Skin in the Game: What my Right Hand Knows

Mention "cow vet" and most people immediately jump to a mental image of someone with their arm up a cow's backside.

Actually, that's a pretty accurate depiction. For the first 20 years or so of my career, rectalling cows is exactly what I did, day in day out. With another decade of hindsight behind me, I can see that this is, by anybody's standards, a weird way to earn a living.

The absurdity came to light earlier this week when I went to my GP because the back of my right hand had been appearing redder than usual. The diagnosis is traumatic telangiectasia - where blood pools in the capillaries just under the skin. "Does your job involve your hands?" the GP asked. Yes: being inserted through dozens of tight rectal sphincters every day; subjected to countless wet-dry cycles; near-constant exposure to blood, serum, birth fluids and powerful disinfectants. That all counts as hand abuse if ever there was such a thing.

It got me thinking about the unique intimacy that cow vets have with their patients. It is one thing to be involved in rectal and vaginal examinations, but it reaches an entirely different level when you find yourself working inside the abdomen of a cow as she stands fully conscious, waiting patiently for the operation to conclude. I cannot think of any other situation in which a person operates inside a standing, conscious patient - and for a cow vet, this is completely routine.

Performing a caesarian section operation on a beef cow. I think it was one of those rare occasions when the sun was shining and it was during the day, not the middle of the night, that prompted the photo opportunity!

We should be very good at that party game - "feely bag" - where you have to identify objects by touch alone. Except in our case, the bag weighs 700kg and occasionally kicks you.

"Is it a walnut?"

Which raises a question I've been turning over for years: why does she let us?

A dairy cow is a large, powerful animal. She is the size of a brick outhouse and considerably stronger than any person who has ever worked with her. She could, if she chose, make veterinary work essentially impossible - and occasionally one does. Yet the overwhelming norm is cooperation. Grudging, sometimes. Stoic, usually. But cooperation nonetheless.

I think we sometimes underestimate what that means. Certainly, domestication plays a big part - thousands of years of selective breeding producing an animal disposed toward human management. As does the practical reality that restraint is used: a halter, a crush, a well-placed hand. But I don't think that fully explains it. Restraint suppresses the opportunity to resist but it doesn't account for the many moments when resistance would be entirely possible and simply doesn't happen. The cow standing in a stall being examined, often free to walk away. The cow haltered in the corner of the loose-box who stays (relatively) still not because she physically cannot move, but because she doesn't. There is something in that cooperation that can feel like a decision.

I think what drives that decision is this: cows are considerably better at reading us than we are at reading them. They pick up on tension, on fear, on aggression - but equally on calm, on care, on genuine intent. The spirit in which we are with a cow matters. She knows whether we are there for her or merely working on her. That distinction - felt rather than understood - is what builds trust. We earn that cooperation through what we bring to the encounter: our own feelings toward her.

Is this why the human-cow relationship has held such significance through many different cultures, and over the millennia? There is something in the nature of this bond that has always transcended mere utility. It also might explain something more personal: why the relationship between a cow and those of us who work with her can feel like a real connection: I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. Compare this with sheep, who make an interesting counterpoint. Sheep are not stupid - that reputation is unfair - but their relationship with humans is different in character. Is it that sheep tend toward panic as a first response? Like cows, they are herd animals whose primary survival strategy is flight, but somehow that instinct sits closer to the surface. Working with an individual sheep more often feels like an imposition you are forcing upon it - a functional relationship and rarely much more.

With cows, their size changes the dynamic - an animal that big, which could genuinely hurt you but mostly chooses not to, forces a greater respect for them. This mutual jeopardy in the encounter means you both have skin in the game: you are vulnerable to her, and she is vulnerable to you.

I am aware that it is easy to become soppy about cows - and people do. The big brown eyes, the long lashes, the improbable curiosity of a sandpaper tongue investigating your arm - these are all traits a good man can easily succumb to! I don't want to dismiss this affection - but it risks obscuring a more interesting question: whether the relationship we have with cattle is genuinely reciprocal in some meaningful sense, or whether we are mostly projecting.

My honest answer, after thirty years, is that I don't fully know. It is very easy to anthropomorphise: assign human-like thinking and logic to cows which the science suggests would be wrong. But the unique physical intimacy I have had with them during my work has at least given me a different insight to draw on than most people have.

If I cannot know what a cow thinks, I often wonder what the cow feels. Some farmers' wives, during a caesarean, shared that it felt like someone doing the washing up inside them - except a cow wouldn't know what washing up is. What I do know is that sick animals often seem to have a sixth sense that you are helping them. Their eyes say it plainly: this really hurts, but I trust you - please make me better. It is a trust given without consent or choice. Which makes it feel like an even greater obligation.

Navigating around a spleen and liver to manipulate a displaced stomach back into place, while she keeps her gaze steady on you - sometimes even continuing to chew her cud - does something to you. You know this animal inside and out, literally. That creates a bond. And a responsibility.

There is something about a cow - a gentle intelligence, a nurturing nature, an abiding trust - that makes her genuinely special. The redness on the back of my right hand is testament to the many thousands of cows I have truly known.