A day with the Kenyan vet

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to shadow one of the local vets for a day as he went on his rounds. Normally, the vet travels by dirt bike to his clients’ farms with only a small backpack and a duffle bag. The backpack carries his tools and supplies for doing artificial insemination (AI) of cattle while his duffle contains all the medication at his disposal to treat his patients. The day I joined him we traveled by taxi to his farms.

Our day started with an AI of a heifer. When deciding which semen to use, the farmer is asked how much milk they produce as well as how much they would like to spend. There are a few different option from a Kenyan bull or imported semen from Canada or the US. In this case, a Kenyan bull’s semen was chosen mainly for the ease of calving as a heifer is a young cow that has not had a calf before which means she is still not full size and so a smaller calf is better. While at the same farm, we learnt that the farmer had recently lost a cow. She went down (this means she was laying and would not get up – very bad for a cow) and a mineral deficiency was suspected. Although the cow was treated she did not improve after a number of days and so the farmer made the hard decision to have her cow butchered. The hardest part must have been that the cow was 8 months pregnant meaning that the investment she had put into breeding her would not be returned and that there would be no more milk sales from this animal. It may not seem like a big deal to North American’s that are used to seeing farms with anywhere between 50-200 milking cows but here the average farm has 1-2 milking cows, maybe a heifer or a calf so losing an animal that close to calving is a hard blow.

Our next farm turned into the next three cases for the day. The first was a cow with mastitis or an infection of the udder. Although mastitis itself is not something new to me, milking a quarter and getting a urine-yellow water-like substance was. It was for me my first case of Klebsiella. Though the animal was treated with antibiotics, the prognosis was not good as most cases of Klebsiella are not cured and the quarter is lost. The second animal had been diagnosed previously with Anaplasmosis, a zoonotic, tick-borne disease caused by the bacterium Anaplasma marginale. We were there for a follow-up as the animal was still off feed. It also had a serious sinusitis from severely infected dehorning wound. The third case was a simple deworming of a heifer.

The following farm had two cows, one of which was limping and the other had not shown signs of heat in over two years. For the first patient, the foot was cleaned in order to check for foot-rot. No indications where seen and it turns out the animal was sore in the joint, likely from slipping in her pen. As for the cow not showing heat, it is a somewhat common compliant here as some farmers are not aware of all the nuances that go into the proper feeding of a cow and often don’t know that the expense of feeding minerals is essential to keeping the cow in good condition.

Our day continued with a few more AIs, a few suspected cases of East Coast Fever (caused by the protozoa Theileria parva) and a cow that had red urine though all the rule-outs where ruled out. For me, the day was now over but for the vet, he still had two more AIs to do in the evening and another case of mastitis but clear on the other side of his territory and we were already past 3pm.