By Bill Stokes
Attribution: James Gillray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in acknowledging the news that a Fox Lake herd of dairy cows has been infected with the bird flu; and this of course prompts the keeper to tell Phyllis—probably not for the first time, about his inoculation for a disease that causes cows to abort their fetuses.
It happened back in the keeper’s farm boy days when he was holding a heifer around the neck so Doc Claflin could inoculate it for the “contagious brucellosis” that had infected the herd.
The heifer lurched just as Doc jabbed and the needle pierced the keeper’s upper arm with its load of medication. The arm took on significant swelling, and the keeper’s mother was subsequently moved to make some unkind remarks about Doc’s proficiency and the suspicion that he sometimes drank a little.
Other than the arm swelling, and the presumed protection against a condition that, as a male, he would never face, the accidental inoculation left no residual effects, except, of course, to give the keeper something to tell Phyllis about–yet again, as he informs her of those Fox Lake cows getting bird flu.
