Lightning Strike: Not a Bad Way to Go

 

Lightning Strike: Not a Bad Way to Go
Dave Wright, DVM

I’ve never been struck by lightning, but I think it must be like getting kicked by an animal—you never know when it will happen.

One hot, sticky afternoon in August, a single call remained on the appointment book at our veterinary clinic—a request to castrate a pen of pigs. The farmer who owned the pigs was not going to be home until after five o’clock, so my partner and I agreed to tackle the job ourselves earlier in the afternoon. We arrived at the farm and heard the pigs snorting and shuffling in the barn. When I looked into the pen, there was a large group of fifty-pounders milling around in the dust. Nowadays, farmers neuter their boar piglets shortly after birth.

“Too bad he waited so long,” I said to my partner. “If he would have done it when they were little, it wouldn’t have been so hard on the pigs.”

“And definitely not so hard on us,” said my partner.

The sweat was already sticking to the back of my coveralls. I took a deep breath and coughed. “The faster we do this,” I choked, “the sooner we can get back into some fresh air.”

“Do you want to catch or cut?” asked my colleague.

I looked at the scars on my left hand, the result of previous surgeries like this. If the pig kicked at the same time I made my incision, I sometimes missed the pig and nicked the palm of my hand. “I’ll catch today,” I said.

I hopped over the fence and waded into the swarm of pigs. I grabbed the rear leg of the one nearest me and looked beneath its tail. “Gilt,” I said and hoisted it over the fence to the empty pen next to it. A gilt is a young female pig, and a boar is a male.

I grabbed another pig. “A boar this time,” I grunted as I pulled both back legs to my chest revealing a couple of large testicles. After two quick incisions by my partner, the boar became a barrow, and I lifted him over the fence to join his companion.

By the time we finished this admittedly barbaric procedure, we emerged from the dusty barn hot, sweaty, and thirsty.

“We’re in luck,” I said as I wiped my face with a towel. A stock tank full of clear, cool water sat just outside the barn. The hose used to fill it hung on the edge of the galvanized tank. I took hold of the hose and crimped it. “Okay. You can turn on the hydrant.”

I knelt down on the damp soil, grabbed the side of the metal stock tank, and leaned over to take a drink from the hose. What I didn’t see when I leaned my sweaty forehead over the tank, was the electric fence.

The next thing I knew, I was laying six feet from the tank staring up at the clouds.

As I lay there on the moist ground, I thought of all the animals that had died of electrocution by lightning strike.

Most farmers have insurance that covers the loss of an animal from being struck by lightning, and veterinarians are called to complete an investigation. Usually, the calls are straight forward, and the clients are honest.

But not always:

Like the time I was called to investigate a possible lightning strike at a farm I had never been to before. I approached the ramshackle farm at the end of a long, narrow lane full of potholes. A single-story house that was once white, had turned to a dull gray. The front porch slumped toward three wooden steps that emptied to a patch of dirt littered with sprigs of dandelions and thistles.

Before I turned off the ignition on my veterinary truck, a grizzled old man tumbled through the screenless screen door waving a crumpled piece of paper.

“You the vet?” he demanded as I stepped out of the truck.

“That’s right. Are you Jed?”

The old man whose wispy hair fell recklessly over a receding hairline, ignored my greeting and waved the scrap of paper in my face. “All ya hafta do is sign this here piece of paper. Insurance company said I jest need ta have a vet sign off on it—then they’ll pay up.”

“I’m afraid I’ll need to see the animal first,” I said apologetically.

Jed stuffed the paper in his pocket, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and gave me a cold stare. “One a my pigs was was kilt by lightning. No doubt about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “No problem, but I’ll still need to do a postmortem exam.”

“A what?” asked Jed. He shifted from one foot to the other like he was standing on a bed of coals.

“It’s an exam of the animal after it died.” I opened the back of my truck and showed him my necropsy knife. “I have to cut open the carcass to see if there are any other possible causes of death.”

“Suit yourself,” said Jed. “She’s right over there. I put up a fence to keep the coyotes from gettin’ her.”

Jed pointed to a rickety snow fence propped in a small circle. Twenty feet beyond the fence was a pen of razor-thin pigs lolling in the dust and nibbling on corn cobs. A faded yellow Minneapolis Moline tractor stood watch, its tires flat and ground into the soil.

I peered over the snow fence. A bleached pelvis and femur protruded from a swarm of maggots that wriggled next to a scrap of dried hide.

“When did it die?” I asked.

“Don’ know—maybe a week, maybe more.”

“Why didn’t you call earlier. It’s impossible for me to know what caused the pig’s death when everything is decomposed.”

“Didn’t know my insurance would cover it till my neighbor told me ta give ya a call. Said his insurance company paid right off the bat.”

Jed was probably talking about a more legitimate claim that I investigated several weeks earlier. There had been a booming storm the night before and our client had called early in the morning.

“I found a cow dead in my pasture this morning,” said the client. “Found her layin’ under a tree. Can you come out and help me file a claim?”

I arrived to find a classic lightning strike situation: a history of a recent thunderstorm; a cow under a tree with fresh bark split to the ground; no evidence of a struggle prior to death; a pile of fresh manure that lay directly behind the cow; and a postmortem exam that showed no significant lesions to explain the death. I completed my report and sent it to the insurance company, which paid my client promptly.

I suspect Jed would have a more difficult time collecting.

“Tell you what, Jed,” I said. “I’ll file the claim and send it to the insurance company. I’m not the one to determine if they pay or not. I just report my findings and let them decide.”

“What you gonna write?” demanded Jed.

“I’ll describe the animal the best that I can. I’ll tell them that there was lightning in the area several weeks ago, but by the time I examined the animal, the carcass was too decomposed to do a postmortem examination.”

“Think they’ll pay?” pursued Jed.

“That’s not up to me to decide,” I said, hoping to leave before an argument ensued. “Does that piece of paper of yours have the name and address of your insurance company?”

Jed pulled the crumpled paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “Who pays for the vet call?”

“I’ll bill the insurance company. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to cover my fee.”

As I escaped along the bumpy driveway, I thought of the biggest claim that I submitted in my veterinary career. A farmer called me out to examine five large beef steers that had died the night before. The differential diagnosis of acute death ran through my mind—poisoning, or dog attacks, or maybe the animals had been sick a long time and the farmer hadn’t noticed.

Several years earlier, I saw a case of blue-green algae poisoning where three steers on a pasture were lying dead next to a path leading from a green pond. It was late summer, and they had taken a big drink of water from the pond. They died so quickly that they hadn’t made it back to the barn.

In another case where several cattle died while being pastured in a grove of trees with sparse grass, the cause of death turned out to be from consuming oak seedlings. Oak toxicity can cause kidney failure, but the animals usually appear sick prior to death.

Japanese yews can cause death so quickly that the animal might still have sprigs of the evergreen plant in their mouths.

When I arrived and drove out to the pasture, five steers lay dead—all in a line like the cattle that died from consuming blue-green algae. This time there was no pond, but the dead cattle were lined up next to a barbed wire fence. When I looked closely, I found bits of wire with melted ends on the ground. The lightning had apparently struck a tree next to the barbed wire fence, the current ran along the wire, and then sparked to the steers that were standing next to it. The electricity ran through the steers to ground, killing them instantly.

Some clients are full of advice. I worked for a funeral director who ran a small herd of cattle on a pasture next to a local lake. He and I had more in common than advising on dead things. He wore an old white shirt, tattered at the collar and cuffs, similar to the flannel shirt I wore. These shirts were like old friends that we didn’t want to abandon just because of their age. They said, loud and clear, that we value comfort over fashion. I expect that we both had to hide them from our wives in the back of our closets, slipping them on in the morning before our wives were out of bed to complain.

My friend found one of his cows lying next to the shore, and since there had been a recent thunderstorm, he called to see if it might have died of lightning strike. As we hiked through the underbrush, he regaled me with stories of people who had the misfortune of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Most of them died on a golf course,” he said. Then he added a morbid warning: “Never volunteer to hold the flag.”

As we approached his cow he said, “In my experience, most people who were hit by lightning had burns on their feet. They can also have pink blotches called Lichtenberg figures. They look like feathers on the body.”

“I’ve heard stories from other colleagues,” I said, “who had clients that tried to fool them by searing the head and hooves with a propane torch to make it appear the animal had burns caused by lightning.”

I looked at the cow and its surroundings. “No evidence of burnt hooves…but it looks like this cow struggled before she died. See how the grass is matted down around her head and legs? That’s not common with lightning strike.”

“I suppose not,” he said. “If it is lightning, what do you expect to find?”

“Mostly lack of other abnormalities. I’ll check the muscles, lungs, gut, and heart. The electric shock short-circuits the heart, and it simply stops beating. Once in a while we find petechia—pinpoint hemorrhages caused by ruptured capillaries.”

I proceeded to perform the postmortem exam. I began by making a bold incision in the axilla—the armpit, lifting and reflecting the foreleg. Then I peeled back the skin to expose the chest wall and abdomen. “Nothing unusual so far,” I said.

I opened the abdomen to see the four stomachs and intestines of the cow. Still nothing.

In order to see the lungs, I had to crack the ribs. In an older cow, the bones are extremely hard. As crude as it sounds, I found that a hatchet works better than any other instrument to expose the lungs and heart.

When I reflected the chest wall I looked up and said, “I think we’ve found the cause of death.”

The lungs were so thick and consolidated that I doubt the cow could have taken a full breath of air. “Sorry to say, but it doesn’t look light lightning was her problem. Looks more like she died of pneumonia.”

“Can’t argue with that,” said the mortician. “Poor thing. I didn’t know she was sick.”

“It’s not surprising,” I said. “Sick animals on pasture can easily go unnoticed.”

Not all lightning strikes are fatal—only about ten percent in people. It is often suggested that the “blinding light from heaven” that flashed over the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus was attributed to lightning. Paul survived but had a life-changing conversion. My experience with the jolt from an electric fence did not cause a religious conversion, but those who know me best thought that a dose of electroshock therapy couldn’t hurt.

All I know is that when the electric fence grazed my forehead, I didn’t see it coming. I felt no pain, and if the shock had been enough to be deadly, I fully expect it wouldn’t have been a bad way to go.

I hope the poor critters that have been hit by lightning felt the same way.

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