Episode 9 More Creatures Great and Small

We Brits love our animals...

..from livestock in the fields

to pooches in the park.

It's the job of the nation's vets to keep them healthy.

Whether consulting in the countryside...

There is something very nice about being next to a nice cow.

..or horsing around in the stables...

I spend all my job outwitting animals.

Got him!

..they're passionate about their patients.

Hey, little miss. I am now known as the mad chicken lady.

On call when the animals need them most...

If we leave it any longer,

he almost certainly is going to not make it.

..they're the dedicated vets patching up pets

and caring every day

for more creatures, great and small.

Coming up...

In Fife, Megan's determined to save a rescue hen's life.

We'll have her in. See what she's done.

In Teesdale, farm vet Richard's called to a calf emergency.

His rumen, his main stomach, is full of gas.

They do get to the stage where they die of it.

And there's a tongue twister in store for vet Helen.

She could have bitten it with a canine tooth

and then it torn through.

The Kingdom of Fife, in Scotland.

It's a mainly rural area,

with 400 square miles of farmland -

perfect grazing for over 1,500 farms...

..keeping the vets from Inglis Practice busy.

And back at back at base, they have their very own farm animals

living in the back garden.

Vet Megan is particularly fond of them...

I am know known as the mad chicken lady,

or crazy chicken lady I think is more like it.

These are ex-commercial chickens,

which were rescued by a team of local volunteers.

One of the other ladies was looking for volunteers to get involved,

so that's how I got involved. And now I'm heavily involved

and spend the majority of my spare time thinking about chickens.

I think chickens will be my thing.

I haven't got time for anything else!

There are 30 million egg-laying hens in Britain,

over a third of them living in cages.

Commercial chickens start laying at around four months old

and are kept for a year and a half.

When their egg production drops below an average of six per week,

then they are considered beyond their commercial value,

so they will get slaughtered at that point.

Some of the rescued hens arrive with serious injuries.

The five that are all over there at the moment, they all had

a fractured leg each, so...

Their legs have been repaired,

whether we've mended them or they've done that themselves,

and now they live the life of luxury out here.

I think the grand total was 2,000 ex-commercial layers that

they've rescued.

Soon to be 2,086.

Today, Megan's going to help re-home another batch.

Rescuers Jackie and Fi have agreements with local egg farms

to re-home some of the chickens due for slaughter.

The hens come first.

This is what this is about.

It's about the hens. it's not about any of us,

it's not about anything else

other than getting the hens from farms to freedom.

Relieved that they're here

and actually don't look as bad as I thought they were going to look.

I know we've not let them out yet,

but compared to the last lot of caged hens,

they don't look too bad so far.

Out you go. There you go.

Come on. Come on.

Come on.

This is the first time ever

they've seen daylight or had the room to move.

Just really emotional.

Some of them come out really quickly and others kind of hide

and you have to tempt them out.

I'm not an emotional person, but this gets to me.

It's Megan's job to health check the chickens.

She's been really badly feather pecked.

She's pretty much bald.

There's nothing wrong with her other than her feather problems,

so when she moults and her new ones grow back in,

she'll look as beautiful as all the other ones. But it takes a while.

But there's a more serious case.

That leg's really sore, so she'll be staying with us.

See what's going on.

She's really limping on this left leg, so we'll have her in,

see what she's done.

And we will try and sort it.

Newly christened Flo is the only hen to stay behind.

The rest have found new homes,

where they could go on to live for another ten years.

This is the first time I've actually rescued hens. It feels quite good.

Yeah, quite good. And hopefully...

Well, they're going to a very good home anyway.

We're taking four.

Always kind of wanted to get some of my own and so this is our chance.

Bock! Bock-bock-bock-bock, booock!

Thank you very much.

They're all looking amazing.

I know they look scruffy, but they all seem happy,

doing what chickens should do.

Look, how cute!

Really, really excited.

And all day and all last night,

I could not wait a second.

That all went pretty smoothly and I think everyone's really happy.

And 85 hens off to their new homes.

There's just one poorly hen

that has a sore leg, so we're going to manage her pain

and then get on and probably X-ray.

I'm just going to anesthetise her just by inhaling the anaesthetic gas.

Hi!

You can see this whole bone is in one piece.

And then we have got part of one of the other femurs here.

And then you can see the other end of it here,

so we've got the fracture.

Flo's leg will need to be fixed with a metal pin.

It seems to be a really common fracture.

We've seen... Most of the fractures we've seen so far

have been of the femur. So whether it's a weak bone

or whether their bones are just weak in general from their upbringing...

Weak bones reduce her chances.

If the leg can't be fixed, Flo will have to be put down.

120 miles south lies Teesdale, County Durham.

Over two thirds of this land is farmed

and home to hundreds of dairy and beef cows,

all potential patients for farm vet Richard.

I think there is a very deep if not an instinct, a feeling amongst

people who have worked with animals.

It's something that is more or less in all people,

but in some people it is quite a deep need to be amongst animals

and to work with them.

Today, Richard has been called to an emergency on the Dale.

We are on our way reasonably swiftly to go and see a bullock

that got bloat. And what that means is that its main stomach, its rumen,

is blown up with gas. And it is one of the calls that if we get,

we drop everything and dash to

because it can be life threatening.

Richard's come to a farm with more than 30 beef cattle

and over 100 ewes.

It's been in farmer David's family for 150 years.

His eight-month-old calf is in a serious condition.

Tea time last night he was looking a bit seedy. I looked at him

and I thought we'd see what he was like this morning.

It's gone down a bit, but it still isn't right, like.

The calf is weaning - changing from a diet of milk to grass,

which is tough to digest.

Cows have four chambers in their stomachs

to break down vegetable matter.

The largest, the rumen,

contains billions of microbes to help digest food.

His main stomach, his rumen, is starting to digest fibre.

But occasionally there is a bit of an upset

as that process is happening and instead of burping up the gas

that's being produced,

it's stopping inside him, and that's what's causing the problem.

It's the gas that's being produced by the fermentation of this forage diet.

Now,

if we leave him, it may sort itself out,

but it might not, and next time we might not be so lucky.

So what we're going to do is we'll put a red devil in his side.

That's what we call red devils.

It's a plastic spiral with a screw thread on it

and a rather evil-looking spike.

We anaesthetise the bullock's side,

make a little incision through the skin

and then that vicious-looking spike goes through the skin,

into the stomach.

And then, as you can see, it's got a screw thread on it,

which picks up the wall of the rumen

and holds it against the abdominal wall.

And then we pull the pin out and there is a wonderful,

satisfying hiss of gas, and he deflates.

They do get to a stage where...

where they die of it. I have before now gone out to treat one and

before I've managed to do anything to it,

the poor thing has popped its plug.

So I guess you can maybe see how his...his rumen, his main stomach,

is full of gas. It's not as bad as it's been, by the sound of it,

but it's pretty...it's pretty bloated.

It's pushing out his side.

So we're just going to put a halter on him just to hold him steady.

The next job, we're going to give some local anaesthetic.

Can you just catch his nose, David, while we do this?

Just to give him something to think about.

I know, I know it stings a bit, doesn't it?

Good lad.

We try and be as hygienic on farm as it's possible to be,

so I want to make sure that his side's disinfected, as it were,

before I make a hole in it.

Operating outdoors has its challenges.

Inevitably, you've got wet hands when you're doing surgery,

and wet hands and wind means cold!

So, yeah, sometimes it's...it is hard.

And you sometimes end up doing these sort of things in snowstorms.

But, yeah, it's part and parcel of what we do, I guess.

To save the calf's life, Richard has to puncture the stomach.

Have you got him there, David?

Good lad. One, two, three...

Good lad, good lad. All right.

And then, one, two, three...

HISSING Lovely noise, horrible smell.

What you don't do now is light a cigarette.

There are tales of vets burning farms down

because this is pure methane, obviously. If you light it,

you end up with a jet of flame.

A couple of stitches ensures the red devil won't fall out.

Just one more thing really, and that's to give him an injection

of some antibiotic just to make sure that,

having made a hole in his side, he doesn't get any infection there.

The calf can now be returned to his mother,

feeling a lot more comfortable.

I would leave that in for a month to six weeks.

I'll leave you the pin. And then,

after that time, if you put the pin back in

for a day or two, just to check he's not going to blow up...

And then, you've had them before, I know, you just nip the stitches

and unscrew it like a screw thread.

There will be a hole there, obviously,

but it will block up within a few days.

And it won't cause him any bother.

He wasn't that bad there,

but if we left him half a day, he might have really been bad.

In Fife, vet Megan has helped re-home hundreds of commercial hens

and has adopted five herself.

Today, her son Charlie is helping out.

Hello, ladies.

Charlie is chicken mad.

He likes to name the chickens.

He likes to go and get the eggs.

He is not too bothered about cleaning out the poo or anything.

And he likes to pick them up, cuddle them,

carry them around the garden...

He just totally interacts with them all the time.

-Three.

-Three eggs.

-Will you hold it up?

-Yeah.

-Are they warm?

-Yes. I want three.

Look, we've had four already, Mum.

These hens have filled us with eggs

for the last six, seven months regularly.

There's never been days when there's not.

These ladies would not have had the best start in life

but they're certainly living it up now.

Megan has just helped re-home a new batch of rescue hens.

She's really limping on this left leg.

But one, Flo, had to stay behind with a broken leg.

We've got the fracture between those two ends of the bone.

Today, Megan's colleague, Ken, will attempt to fix it.

It's a fractured femur.

And it's not unusual for them to break their femurs.

Their bones are really quite delicate.

So we just have to pluck off some feathers then.

You have to pluck off the feathers

so you can sterilise the site properly.

Plucking the feathers actually means that they grow in quicker.

If you cut them, they don't grow back so quickly.

That's a sterilised bandage.

That's just so I can grasp the bottom bit of the leg

without any contamination.

You see how the leg is bending where it shouldn't bend.

It's bending here, and it shouldn't really bend there.

Long-term, it would stay lame if it wasn't corrected.

So the fracture, I have just overrun.

It's fractured there and this is what's happened,

cos it happened several days ago.

The muscles have contracted and pulled it, it's overlapping.

So we'll have to stretch it a bit

to get it back into a better position.

A caged upbringing means Flo's bones are fragile

and could fracture further when Ken tries to pin them.

You can't afford to use too thick a pin or it will crack the bone again.

If that happens, she'd have to be put to sleep.

People might think it's quite extreme

to be doing this for a chicken.

But these guys could go on and live another

six, seven, eight years in somebody's back garden.

And it should supply maybe five, six eggs a week, perhaps,

for quite a little while.

It's well worth the effort, yeah.

We're just checking how far down to put the pin.

So that bone is sitting pretty straight now,

and it's pretty solid, too, it's not bending.

Cut it.

Good.

And we'll take the stitches out

in about ten, 12 days.

And even by tomorrow, she'll be walking about.

It's all been quite an ordeal for poor Flo.

But hopefully, soon she'll recover and find a new home.

In Teesdale, Castle Vets has a steady stream of patients.

Small animal vet Helen can see up to 30 a day.

I'm not feeling an obvious, a really obvious foreign body.

Tell me which toe it is.

What's just slightly worrying is there's something

within her bladder.

But she's not complaining.

The thing is, it's a fantastic job.

It's not just a job, it is a way of life as well.

Her next client is 12-week-old puppy Olive,

with owner Willow and dad Michael.

It seems Olive has already got herself into trouble.

We brought Olive in - she cut her tongue,

so they're going to stitch it up for her.

So she's getting expensive straight away.

We've got a few, don't we? Yep.

Hello.

-Hiya.

-All right?

-Yes, you?

-Yeah.

-Good.

Right...

So we've got little Olive, who's come in to have her tongue stitched

-today, is that right?

-That's right, yep.

What have you been messing with, eh?

How did you cut your tongue?

Do you know how she cut it?

-She bit it.

-Did she?

That was a silly thing to do.

SHE YELPS Oh, I know, but we need to have

a little look.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

A quick check confirms Olive needs an operation.

Well, we'll look after her today and we'll see you later.

-OK?

-Yeah.

-Okey-doke.

-Brilliant. No problems, we'll see you later.

Go on, babe.

-Bye.

-Bye.

First, she's anaesthetised.

But it's a big needle for a little dog.

SHE YELPS

Don't bite my finger, please.

Her veins are just...so tiny.

Helen sees a lot of animals with cut tongues.

Commonest reason is if they licked something sharp, like a tin can lid

or something like that.

That's the commonest reason for them

cutting their tongues, but

she could have bitten it and then the...with the canine tooth,

and then it torn through.

So basically, I'm just going to freshen up those edges a little bit.

Obviously, the anaesthetic risk is much, much greater

in...in very young animals and very old animals.

Getting the anaesthetic right is harder as well because,

obviously, the body weight is so much less, so the quantity

of anaesthetic they need

is much less.

Now the fiddly bit begins.

What I'm going to do is put a suture in...

..on this side first of all so that

we've hopefully got a bit of...

..normal shape there.

Tongues will heel very, very quickly.

And what I want to make sure I do is get the sutures in...

..tight enough, but not so tight it's

sort of going to roll the tongue up or anything, so...

One repaired tongue.

Come on, little munchkin.

20 minutes later, a few bursts of oxygen should bring Olive round.

I don't want it to bite its tongue on recovery.

Yay! Oh!

I'm happy it's awake enough now it can go back in its kennel.

I just wanted to make sure that it was coming round OK and that it was

sort of with it

before we put it back in its kennel.

Yeep.

Oh. Yeah.

You have a settle? Or are you feeling a bit groggy, a bit disorientated?

It'll take a little while for Olive to find her feet.

Out in the nearby County Durham countryside,

farm vet Richard is back on his rounds.

He often helps local farmers with sheep and cattle herd management,

and that means a lot of pregnancy diagnosis.

One, two, three, four...

She is six weeks in calf, Nancy.

-Six weeks?

-Yes.

Some farmers have turned cattle breeding into a science,

using artificial insemination and embryo transfers

to create the best possible cow for market.

It's a very useful technique because

it means that farmers can use semen

from bulls which could certainly be too expensive for them to buy.

So you can buy semen from an absolutely top quality bull

for a fraction of a percent of what he's actually worth,

what it would cost to buy him.

It gives the farmer access to genetics that otherwise

he wouldn't necessarily have access to.

Today, Richard's visiting a farmer who breeds pedigree Charolais cows

for the beef industry.

Stephen wants to breed pedigree calves from his prize cow, Abbey,

which could be worth up to £10,000 each.

The plan is to collect fertilised embryos from her womb,

which can then be implanted into his other cows.

Abbey won't carry a calf herself - her job is to be the egg donor.

So what we are going to do is we're going to scan her

and check her womb and ovaries

and in particular check that she's not in season at the moment.

Um... I'm just looking at her womb

and checking that it looks normal,

that there's no infection in there

and then I'm going to scan her ovaries.

And...

That's her left ovary there.

There is the corpus luteum, where an egg is being released.

I'm going to scan the uterus, check that's all right.

And really what I'm looking for there

is evidence she might be pregnant, though I'm sure she's not.

Obviously, she can't be. Immaculate conception and all that.

I'm scanning her right ovary now.

And that's just got a few very little follicles on.

So that's quite normal. I'm happy she's not in season.

Everything looks fine. She's not got any problems

that would interfere with her being used for embryo transfer.

Richard will control Abbey's cycle with an implant.

Make sure it's as hygienic as we can make it.

And then this is the... It's called a seeder control intravaginal

drug-releasing device.

But as you can see, it's basically a T, a rubbery T.

Those two wings hold it in the birth canal

and that tail sticks out to the back.

And it's impregnated with a natural hormone called progesterone.

Progesterone is the hormone of pregnancy.

So what it does is it will put

a block on her cycle until Steve takes it out. So basically,

what we want to do is we want to make sure

that she comes into season at the right time.

And, uh, when Steve takes that out,

she'll come into season 48 hrs after.

But Abbey's not too keen on the idea.

I'll just need a... Ooooh, poo coming.

Aaah! You lucky brute!

The next stage of the operation is -

Steve will take the seeder out, she comes into season,

she gets served.

And then a week after she's served,

she'll be flushed,

and that means that they'll collect the embryos out from her.

Those embryos will be implanted in Stephen's other cows,

who'll become surrogate mums.

So best cows often get multiple births,

so you get more better breeding cows than normal and,

hopefully, produce livestock with, you know, superior growth

and genes that will go on

and produce multiples of cows

for the beef industry right the way through.

While he's here, Richard checks up on an old friend, Izzy.

Hello.

He's grown a bit.

-It's going well. He's done really well.

-Yeah, that's great.

This calf, at one point, couldn't walk.

COW MOOS

And that's its mother.

Um, and...

So consequently, it's been on antibiotics since it was about...

-12 days old, Richard?

-Something like that.

-Ten, 12 days old.

For 60 days.

And it's absolutely fine.

You're lovely, you are.

And it looks like the feeling's mutual.

Back at base, in Barnard Castle, another toddler is feeling perkier.

Puppy Olive had a nasty cut on her tongue.

Oh, I know, but we need to have a little look.

It was tricky for vet Helen to anaesthetise such a tiny puppy.

The veins are just...so tiny.

But now it's time for Nurse Amy to prepare Olive for home.

Hello. Come on then, let's get you home.

All right.

Come on, then, missus, let's go.

Hello. Do you want to have her back?

She's pleased to see you.

If you just keep her nice and quiet tonight

and let her sleep the anaesthetic off.

She didn't have a pre-med.

So she might still be a little bit sleepy tonight.

SHE BARKS Or she might be like that.

How lovely.

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you. See you later.

-See you later.

Hopefully, Olive will keep her tongue safely

in her cheek from now on.

In Dunfermline, Megan helped re-home a batch of rescued commercial hens.

But one of them had to stay behind.

She's really limping on this left leg

Farm vet Ken operated on Flo's fragile bones to save her.

That bone is sitting pretty straight now.

Now, Flo has been released

into the vet's back garden with the other hens.

Eight weeks since she was rescued, Megan's checking her progress.

If you have a little look at her actual walking now...

She's the one that had the broken leg.

So she's been quite lame, but that's her pretty much walking normally now.

You could hardly tell that she's ever been injured.

When we look back and see what Flo was like when she came,

you know, scruffy and...

She's still really quiet, but now all her feathers have grown in,

she's looking great. Her coomb is nice and red.

And they're just...they're just normal shy hens now.

But there's still the question of who will adopt Flo

and the remaining chickens.

They're happy here to be honest. So...

They've got plenty of space, plenty of food,

plenty of people to spoil them.

But at the moment, they are just going to live it up at Hotel Inglis.