Large Animal Vet Holds Her Own

The Hill Country Clinic, unlike many mixed animal practices, still does house calls. Because of the expense of covering long distances, more and more vets require their clients to bring the animals to them — according to Pilmer, ambulatory care wasn’t even covered in her training. But she loves getting to know ranchers on their home turf and being outside, even if it comes with a few unavoidable frustrations.

It can be difficult and dangerous to examine and treat a bellowing heifer outside the confines of the clinic, with its hydraulic cow chute, fluorescent lights and cement floors. Clients requesting house calls often assure Pilmer and her colleagues that they have the right gear, but when she arrives, the “small” enclosure turns out to be a 2-acre pasture.

Johne’s (pronounced yo-knees), an autoimmune disease similar to Crohn’s disease in humans, can devastate a herd and a rancher’s livelihood. On a recent call Pilmer went to check for a possible outbreak with a reporter tagging along. The longhorn rancher’s assurances that he had eight head already penned were soon proven untrue. Pilmer waited a half-hour in her pickup as the ranch manager and two helpers corralled 25 longhorns into a pen on their four wheelers. The ranch hand told her that there were about 20 head in other pens on different parts of the property. Suddenly a 30-minute job had turned into a potential three-hour commitment, and Pilmer still had four house calls to go.

The next call was an equally bad setup, but this time Pilmer managed to turn it into an afternoon adventure. A new client needed a herd of pygmy goats vaccinated and dewormed, but one look at the goat pen told Pilmer she had another “situation.” Though 5-by-20-foot enclosure was small by longhorn standards, the 15 goats swirled and whirled around, barely brushing the ankles of their would-be captor. After a couple of desperate scrambles to outrun the slowest of the bunch, the scene started to look like a schoolyard game of tag. Pilmer shrugged and said, “Well, I guess I could rope them.”

Two minutes later she came back from her truck and slid back into the enclosure with a plastic blue cow halter rope around her neck and a can of silver cattle-marking spray paint in her hand. After tying a complicated knot and threading the rest of the rope through the slit it created, she waved her arm above her head and whipped it out towards the crowd of cowering goats. The loop was wide enough to capture three heads. Two squeezed out, but the third was less lucky, and Pilmer towed him to the far end of the corral where her supplies were. With an onlooker holding down its legs, Pilmer managed two shots into the goat’s back and some chalky deworming froth into its mouth, and tagged its butt with the spray can before she leapt back to freedom. One down, 14 to go.

“My mom always said all that roping was a waste of time,” Pilmer said. “Well, look at me now.”

Pilmer methodically made her way through the herd under the hot sun in the dusty corral. Sweating and panting, going beyond the call of the typical veterinary house visit, she appeared to be having a pretty good time.