Vet Among the Pigeons by Gillian Hick Read Free Book Online

purely due to being handled and not due to anypain. After that, however, everything would start to go wrong. For a whole month I used nothing but the crange – a large metal guillotine-type instrument. Strong yearlings and two-week old calves alike, I towered over them brandishing the huge blades and, yes, it did work fine on the small calves, apart from a slight difficulty in balancing the enormous instrument on the 3cm-long stumps that would one day become horns. Meanwhile, anything with a decent-sized blood vessel would bleed profusely the instant the heavy blades met.
    ‘It’s the angle you have wrong,’ assured one of the vets I had seen practice with. ‘Get it at more of a slope and you won’t get bleeders.’
    But, no. I still got bleeders.
    ‘You want to get further down the horn, right in tight to the skull,’ said another. ‘But be careful,’ he added, ‘I remember once I went too tight and I cracked her skull. She ended up in the factory.’
    So then I tried the embryotomy wire – a heavy-duty, sharpened metal wire attached to two metal handles which was looped around the base of the horn, allowing the horn to be sawn off. Apart from the fact that every time I dehorned a beast it was like having a work-out in the gym, I thought I was getting there. Yes, they still bled a little bit, but it didn’t look quite so gruesome. However, one particularly hardy bullock destroyed my progress. The first horn was tough going and my face went from various shades of pink to red, to beetroot, to purple as I valiantly sawed, thrashing around in unison with the furious animal, but eventually the offending horn did drop to theground. Resisting the urge to retch, I flopped at the side of the crush until the shaking in my shoulders and wrists had subsided enough to have a go at the second side. Off I went again, sawing and sawing, but the more I went on, the less progress I seemed to make. Back and forth I sawed, until the wire stopped, trapped deep in the horny tissue. With a bit of assistance from the farmer, who seemed sympathetic enough to my plight, I managed to release the wire as he pushed against the cut edge of the horn. Only a few strokes in, the same thing happened, but this time nothing would budge the wire. It was as though the heat created by the burning had welded the wire into the horn.
    Too exhausted to be embarrassed, I went back to the jeep to get the crange to finish off the job. The temptation to drive away and never come back was almost irresistible. As the wire was wedged in the horn just exactly where I wanted to place the crange, I knew that this was going to be yet another botched job. The torrents of blood that shot out at all angles as soon as I had cut off the offending horn was like none before, and despite my best efforts, poking and prodding with a forceps, the unfortunate beast was still bleeding heavily by the time I had finished. I wearily picked up a strand of baling twine and tied it tightly around the base where the horn had once been, until the bleeding stopped. It would have looked absurd enough, but with the length of wire still firmly wedged at the base of the horn it looked ludicrous. The twine was removed the next day by the farmer and the bullock suffered no ill-effects , but to this day, if he is still alive, that strand of wire is still stuck in the remnant of his horn.
    By this time, I was into my next season and some of the farmers were ringing to complain that some of the ones I had dehorned the previous season had started to grow horns back again as my cautious nipping off of the top did not remove the base of the growing horn.
    Now I changed tack and, having given up on my own skills, I tried the animal welfare issue. No sooner would a calf I had safely delivered drop to the floor than I would begin a lengthy lecture to the farmer on the merits of early debudding: by burning the developing bud of horn at a young age any further horn growth would be prevented.
    ‘You