Too Many Legs

D. E. Larsen, DVM

   I pulled through the open gate to the pasture. It was early evening, the weather was great, one of those early spring days that we see in the Willamette Valley. Bright sunshine, no wind, and pleasant moderate temperatures, probably in the high sixties. This was the type of day that I see myself skipping school to go fishing.

  I could remember Mel’s words on the phone, I was just hoping he was correct.

   “Doc, this is Mel, out on Pleasant Valley,” Mel said into the phone. “I have a heifer down out in the pasture. She has been down and straining for a couple of hours. I don’t think she can get up. I left the gate open for you. I have to go to work. I would appreciate it if you could take care of her. Just leave a note in the mailbox when you are done, I will call you in the morning.”

   These heifers often became wild again when a strange pickup showed up with a stranger driving. Just to be safe, I got out and closed the gate. I could still hear my Grandfather.

   “It is a lot easier to close the gate than it is to wish had closed it,” he often said.

   I pulled up to the heifer, she made no effort to move. I could see front feet and the calf’s nose sticking out of her vulva. It looked like a normal position, it must be a large calf.

   I got out of the truck and poured a bucket of warm water. I put a rope around her neck. There was nothing to tie it to except my truck. I had learned that lesson a few years earlier. When a cow is tied to the truck, she goes in a circle on the end of the rope. This usually means she collides with the side of the truck somewhere. That typically leaves a big dent.

   Today I tie the rope to her front leg, bringing the foot up close to her neck. I think that should keep her from getting up long enough for me to get control of her. After I have her restrained, I tie her tail out of the way with some twine. And then prep her rear end.

   This is a Black Baldy heifer. She is black, with a white face. Usually, these cows are crosses between an Angus and a Hereford. They are generally good cows. The crossbreeding provides some hybrid vigor. 

  This heifer is young, less than 2 years old. She looks like she should be large enough to deliver this calf.

   I put on an OB sleeve and applied a lot of J-Lube. I ran my hand into the vagina alongside the calf. First on the right side and then on the left side. Everything felt fine to me. There appeared to be plenty of room in the pelvis, and the calf was in normal position. The calf was still alive.

   I thought we just needed a little traction on the calf, and it should just pop out of there. I put my Frank’s Calf Puller together and seated the breach across her hind legs below the vulva. I hooked the feet to the puller with a nylon OB strap. Then I started jacking the calf out. 

   There was minimal progress, and then it came to a solid stop. I applied a little more pressure, nothing. These calf pullers were sort of two-edged swords. They did the job easier, but they also allowed someone to put too much force on the calf. This was dangerous to the survival of the calf. It was also hazardous to the tissues and the nerves of the momma cow. The idea was to put no more pressure that two good men could apply. That was sort of a learned skill.

   I stopped and unhooked the calf and set the puller to the side. Then I gave a quick wash to the vulva again. I explored the birth canal again, bare-armed this time just so I don’t lose any sensitivity due to the plastic sleeve on my fingers. I could not feel anything that would be a problem with this delivery. 

   I hooked up the calf puller again and put tension on the calf. Then, I pulled the end of the puller down, so it was putting a downward pull on the calf. This would also make the breach put upward pressure on the calf. This did a couple of things. It gave the calf a direction of travel as if the cow was standing. This also elevated the calf in the birth canal. The pelvis was a little wider in the upper portion of the birth canal.

    I was thinking that I was putting too much pressure on this calf. But I gave a little more pull down on the end of the puller. It was close to vertical relative to a standing cow. I was about to stop when I detected a slight slippage of the calf. I gave one more little pull on the end of the puller.

   The calf suddenly came out, almost as if it was shot from a cannon. Landing on the ground, the calf shook his head. At least he was still alive. The heifer groaned a little, but I sure she was relieved that the calf was out of there.

   I went over to look at the calf. He was holding his head up already. And then I saw the problem. This calf had an extra set of legs coming out of his back just behind the shoulder blades. These came up out of the back and folded back along the back. They just added enough extra depth to the chest of the calf to make it a tight fit for the birth canal.

   Doing a quick exam of the calf, his hind legs were paralyzed. A lot of effort for the momma cow, all to no avail. Now, what to do. There is nobody home, Mel is at work. I don’t know if I have a phone number to reach him. In any case, it will involve a trip back to the office to make the call. 

   It would be interesting to know just what is going on structurally with these extra legs. I might see if Mel has any interest tomorrow. I am sure Mel would concur that this calf has no future. Leaving him until tomorrow will just add more stress for both the calf and the momma cow. I take a deep breath and make the decision to go ahead and put the calf to sleep now.

   I draw up 10 ccs of Sleep Away and give it IV to the calf. He is gone before the injection is complete. I return to the heifer and check her birth canal for any injury, it seems fine. I give the membranes a little tug, and they come out with little effort. I instill 5 grams of Tetracycline powder into her uterus because of the extended labor.

 Now to see if she can get up. I untie the rope from her foot and take it off her head. I stand back and give her a swat on the rear. She jumps up with no problem. She only glances at the calf before she heads off to the far end of the field.

  I pull off my coveralls and pour a fresh bucket of water to use to wash up with. Sandy wanted me to stop at the store for a couple of items. I was going to have to hurry if I was going to make dinner.

  I left a note for Mel, saying that I will talk to him when he calls in the morning and letting him know the calf is dead in the field. In the note, I tell him real briefly that the calf had 6 legs, that was why the heifer needed some help. I also tell him that the calf was paralyzed and that I put it to sleep.

  I stop at Thriftway for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk.I much prefer Thriftway, for their service, but also their community support. It is great to have a locally owned, large grocery store in town.

  I find it a little odd that people are avoiding me in the store. Maybe it is because I am almost running to get things and get checked out as soon as possible. But I make it home just as Sandy is getting the kids sat down for dinner.

  Sandy gasps as I am putting the milk into the refrigerator.

  “Did you go to the store like that?” she asked.

  “Like what?” I say.

  “You go look in the mirror in the bathroom, and you wash before you come to the table!” Sandy says in a firm voice.

  I look myself over in the mirror, and I don’t see anything that I would consider unusual. I know there have been times when I have missed blood in my hair and the like, but today I don’t see anything.

Sandy comes up behind and touches the back of my elbow. I raise my arm and look at the back of my elbow. There is a large glob of thick mucus and blood covering the back of my arm and elbow. No wonder I was avoided in the store.

Photo by Klaus Hollederer from Pexels.

Ali

D. E. Larsen, DVM

I first met Ali in the Fall of 1976. He was a German Shepherd. At that time, almost all German Shepherds were great dogs. Ali was a large, black and tan male. He was well behaved and a reliable member of the family.

Gene had called me because he was concerned that Ali was vomiting. It was troublesome more than anything else. He was not vomiting all the time, but usually a little bit every day. Gene was worried because he would bring shaker balls home from the mill, and Ali loved to retrieve those balls. 

“Shaker balls are larger than a baseball,” Gene explained. “I don’t know if he could swallow one of those or not.”

“You wouldn’t think so,” I said. “But, I guess we could try to see if they would show up on an x-ray.”

“They probably are just fabric and maybe some rubber,” Gene said.

This was before the clinic was open. I was limited to house calls and a mobile x-ray unit designed for a horse’s leg, rather than the abdomen of a large German Shepherd.  

I got a picture. Ali was a great patient. It was an awkward setup, but he tolerated it well.  I had Ali lay under the x-ray unit that was suspended from a stand. Not many dogs would put with that without some sedation. It was not a problem with Ali. I often found that large dogs, with a lot of self-confidence, were much easier to deal with when the situation was unusual than a hundred little dogs who were afraid of their shadows.

I looked and looked at the film. There was nothing I could see to suggest a ball in his stomach.

“If you are concerned, we could do exploratory surgery,” I told Gene.

“Well, as long as the vomiting doesn’t get worse, I guess we will just watch him for now,” Gene said.

“We might try to change his diet to canned food and feed in smaller meal sizes, several times daily,” I suggested. “If you get concerned, we can do surgery at any time.”

The diet change almost solved the vomiting issue. Ali would now vomit only occasionally. Gene was no longer worried, and we would talk only on an occasional basis.

Then Easter Sunday came along. My folks were visiting us for the weekend. For whatever reason, Easter Sunday was a busy day for me for the first few years I was in Sweet Home. We woke up to a pickup parked in the driveway with a large sow in the back. 

“Doc, I am sorry to bother you on Easter Sunday,” George said. “My wife said I should come early, so I would be less disruptive to your day.”

I had pulled a pair of pants on and an old shirt and went out to talk with George in my slippers.

“I picked her up at the auction on Thursday,” George continued. “She can’t poop, Doc.”

“Give me a few minutes to get a few things and get something better on my feet, and I will get a look at her, George,” I said.

Looking her over, she looked a little full in the gut. On the rectal exam, her colon was a blind pouch on the rectal side. A lot of scar tissue was present.

“Things don’t go anywhere from this end,” I said.

“Makes me mad that someone would send her to the sale for me to buy,” George said.

“This sow apparently had a rectal prolapse at some time in her life,” I said. “Her colon is scared closed. It was probably poorly repaired when the prolapse happened. I can maybe open it with a trocar, but not without some risk, and it will not stay open for any significant amount of time.”

“Ah, I had a pig like that once,” George said. “A long time ago.”

“How did you handle her then?” I asked.

“I took her to the sale,” George said.

“See there, things sort of come back around, sometimes,” I said.

That brought that visit to a close. There wasn’t much to be done anyway. I guess the sow could be salvaged for sausage. Probably be okay if you were hungry enough, but I wouldn’t want to eat it.

It was well after dinner in the late afternoon when the phone rang.

“Doc, this is Gene,” Gene said. “Now I know there is a shaker ball in Ali’s stomach. We had the daughter and her family here for dinner, and after dinner, her husband and the boys were out throwing a ball for Ali. One toss was high in the air, he jumped up and caught it, and they watched it go down. He is sort of uncomfortable now.”

“My day tomorrow is already a disaster,” I said. “Maybe I should meet you at the clinic and plan to do the surgery this evening.”

“I don’t want to disrupt your holiday,” Gene said. “But if you are willing to do it this evening, that would be great.”

  “I can meet you at the clinic in half an hour,” I said.

Hanging up the phone, I turned to Dad. “Are you interested in going to the clinic and watching a surgery?” 

Dad, Sandy, I head to the clinic, leaving Mom home with the kids. Mom probably would have liked to go, but staying with the kids made up for her missing the surgery.

We were pretty well set up by the time Gene came through the door with Ali. We rushed through the check-in process and moved ahead with the exploratory surgery.

With Ali under anesthesia, and prepped for surgery, I made a five-inch incision on his ventral abdominal midline. It only took me a few minutes to be in the abdomen. I reached in with one hand and palpated the stomach. There was a large shaker ball, and then I felt the second ball also. Gene had been correct in his assumption all along.

I was able to externalize the stomach with both balls. 

With both large balls and just a small portion of the stomach hanging outside of the incision, Dad made his observation. “That looks just like a large scrotum and a couple of big balls.”

I made an incision in the stomach just long enough to allow me to express one of the shaker balls out. The first one, then the next came. The second ball had obviously been in the stomach for some time. All the fuzz on the surface was gone. That was the ball that had been there since last Fall.

I turned the gas off as I started to close. At that time, I had a Metaphane gas machine. Metaphane was an excellent anesthetic gas, but it had a prolonged recovery period. By turning the gas off early, Ali should be away by the time we were cleaned up and ready to go.

The closure was simple. I used a double layer inverting closure on the stomach incision, returned the stomach to its normal position. Then I used a routine 3 layer closure for the abdominal incision.

Ali was awake in no time after returning him to his kennel. We cleaned up the surgery room, and I gave Gene a call to let him know things had gone well, and Ali was awake and doing well. And he was happy about the fact that he did, in fact, have two balls in his stomach.

We started out the front door when for some unknown reason, I stopped and said to Sandy, “We have a lot of money in that cash drawer, maybe we should take it home.”

We had been in the practice of only making occasional bank deposits. I went to the cash drawer and took all the bills, I think about $1300.00. I left the change, which could have been close to $20.00. 

About 5:00 in the morning, the police called. Someone had broken out the glass in the clinic door and broke in. I got up and went to the clinic to go through it with the police. The only thing that was missing was the change out of the cash drawer.

Photo by Басмат Анна on Unsplash

The Science of Love, Dogs, and Dog-Love

By guest author John Marble

Over the years, (decades, actually) I came to know Doc Larsen as a fine “cow doctor”. Growing up on the ranch, I got to see Dave un-twist a uterine-torsioned, backward, upside-down calf, truss up a cesarean-bound cow like a Christmas goose and saw the horns off cows until the sweat beads popped on his forehead and streamed down into this eyes. But honestly, my deepest and most reflective conversations with the Doc were actually about dogs. Not just any dogs, of course: my dogs. My red dogs.

You see, over a period of twenty years or so I had a string of Vizsla Hounds, dogs that started out as tiny yellow puppies and turned into magnificent bird dogs. Vizslas are rumored to be pointing specialists, but my dogs wound up being highly talented pointers, exceptional retrievers and long-lived companions. Damn, they were all just about perfect dogs.*

Of course, Doc Larsen took care of all of them, providing routine vet work plus the occasional disaster care that is required when you have high-energy dogs. The thing is, this kind of dog tends to run head-long into hard objects, jump off cliffs, and find porcupines and snakes from time to time. They are what an insurance carrier might call “high risk” clients.

One of those dogs was truly special. Slobodon (Slobo) was a fabulously talented, all-around hunting dog. His second meeting with Doctor Larsen was for removing his wonderful traits from the gene pool.

“You sure you want to fix him? Seems like he shows some real promise.”

“Oh hell, Doc, I never want to be in the puppy business. Anyway, there’s always more dogs out there.”

This, of course, was blatantly untrue.

Six months later, I found myself camped out on the high desert: three hunters, three red dogs, camping in early fall, hunting for endangered Sage Grouse. The irony of that made it even more fun. Slobo was a young, gangly and goofy boy dog. His old Aunty was the senior dog, and his full sister Sarah (same litter) was the third. Sarah’s owner, my young companion Joel, was terribly proud of his first dog, and we were excited to be hunting together. As we were driving to camp, Joel mentioned that he thought Sarah might be coming into heat. No problem, I said. Slobo was snipped six months ago. 

“Still, kind of keep an eye on her, if you can. Make sure she doesn’t get in any trouble if there are other dogs around.”

When we arrived at our camping spot we let the dogs out to run and Joel’s dad and I began setting up the tent. Joel, a very young and soft-hearted fellow, was doing the heavy lifting, unpacking the truck.  It was a lovely fall evening on the desert, the sky was all purple and red. As I finished pounding the last tent stake in, I looked up to find my boy dog Slobo locked up in full-on coitus with his sister, Sarah.

“Hey, Joel, can you get your little slut dog away from my hound?”

Joel was embarrassed, terrified, in fact. He began apologizing immediately, saying how he had planned to watch her closely, but she just slipped out of sight for a moment.

I told him to relax, that it would be alright, and to remember that Slobo was fixed. Next, I walked to the nearest cooler,extracted an ice-cold can of beer, shook it violently, aimed it at the juncture point of the two dogs and popped the top. I remember Slobo looked at me with a face of pure humiliation and after a few moments slunk away to pout.

The next time I happened to be at the clinic I explained the entire scenario to Doc Larsen. I remember asking,

“Doc, how the hell can a dog with no working parts be a successful…companion in sex?” 

Dave looked at me for a moment, pondering, then told me something I will never forget:

“Well, I guess this just goes to show that there is more involved in romance than just the hardware. Something to think about, you suppose?”

Words to live by, I’d say.

John Marble

Crawfordsville, Oregon

*Keep in mind that all hunting dog owners tacitly accept a singular definition of the “perfect” dog. It is always the one they currently have.