One bull for two rescues
After a largely incident-free farming life, a back country Taranaki couple found themselves both needing a helicopter rescue within weeks of each other.
Cattle breeders Lance and Janelle Downs farm on roughly
5000 hectares in an isolated part of East Taranaki and have taken the unusual step of gifting the proceeds of their first bull sold at auction next month to the Taranaki Rescue Helicopter Trust.
The gift bull is payback for the helicopter getting them both out of sticky situations within weeks of each other in
2017.
Last September Janelle got in trouble while closing a gate behind a cow that changed its mind about the direction it wanted to go.
‘‘When she jumped the gate just came flying back and hit me in the head,’’ she said.
After seeing his wife thrown four and a half metres backwards and knocked out cold with a severe head injury, Lance raced back to the house to call 111.
The ambulance came from Stratford, but could not take Janelle the hour-long drive to Taranaki Base Hospital in New Plymouth. So, even though she’s not fond of helicopters, the Taranaki Community Rescue Helicopter picked her up and got her to the hospital in eight minutes.
A couple of months later, Lance was helping to deliver a breech calf and tied a rope to the calf’s foot.
‘‘She walked forward and it just wrapped around the thumb, and it was just gone,’’ Janelle said.
Lance went in holding his hand and told Janelle he’d cut his thumb. She thought he’d ripped his nail off at first. Then Lance’s father Kevin walked in and said, ‘‘You’ll need this’’.
‘‘I said, ‘what’, and it was his thumb,’’ Janelle said.
She left their children, Ellie, now nearly 3, and Tim, now 16 months old, with Granddad – ‘‘who was in a flap because the cow hadn’t had her calf’’ – and drove Lance to the same hospital she’d been at two months before. There they were told Lance would need specialist plastic surgeons and so he was airlifted to Waikato Hospital by the rescue chopper.
‘‘They tried to stitch it back on,’’ Lance said. ‘‘That took about four hours in theatre and it didn’t work. So they took a flap [of skin] on the side of my stomach and sewed it to that.’’
After three weeks it was removed and the graft sewn back over the end of his thumb.
Gifting the proceeds from their first bull sold at the Tawanui Herefords sale was recognition the helicopter service had come in more than a little handy.
‘‘It’s pretty important to keep it in the air,’’ Janelle said. ‘‘For us rural farmers accidents happen. We’re remote, we don’t have cellphone coverage on our farm so it’s important we’ve got something that we can be confident and comfortable calling.’’ Tawanui Herefords annual bull sale, noon, September 3, 923 Wingrove Rd, with viewing beforehand.