Two toes

Right now we are in a cold spell in North Dakota so I like to reminisce about the warmer days of summer. One of the things that I thought was the strangest service that we offered as a clinic is what we call doing a "cap-chur" for cattle. (disclaimer "Cap-chur" is a trade name and I don't know who the trademark goes to). This fills up a lot of the slower time in summer and makes for all kinds of adventures.

First I must describe a cap-chur. It is essentially anesthetizing cows with a dart gun. We use a CO2 gun that shoots a dart containing 3-7 mL of whatever we want. In our case we use Xylazine (old school name is Rompun) which in cattle is a fairly potent sedative. We shoot the cows somewhere in the muscle....I try to get in the neck when I can for beef quality assurance...and the impact sets off a small charge (like a 22 shell size) in the base of the dart that pushes a lubricated plunger forward to inject the Xylazine into the cow. This is follwed by waiting for 3- 15 minutes for the sedation to take effect and the cow (hopefully) deciding to take a nap. Next comes tying up the cows legs so she can't decide to stand up and walk away, then doing whatever procedure or treatment is necessary. Last, and very importantly, we reverse the effects of the anesthetic with a reversal drug called Tolazine. We give it in the vein and within 30 seconds the cows usually begin to stir and are ready to stand and stumble away within 5 minutes.

Just like any anesthetic the effect of the drug is highly variable from one animal to the next. Without question calves are the easiest to sedate, followed by bulls and then comes cows. They are by far the worst and I could make some gender based comment about females not liking to be told what to do, but I will avoid that temptation. Occasionaly either the charge does not go off, or the sedation doesn't have the desired effect and the cow needs to be shot with an additional dart. Sometimes we get good sedative effect but the stubborn animal just will not lay down and we have to demonstrate our astounding cowboy skills and rope the animal and physically encourage them to lay down. We fondly call this adventure going on Safari because we never know what we may encounter before the job is done. Now for one of many good darting adventures.

I was called out to a very hilly pasture (yes we do have some of these in North Dakota) to look at a cow who had been lame for some time. As the owner informed me as we were driving that he had already darted her three times with antibiotics and she was not better but had just gotten worse to the point that whe wouldn't even put weight on the one foot. Not surprisingly, when we got near enough for her to see us she was off like a shot. I know people say that cattle aren't athletic but I beg to differ. She was flying across that field so fast on three good legs that her calf even had a hard time keeping up with her.

When I finally got close enough to get a shot at her, you generally need to be within 20-30 yards, my gun fired an unusually strong burst of CO2 and the dart went high, glanced off her backbone, and the cow was gone. Another part of the fun when darting is the inconsistent nature of the CO2 cartridges. When they are new they fire extra strong and tip the dart up, and when they are almost used up they fire very erratically, sometimes normal, and sometimes very weakly. After luckily finding the dart, we were back on the hunt again. After about 20 more minutes we finally caught up to the cow and got a good dart into her. As stubborn and wild as she was she required yet another dart but still wouldn't lay down and I ended up roping her and with the help of the farmer pulling her down with the rope.

As we were laying the cow down I was discussing treatment options with the severety of the lameness and non-response to previous antibiotics. I began to talk about toe amputation, and started into my usual explanation about how most cows heal well and do just fine; many are able to rebreed and can even stay in the herd for a year or two. This is often a hard thing for farmers to accept especially those who have never had one done before. As I start into this and begin to tie her up he says. "Oh, yeah, I know they do fine, she already is missing a toe that had to be amputated...
.....6 years ago".