Village Horse Doctor (27 page)

My first inclination was to save the old dog and I was reasonably sure that I could, but I would have half the mothers in town on me by morning if I didn’t get that head on the way to Austin. Since this was an old dog whose days of usefulness were about spent, I very painlessly did away with him and very expertly severed his head.

To be sure that I had the proof and evidence in the proper place, I carried the head up to Dr. Oswald’s with the usual containers and ice necessary to pack a rabies specimen for shipment. On the front porch of his office, I had him watch me put the head in a dry metal container and then put that container in a larger metal bucket and pack ice all around it. I very carefully sealed both buckets and had his secretary address the package to the state laboratory in Austin. I said to Ozzie, “Let’s go put this on the airplane”—which was to leave Fort Stockton airport in a matter of minutes—“and then stop somewhere and get some coffee.”

I had concealed my feelings and he thought that this was a social visit, so he watched the bucket being loaded on the plane without suspecting that I was building a case.

It was then about four o’clock, and from that time until
midnight I had twenty-three calls from all parts of the surrounding country asking about the rabies epidemic. I said that I didn’t know we were in a rabies epidemic, but I knew if we were, it would have to be from some other source than that old sore-mouth dog that spent his life in the yard playing with babies and living on a deficient diet.

At eleven o’clock the next morning I got a wire from the state laboratory stating that there was no evidence of rabies and the head was negative. I took the wire by to show the mother of the little children. She was rather silent about the affair and by now was in better control of her emotions.

Then I went to Dr. Oswald’s office and waited until he wasn’t busy and, in the presence of his secretary, I gave him a damn strong cussin’ for practicin’ veterinary medicine and for exciting an epidemic. But the word was already on the wind and the horror of human hydrophobia was already vividly pictured in the minds of the nervous, excitable intellectuals and the stupid, superstitious of the population. By dark that day I had vaccinated forty-seven dogs and three house cats for rabies, and I wired the laboratory in Kansas City to send me another three hundred doses of rabies vaccine.

I was careful in conversation over the phone and in talking to people who were concerned about the seriousness of the disease. At no time did I discourage anyone from having an animal of any species vaccinated, and since the vaccine itself had reached a high state of perfection and there was less than one half of one per cent breaks in vaccination, it clearly showed that mankind had made tremendous progress with the disease since the nineteenth century when Louis Pasteur vaccinated himself with the first effective treatment and proved by risking his own life that there was hope for a human being bitten by a rabid
animal and that mankind could take steps to protect the domestic animal from rabies.

The mayor of McCamey called me that night and asked if I could come to McCamey early the next morning—all the dogs, cats, and other pets were being brought to the city hall, where he wanted me to vaccinate them. I had enough vaccine on hand to carry me through the McCamey scare, and as I drove back to Fort Stockton I realized that the vaccine I had ordered from Kansas City could not have arrived yet, and I expected to be behind with my treatments by morning.

There were some people with dogs at my office when I got in that night, and I explained to them that I would get fresh vaccine by plane the next day. The plane landed at eleven fifteen and by one o’clock I was again vaccinating dogs at my office.

About midafternoon, I received a call from an oilfield driller at Grand Falls, about forty miles north of Fort Stockton. He said he had a cow that a mad dog must have bitten and she was slobbering at the mouth and falling into the fence; he wanted to know how quickly I could get there.

Cattle and horses are subject to two different forms of rabies. “Mute” rabies is manifested by an animal who stands quietly with his jaws open and can’t swallow, but in most cases he is not wild or excited and is no trouble to handle. Mute rabies could easily be mistaken in a cow for a case of a bone or a stick hung in the throat, and mute rabies in a horse could also be mistaken for some mouth or throat trouble.

There are known cases where a stockman has stuck a hand and arm into the jaw of a rabid cow and contracted rabies and died because of some slight scratch or open wound on his hand. In one such case a dairyman had been
conscious and had been able to give instructions to kill the rabid cow.

The symptoms of rabies as they appear in other animals is commonly referred to as “active” rabies in horses and cattle, and the behavior of such affected animals is characterized by extreme nervousness. They will rub huge patches of hide off their shoulders and legs, and both cattle and horses will bite their forelegs and their sides. An active case of rabies in a cow will cause her to fight and run headlong into fences and anything else in sight. Horses are rarely known to paw with their forefeet but will kick at the slightest motion or touch from behind, and there have been cases in veterinary medicine where horses and mules have actually chased people and bit at them as slobbers flowed from their mouth.

When a human has been bitten by a rabid animal, there is only one thing that can and must be done: vaccination should be started as soon as possible and never later than five days after the person is bitten. This treatment consists of fourteen separate injections given every other day in the muscles of the belly wall; they are extremely painful and many times cause such side effects as nausea and other discomforts.

When I drove up to the oil driller’s place at Grandfalls, they had the cow in a high corral fence made out of railroad crossties stuck in the ground that stood side by side and were tied to an iron pipe at the top, and this made it a big, stout fence. A crowd of people had gathered and were peepin’ through the cracks at this “hydrophobic” cow. Nobody wanted to take the chance of opening the gate, so I crawled over it.

As I crawled over the gate and saw the cow slobbering, I knew it could not be a case of mute rabies and that I needed to look for the other symptoms of active rabies besides
slobbering. She was a half-breed brindle Jersey cow that might weigh seven hundred pounds. She was extremely thin and her eyes were set, so to speak, in her head like an animal that is going to die, and streams of slobbers were pouring from her mouth.

Nobody offered to come in and help, but in my experience I had never seen a cow with active rabies in this seemingly far advanced stage of slobbers that had not rubbed the hair off her sides and shoulders and did not offer to bite the fence or bite her foreleg or gnaw at her side, and this cow apparently hadn’t knocked a hair off from any nervous irritation.

I pitched a rope around her horns and threw the end of it over the fence so that some of the fellows who were watchin’ could draw her head up to a post and tie her. I wasn’t too scared, but I thought I ought to have her tied down even though in my opinion there was no evidence of rabies.

I took another lariat rope and slipped it around her hind legs, and since her head was tied to the fence, some of my audience got brave and came in to help me pull her hind legs out from under her. This would lay her flat on the ground on her side, so I could tell more about her mouth.

I went to the car and put on some rubber gloves and got a probing instrument about eighteen inches long and a wooden axhandle that I carried for such cases as this. I stuck the flat end of the axhandle in the side of the cow’s mouth and then turned it to where it would hold her mouth open about four inches wide.

I very carefully and gently began to feel with the probing instrument for some swelling or foreign object in the back of her mouth and the upper part of her throat. You learn to almost have eyes at the ends of your fingers in the practice
of veterinary medicine, and as I felt around, I found no hard object and an enlargement that I was pressing on didn’t give to the pressure sufficiently to have been in the flesh.

I lifted her head up with another short piece of wood into a position where I could see down in her mouth. I detected something green, and with rubber gloves on I went behind the axhandle just a short way into the jaw I took a hold of a huge flat leaf of a prickly pear cactus that was imbedded and held in place by the spines of the cactus and jerked it out of her mouth and thereby “cured” another case of rabies.

Most of the people in the ranching regions of the Far Southwest didn’t have telephones, and many times trips to the nearest telephone were almost as long as trips to town. One rancher who lived in the Davis Mountain region sent his wife about twenty miles to phone me to come see about a sick horse. She was unable to get me on the phone, so she went another twenty miles and that ranch’s phone was out of order. Then she drove on into Fort Stockton, which made it about a sixty-five-mile trip.

The peculiarity of this horse’s sickness was what kept driving her when she couldn’t reach me and the phones didn’t work. Her husband had told her that the horse was acting peculiar, and he thought that he had been bitten by a mad fox. The possibility of more livestock and the family pets being in danger had caused the rancher’s wife to come in at a pretty reckless speed.

It was about noon, and when I started to say I would be out there after dinner, she said, “No, you won’t. I’ll beat you back and we’ll have dinner after you’ve seen this sick horse that J. C. is so worried about.”

When she took off in a cloud of dust, I had no doubt that she would beat me to the ranch because I wasn’t that excited
or in that big a hurry. I went by the drugstore and left word where I was going in case somebody else looked for me.

It was high noon when I drove up to the corral where all the ranch hands and some of the neighbors stood watchin’ a good-lookin’ dapple grey horse that was standing in the middle of the corral close to a water trough with his feet all spraddled out. This was a narrow water trough about twenty feet long, the top of which was eighteen inches from the ground so that sheep, cattle, and horses could all drink out of it.

We had a few howdys as I walked into the corral and J. C. told me that if I didn’t think it was safe to go near the horse, not to take any chances. The horse could see the water at the top of the trough and he was standin’ with his nose about two feet from the edge of the trough suckin’ and makin’ all the motions and noises of a horse drinkin’ without knowin’ that he didn’t have his mouth in the water.

I asked one of the cowboys to pitch me a lariat rope and I walked up to the horse and slipped the rope over his head. When I tried to lead him, he ran backward as though he was goin’ to choke and I gave him slack. One of the cowboys spoke up and said, “He’s mad if I ever saw a mad horse, and as many dead foxes as there is in the mountains and around the water troughs, he could’ve sure been bit by one.”

I didn’t let his palaver bother me too much, and by rubbing around on the horse’s head, I finally got his attention so that his eyes weren’t so badly fixed on the ground, and in a few minutes he led up on a loose rope.

I saw some loose boards lying against the bottom of the fence and told J. C. to lay one of those boards across the open gate, which he did, and as I stepped over the board and
the horse saw it, he ran backward the full length of the rope.

I asked how long they had been riding this horse. J. C. said that he was just an average kind of horse and they only used him for an extra and he had been runnin’ out all summer until just a few days ago. I said, “You’ve been pasturin’ your extra horses over there at the foot of the mountains, and the runoff from those little summer flash floods we’ve had in the mountains has caused some loco-weed to come in the flats, and this horse has a fair case of loco. When you rode him yesterday, you got him hot and ‘brought it out’ on him, so to speak, and he hasn’t been bit by a rabid fox.”

This brought on some volunteer talk from the cowboys who had been riding the other extra horses that were brought in with his horse, and they had seen signs of boogerin’ and fright from common objects in their horses since they had been riding them the last few days.

Loco is a weed that grows in the semi-arid regions of the Southwest. The early summer growth of loco, which is tender, is readily eaten by horses and it affects their nervous systems and causes them to be more apt to shy from man-made objects. After a horse has apparently recovered from the symptoms, he may still show signs of nerve damage when he is ridden or worked and after he is hot. Most apparently gentle horses won’t step over a rope or cross a plank laying in their pathway and are inclined to booger from almost any kind of a shadow on the ground.

When a horse has eaten as much as 30 per cent of his body weight in loco over a period of time, he will develop extreme nervousness, stagger when he tries to move, and will continue to lose coordination through a prolonged illness until he dies. This dapple grey horse was an in-between case: he had too much loco to be useful but not enough to kill him; and if he should recover sufficiently to be used
again, he would still do things that would cause him to be referred to as locoed.

J. C.’s wife, true to her word, had a big dinner on the table by the time we finished with the horse. At the dinner table lots of hearsay rabies stories were told by the cowboys. After dinner, I vaccinated the family pets, dogs, and cats and went back to town.

I was in the back of the drugstore talking to Roger Gallemore when Blanche came through the front door in a loud pair of shorts and pullin’ on a long cigarette and callin’ to me in a loud tone of voice. In a tone that easily could have been heard all over town, she went to tellin’ me that there was something bad wrong with her Pekingese house dog; it was actin’ strange and she just knew it was about to go mad.

I had vaccinated this Pekingese dog at six-month intervals for about three years, and I knew there was no possible chance that it had rabies. When she lowered her tone of voice and started blowin’ her cigarette smoke, I told her that the only possible way that her house dog could be takin’ rabies was that she had bitten some of the children and some of the children had bitten the dog. She left the store cussin’ me, and said that as crazy as I was gettin’ I must have been bit by some’n myself. This was the kind of thing that made me popular.