A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons

by Julian Norton

  ‘Julian. It’s amazing! Millie’s eating food, from my hand. It doesn’t hurt her at all and she’s not spilled any!’

  I went to have a look. Sure enough, Millie was sitting up, wagging her tail and licking her lips. I went into her kennel and knelt down next to her. As usual, she rested her head on my knee and lifted her eyes, full of trust. She had done well. The cancer that would otherwise have brought her life to a premature end had been removed, and hopefully she would still be around to gather the sheep for next year’s lamb sales.

  It was as if Rodney now expected miracles, but the third time I treated one of his animals – this time a strong lamb called, appropriately, Lamby – it seemed unlikely that I would be able to live up to his high expectations. The lamb had been born in the springtime but now it was autumn and Lamby – a gimmer lamb (a young female, the ovine equivalent to a heifer) – was nicely grown and sturdy. She was destined to enter the flock and become one of Rodney’s best breeding ewes. But Lamby had developed a big problem. A problem as big as half a cucumber. It was a rectal prolapse. This is a condition whereby the rectum pushes out through the anus, a bit like a sock being turned inside out. Lamby’s prolapse was various shades of purple and red and I knew it was serious. I had already replaced it once the previous day and, now that it had come out again, the delicate tissues were looking very damaged. A prolapse that doesn’t want to stay put is a difficult proposition.

  As Rodney lifted Lamby out of his car boot and carried her into my consulting room, I felt an increasing feeling of despair, wondering what exactly I could do next. To replace the prolapse a second time was risky. The membranes were becoming increasingly thin and friable which meant that rupture was a strong possibility. This would be a disaster. As I lifted Lamby off the table and onto the floor so she didn’t leap off (she still was full of energy, the contentment at her head-end belying the serious pathology at her rear) this was exactly what happened. The fragile membrane of her exposed rectum tore, leaving a two-inch long hole, through which her small intestines now spilt. It had become a prolapse within a prolapse.

  The appearance of small intestines, with all their verminous determination to escape, from the back of a sheep usually leads a veterinary surgeon to reach very quickly for the strong barbiturate solution used for euthanasia. It is characteristically blue, so that it is not mistaken for anything else, and amongst vets is colloquially referred to as ‘blue juice’. I looked at Rodney for guidance. Most farmers that I knew would not have entertained the notion of operating on a sheep in this perilous position, but Rodney was not like most farmers.

  ‘If yo’ can fix her, then you’d better crack on. I’ll wait artside,’ were his final words, giving me the green light to try and save his sheep.

  What followed was an hour of extremely tense surgery. I had to resect about eight inches of damaged intestine and suture together the separated ends. It was fraught with the risk of infection and wound breakdown and, realistically, the chances of success were close to zero, but I was in the middle of it now and Rodney expected me to do my best. Miraculously, everything went exactly to plan. Lamby woke up from her anaesthetic without complication and Rodney set off back to Dewsbury before lunchtime, with Lamby looking happily out of the rear window of the car boot. I couldn’t possibly charge the procedure out at the normal rate, but I still had to charge Rodney for the medication and materials. Even this probably outweighed Lamby’s commercial value. Most farmers would have pointed straight towards the ‘blue juice’ but not the farmer from the West Riding. I admired the love he had for his animals, and I was glad to have the chance to work with him. The farmer from the West Riding was ‘raight up my street’ too!

  Elsie the Sow

  Chris was passionate about reviving rare breeds of livestock. His first challenge was with a little-known breed of cattle called Whitebred Shorthorns. According to Chris, these cattle were more rare than the giant panda (I thought this might have been because they lived on a diet of white bread – but apparently not!). The breed was a distant relative of the Beef Shorthorn, which ironically was enjoying a surge in popularity, in part because of the beautiful marbled beef it produced. The Whitebred version was few in number, but Chris was doing his bit to keep the breed alive. I had dealt with them on a couple of occasions, pregnancy testing the cows and carrying out their routine TB test, but on none of my visits to his new smallholding had I spotted the pig in a pen, in the corner of the cattle shed. Her name was Elsie.

  Elsie was an Oxford Sandy and Black – another rare breed, sadly in decline. She had previously been mated with a Gloucester Old Spot boar and the litter of piglets that were asleep next to her lengthy udder looked as delicious as they were cute. They were, indeed, destined to make the finest sausages in North Yorkshire. But Chris had bigger plans for Elsie. She was soon to be mated with a boar of the same breed. The piglets would be retained within the herd, allowing the breed to increase in number. No more babies would end up as sausages. The problem was that finding a suitable boar of the same breed to mate with Elsie was not easy. Oxford Sandy and Blacks were few and far between. So, Chris decided to use the alternative method of getting a sow pregnant, namely artificial insemination. Whilst Chris had done some work with pigs in this area before, he wanted some professional assistance and my inseminating skills were called into action.

  Inseminating a sow is not as difficult as it sounds. My first experience of this process was while I was a veterinary student, working on a large pig unit quite close to my home. The days were long and it was hard work, but I learnt a huge amount about pigs, including how to inseminate a sow. I also learnt quite a lot about power-washing pig sheds.

  Throughout my time there, I was closely supervised by the pigman. Pigmen are quite different to other stockmen. They communicate in their own special way, sometimes more at one with their pigs than their fellow humans. The pigman from whom I learnt my pig husbandry skills, spoke in a mixture of words and grunts. Were it not for the jauntily angled flat cap that never left his head, in the dim light of a fattening shed I think he could have been mistaken for one of the stock to which he attended. I have the greatest of admiration for pigmen. My own grandfather was one himself and he truly loved his pigs. It was his influence that first set me on the path towards veterinary medicine. Every time I see a pig (which is not as often as it used to be), I think of my grandfather and inwardly thank him for steering me towards the career that I now love so much.

  So, some twenty-two years later, the skills I learnt from the grunting pigman from Leeds would be put to use. Chris had organized for the delivery of some semen from an Oxford Sandy and Black Boar, along with all the accoutrements that I would need for the procedure. As I unpacked everything when I arrived at his farm, he related how perplexed the postman had been when he had delivered the parcel. There was a large label on the outside of the box proclaiming ‘LIVE SEMEN’. As if this didn’t make the parcel unusual enough, there were two corkscrew-shaped catheters taped to the outside.

  ‘Elsie is mad on heat,’ Chris said, almost beside himself with excitement. ‘I’ve been sitting on her back and she is not budging an inch! Not even making any noises.’

  We both knew that this meant that the timing was exactly right for artificial insemination. The two cardinal signs of a sow being in heat are swelling of the vulva and standing still when the pigman sits on her back. At any other time during the pig’s oestrus cycle, she will squeal and make a great commotion if a person (or, more usually, a boar) tries to sit on her back and will immediately run away. Elsie was perfectly happy when Chris put his full weight on her rump. In fact they both looked as if they were quite enjoying it. Elsie made small, contented grunting noises and Chris, for his part, sat astride his favourite sow in a similar way to a cowboy trying to tame a bucking bronco. Most pigmen would sit ‘side saddle’ to test a sow, but Chris tackled all his tasks with a greater enthusiasm than most. He just needed a cowboy hat and a lasso to complete the rather unusual image.


  Meanwhile, I was rifling through the box and reading all the instructions. It was straightforward enough. I just needed to remember if a sow’s cervix had a left-handed or a right-handed thread.

  Elsie stood quite still, happy with Chris on top. I lubricated the foot-long catheter with the corkscrew end and inserted it as gently as I could. As the screw-shaped end reached her cervix, I twisted the catheter in an anticlockwise direction. All was going smoothly. Elsie was content and Chris was comfortable, although Pete, the Gloucester Old Spot boar, watching from the neighbouring pen was confused and disappointed that he was not being called into action today. I held the catheter in place with one hand, and had the bottle of semen in the other. The only way I could remove the sealed cap from the bottle was to snap it off with my teeth. I’ve done this many times before when I haven’t had enough hands, but never with a bottle of pig semen. I had not appreciated that the bottle was slightly pressurized. As I twisted the top off, a squirt of watery semen shot out of the bottle, straight into my face. It then dribbled down onto my waterproof trousers, covering me in precious Oxford Sandy and Black pig semen. There was, thankfully, plenty left in the bottle for Elsie. Chris and his wife, who had also come along to watch the spectacle, could not contain their mirth. I, however, dared not laugh, or even speak, for fear of the stuff trickling into my mouth.

  Apart from this minor spillage, most of the contents of the bottle went into the correct place and, after unscrewing the catheter, we sat back and waited for nature to do its thing.

  Three months, three weeks and three days later, we had the result that we wanted. Elsie had a litter of beautiful piglets. When they were a week old, I called at the farm to check them over. It was a cold and crisp autumn day, but the piglets were snuggled cosily under a heat lamp beside Elsie. They were a rich ginger colour with black spots, all healthy and strong, destined to perpetuate the breed line and fly the flag for the Oxford Sandy and Black breed. They looked beautifully content and, as I checked each piglet in turn, I felt like a proud father.

  Chris was bitten by the breeding bug and had bigger plans afoot. He managed to buy an Oxford Sandy and Black boar from a fellow enthusiast in the south. He phoned to tell me all about it. Donald the boar would be arriving (with his gilt friend Ivana) in a few weeks’ time. I was slightly disappointed that I would not be fathering another litter in the same way, but I felt sure that the new Oxford Sandy and Black boar would do just as good a job as me, with my catheter and a plastic bottle from Ireland. I met Donald soon after his arrival and my involvement in the ensuing love triangle continued in a rather peculiar way.

  Donald was a handsome but belligerent boar when he first arrived on the farm, throwing his weight around as if issuing the pig equivalent of presidential decrees on a daily basis. Chris’s trousers were testament to this, as Donald’s sharp and dangerous tusks had made several large holes. Fearing for everyone’s safety, Chris arranged for me to call and remove the offending tusks. This is a simple job, although it requires some sedation to keep the patient still whilst the lower tusks are sawn off neatly, using special wire. The procedure is painless, as there are no nerves in the tusks, and the result is a boar who cannot damage the sows when he mates and does not injure the pigman or his trousers.

  All went surprisingly smoothly, with much less commotion from Donald than either Chris or I expected. Usually, any job involving injecting a pig includes lots of squealing and charging about, but not so today. Donald trundled off into the corner of his pen to sleep off the rest of his sedative, and I happily drove back to the surgery, ready to regale my colleagues with how successful and straightforward the procedure had been.

  So I was not expecting the anxious email that arrived from Chris, two weeks later. Donald had lost his libido. Ever since the tusks had been removed, he had simply laid around, not interested in the seasons of either Ivana or Elsie or any other sow in heat. It was as if the removal of his tusks had emasculated him. At first I thought Chris was joking – his comments about trying soft music and a romantic meal suggested the problem was a minor inconvenience – but the photos that followed showed a pair of shrunken, prune-like testicles and confirmed that the loss of libido was genuine. I was baffled. But, whilst I was as concerned as Chris about this latest turn of events, it did at least mean that maybe I would get another chance to be surrogate father to a litter of Elsie’s lovely piglets!

  Two Sisters and a Cat

  My heart sank when I saw what was in store for me today. It was a home visit to see a geriatric cat called Cedric. It wasn’t so much Cedric that was the source of my woe, but his equally geriatric owners, Beryl and Mavis. I had met them a couple of times before. They would come to the practice together, to bring Cedric in for his annual check-ups. However, more recently, the elderly sisters had found it a struggle to get Cedric into a basket and into the car, so their trips to the surgery had become less frequent and, instead, we would visit them at home whenever the cat needed attention. They lived together in the quaint village of Kilburn, at the foot of the escarpment that is dominated by the famous White Horse.

  The White Horse is not one of those prehistoric symbols or ancient Celtic sites. It was cut out of the hillside in 1857. It is commonly attributed to the local school teacher John Hodgson and his pupils, although others give the credit to a London businessman and native of Kilburn called Thomas Taylor. Whoever was responsible, it was an impressive feat, as the underlying sandstone is not white at all, and had to be covered with tonnes of limestone chippings to emulate the appearance of those mysterious figures carved out of the chalk downs in other parts of the country. Every so often it is renovated, to keep it white and to stop the limestone subsiding down the hill to its feet. It is always a welcome sight when it comes into view at the end of a long journey, driving up from the south, as it means we are nearly home.

  But back to Cedric.

  His health was deteriorating and the requirement for home visits had increased sharply over recent months. Today’s visit would be a challenge, as usual. Cedric was constipated and it was my job to solve his problem.

  There was the smell of wood smoke lingering around the village. It was a beautifully clear autumn day with no wind at all. It was cold, so nearly all the cottages had fires burning in their hearths, and the smoke rose vertically from their chimneys, unhindered by any breeze. I took a deep breath of the sharp, smoky air, and took a moment to survey the amazing browns, reds and oranges of the autumn leaves on the trees that clung to the steep hillside, then I braced myself and strode purposefully up to the cottage and knocked at the door.

  ‘Oh hello, Peter!’ shouted Beryl when she finally realized that there was a vet standing on the doorstep. ‘Come in. Cedric is in here. He’s behind the piano. Mavis can’t get him out.’

  Cautiously, I entered the little stone cottage to find Mavis sitting on the piano stool with no cat to be seen. The two old sisters had a comical way of bickering between themselves, which always amused me. They also both wore absurdly obvious wigs. Whilst it was not entirely unusual in that era for an old lady to wear a wig, somehow two together in the same small cottage seemed to be just a bit too much wig.

  ‘Peter’s come to have a look at Cedric,’ explained Beryl to her sister, loudly.

  ‘That’s not Peter, is it? Peter’s tall,’ replied Mavis, at a normal volume.

  ‘Don’t be daft. Peter’s not small. It is Peter, isn’t it?’ bellowed Beryl, and she turned to squint back at me to get a better look. ‘Oh, you’re right,’ she continued, at top volume. ‘It’s not Peter. Mavis, it’s not Peter. It’s that other one. What’s his name?’

  ‘Beryl, that’s Julian. He’s the other one. He came last time, you remember, when Cedric got the tick on his head. He’s the nice one, you must remember? He’s been a few times.’

  The conversation continued between the sisters, just as if I wasn’t there. I thought I should interject, mainly to make my presence felt. At least now I didn’t need to confirm who I was.


  ‘Hello, ladies. How is Cedric today?’

  I knew he was constipated from the message in the daybook, but I wanted to check, just in case his symptoms had changed in the thirty minutes that had elapsed between their phone call to the surgery and my arrival at their cottage.

  Thankfully, it was Mavis who spoke first to explain the problem, as she was the sister who spoke with clarity and at a normal volume.

  ‘He’s constipated, you see. He usually goes out to the toilet – out there in that flowerbed, actually.’ Mavis pointed out of the window. ‘He’s such a good cat. I watch him digging his little hole and then scooping soil to cover everything up. It’s just as if he has his own little trowel. He’s ever so clean. It’s quite funny really, when you think about it, isn’t it?’

  Mavis digressed briefly, then returned to the point. ‘But he has started going to his litter tray out there in the porch. He just sits there, pushing and pushing but nothing comes out. Sometimes, he pushes so much I think his eyes are going to pop out.’

  Mavis was starting to chuckle now. It was as if explaining the pooing habits of their elderly cat to a much younger, male stranger was quite inappropriate.

  ‘I see. And does he manage to get anything out at all?’ I asked.

  I knew I needed to glean as much information as I could by asking questions because, at this rate, I did not fancy my chances of getting hold of my patient for an examination. I was anxious to find out if he was straining to pass faeces or urine. It was true that bladder disease could easily be mistaken for constipation, even by very observant owners. Since at least one of the ladies had mistaken my identity, I was aware that this was a real possibility. Treating a constipated cat is very different to treating a cat with bladder disease, so it was important that I could differentiate the two.