D. E. Larsen, DVM

Bill was brief and to the point on the phone. “I have a dog here who seems to be having a short seizure every few minutes,” Bill said. “We were wondering if you could get a look at him?”

“I have only been in town a couple of days, and I don’t have all my stuff,” I replied. “Does he have a history of seizures, or is this a new thing.”

“There is a bunch of kids here today,” Bill said. “They have been running all over the hills. One of the girls thinks he has been poisoned.”

  The sun was down, and the twilight was fading when I pulled into Bill’s driveway. It looked like a large group gathered on the front lawn of the farmhouse. Guys and gals all about high school age or a little older. A young liver and white Springer Spaniel was in the middle of the group. He was quiet, but immediately seizures when I closed the car door.

Dixie, a young blond, hovered over Max. The others showed little concern. 

“He has been getting worse, almost by the minute,” Dixie said. “He got into something down by the road, along the fence line. I think it must have been poison.”

“Was there an old deer carcass down there, or anything like that,” I said. “Sometimes, dogs can get pretty toxic from a belly full of rotten meat.”

“No, we stopped and looked,” Dixie said. “We couldn’t find anything.”

The guys were throwing a football, and it bounced past us. Max’s legs stiffened, and he stood like a sawhorse for a moment before falling onto his right side. All four of his legs were extended and shaking, and his head pulled back over his shoulders. His entire body was stiff, with every muscle contracted. His respiration was only is short, rapid, inefficient little puffs of air.

“This looks like strychnine,” I said. “Try not to stimulate him, I will get an injection for him.”

The bag that I carried was limited at this point. My pharmacy supplies were still arriving daily. I did have some Pentathol, which I mixed rapidly, with sterile water.

Max relaxed when the first few millimeters were in his vein. I continued the injection until he was completely relaxed and breathing comfortably. Then I placed an IV catheter in his front leg, capped it, and taped in securely in place.

“Strychnine kills when these convulsive seizures eventually cause respiratory paralysis,” I explained. “At this point, we need to keep Max quiet, in a darkened room and sedated.”

“How long does this injection last?” Dixie asked.

“Not long enough,” I said. “It is best to use some pentobarbital. It is longer lasting, but it is no longer available to veterinarians. This stuff is about the same, but shorter duration. It does accumulate, so with each dose, the duration is longer.”

Bill was standing over us now. “What are we going to do with him now?” Bill asked. “I’m not going to sit up with him all night. And I wouldn’t know how much of that stuff to give him.”

“I am without a clinic,” I said. “Right now, we are house hunting, and we are in a two-bedroom apartment with a baby and 3 other kids. And no pets are allowed. But I guess Max is a patient, not a pet. I can take him home with me and keep him sedated tonight. If I give you a call in the morning, can you come by and pick him up?”

“I am an early riser,” Bill said. “You give me a call, and I will run right in and get him. You sound like your pretty sure he is going to be alright.”

“You want me to be honest?” I said. “The only time I have seen strychnine toxicity was in a lab in school. There is not much to do unless you get to them early. At this stage, there is no way I can give oral medication. It is just a matter of keeping him sedated until things wear off. He will look a little hungover in the morning, but other than that, he should be good to go.”

“When I talked with Stan at the feed store, he said you seemed to be a straight shooter,” Bill said. “I like it when a guy is honest, even if it is not to his benefit.”

I gave Max a small second dose of Pentathol before loading him in the back of our station wagon. He was still asleep when I carried him into the apartment.

“Where are you going to put him?” Sandy asked.

We were bursting at the seams. The three girls are in one bedroom, and Derek, who is a couple of months old, is in our bedroom in a small crib. I bedded Max down in the bathtub. I would be up hourly for the first half of the night. Then I could probably stretch the checks out a little. With the darkened room and quiet environment, he probably won’t need too much more Pentathol tonight.

In the morning, Max was awake. Like I had told Bill, he looked like he had been out drinking all night. I offered him a small bowl of water from  Sandy’s best dishes. He lapped in it up and was looking for more. I gave him another bowl before I called Bill.

“Bill, Max is awake and doing well,” I said into the phone. “You can pick him up at any time. We probably are not going anywhere this morning, but the girls will be up shortly, and they will want to keep him if he stays around too long.”

“I’ll be right in,” Bill said. “His kennel mate is sort of acting lost this morning.”

The girls were up, and they squealed when they found a dog in the bathtub. 

“No, he is not ours, and you can’t keep him,” I explained.

Max was licking hands and faces, I think he enjoyed the attention but was looking for a bite to eat also.  

“Can I give him some cereal for breakfast?” Brenda asked.

“You can just give him a small handful,” I said. “His stomach is probably a little upset right now.”

Bill knock at the door was a welcome sound.

“Good morning,” I said as I opened the door. “Max is going to be happy to see you, I think. He hasn’t quite figured out where all these little girls have come from yet.”

“He likes kids, always has,” Bill said. “Is he walking, or do I need to carry him?” 

“I haven’t had him up, but when the girls got up, he really perked up,” I said. “I am pretty sure he will walk out of here. Did you bring a leash?”

“He wouldn’t know what a leash was,” Bill said. “He will just follow me.”

We stepped to the bathroom door, and Max looked up and jumped out of the tub in an instant.

“Come on, Max,” Bill said as he handed me a check. “Thanks a lot, we are happy to see you in town. Let’s go home, Max.” 

Max’s tail stump was going a hundred miles an hour as he crowded to get through the door ahead of Bill. Bill smiled and chuckled, something I would learn was characteristic for him.

In the following year, Dixie would come to work with us. She was our most stable employee, working on and off for over over 30 years.

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D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Tell me again, Jack.” I said. “What are you doing with these gals?”

Jack had called to have his llama herd checked but was not very specific as to what was going on. I did a lot of work, Jack.  Most of the time, I worked on his cows.  The llama herd was sort of an expensive hobby. 

Llamas were expensive animals, I was never able to figure out why. I guess they were sort of a status thing. There was certainly no viable use for them that supported the prices that were being paid. Female llamas were valued at $20,000 to $40,000 each. I had worked on one llama that the owner had declined an offer to purchase for $80,000. Nobody ate llamas, and their wool was used, but it was not valuable. In South America, it was considered to be peon’s wool.

Jack was a smallish man, but with rugged features and physique. Jack was a long time fixture in the Lebanon/Sweet Home area. I was not sure of all his trades, but his name fits. He was a “Jack of all Trades.” He had owned both a feed store and a grocery store at different times in Sweet Home. He probably made most of his money in logging. He told once that he was the first logging company into the Thomas Creek drainage.

“I need to have them preg checked,” Jack said. “I am selling the whole bunch of them in a couple of days.”

“The whole herd!” I said. “You must be planning some major vacation.”

“Well, the price is getting high enough, I just think it is time to cash in,” Jack said. “I got this herd at a pretty good price almost 10 years ago. We have made more off of this bunch of 20 some llamas than we make off the whole cow herd. If you can believe that. I get a little nervous, these twenty females are approaching a half million. And there is no basis for the price. You can sell the males for pack animals and get $700 each. The wool is worth pennies, and nobody eats them. How do you justify such a price?”

“I agree, there is just no basis for the price,” I said. “I just wish that I could tell you the sex of the baby when I do a preg check. How much do you think it would be worth to know whether the baby was going to worth $700 or $20,000 if you were buying a new llama.”

“That would be great information,” Jack said. “Why don’t you work on that, Doc?”

“I have thought about it a little,” I said. “A guy could probably do an amniocentesis and make the diagnosis. Just too much else to do right now.”

A pregnancy exam on a llama was a little worrisome for me. Llamas were much smaller than a cow but still large enough to accommodate a rectal exam. Their reproductive track was different. They had a long vagina, and the non-pregnant uterus was small and easily reached before you were in up to your elbow.

We worked Jack’s herd through a regular cattle chute, and the twenty head did not take long to complete. 

“Let me know if you need anything else with these girls,” I said as I loaded my things into the truck. “And you have a good time on that vacation.”

I had a feeling that Jack had made the right decision to sell the herd. I had heard several other llama owners who were concerned about the continued escalation of the price of a llama. 

One breeder was continually trying to get me into the business.

“I can almost guarantee you will own one or two female llamas, free and clear, after two years,” he would say. “And it doesn’t matter what you pay. If you’re lucky, all the babies will be females.”

The next Spring, when I visited Jack’s ranch to look at a cow, I noticed he had a new bunch of llamas.

“Aw, you must have missed the llamas,” I said as Jack approached me at the barn.

“My accountant made me go out and buy another herd,” Jack said. “He said I would lose too much in taxes. So what is a guy going to do. You lose money one way or the other.”

I did my routine work for Jack for the rest of that year. We always had some cow work to do, and there were a couple of sick llamas also. 

Then, in the Spring, there were rumors that the price of a llama was falling. The stories soon became fact, the price had dropped almost overnight. Wealthy llama owners were taking catastrophic losses. It was hard to put a dollar figure on their losses because nobody wanted to talk about it in exact terms.

Jack called shortly after the collapse, he had sold his llamas and needed them preg checked.

We were working his herd through the chute when Jack was explaining the loss to me.

“This gal you are checking right now, I bought for $27,000 last Spring,” Jack said. “Tomorrow, I am selling her for $1,150. I guess my accountant will be happy.”

Photo by Monika Kubala on Unsplash

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Hardware disease results from the indiscriminate eating habits of the cow. It was frequently seen when hay was baled with wire. Any stray sharp metal, like a nail, could be involved. The hardware will fall into the reticulum, considered the second stomach. The cow’s heart lies just on the other side of the diaphragm from the reticulum. Then when the wire pierced the reticulum and the diaphragm, it would poke into the heart. This can cause acute discomfort and rarely rapid death, but more likely a slow death from an infection around the heart and chronic heart failure.

My first recollection of a cow with hardware was with our Linda cow at Broadbent. Named after my sister, Linda cow was a Jersey cross cow. Of all our cows, she was the least attractive. Probably crossed with a Guernsey, she was mostly white with some orangish brindle coloration.

In the early 1950s, hardware disease was treated with surgery. The rumen was opened on the left side, and the operator would remove some of the content, and then reach anteriorly to the reticulum and extract the offending wire. Dr. Crawford, a veterinarian from Coquille, did the surgery on Linda. She carried an ugly scar for the rest of her life, which was not unusual with that surgery.

By the 1960s, hardware disease was treated with a magnet given orally to the cow. The magnet would fall into the reticulum, secure the offending hardware, and through regular stomach activity, withdraw it into the stomach. It would stay there, with the magnet until it rusted away.

We had one valuable cow that was treated at Colorado State University Veterinary Hospital while I was in school. It was suffering from severe pericarditis (infection around the heart) from hardware disease. In a last-ditch effort to save the cow, they removed one rib section and opened the pericardium to the outside. They could flush this area a few times a day. The problem was a large amount of inflammatory tissue in the pericardium became constrictive as it aged, and the treatment failed.

My first case of hardware disease after graduation occurred in Enumclaw. Andy had called with a steer that was not doing well.

“I don’t know what is going on with him, Doc,” Andy said. “He just stands mostly and walks sort of stiff-legged when he does move.”

Andy had the steer in his old dairy barn, just loose in the stanchion area.

“Let me get my rope, and we will get a look at him,” I said.

When the lasso landed over his head on the first throw, it surprised but the steer and me. He jumped to the right, and then back to the left, and then he fell over dead.

“What the heck happened to him?” Andy said in amazement.

A quick necropsy showed a five-inch wire poking into his heart. Had I been able to restrain him quickly, a magnet possibly would have saved him. 

“My guess is you are feeding hay baled with wire,” I said. 

“Yes, I just got a new load of alfalfa,” Andy said. 

“I would suggest you give all your other cows a magnet,” I said. “It is pretty easy to do, and it is a good preventative for this type of thing. Although it is rare to see a steer drop dead like this one.”

“So, was that in the hay or did I do that when I opened the bale,” Andy asked.

“There is no answer to that question,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t matter to this guy.”

“Can we eat him?” Andy asked.

“I guess that depends on how hungry you are,” I said. “He doesn’t qualify according to the food inspection criteria. He probably had a temperature and some inflammation. Obviously, you could eat him, but I don’t think the meat will be very good.”

And then there was the call from Barney. Barney was my very first call in Sweet Home. I had only been in town for a couple of days when the phone rang.

“Doc, this is Barney. Stan over at the feed store told me you were in town. I have a cow that stopped eating a couple of days ago and she is just not doing very well. I sure would like for you to get a look at her.”

“Barney, I am really not ready to do any calls,” I said. “I don’t have most of my equipment and drugs yet.”

“If you could just look at her,” Barney said. “If I have to call Albany, it will take them 3 days to get out here. It is going to be great, having you in town.”

“Okay, I will get a look at her, but no promises,” I said.

Barney’s place was up Ames Creek. He had several acres and a couple of cows. I pulled into the driveway in our car as I didn’t have a truck yet. Barney was waiting to greet me.

“Hi, I am Barney. I hated to pressure you, Doc,” Barney said as he shook my hand. “But you have to realize how difficult it has been to get a veterinarian out here in the past. Everybody is excited that you are coming to town.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Barney,” I said. “I am here, it is just that I am not quite organized yet. Shipments of equipment and supplies are coming everyday but the clinic is way behind schedule. The little 2 bedroom apartment we have rented is bursting at the seams. We have boxes stacked to the ceiling. But let’s get a look at this cow of yours. Oh, by the way, Barney, you are my very first client in Sweet Home.”

Barney’s cow, Rosebud, was a Hereford. She was in good shape, in fact, probably a little overfed. I would guess she was 5 or 6 years old. Doing an exam showed a slightly elevated temperature and much reduce rumen motility. Everything else was within normal limits.

“How long has she been sick, Barney?” I asked.

“I noticed that she stopped eating a couple of days ago. She has just been standing around, not moving much.”

I squatted beside Rosebud on her left side. I leaned against her belly with my elbows on my knees.  I placed both hands in the center of her belly, close to the edge of her ribs. Then with a hard push upward, like a punch in the gut, I jiggled her entire abdomen.

Rosebud let out a noticeable groan. Almost a diagnostic pain response for hardware disease.

“She has wire, Barney,” I said.

“A wire, what are you talking about?” Barney said. 

“Cows aren’t very discriminating when they are chewing on hay,” I said. “If there is a wire in that hay, it goes right on down. It falls into the reticulum, a little pouch on the front on the rumen. If the wire happens to puncture the wall, it is a very short distance to the heart.”

“So, what do we do about it?” Barney asked. “It seems I have heard about them doing surgery because of a wire.”

“At this stage in the game, we rarely have to do surgery,” I said. “I will give her a magnet and some long-acting sulfa boluses. I just happen to have both of those. That should take care of things in a day or two.”

“That sounds better than surgery,” Barney said. “Do I have to do anything with her?”

“You just keep an eye on her,” I said. “Call if she is worse tomorrow. I will give you a call or probably just drop by when you get off work in a couple of days. Since you are my first call, I don’t have a lot to do just yet. I should have plenty of time to look after her.”

Rosebud recovered in a couple of days and returned to her normal appetite and activities. Barney became a good client, friend, and neighbor for a few years that we lived on Ames Creek. And he was always proud of the title of my first client in Sweet Home.

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