The Dealer did several double takes when flicking through a number of recent regional veterinary lab reports.

The monthly reports give great detail and insight into the cause of deaths into animals and often have a quirky story or two buried in their pages.

However, The Dealer didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he read that several animals had died from various ailments and that said animals had a “history of sudden death”.

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The Athlone lab examined three lambs that were submitted, all of which had “a history of sudden death at pasture”.

The same lab “examined a four-year-old cow with a history of having been found dead”. The last time The Dealer checked, sudden death or death itself were well past being symptoms of any disease or ailment.