Work highlights of the first 3 weeks

I am now finishing up my third week of work, and it has been fantastic! Most of the work is with beef cattle, but I have done a good amount of dairy work, too, as well as horses, sheep, goats, and alpacas. The beef world is very new to me. At school, we had one black angus client, and a couple clients who had a belted galloway or two as pasture ornaments/tax write-offs. Everything I know about bovine medicine is primarily dairy-related, so I have been learning a lot.

I have been doing a lot of herd checks, and it is very different than what I'm used to. The dairies we worked with at school had us come out every week to check 25-50 cows or so, and I was only doing a portion of those cows since there were at least 3-4 of us working on them. Here, they have us come out every month or two at the most, so we are doing way more cows at a time. One day I palpated 90 cows before lunch...that's more than I'd have done in a whole week of Field Service! Earlier this week we were scheduled to check 350 cows in one day; however they had to cancel their appointment (after we drove 40 min) in order to cut corn.

I've done a fair amount of foot work. Foot rot is known as "sore foot" down here, and there have been a number of sole abscesses, too. I actually get to use the hoof knives and nippers now instead of just watching the residents and interns do it!

I have already seen things I've never experienced before at home. We were called to do a necropsy on a beef steer who was found dead in a small stream. A lot of the beef clients have insured animals, so we are often asked to do necropsies on them to determine the cause of death. The body was in about 3 inches of water and a foot of muck. Every time I tried to move I nearly lost my boot. The flies were bad. We ended up finding buckeyes in her rumen...buckeye ingestion causes nervous system dysfunction and can look like tetanus. They usually die of respiratory failure or bloat. This boy had likely gone down to have a drink, fell over, and couldn't get up. Cause of death: drowning.

I saw pinkeye in dairy cattle last week. It is not a problem in our dairies because the cows stay inside and there is very good ventilation, thus keeping flies to a minimum. Beef cattle and dairy cows on pasture are at risk of developing pinkeye due to a bacteria that flies carry. Their eyes get very painful and they can develop ulcers and go blind. The treatment is a subconjunctival injection - that means injecting antibiotics and steroids in the whites of their eyes. Kinda gross. We had 30 cows to treat, and some were so bad that we had to suture their third eyelid over their eye to give it a little band-aid. I've only read about these procedures, so it's good to see it and learn to do it.

Last weekend I saw my first grass tetany cow. This is something we don't see at school once again due to our client's cows being inside and not out on pasture. Grass tetany happens when cattle have too little magnesium in their blood from eating very lush grass and not getting enough mineral supplement. They can act crazy and can be violent; jumping fences, trembling, staggering, and often going down. This cow was down and severely bloated. We trocarized her (poked a hole into her rumen to let the gas out), treated her with lots of IV medications, and ran her newborn calf in front of her...and she popped right up! She was a little wobbly and ran into the front of the vet truck, but otherwise she looked great. It was very rewarding to see her so close to death (the vultures were already circling) to being back to normal and nursing her calf.

A couple quick cases: a teat amputation on a beef cow with horrendous mastitis (she ended up dying), a horse with a barbed wire tangled around it's foot and maggots in the wound, a corneal ulcer on an alpaca, and a horse with terrible dehydration, mouth ulceration, and intestinal sloughing likely from eating a poisonous plant. The mare went down in our parking lot and I euthanized her. That was my first horse euthanasia, and I was very glad that she was down already. Horses can be very dangerous as they are being put to sleep...they are known for literally flipping over backwards as they rear up. It is very dramatic to watch them being put down, but this mare was very sick and was almost dead by the time I helped her along.

Tuesday night a bunch of us went to Wytheville for sushi. It was a great place and we had a lot of fun. Tonight I went to the local Cattleman's Association meeting. We had a wonderful steak dinner and listened to a presentation from VA Tech's toxocologist on poisonous plants. A number of folks knew me, but I had trouble remembering their names or when I had been to their farms!

So that has been a little of what I've been up to so far. I won't write as much in subsequent posts, but I had a lot of catching up to do this time!

Hey, when are you gonna talk about us?!