: The Life of a Yorkshire Vet Read online

  At that time it was easy to gain, or lose, a reputation. It was a small community and gossip spread quickly. The arrival of two new young vets was unusual, especially since we were both the same age and of a similar disposition. Clients would often mistake us for the other one and we would sometimes play on this, especially if a case was not going to plan.

  We were soon signed up to Ampleforth village cricket team, and played in the Ryedale evening league. Games would take us to villages further afield than our usual patch. We played one game on a beautiful ground in the garden of an enormous house called Hovingham Hall, on its front lawn. It was reputed to be the favourite cricket ground of the famous Fred Trueman. We felt honoured, because there could be no better person to judge it as the best. Not all pitches were of that quality, though. At the other end of the spectrum, the infamous ‘Spout House’ was almost impossible to play cricket on. Not only was it on an incredible slope, but the outfield was littered with both cow pats and actual sheep. Fielders had to be arranged along one boundary alone, at the bottom of the hill.

  Games were usually played in spring and summer in the evenings and consisted of sixteen eight-ball overs for each team. It was always a rush to get to the venue after evening surgery and it was a standing joke: ‘Vet’s late again.’ Since it was unusual that we could both play in the same game, as one of us was invariably on duty, the team sheet would simply say ‘Vet’ and either Jon or I would take the place. The captain, Mike Dobson, would not usually know which of us was going to appear.

  Neither of us was particularly talented at cricket but what we lacked in ability, we made up for in enthusiasm. We were certainly the most active and mobile in the outfield. Mind you, being active in the field was important, mainly to keep warm. In one early season game, the outfield was covered in snow.

  Jon was a ‘Michael Vaughan’ kind of batsman, upright and technically precise. When he did make contact, he had a glorious cover drive. I, on the other hand, was more like a talentless version of Ian Botham. I would both bowl and bat, neither particularly well, although the high point of my short cricketing career was a 50 not out, and then two wickets in my first over. We had our own Fred Trueman, too, in the form of a massive farmer called Clive. He always opened the bowling, and when he was bowling we had a deep fine leg and a very fine third man to back up the creaking wicket keeper. Clive’s cricket season always ended early when he had to concentrate on getting the harvest in, from mid summer. Whatever the result, we would convene in the nearest pub for sandwiches and beer. The post match chat was always more important than the score.

  We ate a lot of sandwiches in those days. It was a hungry business being a young vet. At lunchtimes, we had a habit of buying a large loaf of ‘Country Crunch’ from the bakers, as we lived close to the surgery and could easily go home for lunch. Without any discussion as to which of us would buy the loaf, our system seemed to work. The worst outcome was that we would end up with two loaves but since we ate voraciously, this did not present a problem. One day, the shop was particularly busy. I took my place at the back of the queue and had not been waiting long before one of the shop staff shouted, at the top of her voice, across the packed shop, ‘It’s OK, your friend has already been in to collect it already!’

  A few months in and I thought my reputation as a decent vet was developing well. However, one evening it took something of a battering.

  It was a Saturday night in mid winter, cold and very dark, when I was called to a local dairy farm. A cow was having difficulty calving. I had not been to this farm before and so I took detailed notes on how to get there and sped off at high speed. Calvings are always an emergency and tensions often run high, with farmers anxious about the outcome for both the cow and the calf. I arrived in the pitch-black yard, and eventually found the farmer, Steve, in the cow shed, already with his arm where mine should have been. ‘Ah’ve just about got this un,’ he grunted. It looked hard work, but Steve managed to deliver the calf, which, sadly, showed no signs of life. It was disappointing, but the calf had clearly been dead for some time and the outcome was nobody’s fault.

  We looked at each other. I seemed somewhat redundant, but I offered to check the cow out for injuries or other problems, and to check for a second calf. It was what we had been taught to do. Always check for a second calf, or a third lamb. I felt smug as I quickly identified the presence of a twin. It became apparent that it was breach, that is, coming tail first, with both back legs pointing forwards towards the cow’s head. It is impossible for the calf to be born by itself in this presentation. The back legs need to be manipulated so they are pointing backwards, which then allows it to be delivered. All went according to plan. I repositioned the calf and pulled it out, much to everyone’s delight. The newborn, however, was not at all well. Its breathing was shallow and erratic and it looked close to death. I had a plan. I knew all about neonatal acidosis – my recent research project had been related to this topic, so I felt it was my area of expertise. I rushed to my car boot to get a vial of some powder which I knew would counteract the acidosis that I presumed was the cause of this calf’s problems. I explained my plan and administered the treatment. In my mind, the calf was going to splutter, lift its head and rise like Lazarus. I stood back, awaiting the miracle. Sadly, a miracle did not occur. The calf did indeed splutter, but then promptly expired. Suddenly the cow shed became silent. It was pretty silent before, actually, but I expected to see one of those tumbleweeds rolling through, as the atmosphere became leaden. We stood staring at a healthy cow, but two dead calves.

  ‘Well. Job’s a bad un!’ Steve blurted out, and stumped off back to his house, leaving me cold and traumatized in his cow shed. I had no torch and the lights had been turned off, so it took me several miserable minutes, avoiding farmyard obstacles and sleeping cows, before I could find my way back to the car and make a hasty retreat. My first visit to one of the practice’s biggest farm clients had been an unmitigated disaster. I got home and gloomily went straight to bed, feeling very dejected.

  I slept soundly, despite the spectre of my beeper, which usually led to a broken night’s sleep, even if no calls came through. Early the following morning, I got a message to say there was an urgent call to see a foal with a laceration on its nose. The owner was very upset and so I rushed off, again, eager to get there as soon as I could. The visit was in the opposite direction to the previous night’s call, but I found my way there without any problem. A young lady, about my age, was there, holding the young foal. I opened the gate to the yard, hoping to make a good impression.

  ‘Oh no, not you!’ she said, which surprised me because I couldn’t recall meeting her before and certainly could not think of a reason why she should react quite so vehemently. I examined the injury and explained that it needed stitches.

  ‘Well, let’s hope you do a better job than you did on that calf last night,’ she grumbled.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I thought. Less than twelve hours had elapsed and now the whole of Yorkshire knew how rubbish I was. How could that have happened? The girl did not let on how she knew and I chose not to pursue this line of discussion. Rather, I concentrated on my local anaesthetic and making tidy sutures.

  It was only two weeks later when I went back to remove the sutures, the wound having healed beautifully, that I plucked up courage to find out how she knew about the demise of the calf.

  ‘I’m Steve’s girlfriend,’ she explained.

  ‘Phew,’ I thought.

  4

  There’s Nowt Better than a Good Old Cow!

  During our first few months at Thirsk, there was one local farmer who became hugely important to Jon and me. She and her husband had a small and very traditional dairy herd, just on the outskirts of town and about quarter of a mile from our house. Jeanie and Steve had devoted their lives to rearing their stock and milking their cows twice a day and had been doing this for the last fifty years. The cows came wandering in each milking time, taking their own places in the byre, where they were f
astened side by side. They were creatures of habit as much as their owners.

  We would often be called early in the morning. Steve and Jeanie rose at 4.30 each morning and expected us to do the same if one of their animals was sick – usually a cow that was struggling to calve or a case of milk fever. Milk fever is a condition whereby the blood level of calcium drops, soon after calving time. This leads to muscular weakness and the cow becomes initially wobbly and then, quite quickly, recumbant. Although it is easily identified and treated, it can develop into a serious condition in just a few hours, so it is always treated as an emergency. Since it was usually noticed early in the morning, at the time of milking, we would usually be called around 5 a.m. to attend to such cases. At this time the practice served about fifty family-run dairy herds. Sometimes the poor cows were in a terrible mess, having slipped during the night due to the muscle weakness that developed as the blood calcium dropped. They might have been stuck in mud or slurry for a while, so rectifying the problem was often a messy and dirty affair. Luckily, when such a call came from Steve and Jeanie, the cows were never messy or dirty as they had huge, thick straw beds, and were always scrupulously clean. In many ways the cattle were treated as members of the family and Jeanie could often be heard shouting down the cow byre as she turned them out to grass, ‘There’s nowt better than a good old cow!’

  Since the farm was so close to our house, we could be home within half an hour with a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea to recharge before the actual day of work began.

  Jeanie was a somewhat eccentric lady, with hair and eyes pointing in all directions. She was well known around the market square and in the auction mart as she was born and bred in Thirsk, like many in this rural community. She was very kind and would always give a home to stray or feral kittens that arrived, injured or otherwise, at the practice, cheerfully calling ‘Happy to help out, son!’ as she shuffled out of the practice. The cats that she adopted had a great life on her farm. They were treated like royalty, and the farmhouse kitchen must have sometimes had a dozen cats in various states of relaxation about the room. In return for these cats, Jeanie would bring in large containers of sweets of all descriptions. Sometimes Liquorice Allsorts or boiled sweets in large plastic jars, or sometimes a selection of the wrapped variety. Either way, they were copious and ubiquitous. There were many myths about the source of these sweets, but their provenance, to this day, remains obscure.

  As two young male vets, Jeanie took something of a maternal shine to us. She went out of her way to ensure we had sustenance greater than just boiled sweets. During evening surgery, messages would appear in the day book, not of pneumonic calves in urgent need of attention, or ewes struggling to lamb, but messages that read: ‘Send ’em round. I’ve got ’em a pie.’

  Sure enough, whichever of us was first to leave would call at Stoneybrough Farm on our way home and pick up our tea. Jeanie was an expert pie maker. Her speciality was meat and potato. Meat and juices would spill out of the sides of these great constructions, always sitting in a white and blue enamel pie dish. We got into a perfect routine of returning one empty pie dish, only to replace it with another, bursting with ingredients.

  Occasionally we would be lucky and receive a curd tart – a Yorkshire speciality made of milk, raisins and nutmeg. Jeanie’s were remarkable because they were made with ‘beastlings’. The message in the day book might read: ‘Julian, call at Jeanie’s. She’s made you a beastlings pie.’ As a young vet, I was unfamiliar with some of the local dialect, and I was not acquainted with the word ‘beastlings’. I have to say it did not sound an appetizing treat. I had visions of small, dead animals and eyeballs peering out of the pastry. Later that evening, without the help of internet searches, I ascertained that ‘beastlings’ was the local term used to describe colostrum. This is the first milk that a cow produces after she has calved. It is thick and creamy and full of protein. It gives the calf a good start in life, as it coats its intestines with protective antibodies. After a good helping of Jeanie’s pie, I felt safe in the knowledge that my bowels were bursting with antibodies and that I could withstand any gastro-intestinal challenge.

  In those days, being a young vet, visiting the many local family farms could be as much a gastronomic journey as it was a professional one. There were two other farms where there would always be a feast. The first was Scawlings Farm in Oldstead, a small, pretty village just round the corner from the famous White Horse of Kilburn. The White Horse was carved out of the cliff above the village of the same name, by a local school teacher with his pupils, in 1857. It can be seen from all over this part of Yorkshire and, reputedly, from as far away as Lincolnshire. On the days when I visited Scawlings Farm, I passed right under the feet of the horse, although the view of it from close up was less spectacular.

  This dairy farm was the first I visited when I started in Thirsk. On my very first morning, Peter Wright, the senior partner, asked me how I was at PDs. ‘PD’ is short for pregnancy diagnosis and in this case he was referring to pregnancy diagnosis in cattle. This involves palpating the cow’s uterus, via the rectum. The procedure is not at all painful for the cow and allows an examination of as much of the cow’s abdomen as we can reach. A rectal examination is a crucial part of a large animal vet’s job, as this way we can palpate the ovaries, left kidney, uterus, the cervix, bladder, rumen and other bits. It is an important thing to be able to do with confidence, but it can take some time before a newly graduated veterinary surgeon becomes fully accomplished in this task. In the case of a PD, we were specifically feeling the uterus to ascertain if the cow was pregnant. We could also give some information about the stage of pregnancy. An early pregnancy would feel like a small water-filled balloon in the uterine horn. A later pregnancy would feel like a football and later still we would palpate a whole foetus, and by its size, be able to give an idea of its age. Brimming with confidence, I assured Pete I would have absolutely no trouble with a morning of PDs. Astonishingly, he was happy to accept my assertion, and allowed me to launch myself into the task, without supervision from a more experienced vet.

  We made regular, often twice-weekly visits to Scawlings Farm so I quickly became accustomed to the bumpy road to Oldstead, and good friends with the farmer, Howard. He had a dairy herd of about eighty cows, all high yielders with great genetic merit. Howard had signed up to a scheme, set up by the practice, whereby dairy farmers would pay the practice a set monthly fee based on the number of cows they owned and, in return, would receive as many visits as necessary. It was a scheme years ahead of its time, but had been badly miscalculated by Mr Sinclair, its instigator (Siegfried Farnon in the Herriot books), so the practice lost money hand over fist. Luckily only two dairy farms were signed up to this scheme, and wily Howard was one of them. I wouldn’t say he took unfair advantage of the deal but he certainly got more than his money’s worth. He clearly saw the benefits of a young and enthusiastic vet and ‘free’ visits and I spent a lot of time on his farm. I still remember visiting his farm five times on one Sunday in winter to treat a downer cow. Consequently we became great friends and I honed my large animal skills on his cows.

  I would usually arrive to do the routine fertility visits at about 9.30 in the morning and, after inspecting about ten cows, Howard’s wife, Chris, would appear with steaming mugs of coffee, flapjacks, parkin and biscuits. We would stop what we were doing and, often without even bothering to wash our hands, tuck into the spread. It was very welcome as it was invariably cold at Scawlings Farm.

  The other farm that had a great reputation for providing an amazing spread of food was nearby to Howard’s. The farm had a beef suckler herd. This type of herd differs from a dairy herd, in that the cows are not milked. The calves suckle the cows directly and grow into beasts that will ultimately end up as a Sunday roast. The cows usually calve in either spring or autumn (spring was more popular in and around Thirsk) and then spend all summer out in the fields, the cows eating grass, and the calves suckling milk and also eating grass when
they get bigger. Suckler herds were very different from dairy herds from a practice perspective because, rather than visiting them twice a week, we would often visit them only a few times each year, for difficult calvings, or to see calves that were poorly with scour (diarrhoea), pneumonia or other ailments. A visit from a vet was regarded as a special occasion.

  In those days, cattle needed to be tested for two diseases, tuberculosis and brucellosis, under the auspices of MAFF (the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) who oversaw disease control in the country. Tuberculosis testing was, in those days, every three years and brucellosis testing (which was a blood test) happened every two years. This meant that even farms that had very few problems and little requirement for a vet would still have us visit on an approximately annual basis.

  This particular farm had about forty cows and, as far as I can remember, we only ever visited them to do a statutory TB or brucellosis test. Consequently the handling facilities were somewhat antediluvian. What should have been a straightforward visit of a couple of hours would inevitably turn into one that took all day. On my first visit to the farm, I had to do both tests together. When it fell to do both tests on the same day, the time it took was approximately doubled, since we had to take a blood sample from a vein in the cow’s tail, and then move round to the neck to do the intradermal skin test for TB. In the TB test, tiny amounts of avian and bovine tuberculin are injected into the skin on the neck. In essence, if a lumpy swelling develops at the site of the bovine tuberculin injection, but not at the site of the avian tuberculin, then the cow is likely to have TB. This test was invented shortly after the Second World War and is still generally regarded as the most reliable test for identifying TB reactors. However, since the ministry’s policy of test and cull that has been in place for all this time has not changed the incidence of TB in cattle, it does raise questions over the efficacy of the scheme.