the ewes earlier when heavily pregnant, or whether it was yet another problem developing. In fact, on post-mortem of some of the lambs, it was revealed that they were suffering from a Salmonella infection, contracted I believed, before birth when the ewes were exposed to the Salmonella in an already weakened state during their twin-lamb disease. The Salmonella strain involved was one most commonly associated with cattle rather than with sheep. All treatment of these ailing lambs proved to no avail and approximately fifty lambs died shortly after being born. The mystery was where and how they had contracted the infection because the ewes, unusually for a Salmonella infection, were not ill themselves and the flock had had no further abortions. The lambs, however, were very definitely ill, sadly being born either dead, or else dying within hours of birth. Nothing we could do would save them. We looked for contact with cattle as the likely source of this strain of Salmonella. As mentioned, there were beef cows on the farm, but they were housed and had no direct contact with the sheep.
The farm was entirely set on a steep hillside with the cowshed bang in the middle. It turned out that the slurry from the cows in this barn was scraped along the passageway to a door at the end and over a drop into a heap two metres below, where it lay all winter and spring. Unfortunately, this heap drained into a small stream a few metres away, which provided the water supply for the sheep on the lower pastures where the pregnant sheep were grazing, almost certainly providing a ready source of the infective bacteria for the vulnerable sheep.
Finally, just to rub salt in the wounds, at post-mortem lambs were identified as being copper deficient as well as being infected with Salmonella. Copper deficiency is a well-recognised problem for sheep in some areas and it can lead to serious losses, causing spinal disease and weakness in newborn lambs and reduced resistance to infections. Eventually, the nightmare of a lambing season for Mr B drew to a close. But of his 250 ewes, some forty to fifty had died, double that number of lambs failed to survive, and I suspect that Mr B and his family aged at least ten years as a result of the stress of these three months.
To me, the next step was blatantly obvious: what he needed for next year was a flock health plan covering feeding, vaccinations, foot care and general health advice. All for a fixed price with planned veterinary visits, and so on.
I thought we could prevent a repeat of the problems next time around. Luckily Mr B was very amenable and we planned the necessary steps. I would be involved in the feeding, help with foot care, dipping and advice about vaccinations
and nutrition. The agreed price was fixed, for the whole year, and I gave up several days off on weekends in order to help, and attended many more times than planned. Thank goodness, the following year was relatively trouble-free. At the end of this following year also happened to be the time when I changed my job, moving to a completely new area. Because I had come to know Mr B reasonably well during the year, I rang him to tell him the news and we chatted about all the problems he had experienced earlier.
I said, ‘You know what, I costed it all out,’ and I told him that all those dead ewes and lambs, loss of production, et cetera, had cost him over £6,000 in the year before the health plan.
‘Aye, I know,’ he replied, ‘we costed it out as well, but we reckon that we saved £10,000 not just £6,000 this year. But you know what Julian, ah still think that £300 was a bit too expensive for all those visits.’
I realised that if I had paid him to go on his own farm to help him out, he might have complained I wasn’t paying him enough.
Chapter 17
Cows in trees
Not as rare as you might think
Most of the wild or exotic patients described in the other chapters of this book count as surprises in everyday veterinary practice. One beauty of the job is the sheer variety of problems that are presented on a daily basis; predictable and boring the job is not. Undoubtedly the biggest surprises in my career have involved flying cows – of one type or another.
Abattoirs are a place where veterinary students are expected to gain experience and my experience was of potentially losing my left arm. While I was watching the proceedings at the slaughterhouse, one carcass was being moved on the hooks hanging above us and for some reason, the body had to be moved to a different position. A group of us worked together to lift it, but this turned out not to be a good idea. As we lifted, the carcass toppled. The more experienced workers immediately leapt out of the way. One of the others, who was rather less experienced (that means me) foolishly tried to push the carcass to one side to get the hook to re-engage on the rail as it fell. This was a daft idea and it fell the three metres to the ground. Unfortunately my left arm was obstructing the fall and two hundred and fifty kilograms of carcass with exposed sharp, bony edges hit my left forearm, removing a large area of skin as it fell. I remember being able to see very closely the veins in my forearm that were a few millimetres away from having been sliced open inside this hole seven centimetres across. A quick trip to the local hospital and I was neatly repaired. That has been the only time a dead animal caused me injury. However, cows falling from a great height were not a hazard that I expected to encounter in my career and this was well before I even qualified.
I was reminded of this incident when, years later, I was called out to attend a living cow, which had also become suspended from a great height. When I have asked people for suggestions as to how a cow might possibly have managed to get stuck in a tree, they usually suggest that perhaps the tree was blown over by the wind, trapping the cow in the process.
The truth is that the cow didn’t go up into the tree at all – she fell down into a tall upright tree when she was walking on a high bank. The bank crumbled and the cow fell into a tree growing lower down. Luckily for me, the farmer had done the hard work by the time I arrived and he had lifted her back to ground level. Unfortunately it meant that I was unable to test the method of lifting a cow that I had been reliably informed was invaluable for rescuing cows that had fallen, for example into a slurry pit. This does happen and unless the cow can be rescued promptly by providing straw bale steps or some sort of ramp to climb on, the cow might well drown unpleasantly or suffocate from toxic gases. I have rescued one cow trapped in a shallow ditch by a method involving a lot of sweat, pushing, shoving and considerable swearing. The cow was eventually lifted out by a sturdy rope around the face and through her mouth round the back of the head, with the front legs positioned under the chin inside the looped rope to prevent strangulation by the rope. I was informed that a cow can be lifted vertically this way with all five- to seven-hundred kilograms supported off the ground, but don’t try this at home.
However, this method was not required for the cow in the tree because the cow, a heifer in fact about eighteen months old, was standing on solid ground when I arrived. The only trauma she suffered for her misadventure, apart from extreme surprise, was in the form of rope burns from where the farmer hoisted her back up to ground level. If the rope had snapped and she had fallen to the ground, it would have been disastrous whatever method was used – especially if anyone was underneath.
A cow stuck up a tree was a case that I thought would be unique. But within months of my moving to a new area in 1989 the local evening paper reported a similar case, where the fire brigade had had to rescue another cow stuck in a tree. I was rather surprised and a little disappointed when I read about the other case.
It got me thinking though – this was yet another phenomenon that had never been described at university for some reason. There are plenty of other conditions that are relatively rare but which are dealt with in detail in the veterinary course just in case one sees a case in one’s career. Perhaps cows in trees should be added to the veterinary curriculum.
Chapter 18
Henry and the bullock
The fastest veterinary student in the North
One summer’s day, I was asked to go and look at a bullock (a castrated bull) with a wart growing on his chest. I took a student named Henry with me because I had a few interesting jobs on that afternoon. Henry came to see what there was to do and it turned out he would remember this bullock for the rest of his life.
We arranged to meet the farmer at the field at three o’clock, but when we arrived there, although we could see the bullock at the top of this field, the farmer wasn’t present. He had obviously been there earlier because there was a rope halter left hanging over the gate. I said to Henry, ‘Let’s go’ and I picked up the halter. We climbed over the gate and walked up the hillside towards the black and white Friesian beast, standing near a few bushes and just below a stone wall at the far end. We could see clearly that this animal was large and quite mature, perhaps about eighteen months old or so and, as we approached, we could see a growth bulging out through the hair underneath his chest. When we were close enough, I bent over to have a better look.
Now, having been to university for five years, I immediately spotted that this wasn’t a bullock at all; he wasn’t castrated but was an entire bull. Friesian bulls are not the quietest breed of bull and at eighteen months of age, they can be decidedly stroppy. Castration is done to make them more docile.
I immediately said to Henry, ‘Watch out, Henry, this is not a bullock at all, he’s a bull …’
Then, right at that moment, the bull charged at us. What Henry and I did next was the right thing and it probably saved us, because we split up: I dashed to the left and Henry shot to the right. Fortunately, the bull also did the right thing – he went after Henry.
Henry ran towards the nearby row of hawthorn bushes and leapt through a gap, closely followed by the bull. Henry could do nothing but turn around and jump back through another gap, followed again by the bull. The bull then stopped and looked at me. Those who know me will vouch for the fact that I am not exactly fat, but I think I was pushing my luck trying to hide behind a silver birch tree with a trunk about ten centimetres wide. The bull wasn’t fooled and he charged at me.
Luckily, I still had the rope halter in my hand, and as soon as he was within reach I stepped forward and whacked him on the nose with the halter as hard as I could. He stopped for a second. Then he came at me again, so I whacked him a second time. He paused yet again, then slowly walked in my direction. Further flailing with the rope did nothing useful.
While I was doing this, I was getting helpful advice from Henry. Actually, Henry was doubled up on the floor on the other side of his hawthorn barrier, splitting his sides in laughter at my attempts to try to fend off the bull with a flimsy bit of rope.
After a minute or two, Henry managed to pull himself together, rose to his feet and, controlling his laughter, he decided to make a break for it, running for the bottom of the field. When Henry appeared from behind the bushes, the bull saw his chance and set off after Henry again. Now, Henry was running down a steep slope at the top of this field and he was travelling at such considerable speed that there was no way, absolutely no way, that Henry was going to stop before he reached safety at the bottom of the field. The bull recognised a lost cause when he saw one, so he slowed down in his pursuit and gave up chasing Henry after perhaps twenty or thirty metres. But I now had a head start and I set off in the opposite direction, up the slope. I kid you not, those ten metres up that slope to the stone wall were the hardest ten metres I’d run in my life. I could hear the bull pounding up the slope behind me. When I reached the top, I cleared the stone wall, barbed wire and all, without breaking my stride.
I regained my breath and walked down the length of the adjacent field, now with a solid stone wall safely between me and the bull. The bull still followed me all the way down. Who should I find at the bottom by the gate, talking to Henry? The Lancashire farmer, grinning wildly, and simply commenting, ‘I’ve just been watching your games! He can be a bit playful, can that one!’
So, I just replied, ‘Playful, is that what you call it? Well maybe castrating him and removing those couple of male swellings underneath him will calm him down a bit?’
