The Downer Cow and An Important Meeting

It was March and spring was just around the corner, but you sure didn’t know it this day.  It had been cold and rainy all day and I was looking forward to finishing the evening’s small animal hours and going home to dinner.  At five minutes before close, a call came in from “Ed”.  He told me he had bought some pregnant cows a few weeks ago and that one of them had calved and was having trouble.  I asked for more details but Ed said he was not home, that the man who was feeding had called him and that he had no more information.  He said the man would wait for me to arrive because Ed could not meet me because he had a very important meeting he had to attend that night.

When I arrived at Ed’s place it was still raining and the wind was blowing gusts of wind sideways so the rain would occasionally hit you in the face and run down your neck.  It was also one of the darkest of nights and as I drove up I saw only the light of a small flashlight. It was the man who fed and was waiting for me.

He told me the cow was up on the hill in the pasture. She had had a stillborn calf earlier in the day and could not get up.   I assembled some equipment to examine the cow and we headed up the hill.  The ground was so wet from all the rain that it was slick and difficult to climb.  And it was so dark that we could not find her at first.

When we finally located the cow, we saw that the ground around her looked like a mud-wrestling pit from her efforts to get up.  After an initial exam I determined that the birth had been very difficult and there had been damage to the nerves in the pelvic area.  I told the man that we would not be able to move her tonight but she needed food and water and perhaps some temporary shelter.  The car, barn and water were all back down the hill, a half mile away.  On the second trip up the hill I brought some drugs to treat the cow, and then I helped the man bring up hay, water and a tarp to shelter her on the third trip up.  We slid the cow to a more level spot, propped her up in a sternal position, and she had drunk a bucket of water and was eating hay when we finished.  And we were soaking wet, covered in mud and freezing cold.

As I drove home I was hoping Ed, who was a good horseman, would get out of the cattle business as his place was not really set up to handle cattle.  I also thought he was fortunate to not have been there tonight and have to deal with this mess.

The next morning I called to check on the cow.  Ed’s wife answered the phone.  “Ed sure was lucky he had that meeting last night and did not have to deal with the downed cow in all the bad weather”, I said to her.  “Meeting?  You mean bowling?” she said.  I said, “Bowling? You mean Ed was bowling last night?”  “Yes, he’s in a bowling league with some of his business partners”, she answered.

When I next saw Ed I really let him have it about his “important” meeting.  But he explained that missing bowling would really mess up the team and he had to be there.  And he felt so bad about the rainy night incident that at the end of the year he invited me to attend the Bowling Banquet where I won a door prize.  Ed and I still laugh 25 years later about his very important meeting.