Spring is a wonderful time. The days are longer and warmer, trees which have lain dormant for months are springing to life, the grey of winter is changing rapidly to healthy, vivid green. Newborn lambs appear beside their anxious mothers and play wildly in groups in the early evenings.
For veterinarians in rural New Zealand, spring also means something else — calving. Calving a cow in difficulty can be a satisfying and uplifting experience, or it can be difficult, rotten, smelly, and very, very time consuming. Not just that, a large proportion of calves are born at night, so a call on the home phone at that time of year can raise the blood pressure by a few degrees if you happen to be the vet on duty.
But this was a midday call on a Sunday and it was close to town, only 10 minutes’ drive towards the sea. The Boyce brothers milked about 200 cows, grew cash crops and fattened a few store lambs — a typical Marlborough low country property of the 1970s and ’80s.
Alas, today all that land bears grapes. The animals have gone. Row after terribly neat row of vines have replaced the livestock. Winding flax-lined streams have become dead straight, cleanly battered and sprayed drains, devoid of stream life.
But I digress. I drove down the valley, with that all too familiar, ‘What will I find here and will it take 10 minutes or three hours?’ feeling. When you’re the only vet on duty, long jobs usually mean there’s a list of callers waiting for you at the end. And we didn’t have cell phones then.
The Friesian cow was already in the pen and the brothers pushed her into, then locked, the head bail. I gave her an epidural anaesthetic, carefully injecting 5 ml of local anaesthetic into the spine at the base of the tail, lubricated my hands and had a feel. Tight but probably manageable with a good pull.
I slipped the calving chains onto the two forelegs still inside the cow, and attached my calving rope (an ex jib sheet from my old yacht) to them. At the other end I made a turn around a post, then fashioned a ‘truckie’s knot’ to double the leverage — a sort of bush pulley.
‘I’ll steer it through, you guys pull as I call it,’ I said, with an authority I only partly felt. The brothers pulled. I lubricated the calf and even stood on the rope to increase the traction and to give it some downwards motion. This one was really tight.
‘Pull guys,’ I urged.
The head was protruding through the vulva, but it was a big head, and it didn’t want to come. I tried to lever the offending skin over the calf’s head. The brothers pulled on the ropes. The head was moving out!
With a noise like a squawking pukeko, a powerful jet of cow shit burst from the cow’s rear end, hugely pressurised by the calf’s head just below it. The jet caught me midway between the eyes and spread over my face. The calf shot out, and I eased it to the ground, expecting some help from the farmers.
I looked up to ask for assistance, but I was wasting my time. The brothers were rolling on the ground, howling with uncontrollable mirth. The sight of the vet’s face covered in cow shit was far more important just then than the calf.
‘Jeez,’ said the older brother, ‘we’ll call you out again. Now let’s see if we can get this calf breathing.’