A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons

by Julian Norton

  ‘Heavens above, she can’t half stand up now!’ Wilf guffawed as he burst out laughing. ‘She can run as well!’

  He was almost rolling around with laughter in the grass, an enormous grin all over his face.

  ‘I’ll have to get your halter tomorrow when she comes in for milking! We’ll never catch her now!’

  And off he went, shaking his head with amusement as he clambered back into the tractor. ‘We’ll never catch her now!’ he continued to chuckle to himself as he started the engine.

  * * *

  Another condition that affects milking cows and often goes hand in hand with staggers is called milk fever. Whilst it sounds to the untrained ear like a serious case of lactose intolerance, it is actually caused by a deficiency in calcium. The signs can be similar to staggers and, to complicate matters, both magnesium and calcium deficiency can occur together. However, milk fever is less acute, the treatment is not quite so urgent and the response is not quite as dramatic as it was in Wilf’s cow. The low calcium is a result of the large and sudden demand for the mineral in the cow’s body, soon after she delivers her calf and starts to produce copious amounts of milk. The result is a muscular weakness that makes the cow unable to stand. It can be serious, because a cow that stays lying on the ground quickly develops all sorts of secondary problems and the outlook deteriorates over just a day or so.

  A cow weighing over half a tonne, which cannot stand, can become a logistical nightmare. This was more than evident when I was called early on a Saturday morning to a farm on the far side of Hawnby, a charming but remote little village in the middle of the Hambleton Hills. The cows had been let out for the first night of the year and one, whose name was Buttercup the Third, had not come back in at milking time. The cows would usually stand side by side in the byre to be milked, each one in its correct place, so it was pretty obvious if one of them wasn’t there. Brian, the farmer, had set off on his quad bike to find the missing bovine. The field in which the cows had started their grazing season was on a steep slope dotted with gorse bushes.

  After much exploration of the hillside, Brian had found Buttercup the Third lying at the bottom of the bank, surrounded by trees and half submerged in an icy stream.

  She must have succumbed to the weakening effect of milk fever whilst lying near to the top of the bank and then, as she struggled to rise when the rest of the herd ambled in to be milked, her weak and wobbly legs must have failed her and she had rolled all the way down to the bottom. One could only try to picture the scene of a large and ungainly cow, legs and udder flailing in all directions, somersaulting down the slope, colliding with the occasional gorse bush. Had this happened in the evening as the local pub had shut its doors, the village drinkers would surely have stopped and rubbed their eyes several times to make sure it wasn’t a drunken apparition!

  But, regardless of how many rolls it had taken and who had seen her on her way down, Buttercup the Third was in a pickle. Breaking every health and safety rule that existed, I perched on the back of Brian’s quad bike to reach the stricken cow. I carried all the essential bits of equipment in a plastic bucket. I had the things I would need to make a basic examination and the things I thought I would need to treat the most likely causes of her problem. I took my trusty stethoscope to listen to the heart, lungs and rumen, a thermometer and rectal glove so I could feel inside her abdomen. I also took a flutter valve, bottles of calcium and some needles. I shoved some syringes and other bottles of medicine into my various pockets. I did not want to have to make a second journey up and down the bank.

  The diagnosis was fairly straightforward – the swan neck, weak rumen contractions and subnormal temperature were all classic signs of milk fever, although I suspected that, having been sitting in a stream all night, she would have had a low temperature whatever the original cause. I connected up the bottle of calcium to the flutter valve as Brian held her head. She was weak and there was no need for a halter to keep her still. This was lucky, as I’d forgotten to put one in my bucket anyway, so there was no other option than for Brian to cling on to her neck for dear life. The first bottle ran in smoothly and quickly (the mixture of calcium and magnesium together had very little risk of stopping the heart in the way pure magnesium would have done), followed by a second and then a third. In most cases three bottles would be enough to get a cow suffering from milk fever up onto her feet and wandering off to find her friends. But Buttercup the Third showed no signs of moving. There is a sensible limit to how many bottles of calcium it is safe to give a cow over a short period, so I decided to leave it at three and come back to see her again later on that day. Given that some of Buttercup’s symptoms were bound to be due to hypothermia brought on by having been in the water for so long, I couldn’t be certain exactly how low her calcium levels actually were. It would be risky to give her too much on the first visit.

  I told Brian that I would be back, after Saturday morning surgery had finished.

  He looked gloomy, mainly because his cow was still lying in a river, but also because he had tickets to watch Middlesbrough play at home that afternoon. I tried to be optimistic about the chances for Buttercup and for Brian’s chances of making it to the Riverside for three o’clock, but by the time I had completed morning surgery and negotiated the winding lanes up to Hawnby for the second time, Brian still looked almost as dejected as his cow.

  ‘She’s not up, Julian. She’s still in the water. She’s not even tried to stand.’

  Brian’s downbeat assessment was quite a contrast to the positive and cheerful attitude of Wilf when his cow was in a similar position, but both Brian and I knew it was a bad sign. A cow that rose to her feet promptly after the medication would always carry a very good prognosis, but the longer she was down, the worse the outlook. The fact that she was lying in a stream and at the bottom of a steep bank made her chances of recovery even more remote. We both knew she might never stand again.

  I tried to be positive.

  ‘Not to worry, Brian, I’ll give her another three bottles straight into her vein’ (that made six in total, so far) ‘… and some extra phosphorus too. She’ll be fine whilst you go to the footie this afternoon. If she needs more, give me a ring and I can come back later this evening.’

  ‘Right you are, Julian,’ he replied glumly.

  We loaded up the required bottles and I found somewhere to perch on the quad bike for another death-defying ride through the gorse bushes and down the bank. Buttercup the Third was in the same place as before, half in the stream and still lying down. She did look a bit brighter and her large, brown eyes seemed to widen as she saw me clamber off the quad with my bucket of clanking bottles and orange rubber tubing. It was unclear whether this was with excitement of a possible cure or the fear of me sticking my large needle into her neck again.

  Half an hour later I’d emptied three more bottles of sticky calcium solution into her jugular vein, followed by twenty millilitres of phosphorus and a syringe of steroids to try and help the bruising she must have suffered as she rolled down the bank. She was sitting on her brisket, but had made no attempts to stand. It was almost as if she was relaxing in the stream and didn’t even want to move. Comfortable as she seemed, though, her refusal to rise was worrying and Brian’s trip to the Riverside was a very distant prospect.

  ‘Well, you’ve done all you can, Julian. You’ve done your best. It’s down to her now.’

  We clambered back onto the quad bike for the trip back up to the farm.

  Poor Buttercup and poor Brian. I felt awful that my medicines hadn’t achieved what I had wanted, but offered some reassurance that it might take a while for their full effects to develop.

  My beeper intervened at this point. It was a message about a lame cat that needed my attention at the surgery. I had to go. Before I went, I implored Brian to go to the game, to take his mind off Buttercup.

  ‘Give me a ring later tonight and I can come and give her some more calcium,’ I offered.

  I told him ho
w I had once given a downer cow (that is, one that can’t get up) eighteen bottles of calcium before she eventually rose to her feet. The farmer, on that occasion, was utterly unconvinced that it was worth trying so many visits and so many bottles. I had to promise that all the visits would be free if I was unsuccessful. In this case, though, Brian wasn’t bothered how many visits it took, just as long as his cow got better. As I left the farm, I knew he would be missing the football match that afternoon. Even if he were to go he wouldn’t enjoy it, in the knowledge that the fate of his cow hung in the balance.

  Half an hour later, back at the practice, I was treating the lame cat. It had an abscess on its leg as a result of a bite from another cat – a frequent occurrence in springtime when cats stay out late into the evening and get into trouble.

  Even though it was painful, it was easy to fix with injections and tablets and I knew this feline patient would be feeling better very quickly, as soon as the medication started to work.

  I was frustrated that I hadn’t resolved Buttercup’s problems just as quickly and easily. I felt as if I had let down Brian and his cow, but the rest of my afternoon was busy and my beeper was rarely quiet, so I didn’t have much time to dwell on the recumbent cow and the inadequacies of my treatment.

  I didn’t hear from Brian again until the middle of Sunday morning.

  ‘Julian, I wonder if you could just come up and have another look at Buttercup, please? If you’re not too busy, that is.’

  Things had calmed down and, after I had finished attending to the inpatients at the practice, I set off, my car boot replenished with many more brown bottles of calcium solution.

  On a lovely sunny morning, the drive to Hawnby is wonderful. The road twists and turns and halfway along there is an enormous hill up onto the moors called Sneck Yate. The drive itself was so pleasant that it hardly seemed like work, as deer hopped out of the woods and across the road in front of the car and horse riders kindly waved me past. I couldn’t enjoy the journey as much as I usually did though, as I was certain I would have to euthanase the hopeless case that I would see when I got to the bottom of the wooded bank for the third time in twenty-four hours.

  However, to my surprise, when I arrived at the farm Brian’s face wore a happier expression. Instead of showing me to the quad bike for the off-road journey I had been expecting, he ushered me through the low-ceilinged cow byre and into the fold yard. It was full of straw and there, sitting comfortably in the middle, chewing on a mouthful of silage, was Buttercup the Third, happy and content.

  ‘I thought you might like to see your old friend,’ said Brian, with a wry smile.

  ‘Blimey! How did she get home?’

  I was amazed. Surely she hadn’t walked all the way up the same steep, gorse-covered bank down which she had rolled over a day ago?

  ‘Well, Julian, after you’d gone, I thought about what I could do to help. I knew she had no chance if I couldn’t get her home, so I gave my brother-in-law a ring. He came to give me a hand and we went down the road to the little bridge – the one on the way to Helmsley. We got the chainsaw and took down the hedge so I could get my tractor in. We cut down some holes in the next two hedges and I managed to get my tractor nearly up beside her. We pulled her out and I scooped her up in the bucket.’ By this, Brian meant the big metal scoop on the front of the tractor. ‘We took her out onto the road and then brought her over the bridge, up the hill and all the way home,’ he explained.

  For the second time, I could only imagine the expressions on the faces of any villagers who had been sitting in the garden of the pub as a cow came along the road sitting in the front loader of a tractor!

  But she was safely returned and had been deposited in a clean, comfy, flat and dry straw yard and she was immeasurably better. She had even been standing up earlier that morning, reported Brian.

  ‘I don’t think she needs any more medicine,’ he said. ‘I just thought you’d like to see her. See what you think.’

  Needless to say, Brian had missed the match and had spent his afternoon cutting holes in hedges big enough to fit his tractor through, then repairing the holes again with fencing so the rest of the cows wouldn’t escape.

  I patted Buttercup on the head and injected her with another dose of phosphorus, before preparing another syringe-full for Brian to inject the next day. We both knew she was, quite literally, out of the woods.

  ‘How was the cat, by the way, Julian?’ asked Brian as I climbed back into the car.

  ‘Pretty bad actually, Brian, but I managed to fix her. She only needed two injections!’

  Fire Brigade Work

  Attending farm animal emergencies, like a cow with staggers or a lambing sheep, is often, in veterinary parlance, referred to as ‘fire brigade work’. Some in the veterinary world see this as old-fashioned and the modern protagonists of the profession regard ‘herd health’ as the way forwards. Veterinary surgeons wielding laptops rather than stethoscopes should have advisory meetings with farmers to discuss nutrition and vaccination, so emergencies do not occur.

  In theory this is a great idea, but for small farms like those belonging to Wilf or Brian, providing differential feeding strategies for cows at different stages of their lactation is completely unfeasible. Most of our farmers already use pneumonia vaccination regimes to good effect, so my early forays into the world of ‘herd health planning’ largely fell on deaf ears. Most of my clients were not convinced and traditional fire brigade work still remains a big part of our daily work.

  One visit, not long after I had become a partner at Skeldale, turned out to be more of a ‘fire brigade’ job than expected.

  Harward and David were elderly brothers who ran a small dairy herd on a farm called Village Farm, just outside Thirsk on the way to York. They were both short men and were from the generation of farmers who were always immaculately dressed, wearing a jacket and tie underneath the perennial flat cap. Or rather, Harward’s outfits were always topped by a flat cap, as he was the brother who oversaw the outside work. His brother David was in charge of domestic duties – cleaning, washing, cooking, making cups of tea and organizing the paperwork for the farm. It was a curious arrangement.

  Our work here was the typical stuff of a small dairy herd: TB testing, cases of mastitis, milk fevers and the odd calving. But the most regular job of all, as it was on many farms like this, was to visit every three weeks to disbud a handful of calves. Calves grow small rubbery buds that will develop into large horns by the time the animal reaches adulthood. Horns are a nuisance because they can easily get knocked and damaged when cows are feeding or going into the milking parlour. More importantly, a cow with horns uses them to bully the other cows, by prodding them in the side. This can cause all sorts of injuries, so it is good practice to remove them when the animals are little calves of about six weeks old, when the job is simpler and less traumatic.

  It is a simple enough job. Local anaesthetic is injected into a groove near the horn, where it numbs the nerve that supplies the horn and the top of the head. It takes about ten minutes to take effect and lasts for a few hours, so each calf is numbed first, then we go back round and burn off the horn buds, one calf at a time.

  The burning is done using a gas-powered metal burner, with heat coming out of the end, a bit like old-fashioned curling tongs, although with bigger flames. The burner is lit soon after arrival at the farm, so it gets a chance to heat up to the right temperature – it doesn’t work very well if it isn’t hot enough.

  On this particular day, Sue, one of the best vets that I have ever worked with, had put her initials next to the visit to disbud calves at Village Farm and she was there with characteristic promptness and enthusiasm. The brothers liked Sue. She was a whirling dervish of energy and could always put a spring in the step of an elderly farmer. The fact that she could not involve herself with their favourite topic of discussion – cricket – was only a minor inconvenience, and Sue was always welcome. They were happy to miss out on this discussion when S
ue burst onto their farm.

  Everything was normal at the beginning and the burner was lit up after the usual search for matches. To avoid it being kicked over by the calves, Sue had positioned the burner in the next pen, where it was also out of the draught coming down the passage. Each one of the calves was injected and the conversation was in full flow.

  Suddenly the mood changed, as smoke appeared from the neighbouring pen and it became evident that something was on fire. It was in the days before mobile phones, so David rushed into the house to call the fire brigade and immediately Sue and Harward stopped what they were doing to tackle the fire.

  The burner had set fire to the straw and the wooden feed trough was alight, too. With luck, Sue managed to grab the burner and pull it out of the blaze, turn it off and sling it into the grass outside the Dutch barn. Harward, normally cool and calm under the pressure of a sick cow or a difficult calving, panicked and ran off in the opposite direction, presumably looking for water.

  By the time he returned with a half-full bucket, the flames were near the wooden roof struts and disaster was close at hand. Half a bucket of water didn’t achieve very much and Harward ran off again to get more, shouting at the top of his voice.

  Luckily, on this particular morning the fire brigade in Thirsk was not very busy. Sirens were heard, and blue lights soon appeared outside the farm. The firemen unravelled their hosepipes just as flames were lapping the top of the calf pen. Disaster had been averted.

  After cups of tea all round, two of them fortified with brandy, the firemen were on their way and the rest of the job was completed.

  Back at the practice, there was some concern. The senior partner was blustering around.

  ‘Where’s Sue got to? She’s been gone all morning and she only had half a dozen calves to disbud! She needs to get back here and finish off the ops list! What’s taking her so long?’