During the course of a day, I'll quite often come across a young high school kid who will tell me that they want to be a Vet. Then they'll ask me what they need to do. I usually tell them to take a lot of math and science classes, and to make sure they get good grades in those classes. "Oh." They'll say in a depressed voice. "Maybe I don't want to be a Vet. Why does a Vet need to be good at math?"
Well, I have one client that every year will bring her steers to me to castrate. Wait did I say steers? Haven't steers already been castrated. The answer to that question should be a simple yes.
Unfortunately, she somehow seems to always miss one of the nuts on about half of the "steers" that they banded. Sometimes they've actually missed them both.
Every year I'll patiently tell her that when she bands her bull calves that she needs to make sure she counts to two, as there are two nuts and she needs to get them both in the sack before applying the band.
Every year she has a new excuse too. One year it was "I had my husband do them." Another year it was "I really thought I did count to two on all of them." One year it was "Those little buggers always squirm so much that I can't tell." This year it was "I had my son do them."
You see there is higher math involved in Veterinary work, you need to at least be able to count to two. Apparently it's more difficult than I was led to believe as a kindergartner.
I guess there is one other possible explanation. I recently had a different gentleman bring me a "steer" with the same problem. He said he had banded it himself when it was young. But when it started trying to ride his heifers he ran it in and checked it. Sure enough there was still one nut there. His explanation - "I forgot to check for that third nut when I banded them. Seems like every year we have a couple calves that must be born with three nuts 'cuz after we've already banded them, they end up still having one." Yeah, I'm sure that's the problem. They had three nuts to start with.
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