Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Running on Empty

Experience has taught me a country cow doctor should never run short on three things: 1) Euthanasia solution, 2) Injectable anesthetic drugs and 3) OB wire. There is nothing in the farmer’s vet shack, shop or garage which lets you MacGyver your way through your shortfall. Let me put a face on item one.

It was a sunny, spring, Sunday afternoon decades back when I received a call about a mare having difficulty delivering a foal. When I pulled into the pasture, I realized the term “difficulty foaling” was the midwife of understatements. The mare had gone into hard labor and wandered off to a secluded area in the pasture 24 hours earlier. The foal had hip-locked in her pelvis and had remained so since she had disappeared. When I arrived, the foal was dead, and the mare was paralyzed and exhausted after dragging herself up and down a ravine. She would never rise again; euthanasia was the only option, and this brings me to the problem.

Fatal Plus is a concentrated pentobarbital anesthetic cocktail we administer intravenously to induce deep anesthesia followed by death. Sixty ccs will predictably dispatch a 1,000-pound horse, but this Sunday, my supply was somewhat shy of 60. Because the mare was down and near death, I expected it was enough. It was not. The mare instantly reached peaceful planes of deep anesthesia, but her heart and breathing would not stop. Very shortly, every member of the family was sobbing with neighbors gathering to comfort them. I also shed a tear wondering how I could speed this process along without looking like Jeffrey Dahmer in coveralls and a cowboy hat. I apologized for my shortsightedness and zipped ten miles back to the clinic to grab a full bottle of Fatal Plus and this brings me to my point.

Unlike the unpredictability of a country, cow doctor veterinary practice, elections are predictable and are the single, defined responsibility of the government election department. They are scheduled at a specific time, at a specific place, on a specific date, decades in advance. There are no surprises. How is it possible 35 precincts in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County ran out of ballot paper on Election Day while 70 of Arizona’s Maricopa County’s voting centers suffered the same? Either something nefarious is happening or these people are incompetent. Correcting this chaos is the responsibility of each state legislature but do not expect the Democrats to bite the hand that feeds them. Mass mail-in ballots are how progressives steal power.