draggonlaady

My evening has definitely been... backwoods? county? gruesome? practical? I dunno how to label it. So I'll just tell it out. If gore bothers you, do stop reading now.

My last appointment of the day was to kill and behead a horse. We met the neighbor at the owner's house; he drove his backhoe down so that the horse could be buried promptly. The horse was down and unable to rise, but still skittish, so I wrapped my jacket around her head as a blindfold and kneeled on it to keep her still while Dr S did the actual euthanizing. Then we took the head off and strapped it to the back of Dr S's truck. Tomorrow, he'll bring an axe to work and we'll open the head up to get the brain out and ship it to the lab to test for rabies. Not that I really think it's at all likely that the horse is rabid, but just to be absolutely certain. Normally, for a dog or cat, we'd just send the whole head, or the whole body for something particularly small, like a bat. The cost of shipping a horse head on ice is, however, rather...daunting. The neighbor with the backhoe has apparently buried many a horse... one of those tasks that anyone in the neighborhood with a backhoe will get called to do around here.

I was home just long enough to sit down and look longingly at the food Bruce had cooked when the phone rang. So instead of doing justice to dinner by savoring it, I shoveled food in my mouth while changing into old jeans and boots to go see about a breach calf.

Took about 2 minutes to evaluate mom and calf, and decide it was a bad go. Asked the owner if he liked the cow enough to pay for a c-section to take out a dead calf. "Not really," says he. "Guess we'll burger her. We weren't going to breed her again anyway. Sorry to've disturbed your evening."

And all of this... all the interactions with the owners were just so matter of fact. No drama, no fuss, just doing what needs done, even when it sucks. Acknowledging that it sucks, of course, but what else are you gonna do?