Old Dogs New Tricks

by Peter Anderson

  I knew Thomas pretty well. I’d looked after him for a long time, and had realised he was losing his eyesight. He had cataracts in both eyes, and although his cornea were both clear, the milky cloudiness of his lenses, and the wide-open irises, told the story.

  ‘Is he eating?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but he bumps into things when we take him for a walk. It’s not fair.’ That was Sue Ellen.

  ‘Does he mess inside?’ Me.

  ‘Hell no, he’s too clean for that. He always goes outside.’ Alan.

  ‘Is he unhappy?’ Me again, as I listened to his heart. It was slow and steady, no murmuring valves, no irregular rhythm. I listened to his lungs: clear and healthy. I felt his abdomen, and checked his lymph nodes. All clear. His gums were a healthy pink, and Thomas himself seemed unconcerned. Like most dogs he wasn’t so keen to see the vet, but he was a cheerful little chap, and life was OK.

  ‘So, he finds his way outside. What’s he like in the garden?’ I probed further.

  ‘No problem there, he knows his way around.’

  I knew this would be the answer. Many times I followed a similar line of questioning, and nine times out of ten, we came to the same conclusion.

  ‘He doesn’t need putting to sleep,’ I said quietly. ‘He’s a healthy happy dog who can’t see. But he’s got a nose which can smell things that you and I wouldn’t know about. He can find his way round home. Keep him there. He’s got a few years in him yet.’

  Alan and Sue Ellen were a bit doubtful, but obviously relieved. They’d come to the clinic, steeled and prepared for the worst. Now they were taking their little mate home again. They were good solid folk and I knew they would give Thomas every chance.

  And they did. Years later, I ran into them in Bunnings where they both worked. Alan told me that Thomas had indeed remained a happy and contented dog for several years until his natural time came.

  Euthanasing a dog or cat was something I could never do lightly. Some vets don’t worry about it, but I always did, and like Alan and Sue Ellen, many owners really don’t want to do it either. They just think they are doing their furry friend a favour.

  Many times I’ve seen strong men and women, including farmers, completely heartbroken when I gave their old friend the lethal injection, sometimes sobbing uncontrollably. The truth is we build up a tremendous relationship with our animals, whether they’re companions or working dogs. And because their lifespan is so much shorter than ours, we have to go through it time and again.

  So I used to question most people pretty carefully when they made the appointment for a euthanasia. I’d like to think that over my career I might have given at least half of the doomed animals who came to me a longer life. In the majority of cases the owners were really grateful, but some were dubious, and a few downright angry. They didn’t want to spend any more money on their pet, and who was I to tell them it wasn’t necessary?

  Well, tell that to a doctor, and while we as vets are fortunate to have the legal ability to euthanase, I never ever did it without a lot of thought, and often managed to change the client’s mindset.

  If the dog was still eating, not messing inside, still wagging its tail, let’s look at this again. Sore leg? Let’s see why.

  If it’s arthritis, we can help that.

  Blind? Its nose is a wonderful and sensitive organ which lets the dog ‘see’ by smell.

  And when it really was necessary, as I injected the lethal dose, and watched the animal gently close its eyes, I often found myself in tears with the family who loved their furry friend, or the farmer who was losing his best workmate.

  I think I must be a soft bugger.

  VETERINARY VOYEURS — PA

  Working with farmers in a sheep and beef practice makes you very aware how important it is that all cows get in calf and get in calf early. As we’ve said one of our more important jobs has been to pregnancy test cows and identify their pregnancy status. For most of our careers Pete J and I did this manually and this job would occupy most of our day-to-day work from February until May. By the end of this period we were relatively fit but in my case I was a little bit off balance. Manual pregnancy testing involved putting on waterproof leggings and top and inserting a gloved and lubricated hand to the elbow or beyond up the cow’s rectum. I mostly used my left arm for this and my right arm for holding the cow’s tail and steadying myself and the cow, so different muscles were used by each arm. Surprisingly my right elbow these days is the one that seems to have the worst arthritis. As you can imagine doing the job over 1000 times in a day could be reasonably demanding. These days ultrasound scanning has made the job much easier but not nearly as warming.

  How well the job went depended on the facilities, how wild the cows were and how much dry feed they had been on. While the faeces of cows that had been on dry rank pasture were not unpleasantly runny they could impede passage up the rectum and require raking out. Forgetting to bring gloves and lubricant could also make the job a little more difficult and unpleasant — as happened more than once with me when flying. After about 200 cows there were not too many hairs remaining on my left arm.

  The two most common reasons for cows not getting in calf is either they are in poor condition, which often occurs after a hard winter, or they have not been successfully mated. Pregnancy testing time was usually when the farmer first knew that he had a problem and it was then that he also knew he wasn’t going to be able to budget on a good return from his cows in a year’s time. Depending on what we were finding as we were working, we might be in the presence of either a very happy farmer whose happiness improved, or one whose demeanour steadily deteriorated as the job progressed. At times like these I sometimes felt that the farmer was ready to shoot the messenger and I didn’t enjoy having to mark each empty cow I found.

  However, if the pregnancy rate was poor this was always a good opportunity to discuss with the farmer all the options and to start putting in place a plan to either find the cause or, if it was known, to implement management changes.

  There are many reasons why a cow hasn’t successfully mated or doesn’t conceive. As a young vet I spent an inordinate amount of time when first faced with a problem farm looking for mineral and trace element deficiencies and certain diseases, but only occasionally found that one or other of these were contributing to poor in-calf rates. In the majority of cases the cause of poor reproductive performance in a beef herd was either that the mating cows were in very poor condition or that the bulls were not doing their job. So checking on the mating ability of bulls became an annual event on many farms, both to solve low pregnancy rates and to identify potential problems before they occurred.

  We got into bull testing early on. While poor semen is often touted as a major cause of poor bull performance, in reality it is an insignificant reason. We did not waste too much time semen testing bulls as we were far more interested in wanting to know if the bulls were actually capable of doing their job, and we needed them to demonstrate to us that they could. This was carried out simply by restraining a quiet cow in a special stall or ‘cradle’ and watching the bulls mount her and achieve a successful mating. While smell is important for a bull to determine the time of oestrus in a cow, certain sights will also turn him on, just as with us men (PJ comment: PA is speaking for himself here!). All he needs is the rear view of a cow or the sight of another bull mating, or for that matter another cow riding a cow, to get him interested.

  So we tested lots of run bulls — these being bulls of various ages on commercial farms. A herd of 200 cows might run six or seven bulls and we would test these fellows on an annual basis. Twenty to 30 per cent of bulls regularly failed the test. There were a number of reasons for failure including arthritis, penile defects and poor libido. In a study we carried out, just under 30 per cent of all bulls culled had become incapable because of arthritis, and most of these were not identified as having joint pain until they were put through the mating ability test. Trying to balance a couple of tonnes on one hind le
g because the other one hurts means the mating procedure is very difficult and painful. Some bulls would not show any obvious signs of lameness until after an attempt or two at mating, observed while undergoing testing. It is easy to understand a bull’s loss of enthusiasm for the job when he knows sex is going to hurt like hell.

  A similar percentage of all bulls culled had defects of or damage to the penis. Most of these had developed after working for a season or two. The bulk of these penis problems definitely could not be picked up until we put them through the test. Nor could bulls with low libido be identified until tested. Some bulls — in our study 7 per cent of previously untested bulls — just don’t want sex. Unfortunately because they never work they never wear out and invariably come in at the end of the season in great shape. On a number of occasions I have culled a bull because of low libido and the farmer has said, ‘But he’s my best bull.’ No doubt because he had always held his condition while the rest had done all the work.

  It is all very well for a stud breeder to guarantee a bull and replace one that doesn’t perform, but lack of performance is usually not discovered until after the mating season and then you lose a whole year’s production from all the cows the bull doesn’t get in calf. As a result of our encouragement, and pressure from commercial beef breeders, our local stud farmers willingly got involved and had their young sale bulls tested. They appreciated that selling untested bulls was a bit like selling a new car without checking it had an engine, or at least one that started. A lack of libido is the most significant cause of underperformance by a two-year-old bull in his first season — so testing these bulls is important.

  One stud farmer who was rather reluctant to submit his young sale bulls to the test was Alistair Elliot, a most likeable character with many interests besides his Angus stud. He eventually realised he had to do it and on the afternoon of the test had called in his neighbour Andy Peter to help. Andy now owns this stud — but that has nothing to do with this story. This farm, at the bottom end of the Awatere Valley, has its cattle yards, where we were doing the job, right beside the Awatere Valley Road. Alistair was not really that enthused about the whole process and to begin with neither were his bulls. An initial lack of enthusiasm does sometimes happen when testing virgin bulls for the first time but when one eventually gets the idea the rest, except those with a low libido, happily follow. Alistair was probably beginning to think that perhaps he had a lot of low-libido bulls or that this mating ability test, or serving capacity test, or libido test, or whatever you want to call it, was of no use and we were wasting his time.

  In the middle of this period of low activity a car pulled up and a well-dressed man with a cheerful disposition got out, wandered over and as is usually the case on such unplanned meetings remarked immediately about the wonderful weather before introducing himself. If he had been at all observant he would have noticed that little was bright and sunny over this set of cattle yards. Alistair grunted and then asked what he wanted.

  It turned out he was selling fire extinguishers and opened his briefcase and pulled out a folder with all the varieties of extinguisher and the great deals his company had on offer. It was a very inappropriate thing to do. Alistair saw more than red fire extinguishers and ripped into the poor fellow.

  ‘Can’t you see we are extremely busy? The last thing I need right now is a bloody fire extinguisher and the last thing I want to do right now is to put out any bloody fire of any bloody sort. Now get the hell out of it. Bugger off. Go away. Go. Go.’

  By the end he was shouting and the fire extinguisher man rapidly retreated to his car and disappeared up the valley, no doubt hoping that the next farm he called at might be more welcoming.

  Soon after this interlude the bulls started performing and the tension in the yards lifted. In no time we had done all 15 of them. All performed well except for one that had a persistent frenulum, a relatively rare event in a bull of this age. This is a band of tissue that extends from near the tip of the penis to the prepuce or sheath and prevents full extension of the penis. Normally this tissue breaks down at puberty. Alistair was delighted that I could fix it, which we did at the end of the day by simply snipping the tissue after tranquilising the bull.

  The three of us sat down after all the work was finished, feeling at peace with the knowledge that it was a job well done with a good result.

  ‘I’m converted,’ said Alistair. ‘All the bulls worked and you fixed the one that didn’t.’

  Andy and I had a good chuckle when Alistair then said, ‘Oh dear, that poor fire extinguisher man. I guess I was a bit tough on him. Knowing my luck my house will burn down tonight.’

  HELPING THE RAM OUT — PJ

  I am the father of thousands of sheep, although I have never had emails or letters from my grateful offspring.

  It’s an unavoidable fact that most vet stories are about faeces, pus or sex. That’s sort of what a rural vet’s life is all about. This one’s about sex, between sheep but with a human influence.

  Prior to the mid-1980s the world of merino farmers was a pretty closed shop. The original genetics had been imported from Australia and the northern hemisphere many decades earlier. The Australian merino industry, much larger than ours, had a long-held policy of keeping their genetics to themselves, and New Zealand farmers had to make do with what genes we had in this country from those early days.

  But sometime in the early 1980s that changed suddenly, with the breed association in Australia allowing the limited export of merino rams to New Zealand. The industry in both countries is a close one, and personal contacts between the two countries unlocked the door. Two things happened as a consequence. Rams were imported live to New Zealand and frozen semen was permitted to be imported.

  While the first option, live rams, seemed the best bet, the practice quickly found a major stumbling block. Strict quarantine regulations in both countries, designed to keep a variety of pests and diseases out of New Zealand, meant rams had to spend several weeks in quarantine in Australia, prior to export. Unfortunately the Aussie requirements, or perhaps our own MAF ones, were that the ram had to be hard fed in the quarantine station. That means they were fed on dry pellets only, not green growing grass. From memory that was for somewhere between six and twelve weeks.

  The consequence was that soon after arrival in New Zealand many rams were suddenly and disastrously affected with uroliths, or bladder stones. The problem was caused by minerals in the feed and the lack of a balanced diet in the absence of natural herbage.

  A few Marlborough farmers were among the first to import Aussie rams, and several of them ran into trouble. Pete and I made a number of major surgical attempts to save these rams. The stones, about 2–3 millimetres in diameter, would form in the bladder then pass down the urethra. In the ram the urethra is a very long tube with a Z-shaped sigmoid flexure in the middle, and a fine tassel 2–3 centimetres long where it emerges from the tip of the penis. The tassel is designed to liberally spray the semen around in the ewe at mating to enhance the chance of sperm passing into the uterus. But the tassel is also a narrowing of the urethra, and many of the persistent uroliths would lodge there, preventing the ram from urinating.

  These rams were often pretty crook by the time we saw them, either on farm or brought into the clinic by the worried stud farmers. They’d spent a lot of money getting the rams here, and their future breeding programmes depended very much on the success of these animals. For most of these, and there were probably 10 or 15, if we couldn’t massage it out, we would just snip off the tassel complete with stone. Most of the stones still in the bladder, or in the urethra, could then pass. The ram could then piddle and would recover quickly.

  However, a couple had more serious blockages, further up the urethra, mostly around the zig-zag flexure in the middle of the ram’s penis. These created a real problem. We would sedate or anaesthetise the ram to prevent spasms in the urethra, pass a catheter to the flexure, straighten that anatomical feature out by extending the pen
is, then try to flush the stones back up with pressurised fluid up the catheter. For some this worked, but we still had to remove the stones from the bladder, a significant operation in a ram. Full anaesthetic, incise the skin, then the abdominal midline, locate the bladder, incise into that, remove the stones (often many, like gravel) then suture the bladder so it was watertight and repair the abdominal wound. We would then watch the animal closely for several days, while keeping it on antibiotics, pain relief and muscle relaxants to help any remaining stones pass.

  It was major stuff for the vets, the ram and of course for the farmer, who had invested a few thousand dollars on this ram.

  On one occasion a ram was brought to the clinic by a worried farmer, a stud breeder. He left it with us, and we went to work. The stones were irretrievably stuck in the urethra, somewhere near the sigmoid flexure. We had it on the operating table in the clinic for a couple of hours and had cleared out the bladder, but we still couldn’t get a catheter through the urethra, which is a pretty small tube. We rang the farmer, with Jill, our nurse, dialling the number and holding the phone to my ear.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hamish, I just can’t achieve this. It’s beyond me.’

  Hamish (not his real name) was not only unhappy, he was desperate and angry. He only just stopped short of calling both Pete A and me incompetent, and Pete said something pretty stern in reply. A vascular surgeon may have been able to cut and securely suture that very fine tube, but it was too much for us. Both Pete and I took pride in our work and thought we were good tidy surgeons, so it hurt a lot to be talked to like that, and Hamish was not only our client, but also our friend.

  Sadly that ram was euthanased. Hamish was pretty upset at losing his investment, and we felt bad that we couldn’t save the ram. But there was an upside. After many rams developed such problems the Aussies decided to allow the export of frozen semen from their sheep, and New Zealand merino farmers were to be the major recipients.