Tales from a Young Vet Read online

  There were about ten gorillas in each enclosure and each keeper was in charge of just two or three. Gorillas were prized and well looked after here, and it was clear how invested each keeper was in their gorillas. They all had names and individual characters, and just hearing the keepers talk about them made them seem uncannily like humans.

  We made lots of visits to the gorilla enclosure, to give the keepers advice on usually very minor ailments. While other departments would ask the vet for advice on obvious problems, the gorilla department called the vet for everything, including minor scratches.

  Nothing would go unnoticed, and they received the very best of food and health care. If a particular gorilla seemed a little depressed one day it was an immediate cause for concern. Keeping them well and happy was paramount.

  When I was there one of the gorillas had an autoimmune problem with her eyes and she needed drops. The keepers had trained her to tilt her head for the drops when they put a hand diagonally up to the bars. She would tilt her head the way the hand was tilted. As a reward she got her favourite Bombay mix. I was seriously impressed at how clever she was, but I was told it strictly was not a ‘trick’ and that they only taught things like this when absolutely necessary in order to help the animals.

  On my last day we darted a rhino that had some ongoing problems with sores that weren’t healing well. The zoo had five black rhinos, which was exciting as I had only ever worked with white rhinos in Africa, although I knew that they were pretty similar. The only difference, according to Jacques, was that the black rhinos were slightly more unpredictable.

  Jacques liked to tell a story about when he was working in a game capture team before I met him. They were releasing a black rhino onto a reserve and everything had gone smoothly. The rhino had been moved and woken up and had run off over a hill. Jacques was involved in packing up and was just loading the last bits of equipment onto the back of the bakkie when suddenly one of his colleagues yelled, ‘Get in!’ Jacques turned around to see the black rhino that had just been released charging back over the hill in their direction. Jacques’ colleague had fired up the bakkie and started to pull away as Jacques was sprinting towards it. He dived onto the flatbed at the back and pulled up the tailgate just in time for this rhino to thump hard into where his legs had been dangling just seconds before. It was a story Jacques liked to repeat, to reinforce how dangerous black rhinos can be. Had it been a white rhino, he said, it would have just run off and left them alone, but black rhinos are far more irrational and likely to charge.

  The rhino I was dealing with now was in a shed, so was unlikely to charge, although we still had to treat it with great caution and respect. Up close these creatures are awe-inspiring, and I never tired of seeing the size of them or their extraordinary horns.

  The sores on this rhino, probably the result of pressure from brushing against the walls of the enclosure or bathing in the concrete-lined wallowing holes, needed to be cleaned and a cream dressing re-applied. The first dart didn’t discharge, which was a bit of a blow, as until it discharged, no one apart from the vet in charge could go into the area. The dart contained drugs that were potentially fatal to humans if absorbed into the system, something I knew all too well after my close call with a dart during my work experience in the game reserve in South Africa four months earlier.

  The difference in health and safety rules between the two countries was like light and dark.

  While the vets in the reserve where I’d worked had been reasonably careful, Thys had loaded the dart with the drugs, without donning safety goggles or gloves, as I stood next to him. I had stepped back and told him that what he was doing was dangerous and he said, with questionable logic, that when he didn’t wear safety protection he was more careful.

  In England, no one apart from the vets was allowed within ten metres of the drug. As a consequence we had to stand around in the cold while the dart was being loaded and fired, and wait until it had fully discharged.

  Finally, after a very chilly half an hour, the dart discharged and another twenty minutes later the rhino became sleepy. Pulling him over was hard. Ropes were put around his legs with about ten of us on each rope, but he was fighting the anaesthetic so we were being dragged rather than making any real headway.

  After ten very tiring minutes he finally went over and I was allowed to get up close to him to help with the treatment. He was soon sorted out and back on his feet, but somehow, without having to run through snake- and tick-infested bush surrounded by wild lions and goodness knows what else, it was a different and more mundane experience for me than it had been in South Africa. I had enjoyed my work in the wild so much more. There was more drama, more danger, more adrenaline and excitement – working with the animals in their natural habitat was exhilarating. I realised how incredibly lucky I had been to have had that experience.

  Nonetheless, I enjoyed my week with the zoo vets and I would happily have stayed longer. It was nice to stay with Ross, too, and to see a little of his student life. He had a good friend, Becky, and I left my car at her house every day, so on the way home I’d pop in and have a cup of tea with her.

  The only downside at Ross’s house was the rotten internet connection. So when I got back home on the Friday evening I couldn’t wait to talk to Jacques and tell him all about the work I had been doing, especially with the rhino. Jacques didn’t like the idea of animals in captivity, but I take the view that zoos are a vital source of education and conservation. It’s undeniable that most people will never see these animals in the wild, or understand how magnificent they are, without zoos.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Stella the Heifer

  I peered over the pen door and then stepped back rapidly.

  Ears back and chin raised, the woolly alpaca on the other side didn’t look happy, and I knew what was coming next.

  ‘Lucy, I can’t go in there, she’s going to spit at me.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, she’s just a bit worried. Honestly, look how cuddly she is. Just don’t look her in the eye, it might alarm her.’

  Cautiously, I opened the pen door and stepped inside, while staring pointedly at the wall and not the cross little alpaca inside.

  Pfffffpth.

  A lump of something green and pungent hit the front of my overalls.

  I jumped back out of the pen.

  ‘She spat at me! I knew she was going to. And you said she wouldn’t.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘Well, why do you think I got you to go into the pen first?’

  It wasn’t the most auspicious introduction to farm medicine week. We were in the Royal Veterinary College’s farm department, where they’d just built a hospital ward. Until then the farm department had been forced to share the stables, but now they had their own shiny new ward. Among the first occupants were two alpacas, Coco and Chanel. Coco was a young alpaca, known as a cria, and she had broken her leg. She was a valuable alpaca and her owner didn’t want her to be put to sleep, so she had come in to have a metal plate and pins put in. As Coco was so young, and alpacas are herd animals, the farmer who owned her had sent Chanel along to keep her company, and she was the one being decidedly grumpy.

  Coco was making a good recovery and in normal circumstances she might already have gone home, but the winter’s heavy flooding was still causing mayhem in Kent, so the owner had decided to pay for them to board at the hospital, rather than keep her at home on his waterlogged farm. It wouldn’t be good for Coco’s leg if she was slipping around in the mud, so she was being treated to a long convalescence.

  We had to check on Chanel and Coco every morning, and today it was my turn. Unlike some of the others in my group, especially Lucy and Grace, I hadn’t had a lot of experience with alpacas. I had heard that they could be sweet-tempered, easy animals. But Chanel, who was behaving like an over-protective nanny, was beginning to convince me otherwise.

  I could see that alpacas behaved a bit like horses, putting their ears forward when they were happy or interested and
back when they were upset or annoyed. Chanel was obviously very annoyed, because her ears were almost flat – she was getting ready to spit again.

  I backed off until she had calmed down, and Lucy, having laughed at my mishaps with them, offered to teach me how to handle them.

  Apparently the proper way to restrain an alpaca is to go up to it and hug its very long neck, which causes it to stand still (probably in the hope that you’ll let go), so that a second person can then put a head collar on it, a bit like on a horse. I thought Lucy was having me on when she told me to hug them, but when she finally convinced me she wasn’t I followed her instructions, feeling like a complete idiot, and to my amazement it worked perfectly. I can’t say that Chanel enjoyed the hug, and to be honest it wasn’t my favourite moment either, but she stood stock still as Lucy put her collar on and then led her off. With Chanel out of the way I was able to check on Coco, who seemed like a sweet little thing, a lot more cheerful than her minder.

  My encounter with the alpacas was the start of a cheerful and very pleasant week. Having got their own hospital ward, the joke was that the farm department didn’t actually have that many cases in to fill it. We expected to have to bridge the gaps with seminars and private study sessions but in fact we were lucky – ours was a relatively busy week with a few interesting cases.

  The previous week had also been farm medicine, but for this the five of us in my group were billeted in a large house in Kent. It was a lovely house, but with very little furniture, so we felt we were rattling around in it, living out of suitcases, with nowhere to put anything.

  We spent our week out and about on the farms, all of them knee-deep in mud, doing vaccinations and health checks as well as calf-scoring, a system designed by Winconsin University in which you score each calf between 0 and 3 on nasal discharge, eye discharge, faecal consistency, coughing and temperature, to get a total that helps you assess the general health of the calf. We also did a bit of foot-trimming and some James Herriot-style ambulatory calls: seeing individual cows that have specific problems, such as being off their food, or needing a partial foot amputation.

  One dark morning Lucy and I got up at an unearthly hour to pregnancy scan twenty cows and synchronise the hormonal cycles of five others so that the farmer would know when to inseminate them. After a very chilly and muddy four hours we spent the rest of the morning sitting in the kitchen trying to warm up over several cups of tea.

  That afternoon we went on call-outs with Roger, one of the farm vets from the practice, to farms that wanted us to check over a few cows or needed some advice, but as we drove through one of the very deep ‘puddles’ in a dip in the road, icy water suddenly gushed out of the glove box onto Lucy’s lap. Lucy shrieked, but Roger had to keep going to find a place to get off the road. By the time we stopped Lucy was soaked and freezing cold, and steam was pouring out of the air-conditioning vents. I’ve never been more grateful for being in the back of a car.

  Amazingly the engine was all right and we drove back to the house so that Lucy could change. When we got back to the vet practice, Roger began mopping up the car with towels and having a bit of a panic about how to tell his boss, since the car belonged to the practice. We gave him a hand and after ten minutes spent clearing the worst of it up he decided that the car didn’t look too bad, and that he’d keep quiet and hope the whole incident would pass unnoticed. We thought that might be a tiny bit optimistic, given that the front footwell, formerly pale grey, was now a dark sludge colour.

  At the end of the week Lucy came home with me and we rode the horses, me on Tammy, who was in a reasonably cooperative mood, and Lucy on Elli, who was good as gold. Lucy loved riding; she’d had lessons as a child and riding for her was always a real treat. Afterwards we went out and looked around the shops before going to a bar for cocktails. I invented an incredible one after sweet-talking the barman into making it for me – orange juice, cranberry juice, pineapple juice and Amaretto. It was delicious. I got him to taste it, and he agreed and even said he might put it on the cocktail list, although he had second thoughts when I insisted he call it ‘The Jo’.

  Lucy left by train the next morning while I went back to the stables to spend some more time with Tammy and Elli before heading back to Welham Green for farm medicine week. It had been several weeks since I was last there, and I’d missed college and all my friends. As I carried my bag into the house I yelled out to see if any of the boys were home.

  James was there, having supper with his girlfriend Hannah, so I joined them for a cup of tea and a chat. I hadn’t seen either of them for weeks. They were in the same rotation group and they’d just been on an equine rotation. No sign of Kevin and John, but Andrew appeared later that evening, back from a week working with a small vet practice in his home town.

  As the four of us sat and talked it dawned on me that this – my life at college, my student world – would soon be over. Soon I would have to decide where to go and what kind of job I wanted. And I still had no idea – farm, equine, small animal, wildlife? I hoped the coming months would help me to come to a decision. One by one all my friends were making their choices – James sounded pretty certain and Lucy had chosen her next step. She wanted to do farm work and had applied for a farm vet internship. She had a clear vision of what she wanted: a life in the country, work with farm animals and a dog of her own to enjoy the outdoors with her. I wanted that kind of clarity, too, but I wasn’t there yet.

  That night I lay awake for a couple of hours, thinking about choices and the future. If I graduated as a vet, would I stay in England or go to join Jacques in South Africa? I couldn’t imagine being so far from my family, and goodness knows what I would do with the horses, and yet I loved Jacques and I loved the work out in Africa, with animals in the wild, and on the big, dusty farms. Eventually I fell into a restless sleep, still puzzling over where my life would go in the coming months.

  The next morning I was bleary-eyed, but a hot shower got me going and I headed off to the farm department to meet the others in my rotation group. I was excited about farm medicine week because I enjoyed farm work and I knew I still had a lot to learn, so I was ready to get stuck in. Although I’d done a lot of farm work with Thys in Africa, that was population health, and what I hadn’t done a lot of was clinical one-to-one work with farm animals. One-to-one work is fairly uncommon these days. Most problems are resolved in advance through welfare precautions or are diagnosed at a point where it’s not economical to save the animal, but some farm animals do still need clinical treatment – either because their owners don’t want to give up on them or because the condition has been caught early enough – and this was our chance to get involved with that side of farm work.

  Our first new case was Chicken, a sheep whose full name, for reasons no one could discern, was Chicken Little. Chicken was a chunky older chap belonging to a ruddy-faced farmer who clearly regarded each of his animals as his personal pets. We could only imagine that he’d let a small child do the naming!

  ‘Can you save him?’ he asked anxiously, scratching his head. ‘I believe we can,’ James, the clinician, told him. ‘He’s got a good chance. It’s one of the more common cases we see referred here and we’ll do our best for him.’

  Chicken had a blocked bladder. Male sheep and goats that are allowed to get fat can easily develop bladder stones that can block the urethra, especially if they have been castrated, because castration removes the hormonal influence that allows the urethra and penis to grow to their full size. The passage that the urethra follows in male sheep and goats isn’t just straight from the bladder, around and out through the penis; it goes backwards and forwards in an ‘S’ shape so the stone can easily get stuck somewhere along the route. When this happens, it blocks the flow of urine and the sheep becomes very ill. It will appear restless, dribble urine, show signs of being in pain and, if the bladder bursts, it will die.

  The way to deal with this differs depending on the individual. Sometimes the stone is stuck at the tip
of the penis, which can be fixed by cutting off the urethral process at the tip. More commonly, though, we need to take them to surgery to flush out the stone and fit a tube leading out through their abdomen, bypassing the urethra so that the urine drips on the floor through the tube. This process is called a cystostomy, and it allows the inflamed urethra time to heal.

  Sometimes the stone has already passed, but the inflammation around where the stone was stuck can cause spasms, which can be treated with medication. This was the case with Chicken. He went in for surgery to have a cystostomy tube fitted and we discovered that the stone had gone but his urethra was very inflamed.

  Poor old Chicken was incredibly stoical about the whole thing, but he had clearly been having a pretty miserable time. Over the next few days, as the pain and inflammation cleared, he became much more cheerful, and once his tube had been removed and the opening closed, he was able to go home in the back of his happy owner’s truck.

  Abigail the Jersey cow had been admitted on the day that Chicken left. She was lovely – a perfect example of a neat brown cow, and with her huge eyes and soft ears she was undoubtedly a glamourpuss in the cow world – but she had a serious stomach problem that is, sadly, all too common among dairy cows.

  A cow has four stomachs and the fourth is the abomasum, which, like human stomachs, holds all the stomach acid necessary for breaking down food. The abomasum is small and it normally sits to the right of the rumen, the first and largest of the stomachs, held in place by the rumen’s size and weight. If for any reason – illness, a change in diet – the rumen is a bit small, the abomasum, which tends to fill up with gas, can float out like a balloon and get wedged on either the right or left of the abdominal cavity. This is known as a displaced abomasum.