Herriot’s attempts to raise Handshaw’s cow

Herriot’s attempts to raise Handshaw’s cow turn a routine recovery from milk fever into a test of veterinary judgment, confidence, and authority. The cow’s appetite and alertness return, but she remains on the floor, and each apparent remedy—calcium, a stimulant, shouting, and finally the proposed intervention of dogs—reveals how little control Herriot has over the gap between treating an illness and restoring an animal to its feet.

The milk-fever case

Siegfried Farnon sends Herriot to treat Handshaw’s cow for milk fever, a sudden calcium deficiency that affects high-yielding animals just after calving and can bring collapse followed by progressive coma. When Herriot first sees her, she is stretched motionless on her side, so still that he has to check whether she is alive. His confidence rests partly on a recent advance in veterinary practice: calcium therapy can reverse what had previously been a commonly fatal condition with striking speed.

Herriot injects one bottle of calcium into a vein and another under the skin. Handshaw helps roll the cow onto her chest, and the improvement is immediate. She begins looking around and shaking her head, and Herriot believes that, given time, he might see her stand. Other calls prevent him from waiting. He asks Handshaw to telephone if she has not risen by dinner, expecting the instruction to be merely formal; he does not think he will need to return.

The first call changes that expectation. At midday the cow is still down, so Herriot goes back and gives her another bottle of calcium. He remains relatively unworried at first, reasoning that some cases require an additional dose. But the cow is still on the ground the next day. Handshaw, standing over her with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, is gravely disappointed. The cow is chewing her cud, yet makes no effort to rise. Her continued appetite signals recovery from the immediate crisis, but it does not resolve the central problem.

The limits of diagnosis and treatment

Handshaw’s skepticism sharpens as the cow’s recovery stalls. He invokes his late father’s ability to get such animals up, a confidence that Herriot finds both touching and irritating. The case presses on a practical difficulty of farm medicine: an animal may appear to have overcome its original illness and still remain recumbent. In Herriot’s account, a milk cow that cannot get up has little future, so the distinction between recovery from milk fever and recovery of mobility carries serious consequences.

Herriot returns repeatedly. He administers more calcium, while trying to reassure Handshaw that cows sometimes remain down for a day or two. Before breakfast, after the cow has been down for forty-eight hours, another call brings the problem into sharper focus. Handshaw has poured water into her ear, following an idea attributed to his father, but she is no closer to rising. He also proposes that a supposed worm in the tail might be dealt with by cutting off the end of it. Herriot rejects both the diagnosis and the proposed mutilation, citing the cruelty of tail-cutting and a recent case brought by the R.S.P.C.A.

The evidence points away from continuing milk fever: the cow eats well and seems content. Herriot suspects posterior paralysis instead and decides there is no point in giving more calcium. He tries a stimulant injection, but privately has almost no faith in it; the decision reflects his sense that doing nothing is not an acceptable option, rather than confidence that the treatment will work. Handshaw then suggests shouting into the cow’s ear. Herriot bends down, seizes her ear, and bawls into it. She pauses her chewing, looks at him, and then resumes cud-chewing. The gesture produces no visible change, and Herriot proposes waiting another day before trying to lift her with help from the neighbors.

A communal attempt

The treatment choices are shaped by the year, 1938, and by the limits of the available equipment. Herriot contrasts his narrow options with the wider methods a veterinarian would have thirty years later: a pelvic hoist to raise a cow in a natural position, phosphorus injections, and an electric goad. In the present case, none of those resources is available to him. His professional uncertainty therefore unfolds alongside the practical scarcity of the period, not simply as a failure to recognize what is wrong.

When the cow remains down the following day, Handshaw’s neighbors gather in the yard, cheerful and ready with advice about someone else’s animal. They draw sacks beneath her body and, amid laughter and a stream of suggestions, heave together to lift her. The effort does not make her stand. She hangs placidly with her legs dangling, while Handshaw watches from beside the wall with growing gloom. Once they lower her again, the assembled farmers look to Herriot for another plan, but he has no clear next step.

Handshaw’s dog and the unresolved ending

Handshaw supplies the next proposal from the store of his father’s remedies: a strange dog, he says, would get a cow up. The neighbors agree and offer their own animals. Herriot tries to limit the plan to one dog, but his authority has dwindled, and the group seems eager to demonstrate what its dogs can do. Even the village shopkeeper pedals away at speed to fetch a border terrier.

Soon the byre is filled with snapping, snarling dogs. The cow largely ignores them, though she waves her horns at those that come too close. The final turn comes when Handshaw’s own dog returns from the fields, where he has been helping round up sheep. Small, lean, hard-bitten, and quick-tempered, he enters stiff-legged and bristling, takes in the unfamiliar pack on his territory, and attacks. The passage ends with the dogs’ confrontation underway; it does not establish whether the cow rises. The sequence leaves the central problem unresolved, setting formal treatment beside inherited farm wisdom and communal improvisation without claiming that either has yet succeeded.