This story goes in the amazing but true file.
Back in my dairy cattle days in Taranaki I got a routine call to a cow that was having calving difficulties. I was presented with a fairly small jersey cow with her tail in the air and occasionally straining. There was a bucket of warm soapy water beside her in the cow bail and the farmer was leaning on the rail beside her shaking his head. "I can't figure out what is happening inside her" he stated. This kind of comment was always received with a bit of concern on farms like this as these farmers were usually pretty good at calving their cows themselves so if they had problems we usually knew we had a difficult calving on our hands.
I lubricated and inserted my arm to see what was happening. I was pleased to find a calf coming forward but with its head turned to the side preventing a normal calving. With the right technique, which obviously the farmer didn't have, it is a relatively simple procedure to turn the head to the front and extract the calf. This I duly did. As is good veterinary procedure I then put my hand back inside the cow to check if there was another calf inside her or if there were any tears in her uterus. This is when I felt something strange. At the tip of my fingers I felt something small and hard but it slipped away from me. My arms were quite tired by this time so I removed them from the cow to allow the blood to circulate in them again and then tried again. Yes, it was still there. It felt metallic. I glanced down at my calving chains to see if one of the end links had fallen off but no, they were still intact. With an extra effort I managed to grab it between two fingers. It was definitely a link of some sort. I removed my arm and had a look at what I had hold of. It was a gold signet ring with a greenstone insert. You could imagine my suprise! I had thoughts of pearls in oysters and wondered if I had found a new commercial use for dairy cows, cultured rings, as the dairy industry was just going into a slump at a time.
I showed it to the farmer and he went pale. He looked at his hand and on his large weather beaten brown hands there was a white line around the base of one of his fingers. When he was attempting to calve the cow before I had arrived he had forgotten he had the ring on his finger and in the heat of the moment he had not noticed it had slipped off inside the cow.
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