Another weekend is here, and looking back through my photos, most of them are of food! It would be fair to say that, when I’m out walking round a chilly farmyard all day, it is lovely to get back to a hotel, where someone else will cook for me. The picture at the top of the page was a starter – chicken skewers. I followed it up with sweet and sour prawns.
We were staying in the Premier Inn in Ayr, which was very pleasant. I know there are other staff who prefer to go out and find different restaurants to eat in, but for me the benefits of simply walking downstairs and being fed are too tempting to resist. Although the food is obviously mass prepared (it’s fairly consistent from hotel to hotel) I can usually find something I want to eat. I discovered the sweet and sour in Brighton and I would order it again.
I had to laugh at Lesley’s (the animal health officer who had arranged the trip) main course. She had ordered the chicken skewers as a main. I saw it came with flatbread, but hadn’t twigged that there were chips too. What turned up was a plate of chicken skewers (pretty succulent and with that tangy yogurt dip) with a mega flatbread chip butty! Guess it was probably not much more carb overload than mine, with its white rice and sweet sauce, but it looked way less appetizing!
Lesley had booked the rooms and, for the first time ever, I had a Premier room in the Premier Inn. I was impressed to find both a fridge and a coffee machine in the room, though in the end, having tried to coffee machine with the small sachets of cold milk, I reverted to instant decaffeinated with lattes from the restaurant at breakfast. The little bars of chocolate were nice though.
The farm visits went well. We were blood testing the cattle for a TB Gamma test. The traditional test for TB has always been a skin test, where tuberculin (non infectious liquid, derived from the bacteria that cause tuberculosis) is injected into the neck, to see if it causes an immune response . While a positive skin reaction means it’s very likely the cow has tuberculosis, a non-reaction isn’t a good guarantee that she doesn’t have it. With the gamma test, some cows without TB might have a positive result, but it can pick up earlier infections and is more likely to identify animals with TB that the skin test would miss. We use these tests in combination where there is an outbreak, to try to ensure we get as many of the infected animals as possible.
Fortunately for me, we had a great team and I didn’t have to do too much of the testing. It’s a very physical job, either lifting the cow’s tail and taking blood from a vein that runs down the centre, or getting down on your knees and taking it from the neck. I did a lot of blood testing in the early years of my career because brucellosis testing was still routinely done in cattle, every three years. It seems it’s like riding a bike, because I can still do it, which is just as well because I was asked to step in a couple of times on animals where it was difficult to get blood. The relief when I managed was significant. As my main role was in supervising a new animal health officer who was learning, it wouldn’t look good if I couldn’t do it myself.
The bird flu outbreak is going on and on, though really February is possibly the worst month for it, so it’s not unexpected. I was duty vet yesterday and another two investigations came in. One of them sounded like a certainty, so it looks like our little team will continue to be busy in the coming weeks. I have learned a lot from my involvement last week, not least because I made some errors in case handling and didn’t collect anything like enough evidence for the tracings team. I had to go back and get additional information about exactly where manure had been spread from the farm, when feed had been delivered to each shed, where they got their bedding materials and when and to where had any carcasses been taken away, before the outbreak set in. On a big farm, there are a lot of comings and goings over twenty one days. I did gather the information, but I should have returned the day after I walked round the shed to look at the birds to ask a whole load more questions and to get copies of the paperwork showing all those interactions. Next time, I will have much better oversight. This is how I learn best. As well as being a huge farm, it was only my fourth ever investigation and my first to go positive, and so the steep learning curve goes on.
I had a lovely weekend with Valerie. As well as the hot tub, she introduced me to the addictive TV experience that is Traitors. We binge watched it and it was fascinating to see the damage done in a society when some are enabled and willing to lie and deceive and others (acting innocently) cause havoc and failure through their over-confidence in their skills and beliefs. Others yet, with unseen wisdom and less self-confidence, are ignored. I realise what we see is heavily edited to give a certain slant to things, but seeing the interplay when we know more of the truth than the contestants is very interesting indeed.
Anyway, I shall leave you with my one, single, scenic photo from Ayrshire. Scotland is very beautiful, even in the middle of a sullen, damp winter. Thank you for reading. I hope you have a good week.
This week, I’ve been involved at the ongoing bird flu outbreak at Scotland’s biggest egg producer. Case AIV2026-06 Millennium Farm was confirmed positive for infection on 15th January. As it’s already in the press, I can say that this was not the first in the group of farms in that area, but the investigation and clinical assessment still took me many hours and the last two days have been filled with paperwork. Once disease has been confirmed, more work is triggered, both on farm, where teams prepare for the culling of thousands of birds, while in offices, other teams begin the long process of tracing which commercial vehicles came on and off the farm, delivering feed, collecting eggs and manure. Where did they go. Where might the virus have spread. As you can imagine, our limited staff of vets and animal health officers have been working flat out. The management team must be exhausted too. I was incredibly pleased though, that when I was sent out on Wednesday, one of our most experienced animal health officers was sent out to carry out the sampling process. As I had been in full PPE for four hours by this time, carrying out my clinical investigation on the birds, I was incredibly grateful as he swung into action. All I had to do was number the swabs and hand them to him. By this point, writing clearly and getting the numbers in the right order took all my concentration.
I stayed in a nearby hotel overnight, where they very kindly kept the kitchen open for me for an extra few minutes and produced the meal in the picture at the top of the page, which was slow roast belly pork. I had already downed a pint of cola and a glass of water by the time it arrived. Having eaten it, I did begin to feel almost human again!
I can’t say I slept much. Not in any way the fault of the hotel bed, which was very comfortable, but my mind and body were in that state where I was almost too tired to sleep. Still, I got up for breakfast at 07:30 to join my colleagues, one of whom, I think, was involved in the breakdown from the weekend before, and the other was my lovely, experienced animal health officer from the day before. While I went back up to my hotel room to start completing the forty pages of information I had to provide, he was heading back to the farm to start measuring buildings and assessing how the cull would go ahead. These experienced staff are invaluable and my one sour note in all this is that the civil service have removed progressive pay, so that these hugely experienced staff get paid very little more than someone who is just starting on the job.
Eggs royale for breakfast. Delicious!
I returned to Dumfries on Thursday afternoon and picked up poor Triar, who’d had to watch me rush in, pack a case, and leave the day before. I’m incredibly grateful to Donna (when am I not?) who calmly agreed to take him in and told me just to go and everything would be taken care of. I do have the most wonderful friends.
I had barely expected to get the weekend off. I was on what’s called the detached duty rota this week, which means I can be sent to an outbreak anywhere. My phone is on, my kit is in the car and, if anything else goes down, it’s not impossible I’ll be called on. But for now, I’m at Valerie’s near Stirling. Yesterday evening, I drank mulled wine in her hot tub and today (God willing 😆) we’re going to a Chinese buffet for lunch. Next week’s plan involves blood testing cattle for two days, or at least teaching one of the new animal health officers to do so. Obviously, there’s still a chance I might be redirected, but wherever I’m sent, Triar will be here for a few days, while I’ll be away. One thing about this job, life never stands still.
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.
This week has felt very long. Monday was spent catching up on work from last week. Tuesday, I was out on a welfare visit. I haven’t done so many of those lately as our regional vet team are so overstretched that my line-manager is withholding all but the most urgent work. I enjoyed it. It was a well-run dairy farm (the picture at the top of the page is unrelated) which I always find reassuring. We get a few awful welfare visits, but most of the time I find dedicated farmers who concentrate on welfare as part of their routine work. The reality is that animals that are treated well are more productive, which I’m sure has a bearing, but generally they care about the animals they look after.
Wednesday there was a monthly team meeting, and the first in a series of mandatory meetings for the vet team. As I said above, our regional team is struggling. This is straightforwardly as a result of understaffing. We should have a team of ten vets and right now, we have the equivalent of five fully functional vets. Wages for a Senior Veterinary Inspector are not high in comparison with other vet jobs and South West Scotland is the busiest region. Sometimes people come into our team, train for a while, feel the weight and then leave. They go to other jobs, or to different areas, where there is less work. Anyway, at the meeting, a colleague led by saying she wasn’t even able now to work through her emails as they come in. This rang a bell with me. I look through mine and pin the ones I have to deal with at the top of the page. There used to be around five there at any time. Now they’re off the page.
They don’t really have any solutions and I don’t blame my line manager. He is doing all he can to protect us, but only dealing with the most urgent work means that the work we are doing is often heavy or very much time-constrained. If there are horses arriving in the airport, we can’t say, “I’ll handle that tomorrow.” We have to handle the TB cases because if we don’t, there will be more.
The only reason I had the nice welfare visit was because my line manager was away. Those standing in for him seem unable to bear the weight he does, so while he’s away, the welfare visits get distributed and we get pushed to take on other work. We did an Emotional Intelligence training day a while back, where they set us tasks and pushed us to complete them faster. Some of them involved throwing things to each other. The people running it seemed quite impressed that none of the team criticized anyone who slowed us down, by fumbling a catch or throwing badly. I commented, in a wry voice, that we were so used to missing our targets that nobody was going to be uptight about not getting the fastest time in a throwing game. Everyone laughed, but the reality is that working constantly under pressure means that we do understand what is important and we do have quite a forgiving core team.
On Thursday, I thought that I might finally finish and send off my witness statement from the Farm of Doom case, which I last visited back in April. I haven’t been responsible for all the delays on that one. My Local Authority colleague took an age to come back to me with the photographs for numbering, so I couldn’t finish my statement without them. I thought I was more or less done, then sent my work to one of the ex-police Enforcement Officers, who told me I had to be explicit in stating that I took each photo and what it shows. As there are a lot of photos, I was only about halfway through this task and Thursday lunch time was approaching when my line manager rang.
I answered, feeling quite sanguine as I generally do when I finally get the time to complete overdue paperwork. He said, “Sarah, can you start to prepare for a report case please?” The bottom fell out of my day. Thursday afternoon and Friday, when I had planned to get through All the Things, including the almost finished paperwork from Tuesday’s welfare, updating my TB case and writing a long-postponed talk I’m supposed to be giving on deer were immediately thrown out of the window. A report case would take up the whole of the next two days. “What kind of report case?” I asked. “AI,” he replied. Avian Influenza. Mentally, I cast aside my planned quiet days and started to prepare for the onslaught.
When I go on holiday, and especially when flying, there’s a bit of a tense period before setting off. Making sure I have everything I’ll need creates a bit of tension. Obviously, I can buy new underwear, but if I forget my passport or my phone, with its electronic ticket information, and maybe the phone charger, then life would become more complicated. I usually relax once I’m through airport security. Beyond that gate, anything that goes wrong will be dealt with.
It’s a bit similar for me with a report case. Before I set off, I need to make sure I have everything in my car that I might require for my disease investigation. All the right paperwork, all the right kit. Throw on top of there the knowledge that I might not make it home that night, so I have to make sure Triar’s needs are covered too, and you get the picture. Having been “officially informed” that I am the attending vet, I have half an hour before I’m meant to be on my way. The reality is that we usually get this pre-warning and the official time is so vague that I have trouble filling in the form the next day. There’s no chance of getting out of the door in half an hour.
Anyway, that prep time, as with the airport planning, is always the worst bit for me. Once I’m in the car and on my way, my mind settles and I am committed. There’s no point in worrying about my other cases or whether I’ve forgotten anything. The next few hours, I have one task only, which is to assess whether there is notifiable disease on the farm or not. This time, I was driving out west. I hadn’t had lunch, so I stopped in a roadside shop for a filled roll. While I was stopped, I saw a message from Donna, saying she would take Triar out (and possibly in overnight). Another weight off my mind.
I’m writing all this as if I’m an old hand, but in reality, this was only my third real report case. It was the second bird flu report case in our region this week. The other farm would still be under restrictions because, after testing, the final all-clear for bird flu takes about a week to come through, but initial results suggested that one was negative. My farm, the one I was heading for, was a laying unit, producing eggs. There were, in total, 180,000 birds on three sites. 80 birds had died overnight in one of the sheds. My job was to go in, take a detailed history, examine both live and dead birds, and then decide whether we need to test for bird flu.
If you’re wondering about now, “well why don’t they just go and test them and see?” the answer is because notifiable diseases are only notifiable because they present a risk. The risk might be economic, for example it might mean animals can’t be sold to other countries because of trade agreements. Scotland is fighting to keep its Bluetongue status as “Free of Disease” because that means more international markets are open to them. Most though, have an animal welfare or human risk aspect. If foot and mouth spreads out of control, as it did in 2001, there is a massive animal welfare issue, as well as a huge economic cost to farming and to the UK. Bird flu presents a risk to human health, as well as a significant welfare impact on the infected birds. Both spread like norovirus through a scout camp, so as soon as there is suspicion of disease, the farm is locked down. The first thing I do, on arrival at the farm, is to serve official papers, confirming the verbal restrictions they were told when they called us.
And when I say locked down, I mean just that. Bird flu spreads easily, so it’s not only birds and animals that can’t move off. People aren’t allowed on or off. Vehicles too. Any movement, from that moment, until the restrictions are lifted, has to be made under a licence. If I can’t rule out disease and we go for testing, this farm is going to be locked down for a week. If I decide this isn’t bird flu, they can open up again this evening. This is an egg producing farm, with 180,000 birds, each laying an egg daily. Eggs can carry bird flu. A week’s worth of eggs… well you get the picture.
I need to be calm when I arrive on the farm. If this day is stressful for me, then think about what the farmer is going through. His or her animals and a chunk of his or her livelihood are on the line. They need me to guide them through this so I want them to have confidence. I bless my years in general practice out of hours and in the emergency clinic. I’ve been dealing with other people’s disasters since I was 23. (As an aside, I love the company of old vets for exactly that reason. Many new vets never do out of hours. It’s not good for the profession.)
My Animal Health Officer (AHO) who will take the samples today, if we sample, is F. She’s even newer than me. My first bird-flu case was hers too, but that time we had an experienced AHO with us. This time, it’s just us. She’s holding up well and was out of her car before me. Deep breath. Grab all the paperwork. I open the car door, climb out, and greet the farmer as if I’ve done this a thousand times before and it’s all routine. Explain who I am: what we’re going to do. There will be a lot of paperwork. Hundreds of questions. Better they know what we’re in for, because they are about to be grilled on all their daily routines, their biosecurity arrangements, who has been on and off the farm in the last 21 days, what has gone to plan, what has happened that was different.
We go into the house. The first thing I do is plug in my phone. I used it to guide me here and later, I have to document everything with photographs. The first time I did this, a few months back, I plugged in my phone, but forgot the switch on the socket. Nobody’s perfect! This time I throw the switch. Then we get down to it, at the kitchen table. I ask them questions. They answer, in detail and at high speed. I’m writing it all down. There is no chance all the information will go into my head and stay there. Several times, I have to ask them to repeat, because they are three facts ahead and I’m still noting down fact 1.
I have to guide the conversation, but it’s difficult. It’s already three in the afternoon and I am mindful of the remaining daylight. We don’t want to be sampling in darkness. I need to drill into the core history. What did they notice first? When? How might disease have been introduced? Where are the weak points in their defences? Are there other possible causes? I’m also vaguely aware that tomorrow, I will be filling in a form which is going to ask me for details which may not be relevant here. I try to balance the depth, get enough information, disregard the unimportant.
Finally, I feel I have enough information. I stand up and go to my phone. Calling my veterinary advisor is the next step. I have to refer the history I’ve gathered to check it’s enough. Because the interview had hopped about a bit, it was difficult to find the information. I have three of four A4 pages, densely written. She asks a few more questions and I have her on speaker, so the farmer answers. It’s time to go and look at the birds.
There are eleven sheds in total, but the dead birds were mostly from shed X. A second shed (Y) has had reduced egg production for a couple of weeks. These two sheds are linked. With plenty of time, I might visit several sheds. If bird flu is confirmed, we will need GPS coordinates for all eleven. I suggest visiting one of the healthy sheds first, then egg-drop Y, then dead birds X. Time is so short though, that after a couple of minutes of discussion, we cut it down to sheds Y, then X which are at Site C. Taking the possibly infected shed last is good practice. I don’t want to infect any sheds that are still clean, though if it is bird flu, every single bird will be dead within the week.
I have a ton of gear to take to the shed and we’re driving down. Two layers of disposable overalls, two layers of gloves. Foot coverings for going into the shed. Breathing hood and filters. Post mortem kit. Sharp safe. Phone, inside a plastic bag. I forget my thermometer. Nobody’s perfect!
I take a photo of the door of Site C and a GPS reading, which I screenshot. If the case goes live, this reading will define the 3km Protection Zone and the 10km Surveillance Zone.
Their biosecurity is reassuring. They ask me to change footwear as I go in, but I decline. All these layers of kit are there to protect me from infection and if I take my wellies off and put their footwear on, I’m compromising that. I disinfect my clean wellies and put on the boot protectors, hoping for the best. Worst case scenario, they don’t have bird flu and I take it in. Oh well.
To get to shed Y, we pass the end of shed X. They have shared air space. There’s a pile of dead birds outside shed X and I cast a glance at them as we walk by, but nothing leaps out. I look in at shed Y through the wire mesh. There are no dead birds visible in the shed. It’s a high rise layer unit with birds on perches right up to the roof. Seeing me in all my get-up all the birds on the floor skedaddle for the high-rise perches or away to the other end of the pen. They look healthy enough.
I don’t go in. It’s time to walk through shed X.
I go in on my own. The birds get alarmed if two people go in together, the farm manager tells me. I think this weird creature with the noisy hood on her head will alarm them anyway, but I don’t say anything. The birds in this shed are as flighty as those in shed Y. It doesn’t matter a fig that I forgot my thermometer. There is not a chance we will be catching any of these birds. I can only see them as they run and climb, and then at a distance, but the view is reassuring. None are lame. No lethargic clumps of sick looking birds. Their tails are up, their feathers smooth. Eyes bright. They stare at me in distant disapproval, but none of them are sneezing.
My mind is fizzing as I walk. Surely, with bird flu, there would be sick birds? Probably dead birds too. These are some of the healthiest birds I’ve ever seen. They can certainly run!
I walk the length of the shed. It’s a well-managed unit. Nice dry litter. Plenty of space. The birds can usually go outside, but today they too are locked down. I walk back, through the pens, taking a few pictures with my plastic-wrapped phone. It’s time to post-mortem some birds. I haven’t seen anything in the shed to suggest there is bird flu, but I still can’t definitively rule it out. We’ve had 80 dead birds overnight and I need to be sure.
I take a look again at the pile of dead birds. With bird flu, I might see swollen heads, deep blue wattles, maybe haemorrhages in the legs or diarrhoea round the cloaca. I don’t see any of those things. I select two birds and photo them. It’s not very bright here, so I ask the farm manager if he has a light. He fetches his head torch. I don’t want to move the birds from where they are. It will have to do.
Kneeling on the floor, I start the post-mortem. It’s a month and a half since I did my last bird PM and that was in a brightly lit lab, on a comfortable bench. Now I’m kneeling on the concrete floor, my head encased in a hood that limits my view, in semi-darkness. This PM is make or break time. I check the head, then open up the throat to look at the trachea. There’s no mucus there, no haemorrage. It’s perfectly normal and when I reach the crop at the base of the neck, it is filled with food. Whatever happened to this bird, it was eating until the moment it died. I open up the body cavity, looking for inflammation, haemorrhage or necrosis, but the only thing that looks abnormal is the liver. Normally, the liver is reddish brown throughout, but this one has brown patches. Some of patches have clear cut edges. They’re not abscesses. I worked in a chicken slaughterhouse for three years, but I’ve never seen a liver like this.
The next bird is the same. I open it up. A second mottled liver. Maybe a little fluid build up where the air-sacs would be. Maybe metabolic, I think. Very strange, but just as in the sheds, there is nothing screaming bird-flu at me. I take a few photos of my findings. It’s good to have evidence. Packing up, I edge back to my feet. It’s not so easy these days, but I make it and we leave the shed again.
Once outside, clutching my now-contaminated kit, I decide to go back up to the main holding before phoning VENDU. The Veterinary Exotic Notifiable Disease Unit give us directions what samples to take, but it’s my decision whether we need to take any at all. If I decide not to, they will challenge me to try to assess my decision, but the final choice is mine. I’ve stripped off most of my kit. If they challenge me for information I don’t have, I’ll have to go again. I decide to call my veterinary advisor before VENDU. I don’t think this is bird flu. It had not really crossed my mind, as I drove here, that I wouldn’t be testing, but with all the information I’ve gathered, I’m conflicted. For me, testing is the safe option, but it’s hammering in my head. I DON’T THINK THIS IS BIRD FLU!
I call my advisor and tell her. She asks about the livers and I describe them. She will discuss with her advisor, she says, while I call VENDU. I drop two liver photos into the chat and leave them to it. I briefly chat with the farmer. He drops it into the conversation that he has no insurance that would cover a week of lockdown. I can’t let that influence my decision either. I have to be sure.
The VENDU vet is busy, but when she calls back, it’s someone I know. This makes it easier to have that discussion, but even then, as I tell her I don’t think it’s bird flu, she wants me to be certain. I am as certain as I can be. The only thing that’s holding me back is that it’s a huge decision. If I say no testing, this farm will open up overnight. Halted eggs on lorries will be on the move again. If there are hundreds more deaths overnight, and it then goes positive, the whole thing will restart tomorrow and I will have messed up massively.
I’m almost sure. I REALLY DON’T THINK THIS IS BIRD FLU! If I lock down the farm, their own vet can’t come on and take samples for a week, even if early tests are negative. Whatever caused the egg drop and the deaths, they’ll have to live with it undiagnosed.
I can’t let that affect my decision either. I tell the VENDU vet that I am almost decided, but I want to call my advisor again. My advisor and her advisor have seen the photos. “Good pictures,” is written in the chat. I call her back and tell her I want to negate. I explain my reasoning again. “We’ve chatted,” she says, “and if you want to negate, we will back your decision fully. Even if it kicks off again, we are happy to defend your decision.”
I take a deep breath. “I don’t think this is bird flu,” I say, “I don’t want to sample.”
The farmers’ relief was palpable. They made a couple of phone calls and thanked me profusely and all the while, I hope I’ve made the right decision. I drive home and pick up Triar and in all honesty, I was high as a kite. Adrenaline has been my drug of choice for a long time and, perhaps bizarrely, I love this stuff. Still, the worry was there that it could all kick off. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. My phone rang when I was out walking Triar in the morning. “11 birds have died in sheds X and Y overnight,” they said. 11 out of the thousands of birds. A lot less than yesterday’s 80. I didn’t quite punch the air, but it was a good start to my Friday morning.
I’m writing this on Saturday morning. Despite negating the case, I still had to process all the paperwork and, with a few distractions, it took me all day yesterday. My advisor told me to drop the not-quite completed form into the case folder, “just in case it kicks off over the weekend,” she said. I don’t think it will, and anyway my workphone is switched on. I’m pretty sure if anything kicks off, it’s me the farmer will call first.
Monday will all be paperwork. This case created a new pile to add to that I already had. Even then, if something else comes in, I might have to drop the paperwork and run again.
And after all that, I found out that I left my phone charger on the farm and will have to go and collect it. Nobody’s perfect!
I was in Brighton last weekend to attend “the largest annual grassroots feminist conference in Europe”, according to FiLiA who ran it. If you’re in the UK, you might have seen in the news that the Brighton Centre venue was vandalised the night before it started. The whole of the front of the building was sprayed with pink paint and several windows were broken. In addition, inside there was also disagreement, with a woman announcing in the opening ceremony that she “wouldn’t be lectured on Hamas” before attempting to rouse the room with chants of, “free, free Palestine”. A few women stood up and joined in, some Jewish women stood up and walked out, some jeered and the rest of us sat there in stunned silence. For an uplifting weekend, where FiLiA say you can “Build your Feminist Network. Leave inspired,” it wasn’t a great start.
Regular readers will know I love strong women and there were plenty of them there, but I don’t think I will be going to the next one. Brighton was also curiously depressing, though perhaps it isn’t curious really. Like many UK cities, the drugged homeless lined the pavements and the whole place seemed dirty and down at heel. Like many seaside towns, you could see it had once been gorgeous and rather grand, a haven for holiday makers. Now they go for beaches abroad, with reliable sunshine at lower prices. I did get a photograph on the first evening that I love though. The sea is still beautiful, under the evening sky.
There were cafés along the beachfront, where the lovely Welsh woman I made friends with on the first day bought me an ice cream! It was probably the high point of the weeekend!
On Monday, I headed back to Scotland. Somewhat rashly, I had agreed to work in Stranraer on Tuesday and had booked to stay there Monday night. The logistics of collecting Triar from my parents in Yorkshire and dropping him off with a friend in Dumfries were complicated. Several delays on the railways meant I ended up getting a taxi for the last leg of my Yorkshire journey. A jackknifed lorry on the A75, with blue flashing lights lighting up the night (nobody was hurt) was the final hold-up, but at least the hotel was comfortable when I finally got there at 10:30 in the evening.
My lovely friend also seems to have enjoyed having Triar and sent reassuring photos of him looking happy. I’d been a bit worried about picking him up, driving him two hours, then dropping him off again, but he seems to have been so well looked after, that it was all good!
As usual, after a few days back at work, it feels as if I never left. Two days out on farm, blood testing cattle with three (female) animal health officers was uplifting. We have some wonderful women in our APHA team. I was duty vet on Thursday, where the high point of the day was dealing with a query about fish-sludge being fed to maggots (no, me neither). And all the while, as I was out on farm and juggling bizarre questions, there were emails landing in my inbox about cows which had been transported to slaughterhouses with shackles on.
For my non-farm readership, occasionally (and particularly around calving time when the ligaments are softened) cows do the splits on their hind legs and then can’t easily get up. With shackles buckled onto their hind legs, that stop their legs sliding outwards, they can often manage okay, until they heal. A new decision has been made that travelling in shackles isn’t allowed, on the grounds that an animal with them on, isn’t fit to travel. This isn’t a law, it’s a directive that has come from someone high up in APHA. Like all such decisions, it’s somewhat controversial. If a farmer wants to send such a cow to the slaughterhouse and can’t send her in shackles, he may decide to take them off and risk sending her anyway, which is more risky than sending her with them on.
As my investigative case is all about unfit animals being transported, all the emails about this new rule being broken (in Scotland) are now being directed to me. What it really highlights is not that animals in shackles shouldn’t be travelling, so much as that there is a huge gap in care, now that having lame animals culled on farm and being sent to the abattoir afterwards is so incredibly limited. If a cow has an accident, farmers only have 24 hours to decide if it’s so serious that she should be culled, so there’s no time to wait and see how she fares. This is all a hangover from the EU, so since we’ve left, perhaps we could start to look at systems that might work better for our animal welfare here. If I can find the time, and put together some coherent arguments, maybe a visit to my MP is in order. There are times when trying to sort things out locally, just isn’t enough.
I shall leave you with some stormy pictures of Yorkshire. Thanks for reading and have a lovely week!
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.
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!
It’s been a busy week. On Monday, I made a revisit to a welfare case, Tuesday and Wednesday were spent catching up on paperwork and courses that I should have completed as well as having an appointment with a doctor from occupational health. Thursday I was third duty vet and yesterday, I inspected a chicken farm with a colleague up north of Ayr.
As some of you will know, I had some major neurological issues between 2017 and 2019. These mostly cleared up after I started physiotherapy and had some coincidental corticosteroid injections for a seemingly unrelated issue. I never received a diagnosis, but the problems I had still recur when I’m very tired, and I still tire very easily. My line manager referred me to occupational health as this means that coping with duty vet on top of my day to day work is currently too much.
The doctor has recommended that, though I will still cover nights and weekends, I will be temporarily relieved of the daytime tasks until I am more familiar with what needs to be done. She also recommended I should go to my GP and get myself rechecked. I imagine that could be a long job, involving lots of tests, quite likely with the same end result, but I will keep you posted.
With all that said, I was incredibly touched that another colleague from Lauder, who I’d never met before, invited me to come and do my first ever stint as third duty vet with her and doing it with someone else in the room with me, who was perfectly willing to help, was altogether a different experience. It might be difficult to organize for new starters to do this, partly because so many people still work from home, post Covid, but it would prevent a lot of anguish. So many people I have spoken to describe being in tears when they are stuck on duty vet that I have also reported it as a health and safety issue, but the reality is, we are understaffed and there’s not much that can be done.
Anyway, the best day of last week at work, was actually Sunday. I travelled through to the edge of Edinburgh on Saturday night, and at 07:45 on Sunday morning, I reported for duty as one of the official APHA vets at the Royal Highland Show.
Our routine remit didn’t sound too onerous. We were asked to walk round all the animals once to check on health and welfare. There were other vets at the show to deal with any front line injuries or illnesses. I did read our contingency plans before I went, which detailed what we must do in the event of a foot and mouth outbreak and other unpleasant scenarios, but fortunately none of them happened and instead, it was a lovely day out. The rest of this post then, is going to be taken up with photos from the show. I hope you enjoy them.
Quite appropriately, the most heavily featured breed in my photos is Highland Cattle. The amount of work it must take to have them clean and tidy for the ring is phenomenal. I chanced upon a young woman wielding a long hairdryer on hers and asked if I could take photos and she agreed.
I also loved the belted Galloways.
Though it must be a lot of work to present such beautifully turned out stock, the Highland Show is a real, family event. Again, I asked if I could take a photo, but here, the whole family were gathered around a calf that was being preened.
The Holsteins, for some reason, are shaved all over, before going in the ring. I watched someone carefully running their clippers along the spine, leaving some of the standing up hair, working to get a perfectly straight line, to give the best effect. I didn’t photograph that one, but it was interesting to compare the slimline, dairy cattle with the sturdy beef cattle. For obvious reasons, one of those is bred to not put on any flesh, but to direct energy into milk production, the other is bred to have as much meat as possible. I saw a breed that I hadn’t come across before – the British Blue – which has double muscles. I give you a baby Holstein, then a rump comparison, Jersey dairy cattle, vs a British Blue.
There were even more breeds of sheep. I don’t have so many photos of them, but I was struck by the fluffy cuteness of these black nose sheep.
And these fabulous horns.
There were ponies and heavy horses…
And right away, at the far end of the show, there were goats, alpacas and chickens.
All in all, checking out all the animals was a very long walk and by the end of the day, I had covered twelve kilometers. I felt very pleased though, at having such a wonderful day out as part of my job. I hope you enjoyed the picture and I will see you all again next 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!
A Vet’s Life 