Village Horse Doctor (26 page)

He went on to say that a yearling or two a week was pretty expensive but he thought he could afford my services for at least a few days if I would care to make that long a trip. We made arrangements for me to meet him in Wilcox the next afternoon and go to look at his cattle and country.

As we drove to the ranch the next day, he went into more detail about moving these cattle in from Old Mexico. He had had some early rains and his range was good, and since he had kept yearlings on this pasture for a number of years, he was puzzled as to what could be different about vegetation or the cattle.

Driving around in his pickup, we saw a lot of cattle that appeared to be all right. We drove up to a windmill and one of the ranch cowboys rode up to water his horse and get a drink. While we were talkin’, he volunteered the information that there was a yearling about two miles from there, as he pointed across the pasture, that was down. He said that from the signs of struggle on the ground, the yearling had been down for a day or two. After he had found him, he didn’t know what to do but to report back to the headquarters, and he was glad that he had run onto us.

He loped ahead on his horse and took us to the yearling. I had brought along a small bag of instruments from my car just in case something like this came up. This yearling was in the last stages of the death struggle and was in an ideal condition to do a post-mortem. The liver, spleen, and kidneys showed a lot of chemical poisoning, and there was much discoloration in the stomach and intestinal tract.

Since this was a range steer receiving no supplementary feed, the presence of chemical poisoning struck me as being very odd. I asked Mr. Doyle about pipelines, oil wells, gas lines, and any other type of mineral or chemical presence that I could think of. None of these rang a bell with him or the cowboy.

We were driving back along the pasture road with lots of scenery and no conversation when I noticed a draw that was a solid patch of brown for a mile or so; it was a sudden contrast to the green vegetation around it. I asked him
to stop the pickup. When I pointed to the brown patch, you could see the expression on his face change as it dawned on him that he had forgotten to tell me that these weeds had been sprayed with chemical weed poison.

He told me all about spraying the thistle in that draw in order to try to get rid of it; this was the only place on the ranch that any of it grew. He went on to explain that the spray was guaranteed to be completely harmless to all livestock.

Well, in my practice, I had discarded years back the idea that any chemical was completely harmless, so we drove over into the middle of this brown patch of weeds. There were tender green weeds and grass coming up underneath the taller growth that had been killed with spray. Any cattle grazing the younger growth would have to eat some of the dead weed along with each mouthful of green feed.

We drove back to the ranch headquarters and I asked to see the spraying machine. It was a good, clean, well-kept machine with no corrosion inside the tank. It seemed that this was going to be another case of being a detective instead of a doctor. I asked him where the containers that the chemical came in were. He said that he bought so much of it that he had asked for a fifty-five-gallon drum because of the savings in price.

We went into the back of a shed where the empty drum was kept. This iron drum lacked being empty by about one and a half inches of brown juicy stuff in the bottom. As I reached over to tilt it and shake that brown juice around, the iron drum came apart and the bottom fell out and that dab of brown stuff poured out onto the ground. It had eaten the bottom of the drum out.

I caught about half a pint in a glass jar before it all got away and told Mr. Doyle that we had probably found the
trouble. He began to repeat how harmless this spray was and how many other people he knew had used it without any ill effects.

I told him I thought we ought to talk to the dealer who sold him this spray, and he said he bought it from a ranch-supply company at Safford, Arizona. I didn’t think that I would have to come back to this ranch, so I drove over to Safford in my car and he went in his.

The man at the ranch-supply company was very cordial and glad to see us at first, and evidently hadn’t heard about the yearlings that had been dying. He opened the conversation by asking Mr. Doyle the kind of results he had gotten on the weeds that he sprayed. Before Mr. Doyle could answer, he began to tell what good results everyone else had gotten from that spray.

I asked if I could see a can of the concentrated spray that they had been using on the weeds. He turned around and pointed to a bright five-gallon can, and I walked over and began readin’ the label. I wasn’t exactly tryin’ to trap the man, but I needed more information, so I asked: “Was the same label on the fifty-five-gallon drum that you sold Mr. Doyle?”

He hastened to explain that Mr. Doyle was the only customer who wanted a fifty-five-gallon drum and they had emptied enough cans to fill up a drum, then delivered it to him at drum prices. I asked him if he had such an empty can around. By this time he had begun to get a little bit cagy and asked me “Why?” I said I wanted to see if the can was lined.

He was beginning to look pretty serious and he said that he had never thought about whether or not they were lined. He said further that the company had been giving credit for returned empty cans, and he had wondered why they were valuable.

Mr. Doyle said, “I’ve lost some cattle and if you’ve got an empty can, I want him to see it.”

He shuffled around in the back of the store and came up with a can that had been returned for credit. I held the can up to the light and peeped through that small hole in the top; there seemed to be a lining or interior coating of some kind in the can.

We took a heavy pair of tin cutters, cut the can open and, with little effort, slipped a plastic liner loose from the inside of the container. The ranch-supply man was very much ill at ease, and Mr. Doyle was on the verge of getting mad.

He and I walked away and talked awhile, and I asked him if he thought it would be necessary for me to do any more research on the case. He told me that he owed the ranch-supply company enough to be able to get a settlement before he paid his bill and he felt that he didn’t need any more information. However, in the event that the case should come to trial, he would have me subpoenaed, and I knew this would entitle me to reasonable pay and mileage.

While we were talking he asked, “How much do I owe you for this call?”

I told him what my fee would be, and instead of giving me a check on the ranch-supply company, like most people would, he said, “Go on back to your car, and I’ll go back in the office and get your check for you now.”

I don’t know what this little settlement cost the ranch-supply company, but I imagine that the price of steer yearlings broke them of the habit of saving cans for return credit.

About
two o’clock one hot July afternoon, I was sittin’ on the south porch of my office lookin’ out across the desert, watchin’ the heat waves rise up from the rock and sand and play on the scrub growth of greasewood and black brush that made their leaves and limbs appear to be movin’, when an excited young mother of three slid the tires and kicked up the dust in front of the office and called to me in an excited tone of voice. I stepped down from the screened porch and pulled my hat down to shade my eyes from the glaring sun and she immediately started on her story.

She had a nice big collie dog in her backyard and one of the children had had a little fever. She had called Dr. Oswald and as he walked through the fenced yard to the house, he saw the big dog lying in the cool drip next to the house under the air conditioner. After he checked the baby’s fever and talked to the mother awhile, he said, “I believe that dog out in the front yard has rabies. Have these children been playing with him?”

She almost went into a panic as she said, “Heavens, yes! They all play with him.” Then she had dashed from her house to my office to ask me to come and destroy the dog.

In times of drouth, when the natural feed for foxes, wolves, coons, skunks, and other small animals of prey get scarce, they will change their eating habits and will consume whatever can be found around the edges of civilization. It was not uncommon at this stage of a drouth to see foxes come into town at night to prowl the garbage cans. Other wild animals that weren’t so easily seen moved into town and to ranch headquarters to the feed and water troughs that were kept full for the livestock.

This concentration of wildlife will cause enough exposure to the skunk population, which is the principal parent host of the Negri rabies infection. It seems that
dogs, wolves, and foxes are the most readily bitten species that will transmit the rabies to domestic animals and man.

The Edwards Plateau and the Trans-Pecos Region was practically all net wire fence and sheep ranches, and the ranchers and government trappers had had drives and had trapped and killed wolves until there were no more left in the country. This left the transmission of the disease to domestic animals to the foxes, dogs and skunks.

There had been considerable talk about some isolated cases of rabies in foxes that had been killed. Their heads were sent to the state laboratory in Austin, but no cases had been diagnosed in any other livestock at the time this episode broke out in the yard from the sudden diagnosis of a medical doctor.

I followed the woman back to her house in my car, and as we came into the yard, the old dog looked up from his shady place and wagged his tail. She rushed into the house and stood behind the screen door and told me not to take any chances of him bitin’ me too. As I got to within about four feet of the dog, the odor I smelled was a common one any practitioner could recognize.

As I rubbed this beautiful collie dog on the head, I noticed that his hair was bad. When I opened his mouth, I saw the lesions and sluffing that were causing the slobbering that Dr. Oswald had mistaken for rabies; he had a very advanced case of sore mouth and it could not have been taken for rabies by any person who was familiar with the disease. I turned to the woman and told her that she had fed this dog on either dry or canned commercial dog food and he had not been getting any fresh meat, that he was suffering from a dietary insufficiency, which I could cure by injections.

She was trembling and her voice was shaky, and she said she couldn’t possibly take the chance with her children.
She told me to destroy the dog right there or take him with me. She said that she wanted his head sent to the laboratory at Austin the fastest possible way and that expense was secondary. This was an old dog. His teeth were bad but there was no good reason for destroying the faithful family pet. I tried to talk her out of it but had no success.

I put the dog in the back of my car and took him to my office. Now, I never prided myself on being a small-animal doctor and did not want to encourage any small-animal practice, but at the same time I felt it my professional duty not to start a hysterical epidemic of rabies in the human mind, which is the most damaging.