The Dead Cow Story

A real life education about antibiotics. Now vs Then

Writers should write hard and clear about what hurts.  – Ernest Hemingway

This year is not an easy year to find cattle.  Droughts out West and in Texas for the past few years (and other things like the ripple effects of Covid and dry years here in Wisconsin) have brought about a smaller nationwide cattle herd and thus high cattle prices nationwide for the last couple of years. This makes my life difficult. Any instability will do that but this is extraordinary.

Two years ago I paid $.70 per pound live weight for the cattle I bought from other farmers pasture to put on my pasture.  This year I bought a few for $1.30 but most of them I paid at least $1.40 or even more per pound. They are now up to 1.56 per pound live weight and it looks like it will keep going.  The price I pay more than doubled in two years. I used to pay 10 cents per pound over the top of the market. This is difficult to do with prices as high as they are now. Baby calves that used to sell for 20 to 100 bucks are going for 500 to 1000 bucks.  Calf prices so high makes it look like prices are going to go up even more going forward.

All of the above makes losing a cow for any reason extra hard. Having a cow die of something that is preventable is not a good look and really hurts psychologically, spiritually as well as financially.  Slaughter day is not fun but that is what the cow was evolved for and born to do, so we do it.  Losing one due to lack of knowledge is especially hard because it shows my failure to do my job of keeping them safe, healthy and happy.  Like the feller says: Some lessons are inexpensive, some are costly.

I buy cattle from farmers who grass feed their cattle.  I pay a good price for their open cows. An open cow is one that didn’t get pregnant or didn’t produce a calf for whatever reason.  Most of my farmers are cow/calf operators. A cow/calf operator has a bunch of cows, he has a bull so they get pregnant. The calf is born in the spring and the farmer and the cow raise it until it is ready to go to a feedlot in the fall. This is how he makes most of his living. If the cow doesn’t produce a calf, she is showing traits that she is not good enough to stay in the gene pool. In the wild, these traits would be things like no horns to protect herself and her calf, not fast on her feet, not alert enough, etc. Bottom line is she has to find a different job.  I give her that job. I put her on my pasture and move her to fresh grass daily and treat her right. She puts on weight in both meat and fat. In late summer and on up to the end of the year, I harvest her in as humane a way as possible and turn her into food.

This spring I got some cattle from a usual farmer.  He has always had very good, fast gaining cattle. Last year he had 25 or so.  This year he had 5.  We will call him Farmer B.  I also got some from a new guy that I haven’t received cattle from before. I got 10 from him. We will call him Farmer C.  

B’s cattle got to my pasture about 3 weeks before C’s cattle got here.  About 6 days after C’s cattle arrived, I noticed that one I got from B was hanging back from the herd and panting a bit.  She was a very nice big fat cow.  She could have gone to the freezer immediately but I was going to have her on my pasture until August at least.  I know I am biased, but I think my grass is better than anybody else’s… I hemmed and hawed and wondered what was wrong with her but since she caught up with the herd in a bit I didn’t pay much attention to it.  The next day she looked a bit worse. There was another one that was hanging off by herself as well.  What was going on?   The third day cow #1 had a mucus discharge like a cow sized runny nose coming out of her mouth and was panting more than ever.  I thought she might have Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD, also known as Shipping Fever).  BRD is a type of pneumonia. Since she was one of the ones who had been here longest I thought this was a bit odd but figured she probably caught it from one of those who had just arrived.  I put her in the corral and gave her a big shot of the antibiotic that I had on hand. Straight up penicillin. About an hour later she looked a bit better.  An hour after that she was going downhill again.  

I called the vet and told him all about it, told him what I had given her, how long she had been like this, about the mucus, etc.  He said she had BRD and that the antibiotic I gave her was not the right one.  If I was going to give her that I should do at least 20 CCs every 3 hours and that might knock it out.  That would be about 5 times what was planning and about 5 times what I had on hand. I asked what the right antibiotic is and he told me. 

I jumped in the pickup and went to the closest big farm store, about 35 miles away to get some of the needed drug.  When I got there about 40 minutes later I found they no longer carry that drug.

I immediately called the vet to see if he had some of the right drug and he said he did.  I jumped back in the pickup and went down to his place, another 35 minutes away. 

He gave me the right drug and also a steroid that would take down the inflammation quickly (and mucus) so cow #1 could breathe easier.

I got back to the farm about 40 minutes later.  In total, I was out driving hither and thither for about 2 hours.

I went to the corral and the cow was laying there dead.  Not a good sight.  It is my job to take care of my animals and make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen to them. Telling a dead cow you are sorry doesn’t help much. She was still warm and had probably been dead about an hour.  I got the tractor and dragged her out of the corral and over the hill where she could be composted (buried).

I spent about an hour with the herd that evening watching and listening.  There was one cow that was kind of hanging back and panting.  I called the vet and told him about it.  He said to give her the shot of the new drug.  I did that immediately.   The new drug is very effective and easy to use.  You give them two shots in two different locations under their skin and that is it.  It is a long acting drug.  The old drug had to be given in multiple doses over a few days if it were to have any effect at all.

The next morning the number 2 sick cow was much better but another one (number 3) was panting and coughing a bit.  I didn’t have enough of the drug for her so went racing down to the vet and got a full bottle of the stuff, came back and dosed the number 3 cow.  The number 2 cow was back with the herd, eating grass and doing fine.  By the next morning the number 3 cow was also back with the herd and doing fine also.

Over the next three days I checked the cattle morning and night and spent enough time with them so that I knew for certain that nobody else was getting sick.

I am certain (and I am probably right, if not, let me know) that my dead cow was caused by two things, both tracing back to a lack of knowledge on my part and changing conditions in the cattle industry and indeed medicine overall.

1. I didn’t know enough about Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD).  I did not know that straight up penicillin would not handle the problem. I seemed to remember that when I was a kid, it would do the trick.  The vet told me that I would need to inject the animal with much heavier doses and much more often than what the directions on the penicillin bottle said.  Penicillin doesn’t work as well anymore.

   Antibiotics don’t work nearly as well nowadays as they did in the past.  The original antibiotic I gave to the number 1 cow who died was straight up penicillin. The new antibiotic that I had to race around and get is called tulathromycin. 

   My dead cow situation is a real-world example of how the FEEDING of antibiotics to feedlot cattle has a definite effect on a farmer who never feeds his cattle any grain ever and feeding antibiotics never crosses his mind at all.

My understanding about antibiotics in cattle is NOT and never has been as simple as ‘antibiotics bad’ but there were a lot of things I didn’t know. Like with most things, there is more to it. It comes down to changes made in the cattle industry, mostly after WWII.

• A beef animal is not evolved to eat a lot of grain.  The cow CAN do it and it makes the animal gain weight very quickly but it is not healthy for the cow.  A good analogy is that you CAN eat nothing but candy bars and ice cream and those foods will make you big and fat but it isn’t very healthy for you.

• The cow’s gut biome is not made for grain.  It is made for grass.  When the cow gets a lot of grain, the cow’s rumen (one of their four stomachs) gets very acidic because the cow’s gut biome goes crazy with all the high energy feeds and that produces a lot of acid.  The cow basically has a bad case heartburn.

• Cattle feeders found that if they fed the cow antibiotics (antibiotics are basically microbe killers) the cow’s rumen would have less microbes and wouldn’t produce as much acid and the cow could eat more grain longer.   This doesn’t last forever but the cow gains weight so fast that they get sent to the butcher before they get sick and die.

• The unintended consequence of feeding antibiotics is that microbes start to build up a tolerance to those antibiotics.  

• Thus those earlier antibiotics no longer work as well.

• Someone then has to come up with stronger antibiotics.

• An antibiotic arms race happens.  The microbes get stronger.  Stronger antibiotics are invented.  The microbes get stronger still.  Even stronger antibiotics are needed and invented.

• This has led to legacy antibiotics losing their effectiveness.

• Antibiotics losing their effectiveness would happen over a longish period of time anyway, but making microbes live in an antibiotic soup all the time is definitely a good way to speed up their gaining of resistance.

• Antibiotics losing their effectiveness has an effect on medicine overall as well. Antibiotic ineffectiveness might not stem directly from the cattle industry but the indiscriminate use of antibiotics such as is used in the cattle feeding industry certainly hasn’t helped. Google “antibiotic ineffectiveness” sometime and see for yourself.

2.      I knew that BRD is dangerous but didn’t know how quickly it could kill. I did some research and found out that a beef animal has much less lung capacity per body weight than a horse or even a human.  That means that when their lungs get partially full of mucus, it is much worse than a similar amount with a human or horse. A person can also die of pneumonia but it is easier for a cow to do that. A cow is evolved to eat a lot and then spend a lot of time lying in the shade chewing her cud.  Lying in the shade doesn’t take much lung power.  A horse or a human is made to be a long distance runner. The lung capacity per body weight is much higher so it takes a more serious cold or respiratory disease to knock them out of commission. 

Now I know.  As I said before, some lessons are cheap, others are costly.

I now check my herd twice a day whenever I can possibly do that.  I also have the vet on speed dial. I told him I am willing to pay him a 20 buck consulting fee for every time I call him, false alarm or not.  He hasn’t agreed, but he might once I call him enough times…

SV