A few years back I arrived at a farm to geld a colt.   One of the owner’s children and another from the neighborhood were hanging around, obviously curious.  I guess they were somewhere around 6 years old.  I was surprised when their parents told them to go somewhere else to play.  Apparently the surgery wasn’t something the parents wanted them to witness.   After the kids reluctantly left, I asked the parents if they might not want to reconsider.   I explained that in my experience youngsters exposed to all aspects of daily farm life grow up with pretty healthy attitudes.  The questions that come from young kids are both amazing and pointed, and can be a great learning experience about life with its sometimes raw moments that suburban kids never see.
      
            The episode reminded me of an incident in our own family’s life.   Our son was about the age of those two boys when I was called to out to see a sick horse late one afternoon.   I thought Jim might like to go with me to see what his Dad did every day.   This was to be his first farm call with me.  I knew it would just be the one stop and wouldn’t take long.   Bonnie gave her OK when I said that we’d be back in plenty of time for supper. 

            After you’ve been doctoring horses for awhile the ones that won’t make it are obvious.   To the owners he was just seemed sick.  One look told me that he was going to die.  After checking all of his vital signs, doing a rectal exam, and a belly tap, I told the owners that it looked as though he had suffered a twisted gut, that his intestine had ruptured, and that he was beyond any help, including surgery.   They were devastated but agreed that he had to be put down to spare him a long and painful death. 
 
            My son Jim is now six foot five, but at the time wasn’t up to my hip.  He had never seen a horse euthanized, but there we were.  He watched as I injected the IV solution and saw the horse sink to the ground and let go of his last breath.   I was cleaning up to go when the owners insisted on having an autopsy done.
 
            I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a horse autopsy, but it’s no small job, is a very messy procedure, and takes a solid hour.  I was a little concerned about my son’s reaction.  A few minutes before this horse was alive.  Now Jim was about to see all the horse’s insides on the outside.  It was starting to get dark, and the backhoe was on its way, and, after all, there we were.  As I made the initial incision I tried to explain to Jim what he was seeing so that it would hopefully become an anatomy lesson and not just a memory of a big stinking mess.

             “Now here’s the heart, see how big it is?  Every time it squeezes, blood is pushed up into this big artery called the aorta.   Look!  I think it must be two or three times as big as our garden hose. What do you think?   See how the big pink lungs sort of cradle the heart?  Over here is the stomach, and look, way up here are the kidneys.   See how this small tube runs from each kidney down to the bladder?”

             I thought that things might get a bit too much when we got to the intestines, but, as I said, there we were.  I had to pull yards of gut out and onto the grass to find the point of rupture, and there it was, way back in the large intestine.  I pointed out where one section had turned blue black, and finally had split.  All this time I was worried that Jim would be totally grossed out and maybe never be the same again, but he seemed pretty interested.   From the corner of my eye I noticed that the owners were slowly backing away.   They were probably wondering how all that stuff could fit in one body.   Jim and I were late for supper that night.

            Jim never seriously considered being a vet, and instead became a boat captain.     As he grew up, he’d go on occasional calls with me and watch wounds get sutured, stallions neutered, and mares bred.  Questions came up and were answered on the spot.  I don’t think it hurt him a bit. A few years ago it all came back around when Bonnie and I joined Jim on one of his Alaskan ecology cruises.   We caught some halibut and salmon, and our son was the one on the crew who was by far the handiest with gutting and cleaning the fish.

            I sometimes wonder if my daughter, Tally, more hard wired for this kind of thing, got her start in the healing arts by riding on calls with me.  She never really went through the “Oh. Yuk!” stage because of what she saw at an early age.  Although I don’t remember it, she tells me that she also watched me do an autopsy when she was five, and was left with a sense of wonder about the body.
   
            I think that the healthiest place a boy or girl can grow up is in the country.   Don’t deny your kids the chance to experience it all, from birthing through all the messes that our animals get into, and finally, when the time is right, to be there for euthanasia at life’s end.  It can all be an incredible education for them.