Read Online The Gift of Pets: Stories Only a Vet Could Tell by Bruce R. Coston - Free Book Online

apparatus. When he was satisfied that all was in order, he directed the workers to bring the mare into the arena and then positioned me to one side. In my arms I held the odd paraphernalia he had assembled. The effect of the receptive mare on the amorous stallion was akin to adding jet fuel to a Boy Scout’s campfire. He began to dance and whinny, his neck flexed so tightly that his chin nearly brushed his chest, sweat quickly springing to his neck and sides. It was only with the greatest of difficulty that the frantic groom could maintain any control at all on the glistening horse as he approached the mare.
    When it was clear that the stallion was about to commence operations, Dr. Evers called me close and took from me the six-pound water balloon. With one hand, he grabbed the stallion’s thrusting equipment and diverted it into the lubricated plastic tube he held in the other. That’s what that thing is for! There was intense activity for a few seconds, some loud grunting, and then the stallion was backing away. It was perhaps the most intense, frenetic, and injury-prone event I had ever witnessed. If these two horses were too valuable to risk injury doing a natural breeding, it made me wonder about the value of the veterinarian who had clearly risked life and limb to achieve an artificial one.
    Dr. Evers turned on his heels, cradling the contraption carefully in his arms like a newborn. The test tube was now full of a very valuable thick fluid, which he took to a table on which he had set up a makeshift laboratory with a microscope, several test tubes, slides, and papers. For a few minutes, he looked carefully through the microscope’s eyepieces, evaluating the shape, number, and motility of the great horse’s sperm. He even let me look through the microscope at the millions of squirming tadpoles while he made some notes on a pad of paper.
    He then sucked up the fluid in a syringe, which he attached to a three-foot-long thin plastic pipette. Guiding the advancement of this tube into the mare’s uterus with a gloved arm inserted into her, he had me infuse the entire aliquot of semen through the tube, depositing it just where it needed to be. It was a thrilling drama for me to play even the smallest of parts in.
    In the truck again, Dr. Evers turned to me. “Any questions?”
    Any questions? I was brimming with them. Everything that had just happened was completely new to me. Why let the stud mount the female at all if you were trying to minimize the risk of injury? What were you looking for when you studied the sperm under the microscope? How long did the sample remain viable? How were you able to find the right place to deposit the sample in the mare? But my mind froze. I simply could not organize my questions into a logical sequence. And when I opened my mouth, the question that actually came out was one I had not even considered.
    “How could you tell when the stallion was … you know … done?”
    Dr. Evers’s head sank in apparent disbelief tainted with what seemed like disappointment and he shook it slowly. “You just know,” he said quietly. “You just know.”
    The next job was to geld a young horse on the same farm. We drove the quarter mile to the next barn on a tree-lined lane between beautifully groomed paddocks outlined by gleaming white four-rail fences. We pulled up in the stone-paved semicircular driveway and stopped under the heavy beams that supported the overhang by the front door of the barn’s stone facade.
    Carrying the necessary equipment down the wide aisle of the barn, whose stall doors bore brass nameplates announcing the four-word names of the horses within, a realization dawned on me. The gulf between these horses and the somnolent animals I was used to dealing with at camp, and between this rarefied air and the camp’s pole barn constructed with rough-hewn creosoted two-by-sixes, was akin to the space between South Central L.A. and Buckingham Palace. I knew nothing of the world