Libby

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Our fascination with Silver Persians started in Enumclaw. The clinic had a client who raised Silver Persians and shipped kittens all over the country. She even had some international clients.

She lived in a large house. The people lived in the upper stories, and the cats, I don’t know how many, lived in the basement. When a litter of kittens was ready to ship to their new owners, the lady would bring them into the clinic to be bathed, fluffed, vaccinated, and whatever was needed.

These kittens were essentially feral. They had almost no human contact in their large basement living space. We always had to give them a small dose of ketamine so they could be handled.

“How many cats does Audrey have?” I asked Ann as she was bathing the last kitten.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Ann said. “We send out nearly a dozen litters a year. I have no idea what her basement must look like.”

“I’m not sure I would put up with this kind of work,” I said.

“It pays the bills,” Ann said. “You wait. When you have your clinic, you will have your share of cat ladies. They are everywhere.”

“How much does Audrey get for these kittens?” I asked. 

“She sells them for seven hundred dollars plus expenses,” Ann said.

“That is unbelievable,” I said. “That’s a month’s wages or a lot of people.”

“I think most of the people she sells these kittens to don’t have to worry about the money,” Ann said.

“I wonder what they think about paying that kind of money for a feral kitten?” I asked

“They probably can’t find kittens of this quality anywhere else,” Ann said. “And kittens this age tame down quickly.”

When Audrey came in to pick up her kittens, she had another cat in a carrier.

“I got this cat back,” Audrey said. “I sold it to a lady in London, and after its six months of quarantine, she could not get it tamed down. If you want to neuter it, you can have it. It is too old to sell, and I don’t have a situation to tame him down.”

I was quick to take her up on the offer. That evening, I neutered the young cat and declawed him at the same time. I taped his hind feet and took him home.

At the house, he was okay when he was in a box, but put him in an open room or try to handle him, and he would go wild. After a couple of days, we returned him to the clinic. Ann kept him in a cage for several months, and he tamed down and became an excellent clinic cat.

After moving to Sweet Home, we were excited when our babysitter, Jean Light, offered us a Silver Persian cat. Her mother had been given this cat by a friend who could not keep it. We were happy to accept Libby.

As a young cat, she fit into our household perfectly. It wasn’t long before the thought of having Persian kittens became a topic of discussion. Another friend, another Ann, offered us the use of a Persian tomcat that was being cared for by the local humane society.

We borrowed the tomcat when Libby came into heat, and our learning experience began. Libby was all claws when the tomcat showed her any interest.

“What are we going to do?” Sandy asked.

“Give her a few days, and nature will take its course,” I said.

The rest of the day and that evening, we were treated to any number of catfights in the living room. The other cats in the house were upset, also. This tomcat was not the most sociable individual.

That night, sometime after midnight, I woke with what I first thought was a headache. This tomcat had peed between the headboard of the bed and the wall. The odor was overwhelming. Sandy woke up shortly after I was awake.

In many cases, this would be no problem. One would just have to move the bed and clean up the urine. In our case, the process was a little complicated. We slept on a waterbed. It was a major operation to move the bed, even a couple of feet.

“What are we going to do now?” Sandy asked. 

“I think we are going to sleep on the hide-a-bed for tonight,” I said. “I can get up early and drain the waterbed mattress. Then we can clean up the mess and refill the mattress. I think we will position the bed a little further from the wall this time.”

The next day we cleaned up the mess and returned the tomcat to the humane society.

We learned that Libby found the wondering tomcats much more to her liking. A couple of months later, Libby gave us a litter of long-haired kittens who would grow into beautiful cats. Libby’s kittens became popular, and we allowed her to have several litters.

In her last litter, we kept a couple of her kittens. They were large fluffy cats named Chester and Howard.

After that last litter, I spayed Libby. 

After her spay, she became much less lovable. She hated to be groomed, to the point of being nothing but claws and teeth when someone would try to brush her.

Her hair would mat, and once or twice a year, she would make a trip to the clinic. I would sedate her and clip her hair coat, and she would go home mostly bald. Her hair coat would come off in one piece, like a sheep’s fleece.

As time went on, Libby became more and more antisocial. She began to live away from the house, only coming by for her meals a couple of times a day. She would spend the rest of the time in the neighbor’s small barn.

She started to have urinary tract infections, and medicating her was a monumental struggle. We would have to keep her in the clinic for weeks at a time. She would almost run to her barn when we would bring her home, and it was not long before her urinary tract infections progressed to kidney failure.

Libby did not survive long once she had kidney failure. I felt she was happy as a mother, and she lost her social self when that was taken away. Her legacy was in the beautiful kittens that survived many years beyond her.

Photo by Bianca Vogt on Pexels.

One Sore Foot

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was the middle of August, and we hadn’t seen any rain in weeks. You could almost taste the dust in this small pasture.

Bill Sieg looked down at me.

“Do you think he will fit in the chute?” Bill asked. “I haven’t tried to put him in it yet.”

We were in a small pasture behind the barn, and we were looking at Bill’s oldest herd bull. He was a massive Brangus bull. He probably tipped the scales at close to a ton.

“He is a pretty big bull,” I said. “Your chute should be wide enough, but this guy is tall. He might have to squat a bit to get under the tailgate.”

“I called that guy with one of those tilting chutes to see if he could look at this bull’s foot,” Bill said. “He didn’t think he could fit him into his chute. And even if he could, he wasn’t sure he could get it tilted with the bull in it.”

“That foot is pretty sore,” I said. “He doesn’t even touch it to the ground.”

“Oh, he touches it down a little when he gets excited,” Bill said. “But he is not interested in moving around much. The good thing is we’re done with the breeding season. But I don’t want to lose him because of a sore foot.”

“Well, let’s try to put him in the chute and see what I can do for him,” I said. “We might get lucky and find something simple.”

Bill had dogs, but they were bird dogs, springer spaniels, not cow dogs. I walked out around the bull to get him headed to the corral. His head was up, and he shook it at me, but he made no effort to move. Even still, I was in dangerous territory.

I picked up a couple of dirt clods and threw one, hitting the bull on his butt. He moved, reluctantly, toward the corral. The corral was small enough that he was in the crowding alley once he was in it.

I closed him into the alley and pushed him toward the chute. With Bill on the headgate, the bull squeezed under the tailgate and lurched toward the headgate, and bill caught him perfectly and leaned with all his weight on the bar to squeeze his massive neck.

I hurried and closed the tailgate and pulled the squeeze closed as hard as I could. We dropped the side panel to allow access to his feet. He was holding his right front foot up enough that I could easily slip a rope onto it and tie it up so I could work on it. I was a little surprised at the total lack of resistance to my efforts.

I did an initial exam of the foot. There was no foot rot and no foreign body between the claws.

“He acts like he knows we are going to help him,” I said. “I don’t find anything simple. I will grab my hoof stuff and see what I can find. These hoofs are almost as hard as steel this time of the year. Hopefully, I can trim this one a little.”

I ran to the truck and grabbed a medicine bag and my hoof bag. 

I squeezed hard on the lateral claw in several locations with the hoof tester. There was no response from the bull. Then I moved to the inside claw. With the hoof tester on the end of the toe, I squeezed. The bull bellowed and bounced the entire chute. 

I stood back a minute, thinking he could tip the chute over.

“I think you found something,” Bill said with a snicker.

I went back to work with the hoof tester. This time I put a squeeze on the middle of the inside claw, there was no response, and it was the same on the rear portion of the claw.

“I think he has an abscess on the tip of the toe on the inside claw,” I said. “The good thing is these will usually heal rapidly once they are opened and drained. The bad thing is I have to try to dig in the sole of this foot, and that is going to be hard.”

I ran a file over my hoof knife before I started, but even with a sharp edge, I couldn’t dig into the sole of the hoof. Next, I took the hoof trimmer and loped off the tip of the claw. The bull jumped a little, and pus sprayed in all directions. It smelled bad.

“Boy, that’s rank,” Bill said. “You must have found the pus pocket.”

“Yes, I’m going to clean this up a bit, but just getting that open is going to make him feel a whole lot better,” I said. “You can imagine how much pressure the pus was under by how it sprayed when I nipped the tip off his toe.”

I cleaned up the abscess and medicated it topically. I wanted to release his foot to see how he was standing on it, but I restrained myself, knowing it would be difficult to pick it up again. 

“I have a new thing that I am going to try on this,” I said.

“I’m not too sure about new things,” Bill said. “I sort of like doing things the old way you do them.”

“I’m going to epoxy a wood block on the bottom of his good toe,” I said. “That will keep this sore toe off the ground while it is healing. He should be a lot more comfortable.”

“Okay, that sounds like something that might help him out awhile,” Bill said. “But are we going have to get him in again to take it off?”

“The box says it will just wear off,” I said.

I retrieved the block and the epoxy mix from the truck. It was pretty straightforward. I just mixed up the epoxy to a thick consistency, spread it on the sole of the good claw, and seated the block onto the epoxy. 

We waited for the epoxy to harden, and I released the rope so the bull could stand on his foot. He seemed to enjoy having his foot on the ground.

I loaded him up on some long-acting sulfa boluses. That was a chore, but this guy was pretty gentle for a bull.

When everything was done, it was time to let him out of the chute. It was more difficult to release him than to catch him, but he finally sprung out of the open head gate.

He took a couple of steps and turned to look at us. I liked to think he was saying thank you.

Then on his next step, the wood block snapped off and flew through the air.

“I guess that wasn’t made for a bull his size,” Bill said. “I hope that wasn’t expensive.”

“My expense, Bill,” I said. “I don’t charge for trials that don’t work. My problem is that it comes in a two-pack, and I either have to find a gentle cow to try it on or throw the other one away.” 

“My guess is you would be better off just throwing the stuff in the trash,” Bill said.

I opened the gate and let the bull back into the pasture. He was limping but walking on his foot.

“He looks a whole lot better,” Bill said. “Do you think that will heal up okay?”

“I think he will be fine,” I said. “Getting that abscess open allows him to go from holding that foot up to walking on it with only a slight limp.”

The bull healed well, and when I dropped by to check on him the following week, he was walking normally in the pasture.

I took Bill’s advice and threw the other block in the trash. It seemed like a good idea, but it was probably thought up by some guy who had never worked with real cows.

Photo by Tony Mucci on Pexels.

The Lost Ball, from the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“I don’t know what is wrong with old Ben, Doc,” Gavin said as he picked his dog up and settled him on the exam table. “He started vomiting once in a while several weeks ago. I just didn’t think much about it. But now, he vomits everything he puts in his mouth. He takes a drink and turns around pukes it up.”

“Let’s give him a good once over, and then we will talk about what diagnostics we need to do,” I said.

Ben had obviously lost a lot of weight since I had looked at him, but everything else was pretty unremarkable.

“How long has he been vomiting, Gavin,” I asked?

“I said several weeks, Doc. But you know how time slips away. It could have been longer. I never noticed how thin he was until just now.”

I stood him up, but Ben was a little reluctant to remain standing. Finally, with Gavin holding him under his chest, I started carefully palpating his abdomen. He was thin enough, I could just about define every structure in his belly. 

The mass just sort of jumped into my hand as I palpated his mid-abdomen. Small, round, and solid, it was the perfect size to obstruct the small intestines. 

“Does he chew on rocks or anything like that,” I asked?

“No, he doesn’t do much of anything anymore. He is getting pretty stove up. He does retrieve my golf balls when I am chipping in the back yard.”

“Golf balls,” I said as I felt the mass again. “Have you lost any of those balls?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Doc. I really don’t keep track of them. Do you think that is his problem?”

“I can feel a solid round mass in the middle of his small intestines,” I said. “It is of the size that it could be a golf ball. It could be a tumor or something else.”

“What do you think we should do,” Gavin asked?

“We could send in some blood and get some x-rays to try to define the object. Or we could just do exploratory surgery. We can fix it, or it may be something that we can’t do anything about. Really, the only way to know is to go in and look.”

“Are you saying it could be cancer?”

“Could be, but I would bet on the golf ball. It was probably rolling around his stomach for a few weeks causing him to vomit. Then in the last day or two, it started down the small intestine. That is when the vomiting really got going. If it is the ball, it is a simple fix. If it is a tumor, we can probably take it out, and then it just depends on what type of tumor it is.”

“Let’s just do the surgery,” Gavin said. “When can you do it?”

“I think we can do it the first thing in the morning. We will give him some fluids overnight and get him started on some antibiotics. If everything goes well, he should be able to go home the following day.”

“Do we have any special care,” Gavin asked?

“Not much. We will keep him on fluids and nothing by mouth for 24 hours. Then he will be on a soft slurry of a diet for a week.”

The surgery went well. Finding the foreign body was not an issue. There was virtually no fat in the omentum or anywhere else in the abdomen, for that matter. Ben has had this problem for a lot longer than Gavin had recognized. I explored the intestine’s entire length and palpated the stomach for any trace of another foreign body. None was found.

When I opened the intestine and squeezed a well-worn golf ball from its lumen, it was apparent that it had been in the stomach for some time. The cover of the golf ball had lost most of its dimples.

I closed the intestinal incision, rinsed the area well, and replaced everything into the abdomen. I closed the abdominal incisions, and we recovered Ben.

Ben felt immediately better on recovered. I think he was looking for a steak dinner. “That’s okay, Ben,” I said. “We will give you some liquid steak tomorrow morning.”

When we placed a small bowl of water in Ben’s kennel in the morning, you would have thought that he had been in the desert for a week. It just disappeared. Then we followed with a small bit of dog food mixed to a slurry. Ben lapped that down and was wagging his tail for more.

Ben was bouncing around when Gavin came to pick him up. He was ready to go after having several small meals of slurry.

“He is doing well,” I said. “He is acting like he hasn’t eaten in a month. And that may have been close to the case.”

“He sure looks better. Thanks, Doc,” Gavin said.

I tossed Gavin the golf ball in a small plastic bag.

“It looks like it has been in his stomach for some time,” I said. “You want to keep it in that bag or air it out outside. It smells pretty bad. And you know the rules. It is a stroke and distance for a lost ball.”

“I think that Ben’s golf ball retrieving is over,” Gavin said as they headed out the door.

It was a couple of weeks later when Gavin brought Ben in for suture removal. Ben was a completely different dog. He had gained at least 10 pounds. You could still feel his ribs, but they were not visible, just looking for him.

“He is back better than he has been for a long time,” Gavin said. “That golf ball must have been in there for months.”

“Yes, as long as it was just bouncing around in his stomach, it was only causing him some vomiting. When it entered his intestines is when it caused him some major problems.”

We removed the sutures and patted Ben on the head as I sat him on the floor. He was straining at the leash to get out the door. 

“They never give me any credit,” I said as Gavin was being pulled along toward the door. “They just know this is not a pleasant place to be for any amount of time.”

Photo by Siddharth Narasimhan on Unsplash