Back when I was just a young kid, my uncle owned a dairy farm. Every summer I would go down for 2 weeks and spent some "quality time" down on the farm. It was usually pretty fun getting up at 4 a..m. and milking cows all morning, but I shall get to the point.

One of the cows was just laying in the stall one morning (4 a.m.!) and couldn't get up. My uncle felt around on her stomach and informed me that he was going to call the vet and for me to continue on down the line, and he would get back with me when the vet came. Now usually cows are pretty dispensable when they get sick, but this cow was worth quite a bit because she was a good breeding cow, and she was the mother to several good milking cows. Normally he would have just shot her and taken her down to the processor, but hey, hes a sentimental guy.

The vet came about 2 hours later and by then the cows stomach(s) had absolutely blown up about 5 times as big as it should be. Not only was the cow sick, but the milk she had produced had caused even more bloating. The cows just laying they moaning and mooing, obviously in a pretty substantial amount of pain. The vet said that she had probably gotten an imbalance of microbes in her stomach(s), and the main stomach, called the rumen, was obviously bloated and was in danger of rupturing.

He felt around on her abdomen a bit more and then ran out to his truck. He took out a section of 3" diameter hose about six feet long and began shoving it down the cows throat. As soon as the hose hit the rumen, a friggin gyser shot out the exposed end of the hose. A green/black fluid shot out at mach 5, completely covering the vet, my uncle and the entire dairy floor of the stall. Lucky me had been shoveling cow crap into the drainage line and missed the brunt of the explosion. This concoction smelled like some kind of rotted lawn compost heap, with a nice coating of mucos pond water. Now dairy farms aren't the best smelling places in the world to begin with, but this just absolutely reaked.

The vet starts hacking up his breakfast, which in turn, my uncle drops over unconcious, strinking his head on the stall floor. My uncle, for the record, is about 6'4 240 pounds, and he dropped like a dress on prom night. Now a cows stomach roughly holds 50 gallons at a time, and this thing was swollen up pretty good, so I figure, at a minumum, 40 gallons of cow puke shot out of that hose at around 50 miles an hour. You do the math.

So fast forward about an hour:

I now am operating a pressure washer, wearing a make shift bio hazard suit, my uncle is nursing a nice concussion, the vet is leaving his bill for $75.oo., the cow is standing there like nothing happened.

Two things I learned are this.

#1 Vets don't make NEAR enough money.

#2 Farmers don't get near enough respect for all the crap they do so your kid can have some nice cold milk to put on his cocoa puffs every morning.

~Jim B. ex-farmhand.