A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons

by Julian Norton

  Now it was of utmost importance to trace her owners. I had my morning appointments to do, but by the time I had completed my list of consultations Rachel, the head nurse, had tracked them down and I had a phone call to make.

  The best bit about being a veterinary surgeon is seeing the animals feel better. The second best bit is relaying this news to worried owners. It was no different this time. I need not have worried about jumping headlong into serious orthopaedic surgery without the prior consent of Penny’s owner. Elaine was overjoyed that Penny had been found, that I had operated so promptly and that she was now doing well. Penny had escaped from the family garden, she explained, as pointers tend to do, and had evidently run off in search of adventure. The collar that she usually wore bearing her name, address and telephone number must have got lost in a hedge as Penny raced around the fields of North Yorkshire. Elaine was at the practice to see her beloved dog within the hour, just as soon as she had updated her details on the microchip database.

  I made another phone call, too, this time to Sheila. She had spent so much time with Penny at the side of the road and was delighted to hear that the story had ended happily.

  It wasn’t quite the end of the story. The biggest test would be the healing of Penny’s leg. Over the next few months I saw a lot of her, removing the sutures from her wound and managing her recovery. I removed the pin under anaesthetic three months after the accident. The bone was straight, firm and pain-free. The power of the body to re-form from a mangled mess never fails to astonish me. As surgeons, we are simply there to offer nature a helping hand.

  I still see Penny regularly. It is a joy to see her happy and well and back to normal. Penny, though, seems stubbornly oblivious to my involvement in saving her and her leg, and resolutely refuses to wag her tail in my direction.

  I blame it on the morphine.

  Ripe Tomatoes

  The end of springtime signals the end of lambing time. The young lambs run and jump around in the spring fields, a summer of growing and getting fat ahead of them. But as shepherds breathe a sigh of relief, beef suckler farmers, whose cows have calved in the spring, are beginning to think about the condition of their bull. Once summer arrives the bull will be in action, making sure the cows become pregnant again. Modern, well-managed herds like to have their bulls tested for fertility before putting them back with the cows, so that no time is lost if there is a problem. This is a relatively simple procedure, with the right skills and equipment.

  One of our suckler herds had experienced a huge problem the previous year. Out of a batch of about fifty cows, that had spent the summer with a single bull, not one calf was born. The bull was infertile. It was a disaster. The following spring, the farm manager asked if I would fertility test all five Aberdeen Angus bulls, to check they were okay. I didn’t have the required tools, and I hadn’t done this job before, but a few months previously, at a veterinary conference, I had met a veterinary surgeon called Fraser from a practice over in the Yorkshire Wolds. He had all the kit and all the expertise, and had offered his services should the need ever arise. I found his number and gave him a call. He was happy to help.

  So, on a lovely sunny spring day I found myself waiting on the farm chatting to the farmers, while a collection of onlookers, including someone’s ten-year-old son, gathered to watch the spectacle that was the fertility testing of five enormous bulls. It wasn’t long before an estate car appeared, driving down the daffodil-lined farm track. In those days, the seniority of a large animal vet could be measured by the size of his estate car and Fraser’s did not disappoint.

  He pulled up right next to the cattle crush where the first bull was waiting patiently, utterly oblivious to what was in store for him.

  Fraser leapt out of the vehicle and, with great gusto, shook hands with everyone.

  ‘What a glorious day for a job like this!’ he enthused in a soft Scottish accent.

  It was, indeed, a beautiful day. The warm spring sunshine made it a joy to be outside in the fresh air. It was almost possible to see the grass growing. I hoped this spring feeling would make the bulls turn their attention to the task in hand.

  As we spoke, a very glamorous lady appeared from the passenger seat of the estate car.

  ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I must introduce my wife. This is Kirsty.’

  Kirsty had come along to act as assistant. Successful fertility testing requires the help of someone who knows what to do and Fraser had worked out that neither the farm staff nor I had ever done this kind of thing before. I was hoping to learn a lot today (Fraser had assured me on the phone that, having watched five bulls being tested one after another, I too would soon be an expert), but it was sure to run more smoothly with some experienced help.

  Before long everything was set up. There was a table, on which there was a microscope with a heated panel to keep the semen sample at the correct temperature. There was also an incubator so the various other liquids could be kept at the right temperature too, because if at any stage during the testing process the sample was to become too hot, or too cold, the sperm would simply die and give an erroneously negative test. The main bit of equipment though, was the electro-ejaculator. It was a yellow, white and metallic-coloured torpedo-shaped device, about the size of a small marrow. It was amply lubricated and carefully inserted into the bull’s rectum. A small electrical current was applied to stimulate the prostate and produce a semen sample. It sounds horrendous, but the modern equipment is actually very gentle and the bulls do not mind the procedure at all.

  However, before the extraordinary moment when the electro-ejaculator was brought into action, Fraser palpated the bull’s testicles and internal, accessory sex organs. He dictated copious notes to his glamorous assistant, in much the same way as a dentist dictates to the dental nurse while probing your teeth.

  ‘Julian, the testicles need to be the consistency of ripe tomatoes – not too soft, you see?’ Fraser explained. I made a mental note: ‘ripe tomatoes’.

  He then went on to measure the circumference of the bull’s scrotum, all the time explaining what he was doing.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t squeeze them too hard.’

  ‘Okay, must remember not to squeeze them too hard,’ I repeated inside my head.

  ‘If you squeeze them too hard, you get a measurement that is too low. Scrotal circumference is strongly correlated with reproductive performance.’

  I made another mental note. I was already the father of two sons but until this moment, I had never given scrotal circumference a second thought.

  After this part of the assessment, we all got the feeling that the big moment had arrived. First, though, there was another little job to be done. Kirsty opened the side door of the cattle crush, bent down and pulled a pair of shiny, curved scissors from her pocket.

  ‘I always like to give them a quick trim,’ she explained as she set about trimming all the extraneous hair from the bull’s prepuce.

  ‘There. That’s much better.’

  She stood up and admired her work, which was, it had to be said, immaculate. The raised eyebrows from the assembled crowd did not have time to resume their normal position, as it was now time for the real action. Fraser carefully inserted the probe and everybody, including ten-year-old Charlie, watched with amazement. As Fraser fiddled with the control panel, providing exactly the correct level of stimulation in a rhythmic fashion, the bull was gently coaxed into action. Kirsty positioned the catching tube. It was conveniently attached to a funnel on the end of a long plastic handle so she could hold it safely under the bull, right in front of his penis, ready to catch the sample. Lo and behold, after a few minutes, the bull ejaculated and Kirsty expertly collected it all in her tube. With much excitement, Fraser switched off the machine and exclaimed: ‘Come on, Julian. It’s time to look down the microscope!’

  I hurried after him.

  ‘There’s not a moment to be wasted,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘We need to look at it before it gets too cold.�
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  Off we scurried towards the little office where the microscope and incubator had been set up. Once we arrived, Fraser quickly dropped little blobs of the sample onto several glass slides. Some had tiny glass cover slips placed carefully over them, while others were mixed with purple dye to be analysed later. That way the shape and structure of each sperm could be checked in detail. The most pressing job, though, was to check for motility and the first sample proved to be superb.

  ‘What a corker! Look at this!’

  Fraser beckoned me over to the microscope. I could see swirling, dark grey patterns, moving just like the smoke from a leafy bonfire on a gusty day.

  ‘That’, explained Fraser, ‘is a four out of five for gross motility. It is very good. This is a great sample. A beauty!’

  He explained all about gross motility and progressive motility and the other morphological tests he would need to do later, back at his practice.

  We repeated the process with the other four bulls but I was already captivated by the simplicity of the testing and the immediacy of the results. I had always loved the science of cytology – looking at cells down a microscope. To see the basic building blocks of a body is an amazing thing, but to see the cells that could be the beginning of the life of a new calf was utterly breathtaking. I was hooked.

  After we had finished the final bull, I thanked Fraser and Kirsty for their time and enthusiasm and for Fraser’s tuition. Fraser assured me again that, with some more reading and the right equipment, I would soon be competent at doing the tests myself. I rushed straight back to the practice to search the internet for the required kit and, by the end of the week, I had also enrolled on a course. I would soon be knowledgeable and equipped enough to test all the bulls of Thirsk.

  The Perils of Grass

  By the middle of April, cattle farmers are thinking about letting their cattle out to graze. The precise timing of this takes good judgement, for whilst there is an impatience to get the animals back to their natural diet of grass and to free them from the confines of the farm buildings, there can be some nasty meteorological stings in the tail of spring, even after April has passed. If the weather turns bad after the cattle are let out, or if the paddocks are too boggy, the consequences can be serious. A field of delicate spring grass can quickly be churned up into a sea of mud, rendering it useless for much of the summer. The timing is critical. One wise old farmer advised me, following the advice given to him by his father, not to consider winter to be over (in this case, ‘winter’ referring to the time that cattle are housed, rather than simply one of the four seasons) until May had passed! This seemed remarkably pessimistic to me but the philosophy did, at least, ensure that there was always sufficient winter fodder on this farm to keep the cattle well fed, even through the worst and wettest of springs.

  Eventually though, coldness and wetness gives way to warmth and cattle are let out of their gloomy sheds and turned out to grass. They rush out with great excitement, bucking and kicking in a very ungainly but completely joyful fashion. It is just the same when young lambs go outside for the first time. It is an exciting time for a vet too, although we don’t usually run and jump as we make our way around our calls. Lighter nights, longer days and warmer hands for the next six months makes spring a joyous time to be a vet in mixed practice.

  The change of diet for cows from silage to grass makes its own special type of veterinary excitement.

  In some ways the digestive system of a ruminant is extremely robust. The rumen is a large fermentation chamber, full of microbes capable of digesting all sorts of plant material that other animals simply would not be able to digest. It is a symbiotic relationship – the bugs get a free home inside the rumen of this gentle creature and the cow gets its food digested more easily. The number and type of bugs adapt to the type of food that a ruminant is fed, so whilst the system works very well for both cow and microbe, it struggles to cope with a sudden change in diet. Therefore, the most common problem facing a cow after it heads out to the grassy fields is sloppy, green diarrhoea. This is just a mild inconvenience to the cow and is far outweighed by the benefits of this nutritious leafy food. However, for a veterinary surgeon, it makes any job around the back end of a cow a very messy job indeed. The loose, green faeces splatter everywhere and leave indelible greenish-brown stains that have resulted in many shirts being condemned to the rag bag. Whole herd blood testing, where blood samples are taken from the tail vein of every cow (to test for brucellosis or other diseases) should not be undertaken at this time of the year!

  Minor inconveniences aside, there are some more significant problems that can arise as cattle and sheep gorge themselves on the glut of new spring grass.

  The most serious of these is called staggers. The warmth of the late April sun on the wet ground makes the grass grow very quickly. After a long winter indoors eating straw and silage, a huge field of thick green grass is a delicious prospect for a cow, but while it looks lush it is, in fact, often depleted in magnesium. The cow quickly fills its stomach with copious quantities of grass that has a high water content and very little magnesium. The body holds no reserves of this mineral so the level in the blood can fall very quickly. The result of this hypomagnesaemia is severe – acute collapse, tremors and convulsions shortly followed by death. As veterinary surgeons, we rarely see them at the staggering stage since the progression of the disease is very rapid, but the cow can be saved by very prompt treatment with intravenous and subcutaneous magnesium solution.

  In the days when there were cattle in every field around Thirsk, a warm, damp day at the end of April would spell a constant stream of visits to see cows with staggers. The receptionists were well briefed in the urgency of these cases and would come rushing to find the nearest vet, who would stop whatever they were doing and leap straight into the car.

  Such calls were always fraught with excitement and tension. ‘Hypomag’ cases were satisfying to treat, as long as we were quick. The diagnosis was easy and the response to a bottle of diluted magnesium and calcium solution into the jugular vein, followed by another under the skin, would bring a miraculous recovery, but only if we got there in time.

  One of the most spectacular responses I ever saw was in a black and white Friesian cow, belonging to a happy dairy farmer called Wilf. We visited Wilf’s farm regularly. Several of his cows, although very well cared for, seemed to suffer from one mineral deficiency or another on a fairly frequent basis. On this particular evening the affected cow was stuck in a field near the banks of the River Swale.

  Wilf met me as I drove into the farmyard and waved me towards the field. It was always easier to drive right up to the patient if we could, so we had all our tackle to hand.

  ‘Oh! She’s not very good!’ shouted Wilf, as I wound down the car window. ‘She’s shaking and trembling. She’s in the field over there. You’ll have to follow me. I’ll go in the tractor.’

  ‘Can we keep her still, Wilf?’ I called, worried we would be chasing a staggering beast round a field with a river running through it. ‘Have you got a halter? I’ll need to inject her into the vein.’

  ‘Oh no! She can’t stand up!’ laughed Wilf, and off he went to clamber into the tractor, chuckling to himself and shaking his head, ‘Oh no, she can’t stand up.’

  He always laughed, even in the face of desperation. Like I said, he was a happy farmer.

  Wilf’s grandson held the gate open as I headed off across the field, following the tractor. The cow was lying on her side near the river and it was very clear that she had no chance of standing up. She was more likely to tremor and shake herself into the river and float away than she was to get to her feet. Nevertheless, I put a halter on, if nothing else to try to keep her head still so I could give her the medicine that she needed so urgently. Wilf wrapped the end of the rope halter around the front of his tractor to keep her fastened.

  The cow was very close to death. The treatment was to drip nearly half a litre of magnesium solution very slowly into the jug
ular vein, using a long orange rubber tube called a flutter valve. The flutter valve connected to the bottle of magnesium at one end and the needle in the vein at the other. It required a steady hand to keep the needle in place, and at the same time to hold the bottle up to the right height. The higher the bottle is held, the faster the magnesium solution runs in, so as well as keeping one hand on the needle and the other on the bottle, it is also crucial to keep one eye on the cow and the other on the rate at which the bottle is emptying. If the solution is run in too quickly, which is easy to do under the pressure of the situation, the medicine that can save the cow’s life will stop its heart and cause a fatal heart attack. Too slow, and the effects of insufficient magnesium will kill her. The stakes are high.

  So, as the sun was setting and the evening chill taking over from the relative warmth of the afternoon, I watched the elixir glugging in at what I hoped was just the correct rate. The cow stopped shaking and raised herself from lying flat on her side so that she was sitting up. Moments later, and before I had chance to complete the infusion, she rose like Lazarus and charged off, still with the halter fastened snugly around her nose and ears (not so securely fastened to the tractor after all), leaving me with my arm raised above my head, a dangling flutter valve hanging from the bottle in my hand.