Village Horse Doctor (17 page)

Late
one afternoon, Mr. Lee called me from Iraan and said that the cowboys had brought the best stud he ever owned into the ranch headquarters, and he was bad sick and had been down on the ground and there were patches of hide gone from various parts of his body where he had rolled against rock and he had beat his head against the ground until his eyes were swollen too, and he asked how soon I could get there. The ranch was seventy-five miles away, and I told him I would be there as soon as I could drive it.

I drove into the ranch just at sundown. The stallion was about fifteen hands high with good conformation, and it was easy to see why Mr. Lee was uneasy about him. I didn’t have to examine him very much before I knew that he had a mesquite-bean impaction that would be extremely hard to remove.

Mesquite trees make a long pod that is filled with a sweet sorghum-like-tasting pulp and little oblong hard beans that are high in food value. In the late summer and early fall when mesquite beans begin to ripen, cattle and horses and sheep all will eat them. Sheep have to wait for them to fall on the ground, and at this stage the beans are fairly mature and if they are not eaten will lay on the ground all winter without rotting and are good for feed anytime livestock find them.

Horses and cattle, but especially horses, will pick the beans off the trees after they begin to turn sweet, and as long as there is grass to be eaten along with them, the beans will cause no serious problems and are ideal feed for horses to fatten on. In time of drouth when there is no other green vegeation to be mixed with mesquite beans, horses will eat such enormous quantities of them that they will form an impaction, and a mesquite-bean impaction is real trouble.

As the horse develops fever from this digestive-tract impaction, the fever tends to dry the moisture out of the impaction even more; and as this occurs, the fiber begins to swell, and if some form of treatment isn’t given, a mesquite-bean impaction is usually fatal. There are other cases where mesquite beans when eaten, especially by the small pony breed of horses, will cause founder and leave crippling effects after recovery in the feet of the ponies. Flocks of sheep will stiffen from the protein saturation in the tissue around the joints from a solid diet of mesquite beans. All ranchers look forward to a good fall mesquite-bean crop to put the final hardening fat on large livestock before winter.

Mesquite-bean impactions do not respond to the therapeutic action of internal purgative medication, and if over-stimulation of the spasmodic muscles of the intestinal tract is induced by medication, many times the large intestine and colon will rupture and hasten death. The only right way to relieve a mesquite-bean impaction is the hard way, and I mean by that you go into the rectum of a horse with a rubber hose and a pump and a tubful of water and moisten and water the impaction, and after you have stripped off to your waist, reach into the rectum of the horse and actually dig the mesquite bean impaction out with the aid of the water that you are pumping in.

We put this stud in a chute where he couldn’t lay down and put bars behind him where he couldn’t back up on me and bars in front of him so that he couldn’t move about, and by about ten thirty that night I had removed more than a tubful of the bean impaction and had gone far past the colon. Then I started medical treatment.

We saved the stud, and for the next five or six weeks, I had from one to as many calls as I could answer through
the day and night for horses that were valuable and could be treated because they were gentle. There were lots of unbroke range horses that could not be treated and many of them died.

There was very little treatment that we could give sheep except to move them to pastures where there were no mesquite trees. Cattle belong to the ruminant family and have more than one stomach, and impactions are rarely if ever a problem. There may be an occasional case of bloat in cattle, but the losses from mesquite beans are minor.

I had just gotten in from one of these mesquite-bean cases and it was late afternoon and I was cleaning up a little in my laboratory when the phone rang. It was a fellow at the Walker oil field about forty miles east of Fort Stockton. He was callin’ me about his family milk cow that had calved in the early part of the day, and he said that she was awful sick and thought she had milk fever. This was another one of those hurry-up-type calls because the condition becomes critical so fast that time is important.

In an oil field that is already developed and has settled down to production, there is a class of employees that live in those camps after the boomers have passed on—pretty stable citizens. One or maybe two families keep a good milk cow and furnish fresh milk to the rest of the people in the camp, and these pet milk cows become pretty important.

Only the best milk cows will have milk fever because they deplete their body supply of calcium during the previous milking period. When a new calf is born, nature is partial to producing milk for that baby calf, so that the purest available calcium in the cow’s body is contained in the white cartilage walls of the milk glands that come out of the body and go into the cow’s bag. When the calcium is robbed from these tubes, they collapse and the disintegration
that sets in is referred to as milk fever. It is actually a condition instead of a disease, and the cow is sure to die unless you can hastily replace this calcium.

It was after dark when I got there. This good cow was lying stretched out on the ground almost lifeless and no more than an hour from certain death if she received no treatment. Her breathing and heart ratio were so unstable that I had to spend about fifteen minutes of very precious time with heart stimulants before I dared to slug the jugular vein with calcium gluconate, an excess amount of which would have stopped this cow’s weak heart. She responded to the hypodermic heart stimulant, which, of course, also raised her fever but enabled me to administer calcium gluconate intravenously.

As I worked on this cow, I was aware of a very medicine-like odor that I knew I had nothing to do with, so I asked what it was that I smelled on the cow. It was late October and by this time of night the onlookers had built a fire in the corner of the corral and the neighbor women had gathered to see what was goin’ on and worry about the cow and get in a little gossipin’. When I asked what I smelled on the cow, one of these good neighbor women spoke up and said she bathed the cow’s bag with Watkin’s Liniment.

After a good forty-five minutes of hard medical practice, the cow showed a very favorable reaction and the men and me took her by the legs and rolled her over on the other side to encourage circulation on the side she had been lying on. She got a tremendous reaction from the calcium and started tryin’ to get up.

Well, being a pet cow she was easy to help, and we got her on her feet. She stood there for a few minutes, gained her balance, and walked over to the water trough and drank a lot of water, which was the natural thing for a cow to do
that had just started to develop a tremendous flow of milk and had also been dehydrated by temperature.

I leaned back against the fence, and as the cow bawled for her baby calf, I had a real good feeling from saving that fine milk cow. About that time the old lady that had furnished the liniment flipped her apron up and wrapped both hands in it as she passed me goin’ toward the corral gate and in a very firm voice said, “Well, we’ll never know whether it was the liniment or the doctor that done it!”

About daylight one fresh fall morning, I went out to the irrigation valley north of town to see some sheep that had bloated in the night while grazing on some fresh cut-over alfalfa stubble. This was a common occurrence and the treatment was simple, but the cause was interesting in that it was not covered by any source of veterinary literature and was gradually learned by me and the farmers in the irrigated valley.

In the early fall when the days are still warm in the desert and the nights get very cold along after midnight, sheep will graze and fill up and lay down on dark nights and it’s likely that they may not leave their bed until sunrise the next morning. However, when the moon comes up late after the chill of the night, this sudden change from warm days to cold nights causes a chemical reaction in the tender growth of alfalfa and the sugars of the plant turn to acid and are not transposed again until up in the morning hours of warm sunshine.

During this moonlight period of acid vegetation, sheep will come off their bed ground in the moonlight and graze the alfalfa and develop severe cases of bloat within the matter of a few hours. Most of the farmers grazing alfalfa late in the year learned to pen their sheep on dry feed during the moonlight nights and this prevented those early daylight calls for bloat.

I heard a young veterinary doctor had moved in over at Monahans, which was about fifty miles north of me, and I just thought to myself that if he was real good, I would be glad for him to have the north end of my territory up and down the Pecos River, which would better enable me to take care of the rest of my practice.

I had answered a call up to Kermit still further north than Monahans and was on my way home in the late afternoon and dropped by to get acquainted with the young doctor. He was a great big, fat, slick-faced kid fresh out of college who had been raised on pavement and had no livestock or agricultural background. I was as polite to him as I could be and welcomed him into the country and told him I would be glad to help him any way I could and would be sure to send him some practice. As I drove away, I was sure that the only practice I could send him that he would know anything about would be dogs and cats and the women that owned them.

In about three weeks after meeting him, I got a call to come to Monahans to see about a milk cow. I told the people on the phone that they had a young veterinary doctor there and it would be cheaper for them to have him than for me to make the trip. The old man spoke up and said, “We’ve had him five times and don’t think the cow wants him any more, and for what he charges and what we’ve heard about you, you’d be the cheapest by a whole lot.”

About an hour and a half after that, I drove into the side gate of the man’s house in the main part of Monahans and there stood his milk cow with one side of her head swelled out of all proportion. He explained to me that the young doctor had used some great long words tellin’ him what was the matter with the cow. He said that the words hadn’t helped him none and the shots he had been givin’ hadn’t
helped the cow none, and he guessed it wasn’t a common case as what was usually referred to as lump jaw.

Lump jaw is caused by an iodine deficiency and the jaw bone becomes porous and the flesh around the bone becomes highly irritated and the swelling usually appears on one side of the head. I looked at this old cow a few minutes and she was in real pain and was standing with her mouth open. Her mouth had been open so much and so long that the end of her tongue was dry and sore.

She was a gentle cow, so we didn’t put a rope or anything on her. I just walked up and talked to her a few minutes and reached in her mouth and took hold of her tongue and pulled it out to one side of her mouth. The reason for this is that a cow or horse can’t close their mouth to bite your arm if you have it blocked open by having their own tongue pulled out to one side.

As I examined her jaw teeth with one hand, I ran on to something that didn’t belong in a cow’s mouth. I went to my car and got a long blunt screwdriver and after pulling her tongue out the same way, I went back in her mouth and began to prize on something in line with the teeth in the lower jaw. In a matter of seconds out of her mouth popped a golf ball that had been wedged between two teeth in a socket where a tooth was gone. There had been a mass of feed compressed down into the socket under the golf ball, and, of course, the pus began to flow and the jaw began to go down.

There was a garden hose handy that was hooked to a hydrant so we turned it on and ran cold water through that old gal’s mouth for about ten minutes. After I stuck the hose in her mouth and the water started running through her jaw, I turned her tongue loose and she stood with her mouth open and enjoyed the relief she was gettin’ from the water washing out all that foreign matter. When I quit
runnin’ the water, she walked over to the feed trough and began to eat like she was about to starve to death.

This gave me kind of a sickening feeling for the profession when doctors were being turned out of school that didn’t have common sense or nerve enough to stick their hand in a cow’s mouth to see what was the matter.

The winters in the Southwestern deserts are the most enjoyable time of the year. There are cold nights and warm, still days and just occasional unpleasant spells of weather. During this time of year, the ranchers weren’t too busy and most of them took time to have their horses’ teeth looked after. It was also an ideal time to do surgery on horses and cattle because there was practically no airborne infections and most recoveries were uneventful.

I had been doing lots of dentistry on saddle horses and that caused talk around the coffee gathering and everybody went to thinkin’ about their horses. On one of these nice, clear, cold January mornings, we were sittin’ in the drugstore waitin’ for the sun to come up so we could shed our coats and enjoy the desert climate when John Vic came up to me and in his high, whiny voice asked me what ought to be done about blind teeth on a four-year-old horse.

I explained to him that we could take the baby teeth out where the permanent teeth could come on through, but that the big knots that had formed on the horse’s head over the teeth would not go down after the baby teeth had been pulled and those knots would always show. So we made arrangements for me to remove the baby teeth.

Within a few days, Charlie Dees called me to look at a grey three-year-old colt that he had gotten from the Allison Ranch. This colt had been stifled (stifle joint dislocated), and I explained to Mr. Dees that there was nothing that could be done for this horse and that he would never be any better.

John Bennett came in within a day or two. He had a four-year-old dun horse that was known to be mean to buck and had a white spot in his eye, and he wanted to know if I could do something to cause the spot to disappear. I gave him some powder to be blown into the horse’s eye every other day and said, “If anything will take the spot off, this medicine will.”