For as long as I can remember (and presumably longer) I’ve been a right-hander. There may have been a time of indecision before I left the cradle, but since then any coordination that I might possess has been strictly limited to my right hand, and occasionally right foot. In a musical family, my brothers learnt to play the piano and saxophone and had reasonable claims to being ambidextrous. I was found to be particularly suited to the trombone, where the left hand is only required to support the instrument while the right performs all the fancy slide work.
The Irish refer to left-handed people as ciotóg (pronounced ‘kitog’, or ‘qut-oog’), which is actually Gaelic for awkward. I always thought this was a bit harsh, particularly having grown up watching the likes of David Gower and Brian Lara bat for their respective countries with amazing elegance and skill. I think that ciotóg should refer to people like me trying to do basic tasks like throwing a ball with their wrong hand.
As a 4th year veterinary student, I managed to persuade my local dairy vet to take me round on his calls. Steve was everything I wanted to be as a vet. He was passionate about dairy cows and dairy farming, he couldn’t understand the ‘girls’ that wanted to fiddle around with cats and dogs and bunny rabbits back at the clinic, and he was bloody good at his job. For this he seemed to receive the utmost respect from his clients.
First day out with Steve, after a pleasant drive through the Warwickshire countryside, we arrived at Crab Apple Farm, where Steve was due to pregnancy test (PD) about 30 cows. Although many dairy farms in England would have a seasonal bias towards calving, a combination of poor heat detection, no inductions, and the fact that the Holstein-Friesian would keep milking for years if allowed to, meant that all year round calving was the norm. A 365-day calving index was an ideal that few aspired to. Thus pregnancy testing was done in batches when a sufficient number of cows were (hopefully) at the right stage of pregnancy. Dairy vets usually offered routine visits (e.g. monthly) to their clients, where cows would be put up for PD, post-calving check or ‘not seen bulling’, as well as the odd “while you’re here…” Thirty cows to PD might be a big morning for a dairy vet in England.
Steve had already asked me if I had PD’d any cows, and I had confessed to sticking my hand up a few backsides while at Liverpool Vet School. I was beginning to make some progress in finding my way around the challenging maze of the posterior bovine abdomen, and could usually offer a reasonably educated opinion as to whether or not the groaning animal attached to my arm was actually pregnant. What I needed now was numbers, so I could gain some expertise at this dark art, which I deemed to be a vital skill for a dairy vet to have.
Once we were gloved up, and Steve had asked the herd owner if it was okay for me to “stick my arm up a few”, and had explained to me the benefits of always using plenty of lubrication, we approached the milking parlour. It was much to my horror when I saw the first cow enter the right side of the herringbone, and for Steve to approach from behind and manfully thrust his left arm into her rectum. Steve spent a few seconds expertly manipulating the cow’s uterus before removing his arm, turning to me and inviting me to “have a feel and see what you think.” I quickly summed up the situation. PDing a cow on the right side of a herringbone shed with my right arm would challenge even a contortionist. Naturally, all of my previous attempts had been right-handed. The majority of milking parlours in the area were herringbones, with a few ‘abreasts’ and one rotary. With 20 years of PDing behind him, Steve was unlikely to try out his right arm at this stage. I needed the experience that Steve was offering me. And so I stuck my useless left hand into the deep unknown, and wasn’t all that surprised by how little I could feel. After a minute or so, during which time Steve had managed to convey the pregnancy status of the cow to the farmer without allowing me to overhear, he asked me how I was getting on. I made up some excuse about the rectum having filled up with air after he had removed his arm, so it was difficult to feel. He shrugged his shoulders and the next cow was coaxed in behind the first one. This may sound like a very slow procedure, but in many sheds it was the only option – one at a time up the side of the herringbone. As Steve withdrew from this cow, he suggested that I insert my arm at the same time as he removes his, to eliminate any air being sucked in. I did this, and again failed completely to palpate anything even vaguely recognisable. When Steve again inquired as to my progress, I claimed to have located the cervix, and was working my way towards the left horn of the uterus. “Bit like a sperm, then”, he said, and then, “Come on, we’d better get the next girl in”.
After 3 or 4 similar failures, I could see that I was rapidly losing face with both Steve and the farmer. Unfortunately it can be in situations such as these that reputations are made or lost, and there was a possibility that I might like to work in this part of the country. Panicking slightly, and with my left arm already numb from the most action it had seen in 23 years, I resorted to my usual strategies for challenging situations – lying and cheating. These had helped extricate me from countless scenarios in the past, involving parents, girlfriends, police and exams, and I had no reason to doubt their value this time.
And so I learned the subtle signs of pregnancy. Steve would not let me know his findings, but he would tell the farmer, and I could watch for the change in the farmer’s expression. A smile would be a giveaway. If a cow were empty, Steve would generally reach for some form of treatment. If he picked up the Prostaglandin (PG) bottle, the cow would be empty, but cycling, with a Corpus Luteum (CL) present on the ovary. If he reached for the Progesterone device, then the cow was empty and not cycling. Easy! I became quite adept at this, and I think the farmer may even have been provoked to comment, “Boy’s learning” at some point.
Slowly but surely my left hand was gaining some sort of sensory function. I was gradually becoming aware of different structures that I was feeling, although I was still clueless as to whether it was the calf’s head or the cow’s left kidney that I was massaging. But progress was being made.
Until Steve suggested that I go first…
I did learn to PD left-handed, and spent many enjoyable and informative weeks with Steve over the next 2 years. He was always full of wisdom, and I still remember and adhere to much of his advice. Such as always parking the car facing the exit, just in case a call goes pear-shaped and you have to leave in a hurry. With regard to pregnancy testing, his advice was simply never to guess, something of which I was often guilty during my time with him. As he put it (more or less), “Nobody minds if you don’t know, but if you get too many like that you probably won’t be asked back again!”
When I finally embraced technology in the form of an Ultrasound Scanner, my ability to PD left-handed was a huge bonus. The main benefit of scanning for UK dairy farmers was early, accurate diagnosis of pregnancy (or the lack of it), so that an empty cow could be treated appropriately at the earliest opportunity (e.g. 28 days, compared to 35-40 days by hand). Speed was generally not a factor, particularly with the smaller herds, which might only comprise 25 to 30 cows. So we would take the scanner head into the cow by hand, to ensure that the entire uterus was envisaged. Since I was using my left hand, this freed up my right hand to operate the scanner keyboard, so I could freeze frame different views of the calf and take measurements to give an accurate calving date. Some of those Cornish dairy farmers were totally devoted to their cows (all named, of course), and their holiday plans might have to be put on hold if Daisy was due to calve at the wrong time. I’ll always remember one old-timer, after I had commented on the few standout cows in his herd, saying, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I’ve never taken a holiday. Every now and then I like to buy myself a nice cow.” Fair enough.
Legend had it that vets in New Zealand might PD 1,000 cows in a day. Previous outlandish rumours to come out of NZ, such as the size and speed of a certain All Black winger in the mid ‘90s, had turned out to be true, much to our disbelief. So it was with some trepidation that I set out to travel halfway around the world for ‘a bit of a change’ after I awoke from the drunken haze of 7 years of dairy practice in Cornwall. I also had a newly acquired young Irish wife with me, which is another story, but explains my extensive knowledge of the Gaelic language.
Starting work around calving time, it soon became apparent that nearly all NZ dairy cows calve at about the same time. And yes, we had several herds with well over a thousand cows. So the likelihood was that they would all need to be pregnancy tested at the same time. I worried about this. I’d always kept reasonably fit, and was occasionally known to last the full 80 minutes on the rugby paddock, but I’d generally be buggered if I had to PD more than 40 or 50 cows.
Non-cycling cow examinations gave me some idea of what was to come, but there wasn’t quite the same pressure or weight of numbers as with pregnancy testing. Time marched on, and finally, there it was, marked in the daybook. 600 cows to be PD’d. This was before the appearance of the backpack scanners, and our TV-screen scanner was awkward to use in herringbones, so we tended to PD these herds manually. Fortunately, I was working for a large practice, and we could generally spare 2 vets for these larger jobs. So I was to PD this herd with Fred (name changed for no particular reason). Fred and I were extremely competitive, and regularly engaged in fierce battles on the squash court. While I was still gingerly gauging the weight-bearing capacity of the assorted wooden planks that bridged the pit for us to stand on, Fred became a flurry of activity, assaulting cow after cow, and shouting things like “AB”, or “Late”, or “6 weeks” to the farmer, who was frantically trying to scribble it all down. Fred had already completed half a row by the time I emerged from my first cow, saying, “I think she’s about 9 weeks, Fred. See what you think.” I hadn’t PD’d a cow for over a year, since Foot & Mouth Disease had prevented any routine dairy work during my final few months in Cornwall, so I needed to recalibrate my fingers. Fred put his arm in and said, “Yep, nearly ten”, and was off again. Once I was up and running, I was arming about one cow to every three of his, and was sure I’d be buying the beer that night. I was also quickly becoming knackered, and we were only about 150 cows into it. Fred was showing no signs of tiring. While I was considering what type of injury I might feign to get me away from this job, I noticed that Fred was using both arms (although one at a time!). So I brought my right into action. Although I could not feel much to start with, it did at least make me look busy while I gave my left arm a rest. And, much as before, the more cows I tested, the better it got.
Well, I got through that day and many more like it (and usually ended up buying the beer), and I can’t say I miss it too much now that we scan everything. I do think that manual pregnancy testing skills are still an important part of a vet’s armoury, particularly for confirming that a cow is empty. I benefited hugely from the patience of Steve and the farmers that he serviced when I was a vet student, and I have always tried to offer the same to any students that come round with me. We now have “clean vets” and “dirty vets”. Clean vets scan with their right hand and manually check any empties with their left. Dirty vets do both with the same hand, and make a mess of the scanner handle. We’ve just taken on a left-hander, so it will be interesting to see how she performs. I’ll be calling her “ciotóg” anyway.
