Attribution: Photo by Luigi Boccardo on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, turns the morning over to the keeper to review an incident of his boyhood when he and his family shared life with a variety of animals on a small dairy farm in northwest Wisconsin.
That sharing went over the top the time the keeper got a vet’s needle in the arm that was intended for a heifer being inoculated for “contagious brucellosis,” a condition causing cows to abort premature fetuses.
The heifer the keeper was holding around the neck lurched and Doc C stabbed the keeper in the upper arm which subsequently swelled up and was temporarily painful. The incident likely had nothing to do with the fact that Doc C sometimes drank a little, but the keeper’s mother was not happy with him in any case.
The keeper has told the story a time or two and of course ends up remarking that the accidental medication obviously worked because he has never experienced an abortion.
It is likely his farm boy background that allows the keeper to make light of such a serious situation as abortion, but Phyllis, who once worked for Planned Parenthood, understands that’s just the way he is and anyway she has heard the story before.
