27.10.04

The village we went to this morning had another visitor working in the kabelli. I abandoned our sitting and waiting team and ran over to watch his more interesting work when I saw him slide on a plastic glove all the way up to his bicep. It went right over his button-up shirt and almost to his vest. He was standing behind a cow who was in very tight twig pen. With his bare hand he lifted the cow's tail so she looked like she was giving the poop signal. Then he reached his gloved hand into her anus all the way up to his elbow. Wow. The cow was bothered at first, but once he got far enough in there, she didn't move much.

What was he doing?

Palpating the uterus to see what stage of heat the cow was in.

How could he tell?

She was in the last stage of heat because her uterous was large and engorged.

What was he going to do?

Artificially inseminate her. Did I want to watch.

Very much.

He withdrew his arm and flicked off some of the sticky brown that covered it. He carefully took off his long plastic glove and blew it up a little to keep everything separated, then tied it to the twig cow cage for further use. I followed him up to his office. He bent over a big round cylinder marked "Liquid Nitrogen," loosened the lid, and pulled out one of four little straws the size of little coffee cup stirrers. I was surprised by how tiny they were. He massaged it in his hands, warming it up, then clipped off one end. A milky white drop hung on the end, kept there by surface tension.

Do you know what this is?

Uh, bull sperm, right?

It is the insemination.

He dropped the straw into a larger metal straw, "the gun," about the same diameter as a softdrink straw, but almost two feet long, and we went back outside to the unsuspecting cow. Standing behind her, the vet donned his long soiled glove again, while holding the sperm gun in his mouth. Yes, he held it between his teeth like some people might a rose. Wow.

This part was tricky. He really needed three hands. I wasn't wearing a glove and was expecting to have to dash back over to the team to wrap a measuring tape around a little kid's head at any moment, so I didn't volunteer. With his bare hand, he lifted the tail again. In went the gloved hand. The cow kicked. The cow kicked hard and was knocking out the cross-bars that held her in. I grabbed them and stuck them back in place and got a poop wad on my hand. Then the bare hand retrieved the insemination from between his teeth and poked it in the cow's other opening. Oooh, she didn't like that. She really kicked then.

But the worst part only took a few seconds, and he was withdrawing everything and saying, "Finished!"

We went in and both washed our hands. This is a substation, he told me, but he lives in Soddo, though he was trained up at Lake Tana and then in Debre Zeit. How much does this cost, I asked. For the government, 35 birr, he said. For the farmers here, only 2 birr. Seventeen cents. Wow.