The Lasso and the Wire

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Andy, how long has this guy been sick,” I asked.

Andy was an old Italian with a small acreage on which he ran a few steers to fatten every year.  He was bald as a billiard ball, short and, shall we say, a well-rounded individual.

We were standing in the middle section of his old dairy barn, where he had milked a herd of 20 cows. In those years, the late 1930s, 20 dairy cows would support a family. And with the support of his wife and two boys, he could work at an outside job that allowed the family to live quite well.

The steer stood looking at us through the stanchions. He was locked in the milking section of the barn and had free movement in the reasonably confined space that measures 16 by 40 feet. This steer was in good shape and probably approaching a year of age. He moved with guarded steps.

“I noticed last night that he wasn’t eating much,” Andy said. “Then this morning, he almost doesn’t want to move. I had a heck of a time running him into the barn. And the whole time I have been waiting for you, I bet he hasn’t taken a half dozen steps. He just stands there.”

“If he is not eating, we are probably not going to be able to entice him to stick his head in a stanchion,” I said. “Is he tame enough for me to put a halter on him?”

“You are probably going to have to rope him,” Andy said.

“That was not something that they taught in school,” I said. “But, you know, I am getting better at it all the time. I was talking to an older veterinarian South of here the other day. He said he has thrown his rope away. People want him to look at a cow; they have to have it caught.

“Are you going to do that?” Andy asked.

“I think I would starve to death around here,” I said.

“You make it too easy for people to take advantage of your rope,” Andy said. “But, like today, I wouldn’t be able to get this guy caught until my son got off work.”

“You might think about buying a squeeze chute, or maybe just a headgate on the end of a crowding alley.”

“I’m too old to be buying new things.”

“Yes, maybe, but you still do enough that it would probably make your life a lot easier. My brother-in-law says that if he had to do it over again, he would have bought a squeeze chute before he bought his first cow.”

“I will give it some thought,” Andy said. “But today, you are going to have to rope this guy.”

I laughed at the old man as I stepped into the milking side with my rope. This was going to be easy. The steer looked at me but never moved a muscle. I think I could have dropped the rope over his head, but I threw it from 8 feet away.

The lasso fell perfectly over the steers head. I pulled the rope tight. The steer jumped right with his front feet, fighting against the pull of the rope. Then he lurched to the left, stiffened, and fell on his side. His legs stuck straight out and quivered for a moment. Then everything was still.

I checked, he was dead.

I looked at Andy, standing there in a state between disbelief and shock. 

“What the hell happened?” Andy said.

“I don’t think he liked the rope.

“No, I mean, how did that happen?” Andy said.

“My guess is, if we open him up, we will find a wire sticking him in the heart.”

“I have heard of wire killing a cow,” Andy said. “But I thought it was a slow process.”

“That is usually the case. The way he was acting, I suspected a wire. I didn’t expect him to drop dead. It must have poked him in the heart and caused a cardiac arrest.”

“I am not going to be able to sleep now if we don’t find out what killed him,” Andy said. “I guess I better have you look.”

I grabbed my necropsy knife and opened the left side of the steer’s chest. Sure enough, a piece of baling wire, about 3 inches long, was sticking through the diaphragm and into the pericardium. It probably stuck the heart when he jumped. I showed Andy the wire.

  “Now explain to me how that got there,” Andy said.

“Cows are not very discriminating when they eat. If they encounter a piece of baling wire in the hay, they just eat it. It collects in the reticulum, a small pouch on the front of the rumen. Probably called the second stomach, it is where they get tripe. The wire or any foreign objects stay in the reticulum. The stomach works; the wire pokes through the wall of the reticulum, passes through the diaphragm. Then it pokes into the heart.”

“In the old days, they would do surgery and remove the wire. Today we just place a magnet. With normal stomach activity, it will pull the wire back into the reticulum and hold it there. We put magnets in all the dairy cows now, not so much in beef cows. Most of the time, if not treated, it does kill the cow slowly, from an infection around the heart.”

“Can I make hamburger out of this guy?” Andy asked.

“It depends on how hungry you are, Andy. These cases almost always have a low-grade temperature, which has probably been going on for several days before things got to the point where the wire was painful for him. I wouldn’t eat him, but it wouldn’t kill you.

“I guess it is just a loss,” Andy said. “Sort of a waste, but if you wouldn’t eat it, that is good enough for me.”

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Blackjack and Newt

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Joleen, are you still feeding that feral tomcat out the back door?” I asked.

“I don’t think he is really feral. I am going to catch him one of these days.”

“Catch him. If you get ahold of him, it will be a question mark as to who has caught who,” I said.

Our original clinic on Nandina Street had a large patch of berry vines across the alley from the clinic. That patch of briers was home to a sizable population of feral cats. Joleen had taken a liking to this young black tomcat. She was convinced she could catch him and tame him down.

A couple of weeks later, Joleen came out of the back and washed her hands at the front sink.

“I got him,” she said as if it was no big deal. “I threw him into the isolation ward. It wasn’t so hard. I didn’t even get scratched.”

“What are you going to do with him,” I asked.  

“I figure if we neuter, vaccinate and deworm him, then leave him in a kennel for a time, he should tame down just fine. Then I will either take him home, or we could make a clinic cat out of him.”

“I’m not sure about a clinic cat,” I said.

But, so began Blackjack’s sojourn in the clinic. 

Our first adventure was transferring him from the isolation room, a small bare room at the time, into a cage in the kennel room. He was not going to be fooled by Joleen’s gentle nature again. It took a capture pole and a lot of clawing and biting at the end of the rod to accomplish the transfer. 

Finally secured in a kennel, we made plans to secure his future.

“We are not going to have a tomcat in here for long,” I said. “There is nothing that will stink up a vet clinic worse than tomcat pee.”

“We have time; you can neuter him this afternoon,” Joleen said.

One more wrestling match, and I had an injection of Ketamine into Blackjack. Joleen took the opportunity to comb him out. Blackjack was a short-haired cat, black as could be, but he had been living in the briers for some time now and needed to be spruced up a bit.

Then we neutered, vaccinated, and dewormed him.

“He will be a new man in the morning after his brain surgery,” I said.

Blackjack tamed down in a surprisingly short time. In a couple of weeks, he was given a limited run of the clinic. It was not long that we recognized that he enjoyed people and the cats that were with them. Coming off the street, he was very dog-wise. He could greet a few of the dogs that came through the door. But most of them he avoided with the skills only learned by a feral lifestyle.

He was controlled by the smell of the canned food. Joleen would pop the seal on a can of cat food, and Blackjack would come running from anywhere. 

There came a day when Blackjack wanted out the door.

“Do we dare let him out,” Joleen asked, more to herself than to me.

“I think he knows where his home is by now. My guess is he will be back before closing time.”

That was the case. About 4:00, Joleen heard him meowing at the back door. He came in for his can of cat food and then headed to his kennel for the night.

It was not long, and he would come and go by the front door. He learned to scurry through the door as a client would come or go. Jumping up on the counter and almost scaring some lady who had not noticed him following her through the door.

Most clients loved Blackjack, and he loved to sit on the front counter and accept any pats handed out by clients. But unfortunately, not all clients. One of our ‘Cat Ladies’ thought we provided Blackjack a terrible existence. 

“It is not right for him to be cooped up in here all the time,” she would say. “He should be in a home, where he is loved.”

“Mary, he has the run of this place,” I said. “He can come and go as he pleases, and his life here is far better than his old life.”

“Well, that may be, but I think he deserves a real home,” Mary said.

It was some months after that conversation that Blackjack left by the front door of the clinic one afternoon and never returned. We looked on the neighborhood streets and through the feral cat colony. There was never a trace of him.

“I bet she took him,” Joleen said. “Poor Blackjack, his life here was far better than she will ever provide.”

“There is no way we will ever know. There are a hundred ways that a cat can meet his fate in this world. We gave him the best we could while he was in our care. And I doubt she would have been capable of catching him out on the street.”

We were still in a sort of grieving status over Blackjack’s loss when Kathy burst through the front door with a limp kitten in her hands.

“The highway crew found this guy in the ditch by our house,” Kathy said. “It looks like he has taken a big whack on the head, but he is alive.”

“If you guys can do something for him, that is fine,” Kathy said. “I can’t afford to do anything for him.”

“We will look him over and see if he is savable,” Joleen said. “If he recovers, we can maybe find him a home.”

This kitten was about 6 weeks old and had a patch of hair gone on the top of his head. Still unconscious, he must have been hit by a car. When I started handling the kitten, he began to stir a little. Other than the patch of missing hair on his head, he looked fine.

I gave him a dose of Dexamethasone, and Joleen went back to settle him in a kennel. Or so I thought. She carried him around in a towel for the rest of the morning. 

By noon, the little tabby kitten was back to normal function. We offered him some canned food, and he acted like he hadn’t eaten in a week.

“It looks to me like you have your next clinic cat,” Joleen said.

After devouring his lunch, he was screaming for more. And I did say screaming.

“He sounds like he would make a good Speaker of the House. Maybe we should name him Newt,” I said.

Newt grew up in the clinic. Will, he spent most of his first year in the clinic. The clinic was his domain, he had free run of the place during the day, and we would put him in a large kennel overnight. His voice was the first thing one heard when we came through the door in the morning. He knew he got his breakfast and that the kennel door would be left open.

Newt enjoyed people, and they loved him. He would often perch on the front counter, acting as a greeter. He seemed to have no interest in going through the front door.

He was close to a year old when Bill and Opal were in with Mucho for a check-up. When they completed their visit, they purchased a 25-pound bag of C/D cat food. We were a little surprised when Opal came back into the clinic with the bag of food.

“This bag has a hole in the corner,” Opal said. 

Sure enough, there was a small hole in the bag and evidence of scratch and bite marks.

“That looks like Newt has been helping himself to some free meals,” I said. “We will refund that money. Do you want to keep this bag, at no cost, or do you want another one?” 

“Oh,” Opal said. “We can keep this one if you can tape it up. We really don’t want our money back.” 

I grabbed some packing tape and closed the hole. “You really don’t have any choice, Opal,” I said. “Sandy has already reversed the charge. If I take it back, we will just throw it away. So you may as well get the use of it.”

When Opal left, I went back and inspected our inventory. Newt made good choices. The bland diet foods for liver or kidney failure were not touched. But every bag of C/D had a small hole in the corner.

“Newt, I think you just got canned,” I said. Newt looked at me in a very aloof manner. “I think you earned a trip to the house. I can’t afford to lose hundreds of dollars in inventory to a cat that doesn’t produce any income for the clinic.”

That night Newt went home with us. This transition to the house went off without a hitch. He was quick to stake out his corner on the foot of our bed as he settled into a long life in the Larsen household.

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A Saturday Afternoon Outbreak

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was almost a perfect Saturday afternoon. Late August in the Willamette Valley provides a short stretch of weather that acts as an interlude between the summer heat and the fall’s rains.

We were still getting settled into our newly purchased house. We had the kids outside, working in the garden, and playing in the grass. I started to consider setting up the garage to see patients for a couple of months while waiting for the clinic construction to be completed.

The afternoon’s calm was broken when the phone rang.

“Doc, I know this is Saturday evening,” Dave said while trying to catch his breath. “But Doc, I was just out in the pasture, and I have seven dead calves, all about 2 months old. They were healthy as could be yesterday. I have about 30 more out there. What do you think I have going on?”

“It sounds like we need to get a necropsy on one or two of those dead calves,” I said. “The Diagnostic Lab at OSU is closed for the weekend. I can do a necropsy, but any lab work would need to wait until Monday.”

“If seven of them died overnight, they might be all dead by Monday,” Dave said.

“I agree, Dave,” I said. “I have a pretty good background in pathology. I worked in the necropsy room at CSU the summer following my sophomore year in vet school. I can likely get a good diagnosis with a gross necropsy. I will collect samples, just in case we need them for Monday.”

Seven dead calves amounted to about 15% of his herd. That was probably the profit for the year, at least a good chunk of it. A dead animal usually was not an absolute emergency, unless it was a herd animal. Unless it was a bunch of animals that died in a short time.

Dave had all seven dead calves lined up at the pasture gate when I pulled in the driveway. 

What a waste. All seven calves were in good shape, looked good for a couple of months old. I surveyed the herd out in the pasture. Good pasture for August, and the herd looked like nothing was wrong.

“Where do they get their water?” I asked.

“There is a pond, just over the rise, at the far end. You can’t see it from here.”

I pulled on a pair of gloves and looked over all the calves. Jaundice was evident in each one.

“Let’s take the smallest one and pull him over here out of the pasture,” I said. “We don’t want to contaminate things any more than they are already.”

I laid the calf on his left side and quickly reflected his skin and right legs. Stretching them out over his back. I took a moment to remember Dr. Norrdin’s words, “Work with your mouth closed.” Then I opened the chest and abdomen. The chest was fine, but the liver was swollen and dark in color. The urine in his bladder colored with bile. This was an acute outbreak of Leptospirosis. 

Lepto was known to cause abortion ‘storms’ in pregnant cow herds. Acute outbreaks in young calves occurred only rarely. It always amazed me how I always seemed to see all the rare events in my first couple of years out of school.

I collected samples for the lab on Monday if we needed them, liver, kidney, spleen, gall bladder, urine, and blood. Then I roughly closed the animal up. 

“Dave, I think you have an unusual outbreak of Lepto in these young calves.”

“Is there anything we can do to stop it?” Dave asked.

“Have you had any cows abort this year?” I asked.

“We had one cow abort about a week ago. I never thought much about it. It is not unusual for us to have an abortion or two every year.”

“There is an antibiotic treatment that will stop an abortion storm in cows. The entire herd is treated with a single dose of Streptomycin. I don’t think anything is written about controlling an outbreak in young calves. But my guess is if it stops abortions in a herd, it will stop an outbreak in calves.”

“So where am I going to get enough streptomycin to treat a herd at this hour on Saturday evening?” Dave asked.

“You’re lucky enough that I ordered it on my initial stocking order. I didn’t think I would ever use it, but I wanted to have it on hand. So, I think I have you covered in that regard.”

“There are a couple of other items we need to cover,” I said. “Number one, this is contagious to people. And it can do the same thing to people that it does to these calves. I was just talking with Dr. Craig the other day, he worked a herd with another veterinarian, and they both got sick. Dr. Craig went to the doctor as soon as he noted some blood in his urine, he got well. The other veterinarian waited till the next morning, he died.”

“Number two is the pond. Lepto is usually spread via contaminated water sources. If you had a cow with a Lepto abortion, she sheds organisms in her urine for several weeks. If she pees in or near that pond, calves that drink out of the pond can end up here,” I said as I pointed to the dead calves.

“You need to fence that pond and put a water tank in the pasture,” I said. 

“Do you think I should inject these calves tonight?” Dave asked.

“If you’re up to it, that is what I would recommend,” I said. “You might wake up in the morning with another batch of dead calves.”

“I will get you enough Streptomycin and vaccine,” I said. “I would give both. Lepto vaccines have some limitations in that there are many strains of Lepto. The vaccine protects against three of the most common strains, but there are others, and there is not a lot of cross-protection. It is the best we can do at the moment.”

“What should I do with these calves?” Dave asked.

“Move them out of the pasture. If you will have the rendering truck pick them up, that is okay. Otherwise, bury them deep. And don’t let the dogs get into this calf that we opened. They can get this also.”

I fixed up Dave with the necessary antibiotic and dosages and left him enough vaccine for the entire herd. He had a crew coming to help him. When I left that evening, I left him with one last piece of advice.

“Dave, you make sure everyone works with their mouth closed tonight,” I said. “And make sure they shower before going to bed.”

“Thanks, Doc, wish me luck,” Dave said.

“There is very little luck in this business. That is why it is important to do things the best we can at all times,” I said. “I will give you a call in the morning.”

I spent a long time drinking my coffee in the morning, and Sandy noticed.

“What is wrong with you this morning?” she asked.

“I am dreading calling Dave,” I said. “I am hopeful that I solved his immediate problem last night, but if I didn’t, he might have a bigger problem this morning.”

“Dave, this is Doc. I was just checking in with you on how things went last night and how things look this morning,” I said.

“We got the herd done, had to get out some floodlights for the tail end of it, but they are done. Things look good so far this morning. I have a couple of guys stringing an electric fence around the pond this morning, and I have a small water tank in the pasture. I am getting ready to run to Albany and see if I can pick up a large tank. Can’t thank you enough, Doc. I will keep you posted.”

Dave never had another problem, and the lab confirmed the Lepto diagnosis on Monday. In the next forty years, I never saw another outbreak like this one. Go figure the odds.

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