In my career as a feedlot veterinarian, determination of cause of death was an integral part of the doctor crew's chores. I devised an extensive list with coded causes. It included everything from ACUTE PNEUMONIA and CHRONIC PNEUMONIA, BLOAT and ENTEROTOXEMIA to MALIGNANT CATARRHAL FEVER and ENDOCARDITIS. But to allow that no death went uncoded, the list concluded with UNKNOWN and OTHER.

To the credit of the first-rate feedlot doctors I worked with, these last two categories were small in number. UNKNOWN was an essential classification, however, 'cause sometimes ... ya just don't know.

Other times you know the cause of death, but it happens so seldom it doesn't justify a specific code of its own.

Say, for instance, during the night a steer escapes the pen, makes his way to the ensiled corn pit, eats himself under a ledge horn-high, it falls on him and he suffocates. You might have a general category, RAN OUT OF BREATH, but you don't.

Granted that would be a broad enough classification to include other examples like a steer that got loose in the chronic pasture and was chased by Number 2 heelers 'til he collapsed and died from exhaustion. But RAN OUT OF BREATH is awful close to QUIT BREATHING as a cause of death and not usually a specific enough explanation for the cattle feeding customer, i.e., "Well, Mr. Torluemke, you lost 36 head last week."

"My gosh, what did they die of?"

"They just quit breathin'."

SHOT was never a coded cause, although there were occasions when it was penciled in. I remember a big on-the-fight Bramer steer escaping into a neighboring suburb. We followed him with the dead wagon. He died on a front lawn.

There were also those who died of HBCV — HIT BY COMPANY VEHICLE. But to have it happen so frequently that it deserved its own code would not build customer confidence in your day-to-day operation. We didn't have a code for SCARED TO DEATH. But I remember two cases that happened as a direct result of the consulting nutritionist trying to read bunks from his Cessna 180. I simply turned them in as NUTRITIONALLY RELATED.

More comes to mind that fit in the OTHER category:

SUICIDE, LACK OF SLEEP, TANK HEATER ELECTROCUTION, CLAUSTROPHOBIA, COPENHAGEN ALLERGY, IMPERSONATION OF A GAME ANIMAL, and OLD AGE. All unusual but possible occurrences. Which just goes to show we need to leave a line in our own biography for the unexpected.