The Taint That Ain’t

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was 12:30 on Thursday, and we were mostly closed. Thursday afternoon was reserved for golf. But the phone kept ringing, Sandy had stepped into the back, and I was tempted to not answer. But duty calls.

“Good afternoon, this is Doctor Larsen,” I say as I picked up the receiver.

“Oh, Doctor Larsen, I am so happy I caught you,” the lady said. “I know you close early on Thursday.”

I recognized the voice. It was one of the sisters who lived on a small farm not far out of Sweet Home. They were older, maybe spinsters, but I did not know much about them. They were Edith and Elsie, it was almost impossible to tell apart in person. On the phone, I had no chance of knowing which sister I was talking to. Most of the time, their emergencies were minor problems or no problem at all.

“Yes, we are closed, I was just about to switch the phone over to the answering service,” I said. “Is there something I could help you with briefly.”

“This is Edith, I know that you probably have a golf game scheduled this afternoon,” Edith said. “But we were feeding our pig just now and noticed that he has some large swellings on his rear end. He doesn’t act sick, but if he has a large abscess, I would hate to have to leave it for another day.”

“Tell me about this pig,” I said. “How old and how big is he?”

“He is young, I think we got him in February as a weaner pig,” Edith said. “He is growing fast. He is getting big enough that we are going to have him slaughtered sometime in October.”

“Has he been castrated?” I asked.

“Castrated, will I guess. Don’t they usually do that to weaner pigs?” Edith said.

“Just where on the rear end are these swellings?” I asked. I was convinced now that they had just noticed the testicles on this pig.

“They on just below his butt, they are just bulging out,” Edith said. “They can’t be normal, Doctor. We would really like you to check them.”

“It sounds to me like you are looking at his testicles,” I said.

There was a long pause on the phone. Then I could hear the sisters talking to each other.

“He thinks they are testicles,” Edith says. 

“Testicles?” Elsie says. “I don’t think they could possibly be testicles. They are way too large.”

Now I remembered, Edith always did the phone calls and most of the talking. Elsie just seemed to disagree with everything that was said.

“Doctor, we don’t think they could be testicles,” Edith says into the phone. “These swellings are larger than a grapefruit. Each one of them.”

This discussion was going nowhere fast. And it was not going to be resolved over the phone.

“I’ll tell what,” I said. “I will be going right by your place on my way to the golf course. I will stop and just get a look at this pig. If it looks like something that won’t wait until tomorrow, I will stop by on my home and take care of it tonight.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Edith says. “We were hoping you could get a look at him.”

“You be ready, I am leaving here shortly, and I won’t have much time,” I said. “I am just going to glance at him for now.”

“We will be waiting for you,” Edith said. “He is in a small pen, so it won’t be any problem looking at him.”

I pulled into the driveway, and both sisters were waiting for me. It was just a short walk to pigpen out beside the small barn. The thought occurred to me that I might not be acceptable on the golf course if I got splattered with pig manure, but I didn’t have time to put on coveralls and boots just to glance over the fence.

I could see the pig through the slats in the fence of the pigpen as we approached. This was a good looking young pig, probably over 200 pounds. He had a long body and black and white in color.

I approach the pen so I could get a good look at the rear end of this pig. One glance and I stepped away. 

“Those swellings are testicles,” I said.

“But Doctor, they are so large,” Elsie said. “Are you certain, I mean, I have seen lots of testicles but nothing like these?”

“I didn’t make the design, that is just way pigs are put together,” I said. “I am certain, and I have seen a few testicles also. Now you probably have a couple of choices to make with this guy.”

“What do you mean by choices?” Edith said.

“When pigs are not castrated, their testicles will produce products that can flavor the meat when they reach sexual maturity. This guy is close to market weight but has obviously gone through puberty. You may be okay if you slaughter him now rather than waiting until fall. Otherwise, castrating him now would be a good idea.”

“What do you mean when you say flavor the meat?” Elsie asked.

“It is called boar taint,” I said. “It is in the fat, and in bad cases, it will run you out of the house when you put sausage in the frying pan. Some people say it tastes like piss. It probably occurs in 20 to 30 percent of boars slaughtered. The larger he gets, the more the chances that his meat will be tainted.”

“We were hoping to get him bigger,” Edith said. “I mean, he is growing so well.”

“It might be a good idea to talk with the place you are going to have him slaughtered,” I said. “Some of those places won’t even consider hanging a boar in their cooler.”

“A boar, I have been told you can’t eat a boar,” Elsie asked. “When do you start calling him a boar?”

“I would say about when those testicles start hanging there, so they are noticed. That is why I would suggest you either slaughter him now or have him castrated.”

“And I suppose that castrating him is going to cost some money,” Edith said. “That will sort of change the economics of this whole project.”

“At this age, if I castrate him, it will require anesthesia,” I said. “And yes, it will cost a little money. Actually, there will be more expenses than just the surgery and anesthesia. The procedure always comes with some risks, and he will lose some of his growth. That is why it is so much easier to do it when they are a few days old.”

“We will give it some thought,” Elsie said. “But I think we will go ahead and slaughter him on our original schedule. The odds are in our favor.”

It was sometime in November when Edith stopped by the clinic to let me know that I was probably correct.

“Elsie still is determined to eat that pork, but I make her cook it outside on the barbecue,” Edith said. “It is just like you said it would be when it hits the frying pan, it runs me out of the house. I won’t touch the stuff, but Elsie isn’t going to admit that she was wrong in her decision. She says it ain’t too bad.”

Photo by Leah Kelley from Pexels

The Battle of Ping-Li

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was the end of a busy afternoon when I leaned into the reception desk to check on what remained of the day.

“I’m beat, how close to being done are we?” I asked.

“You poor man,” Sandy replied. She seldom gave me any sympathy. “Your last appointment is in the exam room. It is just a nail trim on a cat, you should be able to handle it okay.”

I stepped into the exam room and met Al and Vivian. They were new clients, but I had met Al when I was on a farm call out on Upper Berlin Road some weeks before. Al was a short guy, stocky, and with white hair and mustache. Vivian was taller than Al by several inches. 

Vivian was in immediate command of the conversation, Al would add a quip every now and then. They were parents of a long time client and had just moved to the area from San Francisco. Al had retired from a machine shop some years earlier but continued with his passion as a western cartoonist and illustrator. 

“Ping-Li is in the carrier,” Vivian said. “We just need his toenails clipped. I am on this blood thinner, and he doesn’t seem to understand that I can’t be his scratching post anymore.”

“And, Doc, he doesn’t really like to have his feet messed with,” Al said. “That is why we are here. We didn’t get one nail clipped last night.”

“Well, let’s get him up on the table and see what he thinks of us,” I said as I started to pick up the rather large carrier setting on the floor. 

I was surprised at the weight of the carrier. I leaned over and looked into the carrier as I set it on the exam table. 

Ping-Li was a large cat, well over 20 pounds and not fat at all. Ping-Li made his feelings known from the start, with a loud hiss at my face.

“I am not sure he wants to be friends,” Al said as Ping-Li hissed and jumped at the cage door.

“I think we will get some reinforcements before we get him out of the kennel,” I said. “You guys might want to wait out front.”

“He is pretty much a baby at home, but it is just the two of us most of the time,” Vivian said. “If anybody comes over, he generally hides. I am hoping this won’t be too traumatic for him.”

“Once we get a hand on him, we should be able to handle him okay,” I said. “I have a couple of gals here to help who are real cat ladies.”

“I don’t think I want to have him sedated for this,” Vivian said. “If it comes to that, we will rethink things.”

“He is one of the larger cats that we deal with around here,” I said. “But I think we can get him under control without sedating him.”

With that, Marilyn, Joleen, and I closed ourselves into the exam room with Ping-Li. The first task was to get him out of the kennel. He made it very clear that nobody was going to reach in and grab him. 

We opened the kennel door, and Joleen and I tipped it up to dump him onto the exam table. Good idea, but Ping-Li had himself braced against the sides of the kennel with all four feet. We shook the kennel several times before finally getting Ping-Li onto the exam table.

I attempted some soft talk and petting to calm him down. He hissed and swatted at the air close to my chest. Joleen made a quick grab for the back of his neck, and that got him a little under control. Using the extra-large cat sack, it took all three of us to get him stuffed inside and zipped up. He was almost too large.

Once secured, I did a quick once over. Everything looked okay, every time I came close to his head, I was greeted with a hiss. Using the scale on the tabletop, Ping-Li weighed in at just under 25 pounds. I looked at a couple of cats that weighed a couple of pounds more than that, but they were very obese. There was no fat on Ping-Li.

Once we had him in the sack, clipping his nails was no problem. We would just unzip a bottom opening by each foot, fight with Ping-Li to get the foot out of the sack, clip the nails and move to the next foot. By the time we were done, the hiss had become a loud growl. I think Ping-Li was indeed mad.

Marilyn checked with Al and Vivian to make sure there was nothing else. They came back to see Ping-Li in his sack before we returned him to the kennel. Vivian wanted to pet him to calm him down a little, but her efforts were met with hisses and growls.

We pointed Ping-Li into his kennel and started unzipping the cat sack. He was squirming out of it before it was half undone. He hit the back of the kennel, turned and hissed.

“Oh, I think he is mad,” Vivian said

“It will probably be more difficult next time,” Al said. “He is a pretty smart cat, and he will remember you, Doctor.”

Ping-Li became a regular visitor to the clinic. On most of the visits, he was much more manageable than he was on this first visit. But he continued to hate having his nails clipped, and it almost always required a cat sack to get the job done. 

I liked to think most cats became our friends, or they came to tolerate our invasion of their space. Ping-Li probably came to tolerate that invasion to a degree, but he never became our friend.

Some months after that battle with Ping-Li, Al came by with the cartoon at the top of this story. It still hangs in my study.

https://www.sweethomenews.com/story/2001/03/16/news/western-artist-al-martin-napoletanohas-brought-old-west-to-life-for-60-years/1384.html

https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&sxsrf=ALeKk01ZkATWBbb2NSQIBcqQ3Bms4Xe57g:1597031150836&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=al+martin+napoletano&client=safari&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwid_sLT3I_rAhUKHzQIHa_UCvoQsAR6BAgKEAE&biw=1343&bih=854

The Missed Quill

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Bob had already lifted Rex onto the exam table by the time I entered the exam room. Rex was an Australian Shepherd. At one time, he had been a cow dog, but Bob sold the cows. Now Rex had little to do except to patrol his property.

“Hi, Bob, what brings you and Rex in today?” I asked as I shook hands with Bob.

Rex is really painful this morning,” Bob said. “Something around his head really hurts.”

I raised Rex’s head with my hand under his chin. I could sense a reluctance for him to allow this. I looked close and could only see a slight swelling around his left eye.

Rex pulled away when I reached to feel the area.

“He is really painful, Doc,” Bob said. “He really yipped when I just brushed the side of his face this morning.”

I tried to feel the eye again, Rex recoiled and growled this time. He was not going to tolerate any palpation around the left side of his face.

The pupil of the left eye was constricted to a pinpoint. I instilled a couple of drops of medication to dilate the pupil.

“Do you know of anything that could have injured this eye?” I asked Bob.

“No, he was in the house last night and doing fine,” Bob said. “Then this morning, he is really painful.”

With the pupil dilated, I carefully held Rex by the chin and looked at the back of the eye with my ophthalmoscope. Starting from a distance and then slowly closing in close to his face to avoid alarming him.

It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what I was looking at. Projecting from the back of the eye, near the optic disc (that spot where the optic nerve connects with the retina), was a porcupine quill. It was probably penetrating over a centimeter into the eye.

“Bob, has Rex ever had porcupine quills?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Bob said. “We had quite a struggle pulling a mouthful of quills out of him a couple of months ago.”

“Will, it looks like you must have missed one,” I said. “It has entered his eye through the back of the eye. This one is for the books. I always hear stories of the quills that are left in the tissues migrating to odd places. But I have never read of one puncturing the eye from behind.”

“Can you get it out?” Bob asked. 

“I can’t, and I don’t know if a specialist could or not,” I replied. “Getting to that area behind the eye would be extremely difficult. And after removing the quill, you might lose the eye anyway.”

“I don’t have the cows anymore,” Bob said, “And old Rex doesn’t have much to do. He just lays around the house and chases a stick once in a while. I don’t think a specialist is in the cards for him.”

“I think the best thing to do is to remove this eye,” I said. “He will do fine with one eye. We will get rid of the pain.”

With that, we set up to remove Rex’s left eye. Enucleation of an eye in the dog was relatively straightforward surgery. I incised around the margin of the eyelids and dissected to the surface of the globe behind the conjunctiva. Then working around the globe, I severed the ocular muscle at their attachment to the globe. I was able to keep bleeding to a minimum this way. Finally, ligating the optic stalk and removing the eye. This was complicated just a bit by the presence of the quill.

Once the eye was removed, I closed the dense fascia over the eye socket so the socket would remain smooth, rather than sinking back into the head when the muscles atrophied. The skin was then closed, and if you didn’t look twice, you might not notice the missing eye.

Rex recovered uneventfully and immediately felt better. Opening the eyeball after it was removed, the quill was halfway into the eye. The track was infected, I doubt if the eyeball could have been saved under any circumstances.

Late that afternoon, Rex bounced out of the clinic with Bob and the kids, acting like nothing was wrong.

Photo by Alana Sousa from Pexels