MACH Rose Country's Bust A Move

In March of this year, Archie completed requirements for a coveted AKC agility title: MACH or Master Agility Champion. Once the dog reaches the Masters level of competition, he begins to accumulate MACH points and double Qs. Points are earned by clean runs under the allotted course time. A double Q means qualifying (running clean) in Standard and Jumpers With Weaves in the same day. At the Masters level, no errors are allowed. Dogs have to get 750 points and 20 double Qs to earn the MACH.

 

Archie is a reasonably speedy dog with no problems making course time. He had well over 1200 points and 19 double Qs by March. I entered the trial in Tulsa specifically because I thought we could run clean under those two judges. I'd shown to both of them many times and knew their course design styles well. 

He qualified in Standard in the morning. A few hours later, we entered the Jumpers ring. I'd been here plenty of times--one Q on the board then we fail to get that second Q. 

Tulsa isn't my home turf but there were quite a few people at the trial that I knew well or counted as agility friends. The arena was well lit, the dirt surface was firm. I wasn't talking about the MACH thing with anyone, but they were certainly talking amongst themselves. Knowing I had that Standard Q, quite the crowd was gathered at the Jumpers ring exit when it came time for us to run. They were filming me too, but wisely knew not to tell me that. I was stressed when I stepped into the ring. So many things could go wrong.

As Archie cleared that last bar following a lovely clean run, I ran over and picked him up for a big hug. We did it!

Archie is the first smooth fox terrier that I was able to put a MACH on. I've been at this with multiple dogs for 20 years. He is also only the seventeenth smooth fox terrier to get a first MACH since 2003. Yep, those are all correct numbers. This should tell you two things: there aren't many smooth fox terriers that do agility, and it's damn hard to be successful in agility with a smooth fox terrier. 

Here's a picture I took of Archie in the hotel that evening. My little athlete, taking a well earned nap.

One consequence of this achievement is that I immediately dropped Archie into Preferred. This means he no longer has to jump 16". Preferred puts him into the 12" class with the little dogs. He flies over those jumps!

It's All About Meeeee.....

 In the past few weeks, I've read four biographies. I don't read biographies often but they caught my eye as I was scrolling through Central Arkansas Library's online offerings. Boy, what a mixed, and rather disappointing, bag!

The first was Page Boy by Elliott Page, the transgender actor. I enjoyed his work in the movies Juno and Whip It. I was looking forward to reading some Hollywood gossip and learning more about him. Sadly, about halfway through, I found myself skimming page after page, hoping an end was in sight. I became emotionally exhausted simply reading about his extreme lack of self-confidence and self-awareness. I can't imagine how much more exhausting he would be in person. If you have to repeatedly ask people around you the same question, over and over, for YEARS, then you should probably find a new therapist.

Next up was Spare by Prince Harry. I really wanted to have some sympathy for Harry and Meghan, since it was pretty clear she had been unfairly hounded by the British press and treated with extraordinary disdain and unconcealed racism by members of the royal family. Plus there was that bit about his mother dying so tragically young, apparently also hounded by the press. But in recounting episode after episode of his childhood and youth, it became clear that Harry was writing from a place of incredible privilege and wealth while remaining utterly tone-deaf to that privilege. Jetting off to Africa whenever you get your feelings hurt is not an experience most of us will ever have. By the end, my sympathy had drained away.

I followed those two disappointments with I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. I am too old to have seen any of her television work but I'd heard reviews of the book and decided to check it out. Spoiler and trigger alert: child sexual abuse, mental abuse, mental illness, eating disorders, substance abuse. Wow. This book was a difficult read. McCurdy is to be commended for coming out the other side sounding like a reasonably put-together adult. Not a book for all readers, but a well-written and interesting story. 

To round out the list, I just finished The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway by Una McCormack. I am a Star Trek fan from way back and this book promised some light entertainment. Janeway was the captain of the Voyager, a starship that was sent 70,000 light years from Earth by a morally conflicted interaction between Janeway and her crew, a threatened species of humanoids, and a dying alien trying to protect them. The multi-year TV series chronicling their journey home was a very successful addition to the Star Trek pantheon. This book was just as fluffy and entertaining as I had hoped. McCormack is a rather prolific fan-fiction industry unto herself, writing for the Doctor Who, Firefly, and Star Trek universes. 

 Ironically, the book I enjoyed most of the four was about a fictional character! 

Never A Dull Moment

The samples and cases submitted to the veterinary diagnostic lab are inherently unpredictable. No appointments need to be made, although we do ask that clients call the lab before bringing in a large animal for necropsy. With a few exceptions, we accept submissions directly from owners and commercial entities. The result is that there is nothing like a normal day to day routine at the lab. My section, Pathology, which includes necropsy and histopathology, is particularly prone to unexpected surprises. 

Surprise! There's a dead goat in the cooler on the dock, on top of two neonatal calves, all dropped off over the weekend. And the goat has no paperwork with it....

Surprise! There's a dead chicken in that box on the counter, shipped without any ice packs, literally creating a stink in the Receiving.

Surprise! It's 2pm, and Tyson just arrived with 36 live broiler breeder hens from three different farms, and didn't call ahead!

Pathology has no routine or predictability at all. We have to be ready to accommodate whatever comes in. In just the past week, I've had to deal with several cases that nicely illustrate how unpredictable my job is.

We have an incinerator to dispose of the tissue waste we generate. The incinerator occupies a fair bit of my management time each week. It is touchy (won't start if it is raining, or right after it has rained, for example). It is also a dangerous piece of equipment. We burn around 4,000 lb of animal remains a month, and use a forklift to hoist bags weighing as much as 1300 lb into it. But remember that unpredictability factor? In December, we burned just over 9000 lb due an unusually high number of horses submitted for necropsy. I was scrambling to keep the propane tank filled during the last two weeks of the year. 

The incinerator lid is raised by cranking up two bottle jacks, one on each end. The jacks and the lid roll back as a unit on a track, exposing the interior of the incinerator. A week ago Friday, one of the jacks failed. It had been leaking hydraulic fluid, and I knew it was on its last legs. So when the techs came back and reported they couldn't get the lid opened, I drove to the incinerator (it's in a secure fenced maintenance yard across from the lab), measured the existing jacks (their labels had been scraped off by the incinerator manufacturer so they could be painted black), and drove to AutoZone to get two more. On Tuesday, one of my techs and I ripped out the old jacks and rammed in the two new ones. Good thing I'm handy with tools.

On top of that, I was scrambling to get more propane. Our walk in cooler was full because we didn't burn on the Friday as we often do to clean it out for the next week because of the jack issue. I usually call or text the propane delivery driver directly but he wasn't answering on Monday. It's pretty useless to call the company directly. But our director still has the business card of a "customer experience" rep at the propane company who helped him set up the tank back in 2018. One call to that guy and we had a full tank of propane (1000 gallons) the very next day. 

A young boa was submitted for necropsy that week. Against the usual backdrop of dogs, cats, cows, and chickens, I quite enjoy these unusual species. Even if I am not on necropsy duty that day, I always take these cases when they come in. They are challenging to handle, and their anatomy and pathologies are always interesting.

On Wednesday morning, I get this picture via text from a veterinarian friend.

That is a very sick calf with green snot coming out of his nose and eyes. Poor little guy. I actually received three photos of the calf, along with this text: "what tests?"

I had to laugh. This particular vet is young, but very good. He works really hard to help his large animal clients. And obviously, we have a lot of mutual trust and respect since he knows he only has to text me to get an immediate response. 

I first replied "gross" then I suggested some testing options and the samples needed, and let him know what I thought should be prioritized in case the client couldn't afford or didn't want to run everything I recommended. 

I had another vet call me on Thursday morning to tell me about a horse she had seen that had large bleeding ulcers in its mouth. Uh oh, a short list of differentials, at least one of which was reportable, came to mind. I've worked with this vet before so we chatted for a while about the case. I told her, I've got to escalate this so hang tight and I will get back to you. I texted the state vet. He happened to be in his office, and came right down to mine. He said, get her to email everything including pictures. She did, and I forwarded all of it to him and to the USDA APHIS vet in charge. They eventually decided it was not a disease issue that needed their involvement, and passed the entire mess back to me and the vet who called me. 

I get calls like this from vets and animal owners/producers daily. Since taking this job, I've worked very hard to make the lab a resource for reliable information and assistance. The result is that I spend many hours each week helping other vets and animal producers and owners, calling, texting, emailing, gathering information. By now, most of the practicing vets in the state have worked with me, and they just call me directly. It also helps that I have a solid relationship with my state and federal colleagues. 

Finally, it was Friday, and I was taking a breather in my office thinking the crazy week was almost over when the state vet pops in. We have a situation, he says. New developments, he added. I thought he was still talking about the horse with the oral ulcers. He said, oh no, something entirely new.

Turns out a brown bat had gotten into the atrium of the building and people were running around in panic while others were trying to catch it. The atrium of the building divides the building into two halves, the lab side and the Department of Agriculture admin side. All of us on the lab side have been vaccinated for rabies as a requirement of our job. Nobody on the admin side has received this vaccine. 

I told the state vet, I'm on it. He and I rushed towards the atrium, only to be met by two admin folks coming towards us with a very small bat trapped in a very large net someone had rounded up from Forestry. Neither of them had gloves. Oy.

I asked repeatedly, any human contact? Any spittle, blood? Any scratches or bites? Negative, negative.

Since the bat was secure for the moment, I had them follow me back to our necropsy area. We ran into the lab director on the way, and I told him, just keep moving, don't look, everything is under control. I put on gloves, grabbed a plastic sample transport container out of necropsy, and maneuvered the bat (stunned into immobility or injured) into the container. I closed the lid, and sent them on their way. 

As a general rule, we don't accept live animals for necropsy. As a result, we don't keep euthanasia drugs at the lab. That's partly because we don't want to euthanize animals here, and partly because we don't want the hassle of maintaining DEA licenses and keeping inventory and so on. However, we do accept live poultry. We use CO2 gas to euthanize them. While this is not recommended for euthanasia of mammals, it was my only option and was how I euthanized the bat. Within an hour of the state vet showing up in my office, the bat had been euthanized, packaged with completed paperwork, and was on its way to the Department of Health for rabies testing. 

Admittedly the bat was kind of unusual, but most of the rest was just a normal week for the lab. Never a dull moment.

Kitchen Theater

 Back when I was traveling a lot for work and leisure, I was entranced by the enormous array of food that I encountered--ingredients, flavors, textures, methods of preparation. I would try to recreate many of those dishes back at home, to greater or lesser success. I was never a cook who acquired specialized gadgets, but I would spend time and money acquiring exotic and unusual ingredients, including spices. 

Since coming back from Saudi Arabia in 2013, my culinary palate has shrunk a little. Cooking is still my primary hobby after working with my dogs, but I no longer spend hours making fancy desserts or finding a source for some weird ingredient that I end up only using once. 

Certainly one big change is that, since starting my second career as a veterinary pathologist, my diet has become more and more plant-based. I'm not a strict vegan as you will have to pry the half and half I put in my coffee from my cold, dead fingers, but I only eat meat products a few times a week. 

Mostly I eat some variation of sauteed or baked vegetables with rice, decorated with black pepper or chipotle pepper, fresh squeezed lime or balsamic vinegar, and a bit of salt or feta cheese, which is itself quite salty. I developed a taste for feta in Saudi, where there was always six or seven fresh varieties to choose from. I only cook with olive oil. Sometimes I add honey to promote browning (the Maillard reaction).

And that's it: pepper, salt, fat, and acid. Sure, there are the stereotypes that link this spice to that culture's cuisine, as in you have to use X if you want to prepare a dish from Y country. That's great, but I don't cook like that anymore. Cooking is less of a production for me now. I am no longer interested in performing theater in the kitchen.

You may have seen the Salt Fat Acid Heat show or book. What I am talking about is miles away from what she promotes. Her elaborate preparations have little in common with my simple meals, other than her promotion of the core uses of salt, fat, and acid.  

These change in diet and kitchen activity have also shifted my palate quite a bit. I find most processed and restaurant food to be pretty gross. Palm oil and corn sugars don't taste good to me anymore. I'm certainly not above picking up a box of muffin mix now and then, but I'm much more careful about what's inside the box. 

I also started meal prepping when I was in vet school, and that habit has stuck. Elaborate, fancy dishes with lots of delicate ingredients don't lend themselves to meal prepping.

And COVID took quite a whack at my view of cooking and eating too. Once I started traveling for agility trials again, I started bringing all of my own food--every single meal and snack. Another strike against elaborate and delicate preparations, which don't travel well. After all, if I'm bringing all my own food, I have to bring it in containers that I have to keep track of and cart home.

None of this is to say that I've just rolled over and eat mush every day. I like big, bold flavors and bright colors, which is easy to satisfy with fresh vegetables. I do have to think about protein sources, but there are lots of plant-based options available now beyond just tofu or beans and rice. Although I quite like tofu, and beans and rice.

Take the theater out of cooking, and it becomes a calm, considered activity.

Intruder Alert!

 The lab where I work is in a part of town that is a bit sketchy. There are a couple of cheap, pay-by-the-week hotels nearby. Some of the larger intersections in the area have a regular rotating array of panhandlers (I hesitate to call them homeless, because I don't think most of them are). And every so often, you can see someone who is actually homeless pushing a shopping cart mounded with random belongings up the main road.

In October and November, we had a young man roaming around the grounds outside the lab, sometimes peering right in office windows. He talked to himself and waved his hands around. This behavior caused immediate and loud pearl-clutching by the admin crowd. The young man was also seen on a bike in the middle of the street blocking cars. Drugs and mental illness were probably both a factor here. He never approached any person that I knew of. I don't think he even spoke directly to anyone. He would disappear every few days then show back up again. One sunny Sunday afternoon, I was called in to the lab by the director to walk someone from the marketing department from the door to her car, all of 15 feet, because she had seen this young man walking around outside while she was in her office. Why was I called, you ask? I am only about 15 minutes from the lab, in another neighborhood but still pretty close. She decided calling the lab director wasn't enough, and called the police too, who arrived at the same time I did. Of course the young man was nowhere to be seen by then. It was a ridiculously overblown reaction in all ways.

So this sets the scene for yesterday. I heard a commotion out in the lab receiving area, and stepped out to see what was going on. There was a young man walking around outside! He had walked close to the building at one point! He had a knife!

Did he brandish the knife? Did he approach anyone? Did he look in office windows like the other guy? No, he had done none of these things.

I work for the state. The lab is not on private property. It's open to the public. There are no fences or signs or landmines to keep people away. Even so, there was a group of women from the admin side congregated in our receiving foyer, pushing themselves into a panic about this young man.

I decided to deal with it myself before things escalated further. I headed out to see what was going on.

I approached the young man, who did in fact have a knife in a sheath on his belt, and asked him if he needed any help. Turns out he and his friend were looking for clear quartz crystals. 

Yep, they were looking for pretty rocks. 

Little Rock is a fairly hilly town. The hills are cored with very old sediments deposited in an ocean that used to be at the edge of the continent. Old like 450 million years old. Most of the sediments have been heavily altered in subsequent burial, heating, deforming, uplifting, and exposure to where they are now. We obviously aren't at the edge of the continent now. A lot of the quartz was heated up and mobilized with hot water into fractures and cracks, precipitating into lovely crystals. I already knew all of this. I have many examples of the different types of rocks in my own backyard, including ones with cracks filled with quartz crystals. 

The lab is on a small hill which is strewn with fragments of rocks, some of which are pure quartz. 

I chatted with the guy for a bit, suggested he look down by the creek as there might be good rock exposures there, and suggested that he and his friend might not want to wander too close to the building. I said nothing about panicked co-workers. He showed me what he had gathered so far and we talked about quartz for a bit.

When I headed back inside, there was a guy I've never seen before holding the door to the lab receiving area open. I said, did they send you out to get me? Yes, he said. Completely unnecessary, I said. That guy and his friend are just looking for pretty rocks.

Sometimes a little less suspicion and a little more kindness are all that is needed.

Poop

I was at a dog show the other weekend, an agility trial. I was standing near my setup (the accumulation of crates, bedding, training gear, treats, snacks, and dogs that one hauls to an agility trial) thinking about what task I needed to tackle next. Because at an agility trial, there's always something that needs doing: taking a dog to potty, walking a course, checking the running order, volunteering, even just sitting down for a few minutes. 

I saw a woman come out of the bathroom, smoothing out a handful of poop bags clutched in one hand. I happened to make eye contact with another woman nearby, our eyes widening at the same time. She said to the first woman, is everything okay? The first woman was a bit confused and replied, yes? then realized she was clutching a bunch of poop bags, and started laughing. 

I said, yep, that's some hardcore bathrooming right there. We all cracked up. In her defense, the first woman explained that she kept her poop bags tucked into the waistband of her leggings (because no pockets), and had to keep track of them somehow when she went to the bathroom. 

Pottying, and poop specifically, is a big deal when you travel with dogs. Everyone needs to pick up their dog's poop to keep common areas clean. And if you are caught by surprise with a pooping dog and no poop bag (because you used it when your other dog pooped), all you have to do is call out to someone nearby, and they will readily give you one from their stash, whether it is a pocket or waistband!

 Per AKC rules, we aren't supposed to enter the agility ring with anything in our pockets, but 99% of us will have a poop bag or two tucked away. They are as much a part of our clothing as our socks. We don't think of them as "extra."

Poop is a regular and accepted topic of conversation between people who do sports with their dogs. We don't generally talk about our own poop, but hey, it's really all the same thing in the end.

The Neighbor Poisoned My Dog

 Here at the lab, we hear this a lot from distraught pet owners when they submit their pets to us for necropsy. It is by far the most common history we get from these owner-submitted cases. We rarely hear this when vets submit companion animals, probably because they've already heard it from the owner and filtered it out for us. 

About the only thing these cases really have in common is that the pet died suddenly with no clinical signs of illness. 

And that is absolutely devastating to many pet owners. 

Sadly, the most common diagnosis (cause of death) in these cases is heartworm in dogs and feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in cats. 

 Heartworm is completely preventable, but monthly parasiticides are expensive. Some owners try to save money by using natural products (don't work) or buying off-brands at the grocery store (don't work). Others aren't aware that they need to give heartworm treatments every month, and in Arkansas, pretty much year-round. They don't know that each treatment kills the microfilaria in the dog's blood that he became infected with in the PREVIOUS month. 

It's always a shock to open a dog's heart and see worms spill out. 

We also see a lot of caval syndrome, which is advanced heartworm disease. The worms migrate out of the heart into the pulmonary vessels and into the vena cavae. While heartworm disease is more or less treatable, caval syndrome is ultimately fatal.

Dogs can have clinical signs with heartworm disease, such as cough and exercise intolerance, but often there is just acute death with no warning. 

Most owners accept this diagnosis with quiet sadness, but we've had a few who absolutely fought us, and insisted that we run many other tests. We've learned the hard way, and ask them to pay for those tests in advance. 

Feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a harder diagnosis for owners. It is genetic in some pure breeds but most often our cases are for your Standard Cat, a mixed breed, short- to medium-haired tabby. We've seen some spectacular cases in which there certainly would have been a detectable heart murmur when the cat was alive...but many owners don't get regular preventative vet care for their cats. And cats are notoriously fractious patients in general. 

There have been some good studies that demonstrated that a normal adult cat heart should weigh 17 g. We had a memorable case in which the heart weighed 45 g, although weights between 20 and 30 g are more typical. The left ventricular walls thicken so much that there is almost no central space left in that chamber, so the volume of blood that gets pumped out with each contraction gets smaller and smaller. And the heart often becomes stiff and fibrous. 

 This disease can cause acute death in cats as young as 2 years, which is always a sad finding. There's no good way to prevent it other than not breeding animals that have it. The tests required to diagnose it are quite expensive, and out of reach of the regular pet cat owner.

I've only had one case where the owners thought the dog had been poisoned, and sure enough, it actually had been. But in that case, the dog was found next to a dead (also poisoned) cat, vomitus containing poisoned hot dog pieces near his head, and similar hot dog pieces in his stomach. I ended up testifying in court about this case. It's never a fun day when you get a subpoena at work, but eventually, the neighbor was successfully charged and convicted. 

There's really no uplifting message here. People do their best but their pets sometimes still die. Our job is to navigate the path between finding out why and informing the owners in a way that is sensitive to their loss but also helps them make different choices in the future.