Village Horse Doctor (28 page)

I had eaten a big dinner and was lyin’ on a pallet on the porch when Rafael rode up on a mule, bareback with a blind bridle on him. He said, “Dok-tor, I theenk my other mule ees sick in the head. I hate veery much to disturb you from your siesta, but we must do something for my mule.”

Rafael lived about two miles out of town on an irrigated farm, and I told him to head back home on his mule and I would be there in a few minutes. I waited long enough for Rafael to get home on his mule, and I drove up at about the same time that he got to the mule corral.

There was a nice little three-sided ’dobe barn with a loft in it that opened out to the south. Rafael’s mules were the small, good kind of little Mexican mule and were well broke and gentle. The corral fence had been grown by planting yuccateae cactus close together and training the branches across each other. It was a very typical desert fence, really a wall of cactus thorns, and would sure hold any kind of livestock.

The little mule had run and fallen into the fence and had cactus stickers all over one shoulder, and from the time Rafael had left home until the time we got back to the corral, he had rubbed that shoulder raw on the front post of the barn. Rafael was very excited and his wife and several young children had been standin’ outside the fence and hollerin’ and chunkin’ the mule to try to get him to stop rubbin’.

The little mule was slobbering at the mouth and had a wild look in his eyes. When a small spotted Spanish goat started across the corral, he ran at him and picked him up in his mouth by the neck and shook him like a dog would shake a rabbit. Rafael started through the gate with a garden hoe to beat him off the goat. I pulled him back and shut the gate and explained to him that the mule had the disease of the “mad-dog bite.”

He turned and, in a high tone of voice, told his wife and children in Spanish to go back to “la casa.” I was explaining that rabies was caused by the bite of a skunk or dog or some such animal when he began to wave his hands in the air. He took off his hat and whipped his legs and burst into a fit of Spanish that was akin to an unknown tongue.

When he finally got control of himself, he explained to me that there had been a momma skunk with some kittens
in the hay in the loft of the barn and that they were “mucho bonito” and that he and the children had watched them. About two weeks ago he had seen the momma skunk come down out of the loft into the feed trough where the mule was eating and bite the mule on the nose. The mule had snorted and whirled out of the corral and slung the skunk loose from his nose and Rafael said, “You know sometheeng else, that skunk and those kittens have disappeared since that day.”

I went to the car and got a .30-.30 rifle and shot the mule through the heart. You never shoot a rabid animal through the head if you might want to send it off, because you would damage the brain.

I explained to Rafael about sending the head to Austin, and he said that the presence of the skunk, the word of me, the Dok-tor, and how the mule acted was all the proof that he needed. I cautioned him that he must kill the goat and burn or bury it, and he said that he would do that when he dragged the mule off.

This was the only case of rabies that occurred in a domestic animal during this several weeks’ rabies scare, and it was caused by the bite of the skunk. It would be hard to estimate the true benefit that was derived from the extensive vaccination campaign that was brought about by this scare, and the circumstances may have prevented an outbreak of rabies in domestic dogs.

The fox by nature is a coward and relies on his cunning for survival and not on his ability as a fighter. In his rabid condition when he started into civilization in his subconscious state he was still not a fighter. I seriously doubt that the foxes that were dying over the country ever bit any domestic livestock. And so, the worst part of the so-called rabies epidemic was in the human mind.

In
my early years in Fort Stockton more ranchers tried grazing sheep on irrigated fields, and due to the war, everybody wanted to produce as much livestock as possible on the acres involved. Considerable interest had been manifested in the possibility of treating ewes to cause them to bring two lambs a year. Hormone therapy was something which had been talked about in the livestock industry but on which very little research had been done. Little knowledge was available pertaining to the treatment of domestic animals with hormones.

I wrote several laboratories that I thought might have information that had not been released, but their response was disappointing, and what information they had to offer did not apply to range conditions.

I began my first attempt to develop a satisfactory hormone preparation by using hormones in injectable form that were compounded in sesame oil. I injected four different pens of ten ewes each. These sheep were all of the same breeding and age. Two pens were injected with two different natural hormones; the third pen was injected with an artificial chemical hormone; and the fourth pen with a blended hormone.

One of these pens of ewes that were treated with artificial hormones became highly nervous and went off their feed and drank unusual amounts of water. Some of them got in bad enough condition to make me think that they might die, so I “posted” one of these ewes and found that the artificial hormone had had a very harsh effect on the reproductive organs of the sheep and had caused severe hemorrhage in the ovaries and extreme contractions in the tubes of the reproductive organs.

Another pen of ten ewes that were treated with pure estrogenic hormones showed little or no reaction and gave no indications of being ready to breed. Since these ewes were doing exceptionally well and were fat, we slaughtered one for mutton and I examined the reproductive organs. There had not been even a slight reaction. Repeated treatment on these ewes with natural estrogen finally caused them to breed, but the repeated treatments would have been too expensive and too time-consuming to be practical.

The ten ewes that were treated with blended hormones produced a false cycle and in a few days (three to seven days) had a reoccurring fertile cycle and we turned the bucks in. When I determined that these ewes were all with
lamb, I treated fifty ewes with the same blend and turned them out under range conditions. These fifty ewes produced forty-eight lambs, which is 96 per cent, and the ten ewes that had been kept in a small lot on feed produced twelve lambs, two of them having twins, which is 120 per cent.

All these sheep were dry ewes that had missed a spring lamb and had been cut out from the main herd at shearing time, and they produced lambs in the early winter and were grazed on irrigated fields. These ewes all showed some age and were broken-mouthed and normally would have been sent to market in the summer after they were sheared. Their lambs weighed around ninety pounds at Easter marketing time and the ewes were also fat and could be shipped with the lambs. This was a good trick in that it got a lamb from an old ewe at an ideal time of year and she was still marketable without any loss from having produced this last lamb.

Dry ewes have always been a loss factor in range sheep, and these experiments pointed to the possibility of making a better market for old ewes that could be bred and grazed on irrigated fields and also on Panhandle wheat pastures.

The following year Othro Adams bought a good number of dry ewes out of the wool from a rancher in the Glass Mountains. He and I went out and “hormoned” these ewes and left them there a few weeks to breed up. This gave him time to cut some more irrigated alfalfa hay before he moved these ewes onto the fields to lamb and graze until time to ship to the Easter market. This would be about the right time to get livestock off the alfalfa to start another season of cutting hay.

My hormone research received wide acclaim. I named my blended product Ewetone and shipped it in large quantities to a number of states.

Young range sheep are hard to get a good percentage of
lambs from the first year that they are bred. Ranchers referred to breeding “yearling ewes,” but, actually, these so-called yearling ewes were almost two years old, and under semi-arid range conditions, such young ewes rarely bred and produced more than a 60 per cent lamb crop the first year.

With little additional experimentation, the blended product Ewetone was being used on hundreds of thousands of young range ewes. After treatment, they produced from 85 to 100 per cent. Range ewes are bred to bring spring lambs, and treatment with Ewetone was not to change the lambing time but to increase the lambing percentage.

I produced the blended hormone product in a sesame-oil base in my laboratory and packaged it for small flocks in the Eastern states in 1-cc. ten-dose vials, and for the Western range-sheep trade, I packaged it in 50-cc. amber vials with hypodermic rubber stoppers. This was a very stable product and required no refrigeration or special handling and was easy to administer.

I was working in my laboratory when Cleo McKenzie, who had ranching interests scattered around but at that time had his main operation around Tunis Springs, came in and began to tell me about a horse that had a big knot “rise up” on his shoulder point. He said he had taken his knife and stuck the blade through a little piece of wood so it wouldn’t go too deep into the knot on the shoulder of the horse, then he jobbed it right quick to open it, and the pus and corruption just flowed. He had taken his knife out of his pocket and was showing me about how thick the block of wood was on the blade and about how much of the blade was left that he used to open the knot. He went on to tell me that he had had to open it two or three times more, and he wondered if I could give him something to put on it.

This home practice was common among Western ranchers,
and it was often necessary to overcome what had been done to the horse. I was fixin’ him up a package of healing powders, and since I didn’t want anything counteractin’ these healing powders, I asked Cleo to let me see his knife again. He very unsuspectingly handed me his knife. With the other hand I handed him the healing powders and said, “You can have your knife back when the horse gets well.”

As the drouth moved in and became more severe, the ranchers in the drouth area were constantly selling off the older ewes, and finally only the young ewes were left on the ranches. In one of the most severe years of drouth about three hundred thousand young ewes in the Trans-Pecos Region were treated with hormones to ensure a good lamb crop. There was no break in the sunshine, wind, and dry weather.

When sheep have baby lambs, they need to be in good enough condition that they come into their natural milk flow and have full bags, which causes them to claim their baby lambs. If a ewe is poor due to drouth or other conditions, she will have her lamb and then walk off and leave it. It seems that the instinct for survival is more pronounced than the mother instinct.

When lambing season started on these last treated ewes, the drouth had reached its worst stage, and these young mother sheep had their lambs on barren ranges with no grass or weeds and only dead brush to survive on, and most of the lamb crop was lost. For the next several years of the drouth no one was interested in treating what few sheep they had, and the sheep that they hung on to, hoping for rain, they didn’t really care whether they brought a lamb crop or not.