Large Animal Vet Holds Her Own

On a recent day in March, Pilmer had plunged her arm into the depths of a cow’s rear end up to her shoulder socket for another client. Darryl Whitworth is a marketing specialist who ranches cattle in his off hours. On this morning he brought six of his heifers to the clinic for Amy to palpate, a hands-on version of the drugstore pregnancy test. Come springtime when hoofed animals have their babies, Whitworth, like all ranchers, was trying to estimate this year’s income by assessing next year’s “crop” of offspring.

Though ultrasound equipment is available for vets who can use it and ranchers who can afford it, most of the time vets palpate cows with their hands in order to find out if she’s “bred,” as the ranchers call it. Pilmer ushers the six heifers Whitworth brought in one by one into the bright yellow, metal slatted hydraulic squeeze chute where, despite its torture-chamber-like appearance, the cows seem relatively relaxed. Pilmer dips her arm in a bucket of lube — two parts powder to three parts water — and edges her right shoulder into the examination slot at the back of the chute. Whitworth stands to her side to hold the tail up and rib Amy about kangaroo sightings.

Reaching with a torpedo-styled hand into the anus, Pilmer’s arm is slowly enveloped by the dense, warm chamber; the internal temperature of a cow, 102 degrees, is about three degrees warmer than a human’s. Her ungloved arm — Pilmer does most of her work bare-handed — extends as far as it will go along the canal, squishing the warm manure to the sides. When she is finally shoulder deep, her hand descends, searching the bottom of the canal wall for the uterus. If the cow is bred, her fingers will feel something hard, and slowly she’ll be able to articulate the bundle. The nose there, the eye sockets giving softly there, and two small hooves perched along the mouth over there.

More of an art than a science — it’s difficult to find and measure a 4-month-old fetus inside a 900-pound heifer — palpating can be a tense occasion for all involved. The rancher is thinking about his $1,000 investment in the heifer; knowing that, the vet also hopes for a baby. For her part, the cow has to stand there and tolerate an invasive, though painless, examination. She does not know that after a few barren seasons she’ll most likely be trotted off to the slaughterhouse. Fortunately for all involved, Pilmer told Whitworth that all but one of his heifers were pregnant.

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Palpation is one part of the job that shows that large-animal medicine is often just as much about wealth (the ranchers’) as it is about health (the animals’). Though Pilmer’s instinct is to try to save all the ailing animals she can, she has to work with the rancher’s pocketbook point of view. When she diagnosed one of her client’s bulls with a broken penis — yes, this is possible when a bull is too enthusiastic and misses his target — rendering him useless as a prime stud, she knew that meant he’d be on his way to the meat counter later that day. His per-pound beef price would pay the rancher; feeding him without output would cost the rancher money.

While the cold calculations of ranchers with a tight bottom line can wear on Pilmer, clients with more emotion than money end up draining her in another way: her wallet. After helping Whitworth load his heifers onto the trailer, Pilmer was called back into the clinic where Danielle, one of the assistants, cradled a peevish brown and white pooch named Buster, who was trying to paw at his face. Buster’s owner, a woman who owed Pilmer over $1,000 for previous care, called Pilmer to report a forest of porcupine quills on his snout from a tussle the night before. Would Pilmer remove them? The answer, inevitably, is yes. After sedating the dog and yanking out the tiny black and white quills with a surgical clamp, Pilmer shook her head. “I’m a sucker, man.”

Another client who owes the clinic more than $2,000 keeps bringing over-iced homemade cakes as appeasement … one that won’t pay the bills.

Her compassion for her patients’ owners, even when it means working for free, is as much part of her treatment as her medical know-how. With each examination she asks herself what she would do if this were her animal. “I always put myself in their shoes because I’m ridiculously attached to my dog,” Pilmer said.

That’s Maddie. Maddie is a 75-pound boxer whose sweet disposition and pungent flatulence are known countywide. At the patio bar downtown on a Saturday night, perched next to Pilmer in her pickup as she does her rounds, or licking the face of a freshly born orphaned lamb on the cement floor of the clinic, Maddie is always by Pilmer’s side — a companion on the long distances she has to drive.