Concerning Cows

“Reproduction is a luxury function,” declaimed the professor from the podium in the vet school lecture hall. It is one of the few statements from my college days that has stayed with me, verbatim (along with “most cases of spontaneous vomiting in dogs resolve in 24 hours with or without treatment” but that’s a whole other story). Essentially, without access to the proper nutrition, a species has difficulty propagating. Kind of a no-brainer, but it took a close association with a less-than-well-run dairy farm to truly illustrate the point.

Dan Houndshell ran just such a farm on the outskirts of the practice territory where I worked during my first year as a veterinarian. He was a spare, sour man whose thin, windswept fields were overgrazed by too many thin, windswept cows. It came as no surprise that these underfed creatures had more than their share of fertility problems and production issues, so hardly a week went by without our receptionists hearing Dan’s dry, unemotional voice on the other end of the phone asking for assistance for yet another patient. We had advised him numerous times that reducing the number of cattle in his herd and feeding them better would have resulted in the same milk yield, but the suggestions fell on deaf ears, and he persisted in the practices he had known for years, if not generations.

I had been working for Larry Smith for several months when he announced that he was ready to take a few days’ vacation – probably the first he’d had in years, since before my arrival he had been a sole practicioner and in addition had helped run his own family’s cattle farm all this time. Apparently he thought enough of my performance as a neophyte vet thus far that he felt comfortable leaving me in charge, or perhaps he was just desperate for a break. Whatever the case, he and his wife Sharon duly packed up their belongings and disappeared , leaving the entire responsiblilty of keeping our busy practice running smoothly squarely on my – in my opinion – insecure shoulders. Hoooo, boy. I squared said shoulders, hunkered down and hoped for a routine week. I’m sure the staff did the same.

(To tell you the truth, I’d like to be a time-traveling fly on the wall and travel back to those days so I could listen to their conversations about me when I was out of earshot. Knowing what I know now, it’s easy to imagine the exchanges:
“Oh my God, she’s so slow, we’ll never get out of here on time.”
“She’s probably never castrated a horse in her life.”
“I just hope Dan Houndshell doesn’t have some sort of emergency.”)

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before the phone rang, Judy the receptionist took the call and, putting her hand over the receiver, looked at me woefully. “It’s Dan Houndshell,” she explained, “and he wants Larry to come out and infuse some cows. What do we tell him?”

Dairy cattle, particularly unhealthy ones, are susceptible to uterine infections which can render them infertile. In the days when I was working for Larry, treatments ranged from placing large tablets, known as pessaries, into the reproductive tract, to actually flushing out the uterus with antibacterial solutions. They weren’t difficult procedures and, though I hadn’t practiced them since school, I knew I could do the work. I mustered up my best authoritative voice and picked up the phone.

“Hello, Dan,” I said, “this is Dr. Burk. Dr. Smith is out of town but I can come out and treat your cattle, let’s see, tomorrow afternoon around one.”
There was a long silence from the other end of the phone and then Dan drawled, “Well, Cher, I know you need the practice, but I’d like Larry to do it.”

Amazing. That master of sparse dialog had managed to insult me twice in a single sentence. Not only had he – as usual – called me Cher, a reference to my ridiculously impractical long curly hair and my beaky ornamental nose, but he had inferred – the nerve of him! – that I actually needed practice! I was incensed. I informed him shortly that Larry would be back at the end of the week and he’d have to call back then, hung the phone up with rather more force than necessary (this was in the days before cell phones that you could actually throw across a room), and stamped angrily around the clinic.

“I hope one of these days he has a big emergency and I’m the only one available,” I fumed to the staff. “It’d serve him right” (how, I wasn’t sure: to be forced to swallow his pride and actually need ME, or to have the inept bumbler that I was certain I was at the time fooling around with his cows).

Be careful what you wish for.

A quiet half hour went by but as luck or the fates would have it, when the phone rang it was Dan on the line again with, of all things, a dystocia.

The term dystocia means difficult birth – in any species. In cattle it can involve as simple a resolution as straightening a calf’s turned-back head, or unfolding a leg; conversely, it can be as difficult a situation as a young heifer trying to give birth to an oversized calf when she is barely more than a youngster herself. I used to call these last ones “teenage pregnancies,” and they were a nightmare, because either way you were in for possibly hours of sweaty work if the calf was alive or worse, a fetotomy – the messy business of cutting the baby up into manageable pieces while still inside the cow – If it was already dead.

I sincerely hoped it wasn’t the latter as I gathered up my equipment and traipsed out the clinic door, clouds of dreary premonition massing into a mental storm and trailing behind me. I assumed the worst. It would be a fetotomy, and I would mess it up. Like many other farmers, Dan would have fooled around so much already in trying to resolve the problem himself that the vaginal tissues would be swollen, even torn, depriving me of much-needed landmarks. There were no two ways about it. With my luck, I was doomed.

What always worried me in these situations was the sure and certain knowledge that the farmer, having worked with cattle for at least several hundred years longer than I had done, would already have tried every trick in the book. What did I, a little horse owner, know that they didn’t?

The ride to Dan’s was pretty grim, and it the situation grew even darker when he had explained that – of course – he had tried to pull the calf himself, using both that interesting tool surely derived from medieval torture instruments known as the “come-along” and, of course, his trusty John Deere tractor, all to no avail.

Glumly he led me to my patient, and I began to feel a little better. This big black and white Holstein was no first-calf heifer; she was a milk cow in her prime, or what passed for prime on Dan’s poor farm. Yes, she had two hind legs protruding from her vulva, but she was a large, full-grown cow – there ought to be enough room to move a couch in there, I thought, much less a calf. Puzzled but not yet terrified, I pulled on a plastic palpation sleeve, liberally basted it with sterile lubricant, and began to sort out the situation by sliding my hand into the cow’s vagina. I forgot Dan standing behind me with his arms crossed in disapproval. I forgot the dirty barn and the cold afternoon wind. I forgot that I was about to look like an inept bumbler in the presence of an experienced farmer who didn’t believe a “girl vet” had a place on his farm anyway. I held my breath and closed my eyes; it seemed that the only part of me that even existed at that moment was my plastic-covered hand, sliding blindly between the two bony legs and into the dark tunnel of the cow’s reproductive tract.

When my elbow had disappeared, I stopped, puzzled. This was clearly a breech birth; the presence of two knobby hocks protruding from the cow told me that, but where I expected to meet the calf’s tail my hand continued to slid deeper into the cow.

And then in the blink of an eye it all became clear and I swear, I heard the Halleluia Chorus being sung by angels in coveralls, probably conducted by a seraph with a pitchfork. My hand was sliding between two different hind legs. There were two calves, and Dan had been pulling on one leg from each calf. No wonder he had been unable to deliver the babies successfully.

I’m pretty sure at that moment a tiny grin of triumph crossed my face, but I managed to maintain my professional demeanor while I pushed one leg back into the depths of the cow, with Dan making sounds of impatience behind me. He was clearly wondering if I’d lost my mind. But I was on a roll now. With one calf pushed out of the way, there was plenty of room in the birth canal for me to fish around, locate the correct pair of hind legs, and deliver the first calf. Being a twin, it was small anyway and it practically fell into my arms when the cow decided that as I had sorted out her problem, she might as well start pushing again. I found the second calf and guided it out as well, then turned to Dan with a satisfied grin. To my surprise, he wasn’t grinning back. Instead, he was grumbling as he worked over the newborns with a filty towel that had seen better days. “Twins never thrive,” he explained. Even then I couldn’t please Dan. But I decided to give it another try.
“Ok, Dan, now that I’m here,” I said and took a deep breath, “how about if I infuse your other cows? Save you paying for another farm call later.”
Now I was talking! He grinned back at last and said, “well, Cher, I’m sure you could use the practice, so go ahead!”

Well, it was a small victory, but it was pretty sweet at that.