Lame Stories from the Vet from Inglewood

Sandra Chesterton

Description

Lame duck, lame horse, lame vet, lame cows. Sandra Chesterton has been listening to “lame stories” for half a century. Now she has written them and arranged them for you to enjoy. “Lame Stories” from the mouth of Neil Chesterton, who introduces himself as “The Vet from Inglewood,” tells how starting in South Africa and growing up in Sydney he came to New Zealand as a new vet. There he meets farmers who desperately need help – too many of their cows are getting lame. With a desire to help people and cows he sets out on a journey to translate anecdotes and surveys into useful scientific answers for farmers, joining the world experts on lameness in dairy cows – mostly by just listening and taking note. What he learned in New Zealand about these cows took Neil all over the world sharing and collecting lame stories.
Stories about dairy farmers, vets, professors, friendly cows, people met on the way and even on a short detour into aid work. It is quite a journey - by car, train, ship, plane, horse and donkey. On the way you will meet the “real” cow which is not a human but not a dumb animal either.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris NZ
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781669880493
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Lame Stories from the Vet from Inglewood
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sandra Chesterton
 
Copyright © 2023 by Sandra Chesterton.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023905945
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-8051-6

Softcover
978-1-6698-8050-9

eBook
978-1-6698-8049-3
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 04/04/2023
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
NZ TFN: 0800 008 756 (Toll Free inside the NZ)
NZ Local: 9-801 1905 ([phone] from outside New Zealand)
www.Xlibris.co.nz
849990
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
 
Chapter 1       Desperation (1983)
Chapter 2       Beginnings (1950–1968)
Chapter 3       Journeys on the Way (1969–1974)
Chapter 4       New Vet, New Country (1974)
Chapter 5       Settling In (1974–1980)
Chapter 6       Learning Lameness Part 1 (1974–1980)
Chapter 7       Learning Lameness Part 2 (1974–1980)
Chapter 8       Real Live Data (1980s)
Chapter 9       Right Place, Right Time, Right Friends (1985)
Chapter 10     Cow CCTV (1986–)
Chapter 11     Lame Vet (1990–1993)
Chapter 12     Videoing Myself and Cows (1993–1999)
Chapter 13     A Scientist in the Field (1997–2003)
Chapter 14     Lameness Solutions: Making Tracks (–2008)
Chapter 15     Ballroom Dancing (2002–2004)
Chapter 16     From Vet on the Ground to Flying Vet (2004–2006)
Chapter 17     New Angles (2008–2010)
Chapter 18     Patience Everywhere (2010–)
Chapter 19     Enter Infection (2012)
Chapter 20     Solving the Double Problem (2012–2015)
Chapter 21     Old House, New House (2012–2016)
Chapter 22     Data Addiction Carries On (2017–2022)
 
Footnotes
FOREWORD
I AM NEIL CHESTERTON, the vet from Inglewood, and I am writing this foreword because this book is about me although I didn’t actually write it.
I love teaching, especially about cows. I always use real life stories to get my points across. When I was travelling and doing a series of talks with a vet friend, Gonzalo, in Uruguay, he said I should make a book of the stories that I tell which come from around the world – “Call it ‘Lame Stories’ or something like that,” he said. “Then everyone can enjoy them.”
I am not good at writing things down, so my wife, Sandra, has done that instead of me. She decided to write the book in the first person and has made the stories sound just like me! She is the ghost writer.
Somehow on occasions in my life I have been the right person in the right place at the right time. Some things were waiting for the right moment to fit together or to be discovered. I just happened to be the data geek on the spot willing to write a record when some data needed to be collected. I just happened to be the person listening when a farmer had a story to tell.
Sandra has chosen some of my stories about becoming a vet and some of the interesting experiences I have been privileged to take part in. Many of these stories involve others who have crossed my path, and I want to thank them for their input into my journey. Some of the stories are more about cows than people. And many of the stories are ones that farmers told me and I remembered. Some of the people have been named and others have been called by pseudonyms, mostly because I don’t know their real names.
If you are a dairy farmer reading this, I hope these little stories Sandra has collected give you a jumble of experiences that will enrich your understanding of lameness of cows and how to prevent it and hopefully on the way give you some lightbulb moments that change the way you see cows.
If you are not a farmer, I hope you will enjoy an insider view of farming cows. And if you are an animal lover – especially a cow lover – then you will enjoy learning that cows are not dumb animals. I hope that every reader will enjoy meeting people through these pages whom you may not have met otherwise.
So here are my “lame” stories as collected by Sandra.
Neil Chesterton, Inglewood 2023
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
T HE BOOK IS about my family – so they are the first ones that I want to thank – for being their special interesting selves. A special thanks to my husband, Neil, who has allowed me to portray his enthusiastic data collecting self without complaining – except to forbid the word “cute” as a comment of his. It gets assigned to me instead. This book has been years in the making and you have had to endure “the book” or the “Lame Book” comments and questions for a long time. Thanks also to my writer son, Peter, who turned his skills on to my earlier manuscripts and thereby improved them greatly. Thanks also to friends who gave me advice. Thanks to Carol Pritchard who read the manuscript and gave valuable feedback. And finally to Gonzalo Tuñon who was the original instigator of the whole project.
CHAPTER 1
Desperation (1983)
I T WAS A fine spring day as I drove out in the early morning to meet up with a farmer named Colin on his farm near Inglewood. I was the vet for his cows. In Taranaki, New Zealand, the grass is somehow greener than green, if that is possible. However, darkness clouded Colin’s spring morning. He could not see the blue sky. The black cloud this morning was lameness. 1
He probably didn’t really have time to look up. Spring 2 is a busy, almost frenetic time for farmers in the seasonal dairy system 3 that operates in New Zealand. “Spring” can start as early as July, just whenever the cows begin to have their calves. Usually, the farmer has timed the cows to all calve within as short a time frame as possible. This means that the cows will all be at the same stage of their milking season so that they all dry off together for a rest – and a holiday for the farmer. However, this does mean that the springtime, when they all calve together, is anything but a holiday.
Every day there are cows delivering their calves who must be checked; the newly born calves have to be collected from the paddocks and taken to shelter and fed the first milk. There may be a cow that has got into difficulty calving and needs to be helped, or a vet might have to be called. Then the cows that have already calved need to be milked, always checking for mastitis. 4 All this is before breakfast.
In the middle of the day, there are other regular jobs such as deciding which paddock the cows will spend the night in and general maintenance or fixing something such as a pump that has broken down. Then, just when the calving has finished and the cows are happily milking, it is time to think about next year’s calves. Mating time. And that is only the farm work – there might be children to take to school or housework to be done as well.
Taranaki, where the town of Inglewood is to be found and where I live, is a central western province of the North Island of New Zealand. Looking at a map of New Zealand, you can see that Taranaki sticks out into the Tasman Sea as the volcanic mountain of the same name has made a sort of lump on the side of the island. Indeed, the province is dominated by that mountain. It is a good reason to live here if you like mountain walking and hiking. It juts out into the sea, so if you like surfing, you would come here as well. The climate is mild because of the sea being nearby, and the coastal towns make for ideal places to retire to. Also, Taranaki is covered with green. It used to be mostly thick forest, but now much of the land has been cleared and is growing grass for our thousands of dairy cows.

View of Taranaki
It is in spring that the grass grows at a seemingly impossible rate – luscious bundles that cows fairly stuff into their mouths. A perfect time to have calves and produce milk on this grass. A cow, upon arriving in the paddock, goes to the best-looking clumps of grass and seizes great mouthfuls of the stuff with her tongue and then swallows it nearly whole. In the spring weather, when the grass is growing very fast and is extra lush, the cows can sometimes get into trouble eating too much of it too fast. To eat enough grass to make milk, a cow has to cram in at least sixty kilos of it every day, needing to take a staggering thirty thousand bites, one a second. 5 It is almost like vacuuming the field. What she is doing is harvesting the sunshine.
Later, she sits down and gradually regurgitates the grass as small balls or cuds to chew and enjoy. Well, I am not sure whether cows actually do enjoy it, but they look like they are in a dream chewing away. We, as humans, also enjoy chewing something like a stalk of grass; whoever invented chewing gum possibly saw that people would be kept calm and patient if they had something to chew. Cows will spend about eight hours per day just chewing. Each cud gets chewed on average around forty times. With a purpose.
The cow has four stomachs to manage to extract the goodness from the grass to nourish itself and, if she has a calf, to also produce milk. The first, biggest stomach which receives the fresh grass is really a giant mixing bag and brewing pot where the grass, as it gets smashed into finer particles by all that chewing, also mixes with special bacteria which do the heavy work of digesting. Then as the brew moves along, all