Story Time

In the last post, I talked about having to get treated for Rabies, and how horrible it was. I mentioned that at some point I would tell the tale of how that came to happen. Yeah, I didn't get bit by something that had rabies, well not the typical animal that has rabies. It's a long story, but I'm just going to make it very short, as short as possible.

When you farm livestock, there are times and places in which you end up getting calves. There are various ways this happens, but it generally starts out with a bull and a heifer. Now, things happen, and at times you end up with just a calf. Now, depending on what is going on, most farmers don't have time to raise calves, so they'll load up once a week, go to a sale, sell the calves they don't want, and go home. Well, we had a bunch of calves dumped on us, and Mom got the brilliant idea to just give them away. So, we took the five calves we had, fed them so they were nice and full, padded up the trailer so they would be nice and warm, went to the sale. None of the calves present sold, so we loaded them back up, hung a sign on the trailer that read “Free calves.” went back inside to see if there were any sickly, half starved cows we could pick up and rehabilitate. When we came back out after finding nothing, we had thirty calves.

Yeah, I told Mom we should have been a little more explicit on the sign. So we pile in the truck, and head back to the house with thirty calves. So, we get home, I run off to the Co-Op to get powdered milk for these babies to drink, and a ton of bottles, because thirty freakin baby cows want their meal, “Now Mr. Mom”. Well, here is the thing about feeding massive crowds of calves, they suck on everything. Pants leg, wet, hands and fingers, cut and drooled in, hair, chewed on. Brain, concussed from a gentle but authoritative headbutt. Other calves, sucked on. So, all the calves are fed, nobody has Scours, everyone is fat and sassy. Things are going well, until I go outside and half the calves are very sick, and three are dead.

Call the vet, tell him, he says he'll come out and look. In the meantime, he suggests that we take the dead to the state lab to have a necropsy done, an animal autopsy, just to assist in treatment, you know get a heads up as to what we are dealing with here. We load up the dead, go to the lab, drop them off. Vet comes out, checks everyone, just some kind of weird cow bug going around nothing to worry about. The next day, a few more dead calves, another trip to the lab, perplexed state veterinarian is scratching his head because outside of being dead, the calves were in good condition. So, while we were gone out veterinarian at the time is once again checking everyone out. I get back to the farm, in time to see him release a calf he had just checked, only for it to fall over dead. A calf he had said was fine, now dead. Now, as upset as I was, this guy was hitting the panic button. This is like a doctor pronouncing that your loved one is in perfect health, only to drop dead of a heart attack while paying the bill, which if you think about it is entirely possible given the state of co-pays here in the US.

So, we load up that calf and take it to the lab, while the good animal doctor calls ahead to see if anything is showing up in the results, and to tell the state doctor the events of this particular calf's demise. When we get to the lab, the state doctor pulls us into the lab, to give us the great news. He went back and checked the calves brains. He did so, because he had a very bad feeling. That feeling was dumb rabies.

Now, when someone says rabies, we all think of Cujo. We think drooling, vicious animal, who relentlessly attacks everything. Yeah, that is active rabies, which many animals get, they actively pass on the infection, and its pretty obvious as to what is happening. Dumb rabies on the other hand, yeah that is some messed up stuff right there. It doesn't present, it only gives a few subtle clues. Hey, hungry calves drool, a lot. In dumb rabies, the afflicted don't attack, they don't show an aversion to water or light. They act normally until they die. And that my friends is what the state veterinarian suspected was what was affecting our calves.

Well then, if its suspected, you get treated, because outside of a single reported case, there is no cure once you start showing the symptoms. Off to the human doctors we all go, everyone who had contact with the affected calves, for a lot of very painful shots in the gut, just to be safe. The vet started treatment on the remaining calves, and we still lost about half of that group, but the infection was already active in them. And I have a very strong dislike of needles.

Yeah, that story wasn't very amusing, its actually very sad. Remember people, get your pets their shots, it can save their lives, and save you a bunch of physical and emotional pain. As for how the calves got rabies? We never did figure that out. We know that initially only one or two calves had it, and that it was transferred via typical calf behavior. Because of the way we raised our calves, in lots transmission was simple (we still didn't isolate the calves afterwards, as everyone agreed that it would have happened regardless). All the vets in the area were put on notice about the outbreak, but nobody came clean as to where those calves came from. We didn't know ourselves, as many didn't have auction numbers. All parties involved assume that one farm had a calf that was bitten by something that had rabies, or it was passed on through other means that nobody was aware of (IE a family pet dying or an encounter with infected wildlife). Just the same, it sucked. Killed the profit margin, left all involved with some serious horror stories, but the best part of it was, our poor veterinarian saw something he had never encountered before. Yeah, when he became a teacher, that was a story he told all his students, which made them better veterinarians.