All On Number One 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

We welcomed our first spring in Colorado. The Rocky Mountain winter had been hard for us Oregonians. Spring term gave me a light schedule in school since I already had taken the microbiology course while at Oregon State. And we had a few extra dollars since I was working at the University dairy.

“How do you bet when you go to the dog track?” I asked the janitor, Bob, as I was helping him tidy up after anatomy lab.

“There are a few guys who have a system, and then there are those who pick the dog who takes a dump going to the gate,” Bob said. “Actually, the dogs are worse than the horses. I think you have a chance on the horses, but with the dogs, it is all the luck of the draw.”

“My wife and I haven’t been out since school started,” I said. “I have a few extra dollars, and the neighbor lady said she would watch the kids. I thought I would take Sandy to the dog track.”

“If you want an evening of fun, and you aren’t worried about making a thousand dollars, there are a couple of strategies to use,” Bob said. “The one that I think works the best is to pick the top three dogs according to the sheet and bet two dollars to show on each of them. Doing that will give you the best chance of not running out of money. You won’t win a lot, but you should win a few dollars.”

***

The parking lot at the Loveland dog track was packed, and we had a long walk to the grandstands. A woman from Denver had won seventy thousand dollars last week, and everyone must think they can repeat the process.

Sandy and I were both a little excited. This was our first date night in some time. We worked our way through the crowd and found a relatively empty section of bleachers that was close to the starting boxes and close to the betting windows.

The first dogs for the first race were just starting their parade as I returned with a couple glasses of beer. Sandy had been scanning the cheat sheets and had the three dogs for us to bet on all picked out.

Our budget was limited. If we wanted to have anything left over for dinner, we needed to be careful with our betting. Otherwise, we were going to have a short night out. 

I took the list and headed to the betting window. There was no line, but the lady in the booth seemed rushed, and I stammered and had trouble getting the information out. She was spitting tickets out faster than I was talking, or so it seemed.

“That will be eighteen dollars,” the lady said.

“Eighteen dollars?” I said. “I only wanted to spend six dollars on this race.”

“There are no refunds,” the lady said. “That will be eighteen dollars.” She pushed the pile of tickets out toward me.

I paid her eighteen dollars. That was just about our entire budget for the night. We had set the babysitting money aside but had hoped to have some cash for dinner.

I was quiet as I seated myself on the bench beside Sandy. I carefully looked through the tickets the lady sold me. I had nine tickets, and they were all the same. They were two-dollar tickets for the number one dog to win, and the number one dog was not even on the list that Sandy had given me.

“I’m excited,” Sandy said. “And you’re sitting there like all gloomy.”

“It looks like I sort of mess up at the ticket window,” I said.

“What happened?” Sandy asked.

“I’m not sure how I did it,” I said. “But I put all our money for the evening on the number one dog.”

“The number one dog was not even on my list,” Sandy said. “What do you mean by all our money?”

“We have eighteen dollars on the number one dog to win,” I said.

“Look at the odds,” Sandy said. “The number one dog is way down the list. I guess we had better drink up and get ready to go home.”

“We need to watch the race first,” I said. “You don’t know. They say that those odds don’t really mean a thing in the dog races.”

They brought the dogs back down the track to load them in the starting boxes. We stood up on the bench to get a better view. The number one dog looked like the biggest dog in the group.

“I don’t know, Sandy,” I said. “I like the looks of that number one dog.”

“Sure you do,” Sandy said. “You put all our money on him. You are bound to say he is a good-looking dog.

Sandy grabbed my hand to quiet her excitement as they loaded the dogs into the boxes. The mechanical rabbit was on the inside rail of the track. The doors flew up, the rabbit took off, and the dogs bounded out of the boxes.

The number one dog came out of the box with half a link lead. By the time the pack hit the first corner, the number one dog was clear of the main group. He was almost leaving the other dogs in his dust. Sandy was starting to jump up and down on the bench. 

When he entered the final turn, the number one dog was running entirely by himself. I had a flashback to that sixth horse race in Boston where my horse almost came to a standstill and lost just such a lead.

But the number one dog was running strong. Sandy was in danger of breaking the bench now. She was jumping up and down so hard it almost made me jump a bit without even trying.

The number one dog finished the race a full two seconds ahead of the second-place dog. I jumped off the bench and helped Sandy down to the solid ground. We rushed to the ticket window to collect our fortune.

The odds paid out at nine to one, so we collected $162.00. That was no minor figure in the spring of 1972 for a struggling college student who got $212.00 a month from the GI Bill. We felt rich.

“I don’t think we are going to do anything but spend money if we stay here,” I said. “The chances of hitting another winner is slim to none. Let’s go find a good restaurant and then go to a movie.”

“That sounds great to me,” Sandy said as we started pushing through the crowd toward the exit.

We found a nice restaurant in downtown Loveland. We had a candlelight dinner with prime rib and all the trimmings. A treat we would not have dreamed of a few hours ago.

As we walked out of dinner, people lined up across the street to go to the movie. The marquee said Sometimes a Great Notion. I just glanced at Sandy.

“We have plenty of time,” Sandy said. “Judy said she was fine as long we got home before midnight.”

So we went to the movie. I would guess we were the only ones in the theater with any real connection to the logging industry in western Oregon or to the setting on the Siletz River.

What a great time we had, and entirely by accident. Or by design, as I liked to kid Sandy. After all, I worked with greyhounds in anatomy lab. 

Photo by Jannik Selz on Unsplash

Cancer Eye

D. E. Larsen, DVM

The old cow groaned a little as I plunged my arm deeper into her rectum. Dixie pushed a little harder on the squeeze handle. I always hated pregnancy exams on old fat cows. Their uterus was often difficult to reach, and any pregnancy over three months was out of reach until six or seven months.

Finally, I grasped the cervix and retracted it enough to feel fetal membranes in the body of the uterus. Based on cotyledon size, this cow was about five months pregnant. 

“Tom, this cow is about five months pregnant,” I said. “That is a pretty rough estimate, and it could be a couple of weeks either way.”

“Doc, I called you out to look at this eye, not to do a prep check,” Tom said.

This was an older Hereford, and her left eye was gruesome. There was a bulge of tissue the size of a large egg, bulging from the inner corner of her eye. The entire left side of her face was soiled from the chronic drainage. This was probably the worse case that I had seen since returning to Oregon.

“I know, Tom, but I needed to know her pregnancy status so I could recommend the right course of action for this eye,” I said. “This is a pretty ugly-looking eye. How long has it been a problem?”

“I noticed it sometime last year,” Tom said. “I guess I can’t be sure just when it was that I first noticed it. But by the end of August, I put a couple of puffs of pinkeye power in it, and I figured it was just pinkeye. But I have never seen a case of pinkeye look like this.”

“This is cancer eye, Tom,” I said. “We don’t see many cases of cancer eye around here. When I was in school in Colorado, we would see a lot of cows with cancer eye. Colorado has a lot more elevation and more sunshine. Just like this cow, Herefords account for most of the cases. That white face doesn’t reduce the glare from the sun.”

“What do you do for it?” Tom asked.

“We need to take the eye out,” I said. “That is why I needed to know her pregnancy status. If she is five months pregnant, we can take the eye out and expect her to live long enough to raise the calf to weaning. Many cows will live for several years after we remove the eye. It just depends on how far the cancer has spread.”

“She is a registered cow, and she was artificially inseminated, but I am not sure she is worth the expense of the surgery,” Tom said. “Can I send her to slaughter?”

“If she goes to an inspected slaughter outfit, they will condemn the head,” I said. “And if they find that the cancer has spread beyond the head, they will tank the whole carcass.”

“You’re saying that there is a possibility that she might not be worth anything,” Tom said.

“If she goes through a sale ring, those cattle buyers will probably not want to bid on her,” I said. “They know there is a possibility that she might be tanked. Selling her to an inspected slaughterhouse on condition that she passes inspection, and you might get something out of her. But you assume the risk of her not passing the inspection.”

“I think I will go that route,” Tom said. “She is nothing special, hardly more than a commercial cow. By the time I pay for the eye removal and treatment and then lose everything at the sale. The profit margin on the calf is not worth the trouble.”

“You’re the one making the financial decisions,” I said. “Often, the best medical decision is not the best financial decision.”

Dixie and I cleaned up and repacked the truck. 

“Tom, you give me a call if you change your mind or if you have any questions,” I said through the open window as we started out of the barnyard.

Dixie was deep in thought. She usually was full of questions, especially when we had treated an unusual case.

“Do you think it would be a mistake for me to make an offer to Tom for that cow?” Dixie asked.

“I thought you were trying to figure something out,” I said. “You want to buy the cow for a song, remove the eye and get a registered calf to start your herd.”

“What do you think of the idea?” Dixie asked.

“For Tom, that might be his best option,” I said. “With that eye looking like it does, he is not going to get much for her. And if they buy her on condition of her passing the inspection, and she doesn’t, that is going cost him the slaughter fee plus the transport fee.”

“So I shouldn’t make a big offer?” Dixie asked.

“For you, I would guess the cow will live long enough to wean the calf,” I said. “And she might live several more years. If you can get her for a hundred bucks or so, you just about can’t go wrong. We could take the eye out without much of a problem.”

“I am going to talk with Blain about this deal,” Dixie said. “I have been wanting to get some cows on our place, and  this will allow me to get a start with some registered stock.”

***

The following week, Dixie wanted to schedule surgery for her new cow.

“I know we have been busy,” Dixie said. “But this cancer eye on Della is really getting to be a mess, and I was hoping we could come up with some time to get it taken care of this week.”

“Have Sandy look at the appointment book,” I said. “If nothing else, we could do it right after lunch on Thursday. That would just mean I would get a little late start on the golf course.”

“I have already looked,” Dixie said. “I was hoping you would volunteer Thursday afternoon. I don’t have a chute. Do you think you can do it without one?”

“Della seemed like a mild-mannered cow,” I said. “We can probably get it done with her tied to a post.”

***

On Thursday afternoon, I pulled the truck into the middle of Dixie’s pasture. Della seemed unconcerned, even a little interested. Probably, thinking there was something good to eat.

She never flinched when I threw a rope over her head. 

“The plan is to tie her to my bumper, and then I will get my other rope and throw her,” I said as Dixie watched. “Should be a piece of cake if I can get her to fall on her right side.”

I tied the rope to the bumper of my truck with enough slack to allow her to fall away from the truck. That proved to be an error.

I went to the back of the truck to get my second rope. Della discovered that she was tied and immediately started fighting the rope. She pulled back and shook her head. Then she swung around like a pendulum and crashed into the passenger side door on the pickup. This made a massive dent in the door.

I came back to settle her down, and Dixie was talking to Della in a stern voice.

“I think you have just earned a dose of Rompun,” I said to Della as I drew up a dose of Rompun.

Rompun was a horse tranquilizer. It had a profound, almost anesthetic, action in cows.

In less than a minute, Della settled to the ground. We blocked her up, so she stayed on her sternum. I removed the rope from her neck and pulled her head to the right with my nose tongs. This gave us good access to her left eye.

We clipped the hair from the left side of her face and around the eye. The chronic drainage from the eye had soiled and matted the hair on the side of Della’s face. Under all the matted hair was a lot of inflamed skin.

There was nothing pretty about removing the eye. There was so much cancer that the eye was almost hidden in the mass of tissue. 

I removed the eye and dissected all the cancerous tissue from the socket. I had to make a sliding flap of skin on the lower side of the eye to adequately close the wound.

We rinsed the area well, sprayed for flies, and gave Della a dose of long-acting penicillin.

“Well, she looks like she came through this better than the truck,” I said.

“I am so sorry about that,” Dixie said. “Do you think the insurance will cover it?”

“I think so,” I said. “And I think I learned a lesson or two today. We can schedule us to get back out here in about three weeks to get the sutures out. You need to check every evening, just to make sure there is no drainage from the incision.”

*** 

Della healed well and gave Dixie several calves before she was done. Jack Wright fixed the truck, and the insurance covered the expense. And I made it to Pineway golf course in time for the evening game.

Photo by Khamkhor on Unsplash

Elk Delivery, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Doc, I have a cow elk that has been walking around the pasture in labor for the last couple of hours,” Frank said into the phone. “I can see a small sac of fluid and a foot once in a while, but she is not making any progress.”

“If she has been at it a couple of hours, we probably should get a look at her. Don’t dart her until I get up there.”

Frank had quite a variety of exotic animals. Sika deer, Fallow deer, some antelope, and a small herd of elk. The elk herd consisted of a bull and five or six cows. There were no facilities for handling any of these. We were stuck with using a capture dart.

“What drug do you want me to use,” Frank asked as we were loading the dart.

“She is not too high strung, and with this difficult birth, a dose of Rompun will probably do the trick. We want her to recover pretty quickly so she will take care of the calf.”

“She is not too big,” Frank observed. “What kind of a dose should we use?”

I had provided a dosage chart to Frank so he would not have to do any calculations on dosage. The chart was set up to give the volume dose in milliliters for each weight in fifty-pound steps.

“Let’s give her a five-hundred-pound dose,” I said. “She might be a little over that, but not by much. And we want her to recover quickly.”

Rompun was a tranquilizer approved for the horse and small animals. We routinely used it at very low doses on cows. It was useful for short-term procedures that required chemical restraint. Its shortcoming was animals who were flat out could suddenly recover and react defensively.

We stepped through the gate into the elk pasture. The bull and the other cows moved to the far corner. We could usually lure the herd to the feed rack with a bucket of apples, but this problem cow was by herself away from the others. I could see her getting up, turning around, straining, and lying down again.

She did not seem to be bothered by our approach. When we were within twenty yards, she stood up, and Frank fired the dart gun, striking her in the hip with the loaded dart. We moved away to allow the drug to take effect.

Once she was on the ground and her head turned to her side, we approached cautiously. 

“Let’s get a rope on her just in case she jumps up when I start working on her,” I said. “We don’t want to have to give a second dose.”

Jim, Frank’s hired man, placed the lasso over her head and backed away. Holding the rope with gloved hands just in case she came alive.

I removed the dart from her left hind leg and applied some Betadine to the wound. Then I washed her rear end and carefully explored her birth canal. She had no response. 

I could feel one front foot and then the nose. I reached deeper. The second foot was to be found in the birth canal.

“The calf has a front leg back,” I said. “I should be able to get it up into position easily. There is plenty of room in there. He will pop right out once the position is corrected.”

I reached in and ran my hand past the shoulder on the calf and along its side. I grabbed the cannon bone on the retained leg and pulled it forward. Then I flipped the hoof up into the birth canal.

The cow elk raised her head when I corrected the leg position of the calf. I grabbed the front feet and pulled. The calf quickly slipped out onto the ground. I pulled the calf around toward the cow’s head and stood up.

“Go ahead and remove that rope, Jim,” I said.

As soon as the rope was off, I gave the cow a slap on the butt. She instantly jumped to her feet. 

At the same time, she kicked with a hind leg. The kick was directed with deadly accuracy at me. She walked away, going only a few steps up the hill.

I was lucky that I was just far enough from her that it only brushed my shirt. I had a neat imprint of the toes of her hoof on my shirt just above my navel.

“I think that would have hurt a little if I had been an inch or two closer,” I said.

“I would guess so,” Frank said, with an expression of concern on his face.

“Let’s just move away, quietly, down the hill. Hopefully, she will return and take care of this calf,” I said.

I quickly gathered my stuff into my bucket, and we moved down the hill. Looking back, she was watching both us and the calf. By the time we got to the gate, she was back licking the calf.

“Frank, I think we got a little lucky,” I said as we opened the gate and left the pasture. “You want to write that dose down on your chart. That worked perfectly.”

“I’ll try to remember to do that when I get back to the house,” Frank said. “Is there anything I need to do with her now?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She would have probably been coyote food in the wild. There would have been no way for that calf to come out on its own.”

I watched up the hill as I turned my turn to the gate on the end of the lane. Momma elk was over tending to the calf. Things were going to be okay.