Village Horse Doctor (25 page)

It
was early summer and I had moved out about fifteen miles from town and was living in a batchin’ outfit on Dow Puckett’s ranch. I had answered a call earlier in the day south of Sanderson and went to my batchin’ outfit instead of going back to town that night.

Mr. Hill, who was foreman of the Hess Ranch a few miles north of Marathon, had been trying to reach me at Fort Stockton. When he couldn’t get me he called Roger Gallemore at the drugstore. Roger told him that if I came in by closing time he would have me call him.

Roger forgot about the call and closed up and went to bed. He remembered during the night and tried to call me. Unbeknownst to me, the phone at my batchin’ outfit was dead, and when Roger couldn’t get me to answer, he called Punch McAdams, who lived at the old headquarters about three or four miles across the ranch from me. Roger told Punch about Mr. Hill’s call and about my phone being dead, so Punch got in his pickup and drove over. He woke me up and told me my phone was dead and relayed the message from Mr. Hill.

I got up and drove to the Hess Ranch, and at about two o’clock in the morning I knocked on Mr. Hill’s door and told him I had just gotten his call. He was a little surprised to see me and explained that he had not expected me to make an emergency call; he said that the horse had been affected
for several days. He invited me in, made a pot of coffee, and got dressed.

After a visit and his explainin’ to me about the horse having abscesses on various parts of his body, we took lights and went out to the barn to look at the young stallion. He was a nice young horse that had been turned out in a small pasture on the south side of Iron Mountain. When Hill had noticed a large swelling on the point of his shoulder, he thought it was from a mare kicking him or some other accident and had brought him into the ranch headquarters. Hill said that he had lanced that abscess and within a week’s time, several more had formed at other places.

As I examined the horse, I realized that I had found a new booger of some kind. This young stud was running very little or no temperature, and when I examined the flesh around these abscesses, he was not sensitive and very little soreness had developed. There was no indication of bruises or any signs of shotgun pellets, and the abscesses that I opened had no mesquite thorns or other foreign objects in them.

I told Mr. Hill that I didn’t readily know what was the matter with the horse, but I’d sure try to find out. I took a blood specimen from his jugular vein for laboratory analysis. Penicillin had just been released for general use and was very expensive, costing fifteen dollars for a three-hundred-thousand-unit vial. I gave the horse as many vials as I thought necessary, and since this was a very valuable horse, Hill said to give him more if he needed it.

When I got to my office it was about daylight, a nice quiet time of day to do some undisturbed laboratory work. I centrifuged the blood, made a smear on a slide with some of it and put it under my microscope but did not find anything
unusual. I did some laboratory tests on the clear serum and got no noticeable reaction.

By now the phone was ringing and the day had started. After a dull winter, my spring and summer practice was pushing me and all I had to do to start a busy day was to get my clothes and boots on and be within hearin’ of the telephone or hollerin’ distance of the people on the street. The cases of the day soon caused me to have to dismiss the Hess Ranch horse until I could get back to him.

I went to the Post Office and was opening my mailbox when Bobo stuck his head out of the service window, laughing, and said, “Doc, here’s a postcard that’s yours too.”

Everybody in the Post Office was laughing about the card.

A few days before this, I had stopped at the drugstore in Sanderson and the druggist told me that a young woman who lived in town had a dog she wanted me to take a look at. It was just a few blocks off my run, so I went by. This young woman had a little baby of crawling age playing with the dog on the floor. The dog was a miniature breed and had some little pups; she wasn’t exactly sick, but she needed some attention. I explained to the young mother that the dog needed some medication and I left her a small box full of yellow coated pills.

The postcard she sent me read: “Dear Dr. Green, The baby knocked the dog pills off the table and ate them. Will you please send me more for the dog?”

I stopped by Dee Walker’s filling station late in the afternoon and Dee said that the Hess Ranch had been callin’ me. I got Mr. Hill on the phone. He said that he had been out in the pasture and brought in a band of mares and colts and abscesses similar to those of the young stud were forming on several of these mares. Hill felt that we were in real trouble and asked that I come out as soon as I could.

The Hess Ranch was a sixty-mile call, which was common in my practice. Since it was summertime, it would get dark late and I needed to see these horses in some daylight, so I set up straight and spurred hard and drove into the Hess Ranch a little before sundown.

The young stud showed some slight improvement from his treatment, but nowhere near the miraculous recovery I had been getting from penicillin in my general practice. The mares in this band were good kinds of range brood mares. All of them had been broken at one time or another, and when one was roped out of the herd, she would turn and lead out, instead of fightin’ and chokin’ down like so many unbroken brood mares in the country would usually do.

As I examined them, I knew that they were suffering from the same thing as the young stud, and it was either contagious or infectious. It had to be some kind of an isolatable bug or a virus, and viruses in that part of the high, dry mountain country, especially during drouth, were almost unknown.

Such infections cause horses to lose weight even though they are being cared for, and these horses were showing such signs of unthrifty condition as bad hair and listlessness, but still weren’t running high temperatures.

One of the oldest and most reliable treatments for bloodstream infections in horses is Fowler’s Solution of Arsenic, and for want of a better medicine or a more accurate diagnosis, I resorted to drenching the affected mares by mouth and we finished the last mare after it was good dark.

I gave the little stud some more of that precious penicillin and decided that I would lance the abscess on his hip bone and pack it with another one of the recently discovered miracle drugs, sulfanilamide, which had only been out a few years. This I did very carefully by shaving the
abscessed area before I lanced it. After I packed it with sulfanilamide, I sutured the incision and was careful to leave proper drainage at the bottom. Hill said he would keep the mares in a small pasture close to the headquarters and I told him I would look at them again sometime tomorrow.

When I got back to the office that night, I decided I had better do some research—the book kind. I had never learned all there was to know from my library and I was a practitioner who constantly referred to the writings of recognized authorities in the field of veterinary medicine. It was true that there were few or no sources of information concerning the toxic plantlife of the desert, but in a case such as the Hess horses, I felt that I must be confronted with some form of infection that science had dealt with and so I read until about two o’clock. When I began to nod, I decided I would go to bed and dream about them damned abscesses instead of readin’ about ’em, and sure enough, I did.

I got back to the Hess horses the next day in the early afternoon and some of the baby colts had begun to show some slight swelling around their flanks and under their forearms. These were locations on the body where the grown horses had not seemed to develop any enlargements.

There was a good blood bay mare that had developed her first abscess on her shoulder point and I suddenly had the bright idea that maybe the pus from one of these abscesses would yield something that I had not been able to discover in blood samples, so I very carefully prepared a spot in the center of that abscess. I sterilized the external area, hoping that I would not pick up any airborne organisms that the mare might have on her hair or skin. When I lanced this abscess, I carefully got 50-cc. of pus in a sterile vial and quickly stoppered it and headed for the laboratory.

By this time, Mr. Hess had come out from San Antonio because he was seriously concerned about his horses and was pondering the possibility that this infection might be picked up by the cattle on the ranch. I told Mr. Hess frankly that up to this point I was baffled as to what type of infection we were dealing with and therefore I did not know whether or how it might spread. I had never met Mr. Hess before, but I found him to be an understanding and cooperative gentleman. He assured me that he was interested in solving the problem and was grateful for my conscientious concern. I rarely had this kind of conversation and I hardly knew how to thank him.

I decided to try several different lab techniques on this fresh pus. I made several slides with various kinds of stain, and at about dark I picked up a beautiful little round-shaped bug with a tail on him. After going through all my lab manuals, I identified the little culprit as being a rare type of protozoa. I started going through my books on
materia medica
to see what medical agent was indicated for the treatment of the protozoa. As I would read the description of the bug, each reference would wind up with “no known treatment.”

Early next morning I went back to the Hess Ranch and explained to Mr. Hess and Mr. Hill what I had found out. While we talked about the problem, a Mexican cowboy spoke up and said that this was the “disease of the deer,” that there were some dead deer in the mountains and others were doing very poorly. After we saddled some horses, Mr. Hill and I rode out the mountain pasture where the mares had been and we found several deer carcasses.

After further research in both my laboratory and my library, after phone calls to smarter men and to distant points, and more trips to the mountains, I finally proved that this type of protozoa could lay dormant in the crevices
of rocks on the south side of the mountains in the warmth of sunlight for several years. In times of drouth when deer and other livestock would graze the steepest areas hunting vegetation that might grow from the moisture that ran off rocks, they would pick up the protozoa by mouth. There had been numerous cases of abscesses in wild deer that had been observed before, but the case of the Hess horses was to my knowledge the first protozoan infection of domestic range horses.

The stallion recovered without any after effects, but I always wondered how much good the penicillin did. However, any pus pocket that I packed with sulfanilamide would heal much faster than those that weren’t treated, and the mares that we drenched several times with Fowler’s Solution of Arsenic showed an even more rapid rate of recovery. However, this could have been from the desirable tonic effects of the arsenic, and I have always doubted that the arsenic treatment actually destroyed any protozoa.

The mares were moved into a better pasture and the cattle were taken out of the pasture where the deer were found and no abscesses ever appeared on the cattle. However, there is a reason that the cattle did not pick up the infection.

Deer by reason of the construction of a cleft in their upper lip can move either side of the lip separately, which enables them to pick up and move very short vegetation growth into their mouths and makes it possible for them to eat almost any grass or weeds that are visible above the ground.

Cattle do not have a cleft in their upper lip and they move the whole lip up and down from one side to the other at the same time with very little maneuverability. Since a cow doesn’t have upper teeth in front, vegetation is brought into the mouth by sticking the tongue out and bringing the
grass or weeds down against the lower teeth. Then the cow moves her head in an upward position to bite off the vegetation. In this respect the eating process of a cow is somewhat a handicap where sparse vegetation is concerned, and it probably was not possible for the cattle to have picked up the infection by mouth. Also, cattle are not inclined to graze and range in steep areas as much as wild game and horses are.

I really believe that the good summer rain that finally came in a very small mountain range probably did more to stop the infection than the research or treatment.

I had been in Old Mexico for a few days on business and came back by way of El Paso. I was sittin’ in the Del Norte Hotel dining room with Buck Pyle when he went to answer the phone. I got up to leave and a man stopped me. He introduced himself as Mr. Doyle and said he ranched in southern Arizona near Wilcox. He said that he had heard something about my work on range poisons and told me that he was having some trouble on his range that he had never before experienced. He went on to say that he was running steer yearlings in some big pastures, and in one pasture he was losing a yearling or two every week and in the others none appeared to be sick. He said that he had had them vaccinated for blackleg and evidently that hadn’t helped any, and he had had several vets out, but none of them had worked on the case long enough to find out anything.