Lame Stories from the Vet from Inglewood by Sandra Chesterton

Author:Sandra Chesterton [Chesterton, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781669880493
Publisher: Xlibris NZ
Published: 2023-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

With all these minor ups and downs, an upside was combining business with pleasure. In 1998, there was an international conference in Sydney, and I had a paper to present. It had grown out of my mountains of data and questions that farmers suggested. Then an added lightbulb was a video with cows as the star performers just doing what they normally would do.

Treating lame cows on an almost daily basis, I had noticed that most frequently when the problem was a white-line injury, it would occur on the outside claw of the back foot. Farmers that I asked said that they noticed the same but also added that it was often different for the two-year-old heifer. I had been keeping records of all my lame-cow cases for quite a few years now, and I thought that it would be a good idea if I looked closely to see whether the records or data could confirm these anecdotes that my farmers told me.

My collection of lame-cow cases was getting quite large – every year brought in over five hundred cases. When a cow had become lame, many of my farmers had called me in, and I had personally treated the lame foot. I would write on my pink sheets anything of note about each case. After I had used the records to make up my accounts to charge the farmers, these pieces of pink paper were stacked away in piles in a cupboard – not much use and very difficult to sort information from. Then enter the computer with spreadsheets. By now the software had progressed significantly, but it was still beyond me. Fortunately for me, another vet in the practice could set up spreadsheets, and my wife and our teenagers could enter data – for extra pocket money for the teenagers, of course. Then came the fun bit – asking the spreadsheet questions.

We had records from ten years of lame cows, and when we checked the data, now nicely organised, to see if the “back foot outside claw theory” stood up to the scientific test, we found it did. The farmers were correct. A cow three years old or more and in at least its second milking season, when it had a white-line injury, it nearly always occurred in a back foot and on the outside claw. In fact, seventy-seven percent of the injuries were in that exact same spot. Why? I wondered.

Even more interesting was the other observation to be confirmed by the data. Farmers had also told me that when they treated a heifer or two-year-old, it would often have its white-line injury on the inside claw of a front foot. Now we had numbers – front foot inside claw in heifer: fifty percent, back foot outside claw in cows: seventy-seven percent. Confirmation twice over.

How could this be? Why was it not random? What was happening must be something physical – it must be something to do with too much pressure on the foot, I thought. But

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