Veterinarian Bill Seals delivers one of four kids as vet tech

Vets care for working animals and pets that really tip the
scales
Michelle Moreno grips the goat’s horns and tries to pull the animal off the truck bed where she sits, her belly immense, refusing to move. Haidee Alvarez, the goat’s owner, steadies the animal’s legs, and the two women haul the heavy, groaning nanny off the truck and onto the ground, then goad it gently toward the barn.

“At this point, we’re just trying to save her,” says veterinary technician Moreno, surveying the pregnant goat, whose unwieldy belly ripples with the kicking of unborn kids. Two days ago, the veterinarians at the Tri-County Veterinary Hospital tried to induce labor with a steroid, but the kids didn’t come, and Moreno is beginning to fear for the mother goat, Heura. The technicians discuss a C-section. “She’s gotten huge since I saw her, just two days ago.”

Heura’s vet Bill Seals, the business owner, is out making house calls, as he often is: From their trucks stocked with drawers of bottled medicine, three-yard-long endoscopes, hot and cold water, even refrigerators, the clinic’s four veterinarians can treat half their animal clients on site, at ranches and homes across the county. Moreno calls it “a hospital on wheels.” Each vet takes eight or nine appointments a day, plus emergencies, such as this one. No day is alike, and one pregnant goat can upset the whole schedule. Nine-to-five is unheard of, says office manager Linda Seals, Bill’s wife: The doctors start at 7:30am, and rarely make it home by 7pm.

Among veterinarians, they’re a rare breed. With the decline of ranching, the veterinary field has shifted toward household pets, instead of the big animals that are this hospital’s specialty. To perform surgeries, they first have to subdue 1,000-pound horses, intractable goats and even camels. Technician Robert Gilroy has tended to a zebra’s eye and ministered to an elephant, who fell ill at the county fair; recently, he brushed up on fowl, charged with castrating a group of roosters.

“Talk about research,” said Gilroy.

As tract homes and shopping malls spring up on South County’s fields, the hospital sees more show horses and fewer dairy cows, and treats different ailments. Lame joints and stress fractures are commonplace now, the results of long hours spent in performance rings, and as animals’ lifespans stretch, age-related illnesses such as Cushing’s disease predominate. The hospital’s mini-horse, Buster, is afflicted with Cushing’s, which causes a tumor on the pituitary gland, and bears the disease’s telltale woolly hair.

Some problems have changed, others never will. Birth, for example.

Bill Seals arrives to find Heura moaning in her pen. He washes his hands and jumps in, Gilroy alongside him. Moreno cradles the goat’s head in the crook of her arm, whispering, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” as Seals reaches into the animal, grabs hold of two doll-like legs, and pulls, Gilroy holding the animal firm behind him. Alvarez is awestruck and aghast, her hand upon her temple. She began keeping goats only a year and a half ago, and has never seen them born. The kid slips free, sticky and streaked with its mother’s blood. It kicks, and the doctors exhale.

“This one’s alive,” Seals calls out.

Heura bleats, as if she understands, and Gilroy lifts the kid to her, to nuzzle and lick clean.

“There’s your baby,” coos Moreno, “there’s your baby.”

Seals reaches back in and gropes in the womb, finding a second set of legs, and a third. Moreno swaddles the second kid in a towel, and the muck lifts miraculously, leaving the two tiny goats downy, white and precious, a boy and a girl.

“No wonder she was in pain,” murmurs Alvarez.

“Oh yeah,” says Seals. “We’ve got at least triplets.”

But the third is slow going. Heura laps at her kids, who bristle and squirm at the feel of March air, and bleats in protest as Seals pulls again. Moreno rocks Heura gently. She bleats twice, her mouth wide and indignant. At the opposite end of the barn, a horse whinnies, as if in reply. Finally, the kid slides into Gilroy’s arms.

“Got to be a male,” Seals remarks.

“Boys always cause trouble,” Moreno jokes.

Alvarez is pale. “Tell me that’s it, please.”

It isn’t. A fourth kid emerges, and the group sighs. Seals pulls out his hand, bloody, and asks for a syringe. “Good girl,” he says. Already the kids are jostling in the wet hay, trying to suckle on the hem of Moreno’s T-shirt. Gilroy hands Seals a towel. Nonchalant, he wipes his forearm clean.

Tending to large animals takes both force and delicacy. The tools are thick and fearsome to look at: clunky de-horners, molar pullers, a “rather large” gynecological speculum that would make any human female wince. But the work is intimate, sometimes even tender.

“C’mere, mama,” veterinarian Jodi Chadim murmurs, guiding a mare out from a stable. Concerned that post-surgical horses, disoriented as they wake from anesthesia, might hurt themselves in the surgery room, veterinarians outfit their patients with helmets. One distressed horse broke the wooden crossbars that latched the door; the hospital has since replaced them with steel ones. The surgery room itself is an octagon, pristinely white, thusly shaped to prevent horses from hurtling into sharp corners.

Veterinarians are more trusted than any other professionals, said Linda Seals, citing a magazine survey, and they have to be, when tending to patients who can’t speak for themselves. If sometimes less revered than physicians, they’re also less reviled, more easily approached in their blue jeans and hiking boots than doctors in white coats or scrubs. They put up few pretenses, and as Seals’ bloody arm evinces, they aren’t afraid to do the dirty work.

“When it rains, we’re out there in the rain,” said Moreno. “When it’s hot, we’re out there in the heat.”

And when the pangs of birth have faded, they are there, too, cosseting newborn goats just like human babies, and lifting a weary mother back onto her hooves.

Previous articleElenore Jacqueline Rocca
Next articleDS Builders Cut Their Way to Top

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here