I’m short of photos for this week’s entry. In addition to a photo drought, I’ve also been struggling for steps. To my amazement, following the unexpected plumber completion after months of waiting, I’ve hit the jackpot because James the plasterer arrived on Tuesday morning, all ready to go. He was here yesterday and said he’d be back this morning.
So with all that in mind, I had hatched a cunning plan to get more photos and steps before I started to write. James told me he’d be here at eight (even checking if it was okay with me to come so early). So, I thought I could go out when he arrived, take Triar for a sunrise walk (steps!) somewhere pretty (photos!) then as a bonus, I could go for coffee and cake at the garden centre and maybe write this there.
I was rather looking forward to all of that, but my plans fell through when eight a.m. came and went, with no sign of James. This isn’t unexpected. James is a lovely man, singing cheerily as he does a fabulous plastering job, but as I discovered last year, he’s also a bit unreliable. I don’t honestly mind. The job he does is great and he seems to prioritize getting my work done (all his kit is in my house, I don’t think he’s off doing work elsewhere) but planning ahead based on when he’s said he’ll come is a pointless exercise.
Still, I’m incredibly happy that the work in my house is finally moving forward again. Once the plaster has dried, I need some decorating done and a couple of electrical installations completing before I can thinking about frivolities like carpets and curtains. It’s probably not going to quite be finished for Christmas, but I had been starting to wonder whether I was going to have to find a whole new team and priming them to take over the project, so for it to suddenly be moving forward again is fantastic.
In equally good news, my car went in for its MOT and service on Wednesday and passed with no problems. Last year, it cost me £2,000 for things that should really have been fixed before I bought it, so I was nervous about finding myself in similarly expensive hot water, but I heaved a sigh of relief when I was told it was all okay. A month before Christmas isn’t the best time for big bills.
Work has been frenetic. When is it ever anything else? If you’re in the UK, you might know already that the bird flu season has started in earnest in England. Well this week, there has also been a case in southern Scotland. It’s not in my area, but it’s had a knock on effect on everything. All the vets in that area are now going flat out. I had to take over as duty vet on Thursday, and all the higher up staff, who usually act as advisors when anything complicated comes up, are embroiled in managing the situation. All the birds will be culled and, in the meantime, animals and birds within a ten km radius are under lockdown, so any movements on or off their farms have to be assessed and licenced.
In the meantime, with that as background, two of my long-term welfare cases are being wound up. By the end of next week, one more farmer will have gone out of business and the marauding pigs will (hopefully) have been removed. From an animal welfare and future work point of view, this is a good thing, but even as I have been putting the work in that will allow these things to happen, it’s been a sad experience. As I looked into various health implications of moving animals off the farm, I could see that in times past (and not so long ago) this has been a good farm, with high standards. How did we end up here, I wondered? Still, for both of the animal owners involved, I hope that as we help to wind up their dreams-turned-nightmares, that we can work as gently as possible and that it will bring relief and not further sorrow.
Only two more weeks at work and I will be on holiday. I need a break. Yesterday, for the first time in months, my FND twitches came back. Not that surprising. Duty vet on Thursday was exhausting with two calls about possible bird flu cases (fortunately negated during the calls, without having to trigger a full report case investigation) and various other tasks, all hitting at the same time. I’m intending to take it easy this weekend, but as a minimum I want to trim the hedge at the bottom of the garden, at least enough to fill the brown bin for its last emptying of the year. But that’s a task for later. James has arrived, so it’s time to head out for that walk and coffee.
Firstly, a disclaimer. The sheep in the photo at the top of the page are random Norwegian sheep and are in no way related to any invest
Last week’s blog was a week late because I received a phone call as I was writing it. Two weeks ago, I was on call for the weekend and hoping to rest. Most on-call weekends are a matter of keeping your phone near you, maybe dealing with a request by a private vet for a case number so they can go out to test a cow that’s dropped dead to check it wasn’t anthrax or a similar request for itchy sheep that might have scab.
This time, to my surprise, I found my line-manager on the phone. “How would you feel about another report case?” he asked. Well how I felt was broadly irrelevant. I was the ready-to-go vet, so unless I was seriously unwell, it was my task to be handled, whatever it was. “Another AI?” I ventured.
”Um… no.” He paused. “We’ve been sent photos of lesions from some sheep’s tongues. They’re trying to decide whether to treat it as a bluetongue enquiry, or foot and mouth. This isn’t your official call, just a prewarning so you can start to prepare.”
Once the official call comes in, you are expected to be on the road within 30 minutes. In theory, everything should be in your car and you should be able to get in and go. In reality, there are things you might need for sampling that have to stay in the fridge in the lab at work. The buffer solution used for foot and mouth sampling is one of these, so I was glad for the heads up.
I admit, I did feel slightly breathless. Those living in the UK who are old enough to remember 2001 will recall the horrors unleashed on the country as whole farms and regions were forced to cull their livestock and burn them in the fields on horrific pyres of death. The recent, sporadic outbreaks in Europe mean we are on high alert. That the photographs sent in had the high heidyins in a nine am meeting discussing whether they dared risking treating it as “only” blue tongue felt quite significant.
I dressed and went into the office and started to gather paperwork. In theory, I should have paperwork for every eventually in my car, but having the appropriate papers to hand for setting up restrictions is useful. To my mild consternation, I found the main printer wasn’t working. Thanking my lucky stars that I wasn’t a newbie and knew how to work the secondary printer in the lab, I printed out what I thought I’d need.
I also threw a load of blood sampling equipment into my car. Better to have too many tubes than to create the necessity for someone else to come out and onto a farm with possible foot and mouth because you weren’t well enough prepared.
It was quite a long drive out to the farm. As I neared the farm, I slowed down to cast an eye over animals in the nearby fields. None were drooling or looking sick. A good start.
It had been confirmed that I was to treat it, for now, as bluetongue, but that foot and mouth was still there as a possibility. To explain the difference in requirements, because bluetongue is spread by midges, tramping on and off the farm with dirty boots and tyres isn’t so much of a worry. Not that I do that, but if I did, it’s not a disaster.
The restrictions served on the farmer are different too. Bluetongue restrictions only stop animals coming and going. Foot and mouth suspicions, like avian influenza suspicions, mean that every person and vehicle going on and off the farm has to have an individual license and any and all incursions are strictly limited to absolute necessities.
I arrived at the farm , put on paper suit and gloves and served the restrictions. It’s always the first thing to be done and having signed the form, I read out all the clauses that explained in full what was required. Next was history taking.
This is not like taking a history for a normal vet case, where you mostly want to know what has happened to the animal. For a notifiable disease investigation, by the time you are finished, you should have details of every movement on and off the farm within the last twenty one days. You have to assess whether there are any high risk factors. Are there rights of way and picnic sites where people might have fed the animals? Has anyone from the farm recently been on holiday to a different country? Are there stagnant ponds in the vicinity that might encourage midges? The factors, like everything else, vary with the disease suspected.
Having taken a careful history of the animals and the risk factors, I donned more layers of PPE and prepared to look at the animals. I knew, both by being told and by observation, that there were fields nearby that held another farmer’s cattle. I decided to walk up to look at them first. If it was something highly infectious, they might be showing signs too. Again the picture was reassuring. They were young stock from a dairy farm and could not have looked more healthy. They were eating as we approached, then lifted their heads to look at us. Not a nose lesion among them. Nolameness, no drooling. Bright eyes and shiny coats.
I was already, mentally, beginning to think foot and mouth was less likely. Obviously there were still the sheep to look at, but clinical signs in sheep can be subtle, cattle less so. These animals had been in relatively close contact, so by the time the mature mouth lesions were spotted in the sheep (with the caveat that it might have been caught early) I would expect to have seen some spread.
There were two groups of sheep – adults and lambs. The lesions in the photographs, nasty red eroded areas on the tongues, had both been from lambs. We therefore looked at the adult sheep first, partly to prevent any possible cross-infection, but also because a complete absence of problems there would go further towards ruling out foot and mouth. No reason why young sheep would be more severely affected than the old in a disease where neither group would have immunity.
What struck me again was that I was looking at a broadly healthy group of animals. There were 43 ewes and as I scanned their mouths, feet and udders (where possible) I saw nothing. Only bright, uncrusted eyes and alert ears. There were two that the farmer had noted had been getting thin for a while. We selected them out and I examined them more closely. Not a lesion in sight. Normal breathing, normal temperature. One was a bit dirty on her backside, but nothing to suggest foot and mouth or bluetongue.
We moved onto the lambs. This time, I decided we should examine all of them. There were thirty two in the group and the farmer caught each one and held them while their mouths and feet were inspected. In the end, there were four with tongue lesions, four with lesions around their lips and one with a sore area above its foot. None of the lambs with lesions was running a fever. I was strongly beginning to think that what we were dealing with was a severe case of orf – a pox virus that affects sheep and can infect humans who come in contact. It would be unusual to have tongue lesions, but not impossible.
Having taken history and examined the animals, it was time to decide where we were going to go with this. At one extreme, if I thought foot and mouth was still in the picture as a possibility, we would have to issue new restrictions as well as taking samples. I might well have to stay on the farm until it was ruled in or out. I’m still a bit sketchy on the details, though I had arranged for Triar to be looked after, just in case.
If I thought everything was ruled out, I would leave the farm with no tests done and hope I’d got it right. To do that, I’d need to be very certain. My gut feeling was that this was orf, based on the fact that it was only affecting the lambs. Orf is common and spreads in flocks to the new crop of animals born each year. Older animals can carry it, but usually have enough immunity that there are no clinical signs.
So on the grounds that only the lambs were affected and the adult ewes and neighbouring cattle were perfectly healthy, along with the fact that all the lesions were quite mature and I would have expected to see more early stage lesions (we have lectures about aging foot and mouth lesions) I felt confident enough to rule out foot and mouth (phew!). But could I rule out bluetongue too? I decided I couldn’t . After all, midges might well have selectively bitten the lambs with their thinner wool pelt. And orf might exist alongside bluetongue. The lip lesions could be orf and the tongue lesions something else.
And so, armed with my evidence, I called VENDU (the veterinary exotic notifiable disease unit) to tell them what samples I wanted to take. I have never been asked so many times and in so many different ways if I was sure, 100% certain, absolutely confident that I could rule out vesicular diseases like foot and mouth. At the start of the conversation I was using words like probably, but by the end, I was telling the, firmly that no, it was not foot and mouth.
So we tested the nine lambs for bluetongue: the four with mouth lesions, the four with lip lesions and the one with the foot. To cut a long story short, the test was negative, but most of Sunday was still spent on paperwork. I strongly suspect all the lesions were caused by orf: an unusual and interesting case all round and a good learning experience for me.
Lots of text so far and not many pictures, so I shall rectify that. Last weekend, I went to Drumlanrig Castle and met Sue (who used to locum with APHA) for a walk and for lunch. The gardens were beautiful.
Isn’t it warm? It’s not yet seven thirty as I write this, but Triar and I have been out for our walk early. We stopped to have a chat with some heifers in a field (we stayed outside the gate) which is the high point of our day so far! Aren’t they gorgeous?
I came down yesterday as I had a dentist’s appointment to get a filling. I intended to come down on Thursday evening, but was unexpectedly offered a cancellation appointment to see a neurologist, so of course I jumped at the chance. As the occupational therapist at work wanted, he has given me a diagnosis – FND, which I’m guessing most people haven’t heard of. It’s described everywhere as being “like a software problem and not a hardware problem”. Basically they can’t see anything wrong on a battery of tests, but it fits certain criteria.
I’m still trying to process the ramifications. The tests I had were years ago and he hasn’t sent me for any new ones. With hindsight, I’m not sure we talked enough about what’s happening now and how it will be fixed. Back in Norway, I maintained fairly good health for three years, by resting properly when I needed to. He’s going to write me a letter to take to occupational health, so I will see what it says.
But overall, I think it’s good. On examination, he didn’t find anything new or particularly significant. He seemed certain there wasn’t a degenerative disorder. Having spent years looking up my own symptoms (don’t do this!) I had myself thought FND was the closest fit. Back in 2017 when this all began for me, I found almost nothing online about it. Now the internet is awash with information. It is, I feel the neurological disorder du jour! Hopefully I can find a way to manage it better than I am at the moment. I’m still working full time and doing a good job. I’d just like to have more energy to do things when work is over.
In other news, I’m getting through the paperwork mountain, though the dreaded Framework Agreement still needs some work. I’m giving training sessions next week, on Foot and Mouth disease, to some local authority inspectors on Tuesday and on the Disease Risk Form (investigation) during TB outbreaks to my fellow Senior Veterinary Inspectors. My boss, Dean, has a case lined up for me when those are done and there is some chicken work starting from July, so plenty to keep me going. I may be easily tired, but I also don’t like twiddling my thumbs, so it’s all going right at the moment.
I shall leave you with some more cow pictures and maybe some flowers too. Blackbird Lane is wonderfully overgrown and tangled at the moment, with wildflowers peeking out all over the place. And now it’s time to go make breakfast, so have a good week all, and thanks for reading.
I went back, both to work and to the doctors’ on Monday. The GP I saw was helpful. He was young and I think may have been in his foundation years as a GP, but he took the time to do a fairly thorough neurological examination. I was laughing to myself afterwards as I’ve had so many of them that I could have told him a couple of bits he’d missed, but he found a few things, at least one of them new.
He told me he will contact the neurological department at the hospital, both to ask them to reassess my triage as urgent and also, to ask if there’s anything that can be done for me while I’m waiting. It will be interesting to see if I am now seen earlier than July. I don’t know when he’ll get an answer to the other question.
So I’m not as fatigued as I was. I am managing to do some things again that had more or less come to a halt, like cooking and tidying the kitchen afterwards. I even took myself upstairs yesterday and did a bit of painting in the bedroom, but the energy I had quickly drained, as it did when I tried to do a veterinary risk assessment yesterday morning.
The veterinary risk assessment (VRA) I have to do is an assessment of the possible consequences of moving cattle from a farm where there is no TB present, to one where it has been confirmed.
This particular VRA is a bit of a wildcard because TB hasn’t been confirmed yet. We are waiting for the results at the moment (they are trying to grow bacteria in a Petrie dish from lesions found in the lungs of a cow that was slaughtered) and they won’t be back until mid-March. The cattle that need to be moved onto the farm are young stock (heifers) which are being wintered on a different farm. They are due to calve in mid-April. If the culture is negative, restrictions will be lifted and heifers can move to the dairy unit with no problems. If it’s positive, the restrictions will remain and we will need to move quickly.
In order to complete the assessment, I will look into all kinds of factors, including how high the risk of spread is. For example, are there cattle on neighbouring farms and how likely is it those cattle have had nose to nose contact with cattle from the infected farm? What are the potential costs to the government? For example, moving a lot of cattle onto the farm might mean the government has to pay compensation later, if those animal become infected.
And there is an absolute requirement to carry out a short interval skin test (SIT) before any cattle can be moved onto the farm. TB is a slow moving disease sometimes. A cow can be infected for years before it is spotted. When we confirm there are TB bacteria on the farm, we have to check, via the SIT whether we have one infected animal, or many. Until we’ve done that, it’s impossible to weigh the risk.
So if we get a positive culture, I will need to be ready with the SIT and the VRA so we can move quickly. There’s nowhere to calve those heifers and nowhere to milk them, where they are, so they need to go somewhere, on welfare grounds. I find this part of my work very interesting, but with so much cross-referencing of data, I need to be on the ball. Hopefully I can get more of it done in the early part of next week. Big welfare case is also due a revisit though, so we will see!
I don’t have so many photos at the moment. I’ve not been out walking or exploring much, though I took a couple of pictures of colourful lichen in Blackbird Lane, which I will share with you.
Taking time to look closely at the nature around me keeps me sane! A few minutes ago, Triar was whining, so I took him outside and stood in the semi darkness, listening to the most wonderful dawn chorus. There were robins and blackbirds and a song thrush, all greeting the new day. Triar stood and listened too, as he sniffed the morning air. I wonder what he could smell.
I saw on Facebook that Norwegian ships from WW2 are coming to Shetland the week I am there. I was oddly emotional when I saw that, hoping I can speak to the sailors who bring them over. I found a rock beside the Nith (which runs through the middle of Dumfries) commemorating the connections between Dumfries and Norway in the war. Funny how things come together sometimes.
Anyway, I will leave you with photos of the stone and the Nith itself. There were flood warnings in place last night, but midweek, when Triar and I took a walk there, it looked benign enough. Triar photobombed the rock shot, but I’ll not crop it! Have a good week all!
A Sunday afternoon entry this week. Yesterday Mum, Dad, Triar and I travelled to Teeside to a farm stay cottage. It’s a lovely place with cosy stone houses and stables, a cobbled yard and plenty of animals. I took Triar for a tramp on the moors at seven thirty this morning and we came home hungry for breakfast. Morning coffee came later. The cheesecake looked delicious, but having been mostly off sugar for a few months, it was a bit too much. Next time, it’ll have to be a cheese scone instead!
The farm is gorgeous! It’s also a lovely novelty to be able to take pictures without worrying that I’m giving away classified information. The owners are very friendly and, with permission, we explored the farm this afternoon.
As well as finishing cattle…
…there are chickens…
…a traditional brace of guard geese…
…and a collie that never got the memo about herding cats.
To be fair, I’m not entirely sure this cat is taking this game seriously.
As you can probably tell, I’m enjoying my holiday so far. We stopped at The George for lunch yesterday. It’s a 16th C coaching inn, though I suspect the food styling has changed a bit in the intervening centuries. Who knew that Halloween themed fish would be a thing?
I selected the delicious sea bass with roasted vegetables. Mum chose Yorkshire pudding steak pie on a bed of buttery mash. Mine was definitely the right choice as I enjoyed every last bit, while the (probably equally yummy) pie was a bit too big. The George is within easy driving distance of the farm, so I’m hoping to go back.
Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Have a good week all.
Last Sunday, in the evening, I met Donna and some of her friends for a picnic in the park. Everyone brought food and it was a great spread, with old favourites, like delicious egg sandwiches, to more modern twists, such as salty caramel shortbread. This was in preparation for a spot of outdoor culture – in the shape of a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
It was a great evening. The makeshift stage stood in front of the Chrichton Memorial Church and the entertainment was occasionally enhanced by dive-bombing seagulls. Romeo and Juliet isn’t my favourite Shakespeare; I prefer comedy to tradgedy. Juliet’s mother’s big red beard and broad shoulders were an interesting diversion, as was Romeo’s habit of turning his back on Juliet when she was on the balcony (though I understand this was probably related to the combination of a limited stage and the difficulty of being heard outdoors) but it was a great evening and lovely to get out for some entertainment on a sunny evening.
Monday morning started with a visit to my new physiotherapist. I asked my GP to refer me recently when I heard there was a year long weight to see a neurologist for non-urgent problems. I can’t remember whether I mentioned that GP visit, but occupational health at work advised me to go in order to re-examine the neurological problems I had in 2017-19, which resolved to the point where I can work full time, but have never completely gone away. I had physio three times a week, back in 2018-19 and it made a massive difference in getting me back on my feet.
I could see my new physio was somewhat bemused by me. I suspect most patients she sees are significantly impaired, whereas what I want is to build muscle and get as close to full fitness as I can. I suspect there are differences in attitude from Norway. I was much worse, back in 2018, but I can recall being told to warm up for every session, then do three sets of eight, deep squats, three times a week, very early on. Here I’ve been asked to do five to ten, a couple of times a week.
Realistically, I’m more likely to stick with a gentler routine that I can build into my day, which hopefully should be my aim. She did ask me if there was something I wanted to achieve – a goal I could set. I couldn’t think of anything concrete on the day, but after chatting to a colleague, it crossed my mind that I would like to be able to go (downhill) skiing again.
For that, I would want to lose a lot more weight, as well as regain a higher level of strength and fitness, so it’s quite a lot to aim at, but hopefully a worthwhile goal. To give my UK readers bit more context regarding the differing attitudes in Norway and the UK my lovely line-manager, Kirsty, who retired yesterday asked me whether I wasn’t worried about breaking bones. I am, to an extent, but in Norway, most ski slopes have a policy that skiing is free for people who are 70 or over, and it’s not just set up that way as they know nobody will take them up on the offer.
Midweek, Donna and I drove over to visit a friend of hers, who is selling some cottages and (hopefully) some furniture. Assuming none of the people buying the cottages have prebooked sales, hopefully I will be buying three wooden bedside tables from her, along with a matching mirror. I’ve been struggling to find any I liked that weren’t too expensive, so hopefully that will solve that issue. The image at the top of the page is the view from the garden of one of the cottages she has sold, and while we were there, we also met her lovely pig, Dotty. It was a lovely evening.
Yesterday was a lovely day as I went over to Stranraer, where Kirsty was working her last day. Several of us made the trip and we had lunch together and then lots of hugs. She and I discussed Stranraer, where I used to work, many years ago. The office there is very small and much more cosy somehow, than the office in Dumfries. I do sometimes wish I worked there, though due to Donna, and various connections, I have a better social life in Dumfries than I would have over there. There’s also the not inconsiderable matter of Dumfries being a two hour drive from Mum and Dad. Stranraer would nearly double that journey.
Tonight, I have booked to go on an evening wildlife walk with my colleague, Cris. Hopefully the rain will hold off, but whether it does or not, I am looking forward to it.
I will finish off with some photos of the the fields around Blackbird Lane, with some cattle basking in the lovely sunshine we’ve had over the past few days. I wish you all an enjoyable weekend and good week.
Andrew and I were in Yorkshire last weekend, which feels like a lifetime ago, but it was a lovely warm day on Saturday and we went on an ice cream hunt, which on the face of it wasn’t very successful. The firstly place we went to was styled like an American Diner, but it was so noisy and there were so many children leaping about that we turned and walked back out. The next place we tried, after consulting the Oracle of Google Maps was a small, village shop, but the only parking we found was in a field, which some canny farmer had mown and was charging £10 per day to enter.
We ended up doing a big circle back to Grassington, where fortunately, we bought a cone, but it wasn’t quite the ice-cream parlour experience we’d been searching for! Grassington is very pretty though and the drive back was too.
On Tuesday afternoon, I met up with some women I met on social media. We’d been chatting online and they were part of a women’s group I wanted to join, so we met for a coffee. I’ve been worried about Andrew being here for the summer with nothing to do, and to my delight, it turns out one of the women owns a small media company in the area. She does some work with young people, so later this morning, Andrew has been invited to a scriptwriting workshop in a cafe in town. He’s read the script they’ll be working on and has some ideas, so hopefully he will enjoy it. If Andrew wants to work in film, the most difficult part might well be finding a way in, so any experience and contacts he can form are a good thing.
I was through in Stranraer again this week, on one of my TB farm cases. We’re still waiting to see if TB is confirmed, but it’s looking more likely and so my Veterinary Advisor and I went to the farm to assess the boundaries and history of animal movements on and off the farm. If TB is confirmed, we will need to move quickly to start tracing where it might have come from and where it could have spread to, so now we are prepared to move to that stage without delay.
I was driving back to Dumfries, when I found myself in a queue of traffic. It’s a fairly difficult road for overtaking long queues, and this one was particularly frustrating as it was going slowly round the bends and speeding up for the straight parts. Seeing a sign for “Holy Cairn” I made a snap decision that this might be a good moment to go and explore one of the historic monuments that are scattered along the A75.
This is a hit and miss activity. Sometimes you can follow side roads for miles and find nothing, or you do arrive, only to find you’re looking at two stones on a hillside. This time, however, I found a good parking space and went through a small gate to find what looked initially like a circle of standing stones…
… but which on closer inspection, had been the spectacular entrance to a chambered cairn.
There was an information block in the corner of the enclosure, which told me a little bit about the cairn and its excavation, but the best thing it told me was that there was another cairn, further up the hill. I followed the track up, to find another, rather different cairn. The entrance to this one was a little less spectacular, but it was sited in such a beautiful place that I could only stand and gaze.
I read the information here too. Long-time readers might remember my trip to Stonehenge where I was amazed to discover that animal herders came down from Scotland to celebrate the winter solstice. I found myself wondering whether the people who used these cairns were among those who made that trip.
The plaque told me the cairns dated from 4000 BC. When I looked up Stonehenge later, it is thought to have been started in 3000BC, so these beautiful cairns were in use a thousand years before Stonehenge was begun. As ever, I felt the wonderful calm feeling that I always get when viewing something ancient or ageless. It’s always a wonderful reminder of how short and insignificant my life is in the grand scheme of things.
And finally, I had been gradually gaining weight, ever since I moved to Arctic Norway. Winter hibernation is all very well, but when winter lasts from October to May, it’s a large chunk of the year to take a break from walking, which was something I had done to keep myself healthy for years. I had hoped to break the bad habits when I came back to Scotland, but there is far too much temptation and I haven’t lost anything at all.
I asked at my GP clinic for help and they have signed me up for six months on an app called Second Nature. It tells me it’s going to help me break my bad habits and form some new and healthier ones, so I will be starting that on Monday. My main hope is to lose enough weight so I can start to go up hills again without creaking to a standstill within a few yards. There’s no weighing and measuring foods or calorie counting, which is good as I can never be bothered with all that. I’m also glad they didn’t offer me drugs. I want to improve my lifestyle, so hopefully this will help. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Of course, I am back in Scotland, and true to form, my colleagues in Stranraer, on hearing this, convinced me that it was essential that I should make the most of the last few days before I began, so this was the result. Have a good week all!
Though in some ways, the weeks seem to rush past, by the time I write this blog, things that happened Saturday to Tuesday always seem distant. I will be wandering round, on one of those days, thinking “I’ll have to write about this,” then by the end of the week, something else displaces it. Ideally, I should start logging in as things happen, but hey, I’m not that organized! Anyway, this week I have carefully stored away a couple of things I really want to share. The first is about a welfare inspection I did on Tuesday.
I’ve probably said it before, but the sheer size of farms now, compared even to fifteen years ago when I left, is astonishing. When I qualified as a vet, in 1991, larger dairy units might have had 150 cows. Numbers were creeping up though, and by the time I left the UK many of the bigger herds had expanded to having over three hundred cows. Now it seems to be not unusual to have a thousand, sometimes even more.
I have been wondering how welfare is maintained on such a unit. Back when herds were smaller, most farmers knew their animals well. I went out with a dairyman when I was at college and he knew the personalities of the cows he milked and there were some he was very fond of. I remember seeing him cry when he’d been away on holiday and came back to find one of his favourites gone, due to the carelessness of the relief dairy worker that had been covering for him. No wonder some farmers barely take holidays.
I am not under the false impression that bigger is inevitably worse. Those who have expanded are often the most efficient and forward thinking farmers. They are investing in the herd and their own future, but still I had been wondering how. These are living animals and to keep track of when they are in season or in calf, or are sick, takes a lot of time for observation and knowledge.
As we walked along the calf pens, I could see they were being bucket fed. Lots of bigger farms use automatic feeders for their calves, but not here. The farm is run by a couple and (fairly traditionally) it’s the woman who is responsible for feeding the calves. They did have automatic feeders for a while, but found they tended to get dirty. In addition, teaching them to drink from a bucket prepares them for going into bigger groups and being given milk from a trough. You can also check how much milk each calf gets and individualise each one. I guess it takes a long time at peak calving time, but it was interesting to see that a good start in life is so important that industrialization hadn’t occurred (or rather, had been tried and rejected) on this part of the farm.
As we moved from the calves to look at the close-to-calving cows, I was interested to notice that the nearest cow had something attached to her foreleg. I asked what it was, and was told it was a movement monitor. Just as I wear a watch that can tell me how many steps I take each day, the cow’s steps were also being monitored. I wasn’t immediately sure what purpose this would serve, but later, he took me to the computer where these measurements were read.
He showed me a the readings of a cow that was coming in season every month or so. Sure enough, the movements peaked hugely at that time. But it wasn’t only that he could look at the program and see which animals were in season. The system itself recognizes the pattern and, as the cow comes out of the milking parlour, where it goes twice a day, a gate automatically opens to allow it through into a different area, so she can be inseminated. A person walking through the cubicle shed to separate out these cows disturbs all the other animals. Instead, this is another process that is mechanised to minimise both the work required and the disruption to the herd.
Automatic scrapers to clean passageways in cubicle sheds have been around for a long time. Usually they are pulled by chains or ropes and there were some of those here. The chains were in runnels to prevent the cows standing on them and hurting their feet. One of the sheds had one of the newer machines, that functions like a robot vacuum cleaner. These have the advantage that they can go round corners, so there are no missed sections, which there are with the chain scrapers.
What I hadn’t seen before though, was an automatic scraper for moving silage. Usually cows are fed in a passage, where they put their heads between bars and eat the silage and feed that is put there. As they eat, the food gets pushed away, and usually someone will drive along with a tractor now and then and push it back in. Here, there was a machine that ran along a metal track, doing the job automatically for all the big sheds. It runs every two hours, except just after milking time, when it is set to go hourly, as the cows tend to be hungry when they’ve just been milked. Again and again, I saw that, although this system was on a large scale, there were tweaks and tricks that meant that it was really set up, based on what the cows needed.
And finally, back to the matter of the individual animal and the personal relationship. I can’t say I really touched on this with the farmer, although it was apparent as we walked round, that there was still fondness for individual animals. He did tell me though, that where his dad had always been keen to give every sick animal a chance, he tended to be more ruthless is removing animals with bad feet or which had been ill enough to mean they probably wouldn’t thrive. One thing I have observed from life as a vet is that there is a lot of unconscious cruelty by some pet owners, who keep their pets alive long after that life stopped being worth living. Perhaps in a system where animals with bad feet get removed quickly, breeding from those animals that are left will create a better herd, with fewer foot problems in the future. Anyway, I really enjoyed my visit. Cows are still cows and they are still my favourite animals and these visits give me plenty of food for thought.
The other memory was from last weekend. I mentioned I had been told there was a man in his nineties, who’d lived here all his life. I ran into him last weekend. He has a garage at the end of the street where he makes wooden toys for children. He beckoned Triar and me in, and gave Triar a biscuit. Though he was in a wheelchair and his hands were shaky, he was painstakingly painting a toy duck that would go on a stick. There would also be feet attached to a wheel that would spin as it was pushed along the ground.
I asked him if he sold the toys and he said no. He gives them away, and the look on the child’s face is payment enough, he told me. If I ever have any children to stay, I will undoubtedly take them along to see him.
He also started to tell me a bit about the street and I resisted the urge to ask him if I could record what he was saying, as it was lovely. He had lived in the street law his life, he said, and could remember back to the time when it was a village and not part of the town. The doctor came out rarely, he said. If someone was sick, they called for Mrs Black. Mrs Black was also the one you called on if someone was giving birth. We also had a discussion about the healing powers of honey. As antibiotic resistance is growing, even in the vet world there is starting to be more exploration of how old remedies can be better integrated into modern treatment. I bet Mrs Black could have taught us a few things about helping sick people that we have lost in our rush towards modern medicine.
Anyway, I’ll leave you on that note. The pictures are from Blackbird lane, where Triar and I are still walking, morning and evening. This week’s unusual birds were a tree pipet and a mistle thrush, but the blackbirds haven’t deserted. Have a good week and thanks for reading!
I have been down to Weybridge agent this week, this time for a cattle handling course. Before going, I was rather cynical. After all, I’ve been a vet and have worked with cattle for a long time, I’d done a course in Norway about the design of facilities in abattoirs, where I learned about behaviours, so I rather thought it might be a lot of repetition. The two colleagues who attended with me were actually farmers, so I think they had the same concern, but it warm in fact, very interesting.
The essence of the course was to teach us about health and safety when it comes to cattle. I haven’t read it yet, but there is a health and safety document (HS32) regarding handling facilities and minimum safety standards when we go to a farm, what we should look for and when to walk away.
There’s a drive in UK farming at the moment and grants available for building safer facilities, we were told. Farmers who provide inadequate, unsafe facilities are paid the same for their products as farmers who don’t, so if we walk away, for valid reasons (backed up by HS32) then there is legal pressure for them to comply. If they don’t, they will find themselves under a movement ban. As someone who probably would have tended to push on through, this in itself was a good message. Take it further and it’s also good for the animals. Escape attempts that go wrong don’t only result in risk to the human beings present, but to the animals as well.
Most of the course was led by Miriam Parker, and if you are interested in what she does, there are videos online. In essence, she designs livestock handling facilities with the animals in mind. If you want an animal to go somewhere, the best way to do that is to design the facility so the animal wants to walk through it. Ideally, you want the handlers to be able to guide them from outside as well, as that is much safer.
I had learned about flight zones before: the area an animal maintains around itself – enter it and the animal tries to move away. I also knew about the balance point – if you stand behind its shoulder, it tends to move forwards, in front, it moves back or turns. But we also looked at the behaviour and signs of discomfort when you are in the flight zone (a potentially risky place to be) and the limitations of cattle sight.
I had always thought that, with their eyes in the sides of the head, that cattle were mostly looking out to the sides. Not so! They have very wide peripheral vision and can perceive movement there, but most of their attention is still focused in front of them. I should have known that really. When they stand looking at you in a field, they do look straight at you, after all. What they do have though, is a great big blind spot in front of them, which means it’s much harder to judge distance when close up, for example. If you wondered what the picture at the top of the page was, it’s my colleague, Lesley, wearing a pair of spectacles that allow you to get an idea of what a cow sees. No wonder, when cows are walking into somewhere that looks strange, they take a lot of time, putting their heads down and to different angles, trying to eye up not only whether it’s safe, but whether they can get through at all.
We also went out to a field, where there were some fairly flighty calves. Our group of about twenty was split into smaller groups, then we were sent out in turn to try various exercises, such as getting them to walk to different places in the field. This proved to be quite difficult as getting them moving slowly in the first place was one thing. Slowing them down if they took off was much more difficult. Miriam explained the importance of moving back to give them space, rather than pushing them on, or standing close to keep them where you want, to the point where they’re stressed and milling. Step back and they are more likely to relax and stand.
I had been disappointed with my performance with various teams for much of the exercise. However the last task of the day was to try to split off two calves, leaving the others in a group. Many years ago, I used to stay up late into the night, watching One Man and his Dog on TV. For those who don’t know, this was a shepherding competition for a shepherd and his sheepdog, where they had to guide the sheep round the field, through various gates and into certain areas, before guiding them into a pen and closing the gate.
One of the exercises they did was to separate out two sheep from the rest of the flock. How many times did I watch as those calm dogs edged towards the group, moving in an out until they saw their chance? A gap would form, where two of the animals started to edge away and the rest weren’t quite ready to follow, and then the dog went in between them, cutting the group cleanly into two. To my enormous pleasure, I found I could do this instinctively, and for the first time that day, our group performed this task smoothly and without a hitch. It was a great end to the session.
Good as the cattle course was, it was also great to spend some extra time getting to know my colleagues better. As well as Lesley, we had Lauren there. Both of them are from farming backgrounds and, like many people from farming stock, they are very down to earth, as well as funny and practical. I’ve always felt that the people I work with are what make the most difference between enjoying work or not and I’m looking forward to working with them more!
I’ll finish with a few photos from my new garden. Though it’s running a bit wild at the moment m there’s plenty of colour and lots to look at. Have a good week, all!
I was tempted to call this week’s entry TB, or not TB but that feels wrong. Although I have enjoyed this week, the subject is serious and there are sad overtones. I suppose the animals that go to slaughter following our test would have ended up there anyway eventually, but their lives will be cut short and it is a loss for the farmer, though he will receive some financial compensation for the cattle which are culled. It can’t be easy, knowing there is disease in your herd.
Though the aim to wipe out TB is laudable, for each farmer affected it can be a major headache. When we find TB on a farm, all cattle movements on and off that farm are limited. Restrictions are put in place and the only place those animals can go, is direct to the slaughterhouse. This means that if there are more animals on the farm than grass for them to eat, the farmer can’t send the excess stock to market. He either has to buy in food for them, or send them to be killed, even if they are animals that would be more valuable sold live. A young breeding cow has more value than the price of its meat, for example.
So it’s a difficult juggling act for the farmer. Throw in there the fact that our tests aren’t perfect, the disease is unpredictable and eliminating it can be difficult and you have the perfect combination for resentment of the people coming on the farm to do the testing and represent the government who put all these rules in place. We were very lucky this week that the farm owners were philosophical. It’s time consuming for the farmer as well. We tested close to four hundred animals this week. It took the best part of four days and even then, there are some retests that need to be done. Then in a couple of months, the whole thing will need to be repeated. On and on until the tests come back clear.
I met up with the team on Sunday night in the hotel where I would be sleeping for the best part of a week. I had met S the vet before. She took me out on some welfare visits a couple of weeks back, but there were two animal health officers coming too to carry out the blood testing and keep the paperwork in order. There was also another TB team, who would be skin testing at another farm in the area, so we were quite a big group. Though the food and conversation were good, we all retired early, ready for the hard work that was coming the next day.
It was interesting to me to go out testing. Thirty years ago, I used to carry out TB skin tests in the area, though in those days, there was no known TB in the area and all the tests were routine herd tests where we didn’t expect to find anything. The farm where we tested this week has already had TB confirmed. Culled animals had been found to have TB lesions present and culture results – where they attempt to grow bacteria in a lab from a possibly infected source – had shown that bovine TB to be present.
As far as I could see, the skin test hasn’t changed much at all. Two patches of skin on the neck are clipped (so you can see where you injected) and two types of tuberculin are injected: avian and bovine. Tuberculin contains purified proteins from the tuberculosis bacteria and in the UK, two types are used.
Because other harmless bacteria can be present in the environment, avian tuberculin is also injected, to try to rule out animals which have developed an immune reaction to those harmless bacteria, but still capture those that are infected with the harmful cattle strain. What this means, in terms of the test, is that if the animal produces an immune response, a lump develops at the injection site. If the lump at the bottom (bovine tuberculin) is bigger than the lump at the top (avian tuberculin) then the animal is classified as a “reactor”. That animal must then be slaughtered and checked for disease.
What was new to me though, was doing blood testing for TB in addition to the skin test. The blood tests are relatively new, very expensive, and there is a limited capacity for doing them in the UK. The animal health officer – SW – who arranged the test, had to call the lab in advance and book in our samples. The blood in the tubes also has to be kept within a certain temperature range and as it is winter, that meant that as soon as the sample was taken, it had to be placed in an insulated box with a heat pad. At the end of the day, a courier came, who would drive the samples directly to the lab.
Though it was a dull day on Monday, the test started well. SW was taking bloods and was wonderfully efficient at it. The arrangement with the needles was a bit different from what I remember in the old days. We used to use a test tube, a needle and a small, plastic needle holder. In between blood tests, you would unscrew the needle from the holder and replace it with a new one, so the holder was reused. Now, presumably due to the number of needle stick injuries that caused, a new needle holder is used for each animal. In addition, you don’t put the protective cap back on the needle. Instead there’s a green plastic flap that you flip into place to cover the needle. Doubtless it saves a lot of sore thumbs, but there is an immense amount of plastic waste.
This is K, the other animal health officer, taking a sample from the cow’s tail.
I had forgotten how messy blood testing cattle is. It was a beef farm, so the animals are always a lot wilder than dairy cattle. The animals are run up a race (a narrow fenced passage) and into a crush, where their neck is trapped so that they can’t move forward or back. That doesn’t stop them fighting it though, and as they scrabble about, the air fills with flying dungbombs. Of course, when you’re taking a sample from the tail, you’re also directly in the splat zone. I did a few samples and was briefly proud of how clean everything was… and then a cow sent the traditional jet of liquid shit directly at me and I spent the rest of the day with half my jacket and one trouser leg well and truly coated.
SW and K made a wonderful team. I was worried at the start that I would be a complete spare part, but they quickly involved me. Despite all the flying faeces, and the potentially serious nature of our visit, it was wonderful being back out on a farm, in the thick of the action, doing the job that I trained for all those years ago.
We had bought packed lunches in the shop in the morning. As we walked back to the cars, I was reminiscing with S the vet about the old days. When you spent the day on a farm testing, it was normal when you broke for lunch, to find a wonderful three course meal waiting for you in the farmhouse, courtesy of the farmer’s wife. Though it was already starting to be more common for farmer’s wives to work, it was still a regular part of that life back then, but I had been told it was uncommon now.
Of course, with four of us there, it would also be a big ask, but to my delight, we were invited into the farmhouse, where there was delicious, warming farmhouse soup, sausages, cheese and rolls and pancakes with butter and jam. Given what we were there to do, it was fantastically generous and it added to that feeling of deja vu I had all week.
We spent all day on Monday and Tuesday, injecting the skin test and taking blood samples, then on Thursday and Friday, S went out to read the skin test and I accompanied her, partly to do the writing (making sure you record the numbers and make sure the right animals are identified is crucial) and partly to see what the skin reactions are like and how they should be read. Though I’d seen a few avian reactions years ago, I never found any reactors and I was half hoping we wouldn’t find any.
But that hope only got as far as the third cow. Unfortunately, she had a lump where the bovine tuberculin had been injected, but no reaction at the avian injection site, which meant that she was a reactor. It was quite a chilling feeling for me, partly because the cow would have to be slaughtered and partly because I now knew that here was an animal with an infection that could be passed to humans. We’re not allowed out on farms to test without having had a BCG vaccine, but it was an unexpectedly sobering thought.
Things went relatively well from there, though there was one other reactor, and that was last years calf from the infected cow. Interestingly, the blood tests came back on Friday, and though it had picked up TB in the calf, the cow tested as negative. It will be interesting to see what is found when the two of them are culled. Though it’s not nice to see a young, recently weaned beast being sent off, it was some consolation that the cow would have company. Cattle tend to be stressed when they are isolated from the herd, and the farmer is required to isolate reactors as soon as possible.
There were also some more positives from the blood test, so they will be sent off too. Then, as I said back at the start, the herd will need to be tested again, and maybe several more times, but hopefully it will eventually be cleared. Officially Scotland is TB free, but in southwest Scotland, where animals are regularly brought in from Ireland, it’s always going to be a problem until they find a better solution. And as this is part of my patch, it looks as though we will be working on it for some time yet.
And for those of you that have made it this far, here are some gratuitous food photos from the Craignelder Hotel, where we stayed.
A Vet’s Life 