The Gentle Barn’s Prosthetic-Legged Steer is Dead… Under Suspicious Circumstances.

Following my concerns with the Holstein cow Brianna from Skylands Animal Rescue, I thought I would bring up an old post from a couple of years ago about another bovine that was also rescued… but didn’t die of a ripe old age.

Why? Find out more below.

Gentle Barn Founder Ellie Laks announced Tuesday that Dudley, who had been having difficulty eating and defecating for a few days, died after “a ruptured ulcer tore apart his stomach.” 

“There was nothing the surgeons could do to repair it,” Laks said in a Facebook post. “I don’t know why these things happen, I don’t know why extreme loss is a part of our earth experience, but I’m so deeply grateful to have been graced by Dudley over the last two years, and if we could do it all over again, we would.”

Source for quote: Knoxville News-Sentinel “Dudley, steer with prosthetic foot and mascot of Gentle Barn in Tennessee, has died”

Let’s make one thing clear before I launch into this blog post:

I am not a fan of the Gentle Barn. As a matter of fact, I’m not a fan of any “farm animal sanctuary.” As you’ll see below, these “sanctuaries” for farm animals are really nothing more than glorified petting zoos. Some are places, however, are pure hell for animals. The abuse in such places is passive-aggressive, where sheer neglect is profound in terms of giving nutritionally-adequate feed for the animals and ensuring clean living conditions. I have yet to bring that topic up in another article at another time. 

Now that’s out of the way, this post, albeit a month late, needed to be written about Dudley, the Gentle Barn’s mascotized “rescued” Hereford steer. I had to give some thoughts as to what this bovine may have actually died of, and why the Gentle Barn may have actually lied about his death.

In order to do that, we need to start from the beginning.

In the Beginning…

According to GB, Dudley (a yearling bull at the time, prior to the rescue) was rescued with a severe infection or gangrene in his right hindfoot. This was from, supposedly (though it makes sense), baler twine wrapped around his fetlock (just above his hoof) for an extended period of time. He was found thin, and hobbling on three legs. The baler twine was wrapped so tightly around the fetlock that it completely cut off circulation. 

Let’s stop right here and think about this.

I can understand how this would happen. There are times when life on the farm gets so busy that we sometimes forget to look in on the animals less often than what most may consider “optimal.” These animals are not house pets. They usually get looked at when it’s time to feed them, which may range from once a day to every few days.

When one comes up looking quite ill or lame, occasionally can be to the point where it’s almost too late. Most of the time, it’s not: a sick or injured animal gets the necessary veterinary treatment to get it better, at least as far as how much a farmer is willing to spend on saving an animal. Bovines are not cheap, so anything that can be feasibly done to save a sick or injured animal will be done. However, when a freak accident happens or an animal goes down with an illness so quick, or, worse still, gets diagnosed with an incurable illness, that leaves the farmer with no choice but to euthanize the animal. It’s the kindest thing to do, rather than leaving the animal to suffer because “an animal doesn’t want to die.”

In this case, I can only assume why Dudley had such an unfortunate circumstance happen to him. Was the farmer really that negligent in checking his animals? Or was it more a matter of leaving far too much baler twine behind? We’ll never know. 

Just so you know, plastic baler twine is really tough stuff. It’s extremely hard to break and doesn’t decompose nearly as fast as sisal twine. It’s plastic. It remains in the ground for a very, very long time. Nasty stuff. So, when it gets wrapped around any bodily extremity, it’s so strong that it will indeed cut off the blood supply, acting like a tourniquet. The reason I know that is with this story:

Dad used baler twine as a tourniquet after dehorning steers to stem the blood flow. The only bad thing was that those steers had to be run through the squeeze chute again because the twine doesn’t fall off on its own. Finding out the hard way (poor steer[s]), if left for too long the baler twine cuts into the skull, where the skin grows over it, and the horns grow all weird too. Ick! Dad hated himself for making that dumb mistake; he really cared about those animals. So, he decided that the rubber rings used for canning jars worked best, because the rubber rots and eventually falls off on their own, and don’t cause as much gross damage as that damn plastic baler twine.

Back to the Dudlester. 

So, the bull got “turned over” to GB instead of being slaughtered. He was put through quite a bit of surgery to get the hoof amputated, and a prosthetic foot replacement put on. 

While in surgery, the bull got turned into a steer. 

From all the photos I perused on Gentle Barn’s Facebook page, all this surgery was done while Dudley was put under general anesthesia. 

The whole thing would’ve been extremely stressful on him. While I’m not a veterinarian, I’ve worked with one for a little while, long enough to understand the serious implications of putting a ruminant animal under. While it’s not impossible to do, it’s not good for them. Ruminant animals have a rumen that functions on regular contractions and burping once a minute to release the gases. Dogs, cats, and us humans do not have this forestomach (nor two additional forestomachs, the reticulum and omasum). Basically, general anesthesia disturbs normal rumen function. A ruminant can recover just fine if they’re put under once in a while–like only a few times in its entire life, if that–but not repeatedly over an extended period of time like what those vets were probably forced to do with the Dudlester. As you’ll read below, I have a suspicion that it was these many surgeries that partly resulted in Dudley’s eventual death.

The timeline for all of this, I believe, is that the bull was given to The Gentle Barn when he was ~10 months old (January 2015). Six months later (June 2015) he was brought to the Tennessee Gentle Barn sanctuary centre, being the very first resident of Gentle Barn’s Tennessee sanctuary. Every six months, he had to go in to get a new prosthetic over the next two years. Dudley died (was humanely euthanized) almost exactly two years later, in June 2017. In other words, he was 10 months old when surrendered to Ellie and the Gentle Barn crew, put through six months of multiple surgeries, and spent two years at GB Tennessee, making him three years and four months of age at his passing. He more than likely had more surgeries done to him prior to his death to fix his foot. 

That means, for two years of his life, he was in awful, unnecessary, needless chronic pain from his amputated foot… and his respectively digestive issues.

​Dudley’s Life at the Gentle Barn – The Dudley Story

​Moments up to and including Dudley’s Death

Cattle with bleeding abomasal ulcers may be asymptomatic except for intermittent occult blood in the feces, or they can die acutely from massive hemorrhage. Common clinical signs include mild abdominal pain, bruxism, sudden onset of anorexia, tachycardia (90–100 bpm), and fecal occult blood or melena that may be intermittent. Signs of blood loss are seen with major hemorrhage and may include tachycardia (100–140 bpm), pale mucous membranes, weak pulse, cool extremities, shallow breaths, tachypnea, and melena. More severe signs include acute rumen stasis, generalized abdominal pain with a reluctance to move and an audible grunt or groan with each breath, weakness, and dehydration. Melena may not be present in peracute cases, because it takes at least 8 hr for abomasal blood to be detected in the feces. As the condition progresses, body temperature drops, and the animal becomes recumbent and dies within 6–8 hr.

In general, bleeding ulcers do not perforate, and perforating ulcers do not bleed into the GI tract sufficiently to produce melena. However, hemorrhage and perforation are seen together occasionally, usually in cases that are chronic or associated with abomasal displacement.