SEVERAL MONTHS into my final semester as a
zoology major at UMass, I was confronted by an assignment to
study and to demonstrate to my classmates a metabolic topic:
specifically, something called urinalysis. Perhaps shyness, or
perhaps a recognition that none of my lab group could produce
the volume of urine that would be required to satisfy the needs
of this task, led me to embark on a search for urine that wound
up in the barn of one amused Hadley dairy farmer.
Rolling into the farm on a bicycle, my presence, I am sure, was the occasion for barely suppressed hilarity. "Sir," I asked, "might I be able to borrow about a liter of urine from one of your cows?" As a city boy, I had not quite realized that each of those cows would produce liters in a day. To me, cows produced milk, and I really hadn't thought about the rest of their production.
In 1975, the fields along the south side of Route 9 were still planted in rotations of corn or hay. The sawtooth profile of the Holyoke range loomed over the open fields, untouched by the concrete wonder of the several malls now firmly planted in the landscape. Route 9 was not the highway it now is, and travel to and from the area by bicycle was challenged by free-roaming farm dogs, more so than by vehicular traffic.
Exactly how does one obtain a dollop of urine from the back end of a cow? I believe that I was armed with sneakers and a mayonnaise jar: the former to speed up and down the barn whenever a tail raised in signal of the impending act; the later to provide a sufficiently wide neck to corral the splashing stream of urine. The morning after my initial scouting expedition, in any case, I arrived to be greeted by a farmer and several of his disbelieving friends and farmhands, and to be escorted into the barn to meet the cows.
The first tail went up, at least the twentieth cow down the line, and I raced off. My footsteps caught the attention of that cow, who rolled those big eyes back at me and shut off the stream of urine as my jar and I arrived. Smiles and chortles, not polite applause, came from the other end of the barn. Another tail went airborne back the other way . . . and I raced off to meet the same end. The stream ceased the instant my jar was in position. Five raised tails, five rolling sets of brown eyes, and more laughter met my efforts over the next several minutes.
Finally, a cow bred of less modesty than her neighbors allowed me to fill the jar, my sleeves, and the tops of my sneakers.
I talked with the farmers that morning and shared with them the rationale for what we did. They laughed with me and were pleased to see the college boys taking an interest in the dairy business, albeit a peculiar interest, it seemed to them. The experiment later that day was also a success. No one questioned why the urine was not performing exactly as the dipsticks and the histology illustrations all designed for research on human metabolism predicted. But where on earth did one get a liter of pee? When I left the valley later that spring, knowing more about cows and having made friends with a small mix of farmers delighted with my naive enthusiasm, I'd learned a lesson found nowhere in the syllabi.
John Hermanson '75 teaches at the Cornell University College
of Veterinary Medicine.
