Tall Cow, Fat The trailer rolled into the parking lot of the clinic, eliciting sighs of awe and amazement from the group of onlookers. Mr. Pep was his name, and he was bringing in his sick cow. The other clients who happened to be at the clinic with me stood with dropped jaws as he pulled across the expanse from the road to the building. It’s not every day you see a cow riding on a flatbed trailer. This was no ordinary flatbed; it must have been five feet off the ground, and it had a cow strapped down on it with those “come along”-type straps that people use to bind round bales—not your ordinary bovine-delivery method. Ol’ Pep had called early that morning to tell me that he had a “real sick” cow that I needed to come out and examine. My reply included phrases such as, “I’m really busy this morning. It will be quite a while before I can get away. It would be better if you could bring her in. I don’t want anything to happen to her, so we could get to her quicker if you could load her up.” And, “Get her here as quick as you can.” It was 5:00 p.m. now, and I had almost completely forgotten he had phoned. Strapped to that five-foot-high trailer was the skinniest cow I had ever seen. She looked like something from an Ace Reid cartoon. Every rib was visible, and her flanks almost touched in the middle. I was amazed. “What are you feeding her, Pep?” was all I could think to say as I stood above her. “I got a giant pile of food for ’em out there,” he replied with great conviction. “Do all of your cows look like this?” was the next logical question. “No, about half of ’em are big and fat.” The last thing you ever want to do is argue with a convinced cow raiser about nutrition; I learned that early on in my veterinary career. So, I treated the cow the best I could, and Pep went merrily on his way. Three days later, he called me to come out to treat another cow that had gone down. This time, things around the clinic were not so hectic, and I drove out to his place on the outskirts of Clarendon. He had told me that the cow we treated at the clinic was much better, but now another one was down, and two or three of the others were in bad shape. What I saw when I arrived amazed me. This guy must have had a hundred cows grazing in what looked like a junkyard. There was junk scattered everywhere. I stood in the middle of this “pasture” and looked at the scattered herd. He was right; some of the cows were big and fat, but others were as poor as any cattle I had seen in my life. My mind was racing with all the differential diagnoses they had filled my brain with in vet school. I was thinking about disease, poisoning, bad teeth in the old cows, and other things that had big, Latin-sounding words. As I pondered the situation with puzzlement and perplexity, something suddenly hit me: all the fat cows were tall, and all the short cows were skinny. My eyes moved from cow to cow…tall cow, fat…short cow, skinny…tall cow, fat…short cow, skinny. It went on and on and the pattern held with no variance as I looked over the entire herd. “Pep, where is this pile of food you told me about?” “Over there behind the barn.” “You mind if I have a look at it?” “Shoot no, come on over.” As we rounded the corner, the answer became apparent. There, about ten feet behind the barn, sat another flatbed trailer that was five feet off the ground. Surrounding it was a large group of short cattle that were straining their necks, trying to get to the “pile” of food that the tall cows had eaten back. I counseled with Pep for a while about pushing that feed off the trailer so the short cows could get to it. I could tell he thought that was going to be too much work, but he grudgingly agreed that he would do something to remedy the situation. I was driving by Mr. Pep’s place about a month later and decided to stop by and see how the short cows were faring. He was nowhere to be found, so I drove on over to the pasture and began analyzing the cows. Things were looking good—tall cow, fat…short cow, fat. I went around behind the barn to see how the problem had been addressed, and you will never believe what I found. There, in the same place it had been before, was the flatbed trailer with a pile of food on it. The only difference was that he had hired a backhoe to dig a pit into which he could drive that trailer. Now the trailer was lower to the ground, and all the cattle could get to the pile. They just can’t teach stuff like this in vet school. Read this and many more stories in crowded in the MIDDLE of nowhere by Dr. Bo Brock Amazon kindle and paper back
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 01:14:47 +0000
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