It’s the Pitts: The Eyes Have It

by Lee Pitts

When pinkeye raged through my kindergarten class, we all looked like a bunch of crybabies who’d been ballin’ our eyes out because our class hamster, Hieronymus, died of suspicious causes. 

Mothers back then were pulling their kids out of class faster than an Arizona roadrunner with its tail-feathers on fire, and pretty soon, the weepy-eyed teacher and I were the only ones who showed up for school. 

So I know what the pinkeye calves are experiencing right now in my neck of the woods.

We had a weird year of rainfall. We didn’t get very much but what we did get was timed perfectly so now the rye grass is as tall as I’ve ever seen it and the seeds and chaff are eye-high to the calves. 

The face flies are also thicker than bedbugs in a bunkhouse, so I’m starting to see little white spots in my eyes everywhere I look.

I’ve tried everything in the book to rid my herd of the peeper-problem, from buying goggle-eyed Hereford bulls to actually injecting milk into a calf’s eye according to the theory the antibody police would rush to the scene of the crime. 

This last solution was recommended to me by an old cowboy and his idea seemed to work, but I always got a little squeamish performing the procedure. 

I’ve used dust bags, pour-ons, fly control, vaccines, etc., but the only thing that worked 100 percent of the time was to catch the pinkeye early, dust the calves eyes with magic powders from my vet and then cover the eye with a Levi or Wrangler patch.

I glued the eye patches on with the back-tag glue they use at auction markets. 

I’m sure you’ve seen 20 or 30 head enter an auction ring and a savvy buyer will indicate he wants one head taken off, usually because he spotted a calf with a little round spot of white in its eye. 

In this case, the female clerk – it’s always a female clerk – who is writing down the price and the buyer as she counts the number of head in the ring while also checking for a bad eye, will reach for a back tag, put a glomp of glue on the back to give it weight for better aerodynamics and then throw it 20 feet and it will land squarely on the right calf’s back where it will stay for 100 years. 

I’ve seen plenty of yearlings headed for the feedlot with a big circle of dried-up glue around one or both eyes long after the patch has rotted away, dooming the cattle to buyer’s scorn and a lower price. 

The worst case I ever saw was a pen of stockers that had been on carrots, as is custom in my part of the world. Besides giving them an orange butt, 50 percent of those calves had the distinctive circle of glue around one or both eyes. 

So much for the theory carrots are good for your eyesight.

Another problem with patches is some men and women are such good cattle persons, they don’t use up all of their old jeans making patches, while others, like myself, have a big problem because my wife will only buy me two pair of Wranglers per year which doesn’t even come close to meeting my herd’s pinkeye needs. 

This is a dead giveaway when comparing yourself to your fellow cattlemen. 

If they are wearing new – or nearly new – jeans to work cows or build fence, it means they have a pinkeye problem and they are trying to catch up by having to buy way more jeans per year than they can hardly afford.

In my research, I’ve found a good cattlemen should wear out two pair of jeans per year for every 100 cows he or she owns. This is what I famously named the “jeans-to-pinkeye ratio.”

Wrangler and Levis could save as all a fortune if they’d just come out with a new product – fairly priced packages of pinkeye patches that don’t leave any residue. But they probably won’t because they’d probably sell a lot fewer jeans as a result.

I’m currently attempting to get a $1 million grant from either Wrangler or Levis in order to do further research to determine which brand of jeans works better than the other.