Special Snowflakes Behaving Badly

The PI of the cow project had to call in a lot of favors to get enough supervisors to cover 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for nearly seven weeks (a total of 40 days when the calving phase ends on Monday when the last blood draw is done on the last calf). Three of them are vet school students. I don't know them and my shifts never overlapped with theirs. But as soon as the project started, I began to hear whispers about them.

The gossip started with the PI herself. It was the first week of the calving period, and the schedule was a bit sketchy. We had one birth one morning and she asked me to stay for a few extra hours--she had to run home and shower before going back to the vet school to teach her class (I ended up being at the barn for 9 hours that day). I stopped and looked at her, and said, Jean, you teach vet students. Vet students! What’s wrong with showing up in barn clothes to teach? So you work with animals. If I were a vet student, I’d sure be pleased to know that my instructors had hands-on experience with real cows, not idealized spherical cows. Oh my, she said, they would get extremely upset if I went into class smelling like the barn. They would accuse me of disrespecting them, of not taking their education seriously.

She was completely serious. And I was speechless. At the time, I thought that maybe she was being overly sensitive. Maybe she was projecting her own desire to appear as professional as possible onto the situation. Which was perfectly fine.

Then a few days later, I began to hear the student helpers talking about the vet student supervisors. Apparently the vet students never showed up alone but always in groups of three or more. They promptly shoved all the undergraduate student helpers out of the way. They never explained anything. They were rude and demanding. Half of them didn’t want to get in the pens, and when they did, they tiptoed around the piles of poop. In short, they were special snowflakes acting badly.

At first I took this with a grain of salt. Some of the undergrad helpers were quite inexperienced and that might color their interpretation. But I kept hearing the same stories over and over from many different student helpers.

Then, completely unprompted and in a completely different context (we were discussing my upcoming decision about which vet school to attend), two different professors made similar comments to me about how many of the OSU vet school students acted like entitled snots. One in fact said that he hoped I would accept OSU’s offer of admission so that I could “shake things up a bit”.

I have been mulling this over for weeks. I am by no means perfect but I regularly marvel at all the amazing things I have learned in the past few weeks, not just here in blog posts but to my professors and others. This is an extremely complicated project. I have been physically and mentally challenged throughout. But I get up every morning excited to learn more.

I always thank my student helpers. I go out of my way to involve them. When I ask them to muck pens at 2am, I get in the pens with them, shovel in hand. I take the time to explain what the project objectives are, and how it was designed to obtain specific data to address those objectives. I never drew blood from a calf without letting everyone present feel the vein. I give anatomy lessons and show the students how much variation there is in the size and placement of the jugular veins. Heck, I even taught two students who had no prior cow experience how to draw blood from the calves, letting them get samples while I held the calf. Both of them were perfect on their first attempts! That was a way for me to thank them for showing up on a regular basis during my pre-dawn shift. All this sounds really warm and fuzzy but of course I have ulterior motives. I believe that by teaching others, you solidify your own knowledge and learn new things in the process. One component of science is communication. Not just telling peers about your results, a formalized process that is important for credibility as well as verification, but also telling others who are not knowledgeable about your particular type of science what you are doing and why it is important. It’s like moving cows and moving around cows. It’s two sides of the same coin.

I think the second shoe finally dropped for me with respect to the vet school students when one of them sent out an email the other day asking to switch days with someone, and I replied to her, not to the entire group, with a very brief comment about how I hoped the cow would calve and we’d not have to worry about this anymore. Her quick reply was incredibly patronizing and rude.

The special snowflakes have failed to grasp at least two life lessons. First, there is no reason to act like an entitled shit. Getting into vet school is certainly hard but the bar isn’t set THAT high. Magical super powers are not required. And second, those professors and students that you are treating so poorly represent introductions for jobs, reference letters, sources of useful information, maybe even friendships. To be so self-centered at precisely the time in your career when you need to be cultivating those relationships is just stupid, naïve and stupid. That so many of them behave this way worries me a little bit. Is it something in the water? One or two ringleaders with bad attitudes? It's not my job nor in my own interests to fix whatever has gone off the rails at the vet school, but I'm now hyperalert to my own thoughts and actions. No doubt people say many things about me, but I don't ever want them to say that I am a special snowflake behaving badly.

(I was informed from a reasonably reliable source that the vet students who were reluctant to get in the pens probably only had interests in small animal medicine. Vet school training requires that you work with many different species, however. They probably showed up hoping to see a calf being born, preferably from a shit-free vantage point outside the pen.)

Cones and Clickers

-->

It’s almost springtime in the Pacific Northwest. We had a mild winter so the transition has been a subtle change from cold and damp to cold and less damp. Cold is relative, of course. I mentioned the freezing pre-dawn temps that I work in at the barn (the last cow had her calf this morning; we are almost done), but once the sun comes up, things warm up nicely. In other words, our winter has not been nearly as intense as what the rest of the US has been experiencing these past few weeks.

Even with the drier weather, the ground is still far too muddy to do much outside. My schedule with the cow project has been rather hectic and I come and go a lot. Since I always give the dogs a treat before I go, I plan ahead and do a few minutes of training with them a couple of times a day.

Azza is about as mature and stable as she will probably ever be so I decided to try her again on simple agility equipment. I’m only using a cone and a jump bar. And I’m using a clicker. She never really took to the clicker before but she’s pretty into it now. I wonder how much of her enthusiasm comes from sitting on the couch just a foot or two from Mimi, whose level of excitement for clicker training is quite impressive.

One of my training goals is to have the non-working dog wait quietly in one spot while I train the other dog. No crate, no restraint. But no barking or whining or leaving that spot. I frequently click and treat the dog who is staying quietly in the spot. It’s good for the working dog to see this--both of them have to get on board with the idea of sharing training time and space.

Another training goal is to have the dogs reliably go out and around a cone. I'd like to set them up to work backsides of jumps when we can get outside and have more room. Mimi’s problem has always been too much handler focus so I work more distance with her. Azza, well, I just want her to go around the darned cone. At first all she wanted to do was touch it with her nose or paw--excellent, rewardable behavior in most circumstances but not what I wanted. Sometimes I lay a jump bar on the ground with the cone at one end. Azza has been particularly afraid of the jump bars. But she has been doing extremely well with this exercise, diving around the cone with quite a bit of momentum, and taking a little hop over the bar without stopping to worry about it or acting like it will bite her. My long term goal is to get her to reliably jump real agility jumps set with low bars, say, 12 inches. She is of course physically capable of clearing much higher jumps but I just don’t think that is a realistic goal. If she touches any part of a jump, she shuts down. And if she knocks a bar, well, it may take days before she’ll even approach the jump again. So for now, it is a bar on the ground and a cone.

I also decided to convert two of Mimi’s behaviors into verbal cues only. She has a “spin” (she turns to her right) and “turn” (she turns to her left). I use verbals for these commands but she responds mainly to the hand signals. She is handed and performs the spin much better, faster, and more consistently. So I worked on the turn for a few days to get it in better shape, then I started fading out the hand signals for both, making them smaller and smaller until I reduced them to a finger twitch. I’m now insisting on the behaviors with verbal only. It’s funny to watch Mimi process this. She KNOWS what I mean when I say “turn” but she tries half the behaviors in her repertoire before she will do the turn without any body motion from me. She often tries the rally obedience “around” in which she moves from a position facing me, around my back, into heel position on the left side. She’ll try this two or three times, spinning in tight loops around me. And she always falls back on her favorite trick “beep beep” in which she backs up while facing me. But she is definitely making progress. It's a silly game, really, but she certainly enjoys it.

And the last trick that I'm working on is the two-dog heel. Mimi has been trained to heel on the left side. That's conventional. But for dog management purposes, I trained Azza to heel on the right. I happen to use the exact same phrase for both of them: get ready. So I'm working on putting them in sit stays facing me from a few feet away, then releasing them at the same time and having them get into heel position at the same time, one on each side of me. Also a silly game but quite amusing for me.

Let’s be honest here. Mimi’s agility competition days are long behind her. Azza will never compete in agility. That environment is far too complex for her to deal with. But there’s no reason not to keep their minds challenged and their bodies active. They like the extra treats too, of course, but having all my attention focused on them is certainly motivating for both of them.

The Penultimate Cow Experience: Milking a Beef Cow

The ultimate cow experience will be seeing that last cow have her calf. She's been holding out on us for days. This is week 9 of the 10-week term and students in the calving class are dropping like flies because of the demands of final projects, term papers, preparing for final exams. I have the same demands on my time on top of working on the thesis but I don't have the luxury of slacking off. 

I promise that this is the last pregnant cow post. I hope to have some dog training stories in the queue shortly. A nice change of topic.

But today I have to write about the penultimate cow experience: milking a beef cow.

Besides pulling blood from the calves every 12 hours, we get blood and colostrum from the mothers. Despite overseeing new calf activities for many calves, I have not yet collected colostrum myself. There wasn't any reason or excuse, it was just one of those things that I thought that the students could do. They aren't allowed to draw blood so I tried to get their hands on the cows and calves in other ways. We only need 50 ml of colostrum so it's a few pulls on a teat to fill a plastic collection tube and you are done.

But a calf that was born yesterday has not been thriving. We all thought she was nursing, it certainly looked like she was nursing, but she lost nearly 5 lbs before the PI decided we needed to bottle feed her in an attempt to teach her to nurse properly. What does one put in that bottle? Mother's milk, of course. And there's only one way to get that. So we've been hand-milking the cow every five hours or so and bottle-feeding the calf. 

These cows are not the gentle pets that dotted the Swiss Alps around Heidi's village. They aren't feral range cows either, but something in between. You don't pull up a comfy stool, rest your head on the side of the cow, and milk into a bucket, surrounded by meowing barn cats. No, you have to run the cow into the squeeze chute, take the sides off the chute, and crouch down beside it, reaching under to squeeze a teat with one hand while holding a plastic bottle under it with the other, hoping that the teat is pointed into the mouth of the bottle because you can't see a darned thing. You don't squeeze all at once but sort of close your fingers sequentially along the length of the teat (no, you don't pull on the things, that produces nothing). Your hands are cold because it's been 28F in the barn the past week or so during my pre-dawn shifts, and the cow most certainly does not like you messing about with her udder even in the best of circumstances. You have to move from one side of the cow to the other to reach all the teats (there are four, each with its own milk reservoir). You have to be ready to pull your arms and head back if she kicks, or pees or poops (splashy). You have to be patient: once you empty a teat, it might take a few seconds to refill. This is not a fast process.

I'd never in my life had my hands on a cow's udder until 4am this morning but I was able to pull 3 pints out of her in about half an hour. The student who was helping me never got the hang of it so he supervised.

Before I got it down myself, I managed to spray milk pretty much everywhere. Of course it quickly froze so my jacket cuffs and hands and the outsides of the bottles were soon sticky and icy--raw milk has a lot of fat in it, and that part doesn't freeze but the rest of it does. The crouching is viciously hard on your thighs. My wrists and forearms are now stiff and sore.

Good thing I've got some other career plans in place because I'd never make it as a farmer or in the porn industry.

I spent most of the half hour mumbling about the insanity of this mammalian progeny-feeding system. What was evolution thinking?

Anyway, we got the milk into the calf eventually (it took longer to get it into her than it did to collect it). And I just got an email from the PI saying that they managed to get the calf to successfully nurse from the mother while in the pen (not the chute). So it looks like we turned the corner on that one.

We Are Cultured, Dammit!

I am sure that many of you watch Downton Abbey. Despite my brief exile in Saudi Arabia and lack of a television now, I can assure you that I also go to some lengths to keep up with this PBS show.

In fact, I revel in Downton Abbey, and not because of a simplistic love of things British. No, I like the show because of the sly bits that the writers slip in here and there, references to literature and art and politics and science and philosophy.

This year, the fifth of the series, has been particularly entertaining. The first episode included a scene between the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith) and Lady Shackleton that had me on the floor rolling with glee. I nearly peed myself when this exchange took place:

     Lady Shackleton: A single peer with a good estate 

                won't be lonely long if he doesn't want to be. 

 

     Countess: You sound like Mrs. Bennett.

Of course! Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, published in 1813. Her novel was just as relevant in 1924, nearly 100 years after it was published, as it is now. The fact that the Countess made the reference underscores how the novel was even then connected to both the past and to the emerging modern age. It still resonates today, I think.

There are a handful of books that helped to shape my young imagination: The Hobbit, Watership Down, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre. I read these books again and again, and I still re-read them today. Of course, I am aware of the many flaws in these stories, the many stereotypes of class and of sexism, but on each reading of these novels, I find new insights into the human condition. I find magic in these stories.

(Re Jane Eyre, IMO there is no better cinematic interpretation than the one directed by Cary Fukunaga in 2011. It's fantastic.)

Downton Abbey rekindles some of this magic. Not in the thin fantasy style of Harry Potter but in the style of the great authors who have shaped our ideas and our culture by writing about the people around them in a way that gives us insight into ourselves 200 years later. I'll admit, I teared up when Lord Grantham unveiled the small plaque he had commissioned for the nephew of Mrs. Patmore. That was good writing and good drama.

And since our topic of today is Downton Abbey, and I have just watched episode 8, in closing I have to warn you all, don't fuck with Lady Sinderby ("And then you will have a scandal worthy of the name.")

Counting Down: Five Cows To Go

As of 6am this morning, there were still 5 cows yet to calve. Another one was born on my shift on Thursday morning, a really cute red Hereford bull calf. The student named him Duke. He came out weighing 92 pounds--that's a big calf.

One of the many interesting things I've learned during this project is how wide the range is for normal calving. The entire process can take five minutes or two hours (the average duration is one hour). The water sac usually comes first but it might follow the calf. The mother might do the entire thing laying down, she might calve standing up. Some cows give you lots of warning signs that they are in early labor: standing at the back of the pen, or even standing at all (the cows are usually laying down sleeping during my shift), switching their tail back and forth, lifting the head of the tail where it attaches to the spine, arching their back. They will stop ruminating. Some cows become somewhat anxious, repeatedly lying down and standing up, not able to settle. You can see them having contractions once labor begins but this is not very visible in the early stages. And when the calf is moving through the birth canal, the cows will relax their pelvic ligaments, causing their entire pelvis to rotate so that the opening that the calf passes through is more perpendicular to their path and less oblique, which makes their hip bones suddenly stick way up. Sometimes they even look "less" pregnant, a sign the baby is moving into the birth canal. But some cows give you absolutely no warning of any kind. We've had at least three calves born in which people were standing around IN THE BARN when they heard a whoosh of fluid then a plop and there was a calf on the ground. They had no idea at all that the cow was in labor.

Cows that have a snack on remnants of the evening feed ration are probably not going to calve in the next few hours. In fact, one of the first things I do when I arrive at the barn for my shift is go down the aisle and sweep the scattered alfalfa hay remnants back up to the pens. Cows that don't come up for this are the ones I watch most closely. It's proven a reliable test for weeks now--I've in fact predicted which cow was going to calve next probably half a dozen times based on this and my other observations.

I have a bit of an advantage over the students and other supervisors. I'm the only person who is at the barn every single day at the same time. The PI of the project is at the barn every day but she isn't there at the same time. Cows have routines just like we do, and by observing them at the same time, I am able to notice even small changes in behavior. However, it's taken me all of these five weeks to compile a relatively complete catalog of possible early labor signs because no cow exhibits all of them.

Getting the blood samples has also involved an evolution of process. When I had to draw blood on the calves back at the start of the project, I would often close my eyes when feeling the vein. Closing my eyes narrowed my focus and I would visualize the vein in 3D, its diameter and orientation, whether it seemed "rolly". Sometimes the vein will roll a bit under the needle and you will nick the vein instead of hitting it in the middle. I'd release the pressure to let it deflate then hold it off again two or three times to make sure I was going for the vein and not some ligament in the neck or, dog forbid, the artery. I might hold off on both sides before choosing the side I preferred, although to be honest, as I am left-handed, I prefer to bleed from the calf's left side, which is on my right as it faces me. Even so, if the vein is better on the calf's right, I'll go for that one. The process was somewhat theatrical, to be sure. I'd usually verbalize continuously, I feel it here, this one looks good, etc. It's an oddly intimate thing to do--I'm on my knees in front of the calf (I prefer to do this in a pile of grass hay if possible to provide a cushion for everyone) while the student is kneeling over the calf's shoulders, holding its head firmly but not too tightly against them. The calf might have its front feet folded under or straight out in front, and its hind feet turned to the side or tucked under. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I can't see the face of the holder. I am sure there were many eye rolls at my dramatic performance but I don't care. It worked for me, forced me to take my time, be patient, know exactly where that needle had to go before I ever uncapped it. And I have become pretty good at getting blood from jugular veins of calves. It usually takes longer to get the calf settled on the ground that it does for me to get the sample.

So to close, I have a small brag. One of the supervisors called me to the barn for a blood draw (he remains unwilling to even attempt one). When I showed up, the PI was there too. She was surprised to see me but I told her quietly that I had been called in. She said, okay, since you're here, we need to get blood from that cow too. Into the chute the cow went, halter put on her head, head tied off to the side. Jean handed me the tubes and the cuvette (we have to fill three tubes from the mothers), and while she and I were jibber-jabbering about something, I proceeded to do the blood draw. No drama, no problems, nothing but three tubes full of purple venous blood. As I was withdrawing the needle, I suddenly realized that I had done the procedure entirely on auto-pilot. Jean realized this at the same time, and said, well, it looks like you can draw blood from just about anything now. Wow, that made me feel really good that she not only recognized my accomplishment but that she let me know it.

Ew, That's Gross! Hold On, Let Me Get A Picture!

How do you know when you are working with animal science students? When confronted with slimy body parts or stinky, sticky body fluids, their first response is just like yours: ew, that's gross. But their next response is to touch it, pick it up, turn it over, and of course take a picture.

Yep, a bovine placenta. It is a sac that surrounds the calf. The red blobs are on the outside surface. They link to similarly sized blobs on the cow's uterus (caruncles) and are the connection points between cow and calf. This strange arrangement means that cows don't transmit certain things to their fetuses in utero, but only through colostrum after birth. This cow had given birth just a couple of hours before. The stress of moving through the chute caused her to drop her placenta pretty quickly. Usually they are dropped in the pens so are covered with bedding and poop. This one was nice and clean, well, relatively so, and was very photogenic.

Don't even get me started on the evolution of feces in newborn calves or the various states of vulval prolapse in pregnant cows.

We went 9 days at the barn without a birth. Some of these last 17 cows aren't predicted to be due until next week, some are past due. That is, if you actually believe the predicted birth dates. I made a graph of predicted versus actual to date: two cows birthed on their predicted date, half a dozen birthed after their predicted date, and the rest birthed up to two weeks earlier than their predicted date. In sum, predicted birth dates were not terribly useful.

Nine days of nothing except really nice spring weather, and suddenly in about 12 hours we had 4 calves on the ground. I watched another one being born this morning, my sixth, I think. 

Newborn calves are pretty fun to watch. As mother licks them dry, they fluff up and warm up. Eventually they begin to attempt to stand, usually within 15 minutes of birth. This is the most amusing part of the process because their legs and their brain are not communicating too well and each of their legs can end up going in a different direction. I've seen some calves do spectacular face plants and somersaults. But most of them are standing within another 15 minutes, wobbly to be sure but standing. They will often start to frisk and gambol about the pen within a couple of hours. Happy to be on this earth.

Cow licking the calf stimulates hormones and endorphins in both of them. Calf nursing stimulates hormones in cow that assist with release of the placenta and increased milk production. These are called neuroendocrine reflexes: a physical sensor (touch) generates a response in the hypothalamus in the brain which then sends signals to hormone-releasing tissues. And there are pheromones present, at least for a few minutes after birth. But I've been wondering about another thing the cows do: they moo very loudly at an oddly low frequency right at their calf's head, over and over, especially in the first few hours. It is not a normal cow vocalization and seems to be restricted to cows with newborn calves. I wonder if the frequency of the sound is also creating some neuroendocrine reflex.

The supervisor on the shift before mine called me at midnight--I was deep asleep. But she couldn't get a blood sample from a newborn and it is fairly critical to the research study that the zero hour blood sample be drawn before the calves begin to nurse. I managed to stumble in by 1am, an hour before I was supposed to be there, and got the calf weighed and blood drawn in 15 minutes (with the help of two students). Thankfully, that calf hadn't started nursing yet. Sometimes it takes cow and calf a few hours to get it together. With all of the blood draws and cow/calf management this morning, I wasn't able to sit down until 4:30am. Whew!

Getting a colostrum sample from a beef cow. They can still kick even when in the squeeze chute so you have to be careful.

Calf Rodeo

The pregnant beef cow study continues. I don't have a theme for this post, just some random thoughts.

In case you were wondering how I can manage a 2-6am shift every day (that's 7 days a week), I shifted my sleep schedule. I go to bed at 6pm, get up at 1am.

I've suffered from insomnia for many years. But for the past three weeks, I've been so mentally and physically exhausted by all the extra work that I can barely manage to turn out the light before I'm asleep, and I don't move until the alarm goes off. I feel reasonably rested during the day, and I'm certainly getting more hours of sleep than I normally do. But this schedule still doesn't feel quite right. I love walking up and down the barn in the dead hours of the morning, listening to the cows breathing. Still, I'll be glad when I can resume normal programming.

Not all supervisors have equal skill sets. One of them, who is in fact a PI for the project, has been extremely reluctant to touch the cows or calves, and he refuses to do blood draws on the calves. Since each calf gets poked five times (0, 12, 24, 36, and 48 hours from birth), that's a problem. He's taken to calling me, no matter what time of day (he never takes night supervisor shifts, thankfully), to come in and do the blood draws that fall during his shifts. He and the primary PI are feuding so he won't call her, and I sure don't like being in the middle of that. But I look at it this way: it's just more experience for me. Sure, it's inconvenient. And sometimes he calls me when I am not at my best. But I view it as a real-life challenge: veterinary medicine means working with animals and they don't give a toss for our arbitrary schedules, so I need to be able to think, act, and make decisions even when I'm tired. So when he calls, I change into my barn clothes, drive in, do the blood draw, hop back in the car and go home.

Calf rodeo. All three student helpers weren't needed to hold this calf down; in this position, only one holder is needed. But I thought it would make a funny photo. "Indulge me," I told them.

Cows have some interesting social dynamics. A new mother will lick the neck of another pregnant cow in her pen, exchanging pheromones it is thought, and that second cow will generally go into labor within a couple of days. Pregnant cows sometimes try to steal newborn calves from other cows. Sheep do this too. And if you move a bonded group of cows to a new pen, they will challenge the cows in the neighboring pens, slamming their heads into the gates and generally making a lot of drama.

New mothers can be amazingly aggressive! Five of the 45 pregnant cows were range cows from east Oregon, newly purchased by the OSU farm this year, and they are not used to people. They were fucking frightening to deal with after they had their calves. I called them Crazed Beast 1, 2, etc. Sure, cows don't have claws or flesh-tearing teeth (they do have teeth), but they kick as fast as lightening and they will charge you, ram you with their head, stomp on you if you are on the ground. When you stand in front of a pen and the new mother lowers her head, stiffens her legs, and gives you the stinkeye, you know you need to be careful when you pull that calf out to get some blood and a weight. I could write a book about what I've learned about how to move around cows and about what I've learned about how to move cows around. 

Also interesting is what I call the "dead calf" mode. The calves generally struggle a bit when you hold them for blood draws but if there are delays (veins blown or hard to find, for example), they usually drop into this weird state with eyes rolled back and bodies completely limp. I suppose it is an evolutionary adaption for protection against predators. I still laugh every time it happens. 

My tolerance for dirt and stink was greatly expanded when I started living with dogs. But now that I've been spending time with ruminants, I only notice the most egregious fluids (the first poop that newborn calves make is nuclear yellow and unbelievably smelly; I generally clean that off right away). Even so, I always wash my hands and arms carefully when I get home, and I take my barn clothes off right by the door and store them away from the dogs (I wear the same clothes for several days in a row). I keep my boots in the war room at the barn. Lice and such tend to be species-specific but there is no need to be stupid about things.

Besides regular blood draws, we have to weigh the calves a lot. We crab-walk them from their pens to the scale and snap the sling onto them--it has extra straps that go around their chest and butt to keep them from tipping out. Then we have to lift them high enough to clip the sling onto the chain. It is attached to an S-shaped piece of metal with electronic sensors on it that measure the separation of the top and bottom of the S; this electrical signal is converted to pounds by an electronic display.