Opportunity

A couple of Saturday mornings back, I willingly spent several hours getting soaked by rain, cow slobber, cow shit, mud, and blood (bovine and some of my own). It was tremendous fun!

This wonderful opportunity came up when I found out that one of my committee members was starting a nutritional study on dairy cows, currently pregnant, and their calves, arriving in late January-early February. This will be a follow-up to a study she did last year. The paper on the first study was published a couple of months ago and we discussed it in our nutrition journal seminar. Upon my inquiry, I was told that no vet school students or students from the Animal Sciences department had participated in the first study. I was astounded. The study is certainly scientifically interesting. But it also represents a great opportunity to get large animal exposure--and it only requires a student to show up. Maybe vet school students don't need that kind of experience but undergrads who aspire to go to vet school sure do need it. I couldn't understand why they weren't elbowing each other aside to volunteer.

My vet school applications have long been completed but I figured that any chance to get some large animal exposure would not be a waste of time.

So I emailed Jean and offered my services. She was happy to have me come along. That Saturday was day zero of the study. We were going to get about 25 ml of blood from each cow. The blood would be analyzed to establish chemical baselines before the cows started eating the various dietary treatments. There are about 50 cows in the study so extra hands for this particular activity were going to be very valuable.

I met her on campus at 7am that morning. It was raining but not that cold. Three undergrads joined us, all sophomores (and all young women) in the pre-vet honors program. Besides taking a few special honors courses, they each have to complete a research project. I think at least two of them showed up with the idea that this project might be their honors research project. I began to have a few doubts about my fellow volunteers when one of them walked up wearing a pink hat knitted to look like an animal's face and ears, a pink rain coat, and pink rubber boots.  

We loaded up the equipment, piled into various cars, and headed out to the OSU dairy farm north of town. Four guys, students at OSU who work at the farm for money, wrangled the cows from pasture to barn to pen to chute. Two more men, one of them a vet at the OSU vet school, helped restrain the cows' heads. Jean kept track of the paperwork. 

It was up to me and the three girls to collect the blood samples. I was getting more and more excited--I had no idea that we'd get so involved.

Let me describe the chute. It was entirely contained in the barn, starting from a largish pen at one end to a narrow chute snaking around the wall that ended in what is called a compression chute. This is a special chamber with sides that can be ratcheted in and a two-piece collared door at the front. It is opened up to let out a cow, and the next cow, seeing open pastures in front of her (the barn had no wall on that side), would run forward. The wranglers pulled the sides in and slammed the collar together at precisely the right moment to capture the cow with her head sticking out. As you might imagine, this mightily pissed quite a few of them off. They were so close, just this close, to freedom. They bellowed and tossed their heads, spraying us with slobber and shit. Only the first cow didn't have poop on her head and neck so there was lots of poop spraying too.

A rope knotted in a sort of bridle was passed over their noses and foreheads then cinched down to a metal bar on the side of the compression chamber. This pulled their heads to one side. The vet then grabbed their nostrils and pulled their heads to the side even further, stabilizing himself and the cow's head against the side of the chute. Why all this drama? We were going to get the blood from their jugular veins so needed full access to the right side of their necks. We also needed them to be relatively still. 

Each volunteer was told to do 5 cows each then we would start the rotation over again. It was a complicated business. It wasn't until my 7th cow that I finally got the hang of jamming my hand in to the side of the cow's neck to make the jugular pop out. You really have to jam it in there. There's the complication of using a little cup with a double-ended needle on it; the collection tubes are pushed into the cup, filled, pulled out, next one pushed in, all while the needle remains in the cow's vein. Three tubes per cow. I managed to stick myself with a needle that had some anticoagulant on it and my thumb didn't stop bleeding for the rest of the morning. It was a very tiny prick and you could hardly see it with all of the mud and shit anyway. 

You jam your left hand into the vein low on the cow's neck, feel for the vein location with your right hand then, still with your right hand, jab the needle in and lock the first tube into the cup. This one-handed maneuver was tricky but I'm a quick study. I missed the vein only one time (have to start over with a new tube and sometimes a new needle if that happens) and managed to keep going even when a few of my cows started tossing around (hard to believe they could do so with all the restraints but some of them find a way). 

At this point I should mention that the front opening of the compression chute was positioned just inside the drip line of the barn room. We were bent over, sometimes kneeling in the muck, faces inches from the cow's neck, rain dripping down the back of our necks from the roof. 

Only one of the three undergraduates kept going. The other two were incredibly tentative, unwilling to jab the needle in and then they were so nervous that they missed the vein. Every. Single. Time. (In an adult, pregnant, pissed off dairy cow, it's about the diameter of a garden hose; not only can you feel it but you can see it.) One girl never completed the procedure on a single cow. As a matter of surprise to no one, pink girl was one of those two. They held the cup like a pencil, like they were going to write on the cow's neck. They weren't strong enough or not willing to jam their hands into the cow's neck hard enough to make the vein pop out. They were reluctant to stand in the rain, hesitant to kneel in the mud. They were scared when we got a particularly lively one, often dropping the entire assembly instead of bracing against the cow to keep the needle in and blood flowing. Jean and the other OSU vet were giving them step-by-step guidance, and the other girl and I made sure that replacement vials and needles were in their hands before they asked for them. They weren't left to flail on their own for very long (initial flailing is necessary of course), yet even with all that support, they still gave up.

Well, more cows for me and the other girl, I told myself. Turns out she had been raised on a farm and had done blood draws a couple of times on her family's cows.

I was on quite an adrenaline high from the morning. I managed to jump right in and find my stride. It gave me a lot of confidence to successfully repeat the procedure on so many cows. I know that in vet school, when asked to do a blood draw on a horse, cow, goat, or sheep, I will be able to do it. I will know what to do. 

I hardly even noticed the rain even though I was soaked. But, as we let the last cow out of the chute to trot off into the field, we all noticed that the rain stopped, the sun peeked out, and an enormous rainbow formed not 200 yards from us.

When reflecting on the morning on the drive home, I found myself a bit disappointed in the two girls who gave up. They claim they want to be vets, so you might reasonably assume that they know they will have to work with large animals at least in vet school if not afterwards. They showed up at 7am on a rainy Saturday morning so they either figured out or were told that this would be a good opportunity for them. Yet they were not able to follow through. 

Yes, I know, they are young. That was pretty obvious. But opportunities like this one don't drop out of the sky every day. It bothers me that they didn't seem to realize what a significant responsibility Jean was offering them. These kinds of activities build an "animal experience" resume.

Of course, I told Jean that I'd help with the calving in January-February. Freezing weather, nights spent in cold, drafty barns--it's going to be great!