by Jo Hardy
I lifted Pepper gently out of his box. He was a lovely grey-and-white cat and he sat patiently as I examined him – until I got to his back leg, at which point he hissed and swiped a paw at me. A closer look revealed several skin-deep wounds.
The thing about cats is, they have a life of their own away from their owners and you simply don’t know what’s happened to them. Traffic accidents, fights and falls can all cause injuries, so all we can do is try to piece together the story, imagining what might have gone on, but never really knowing for sure.
‘These wounds aren’t too deep, but they must hurt,’ I said. ‘I’ll clip the fur around them and clean them with some antiseptic. He’ll be a bit sore for a couple of days, but they’ll soon heal.’
I sent Pepper home with some pain relief and antibiotics. The wounds were almost certainly contaminated, either from when he sustained them or through his licking them since. His owner was relieved and, feeling guilty for not recognising he was injured immediately, promised to make a big fuss of him while he recovered.
The hospital for inpatients at Dacre House is a room with cages along one wall and shelves along the opposite wall packed with newspapers, blankets, litter trays, food bowls and all the other items animals might need.
As the on-call vet you don’t have to stay overnight, but you do need to make regular checks on the animals. That weekend there was just one inpatient, a cat called Bobby. Bobby was a timid young Ragdoll cat, blue-eyed and handsome but not keen on attention; he had been hiding at the back of his cage for his entire stay so far. The nurses had created an upturned cardboard box with a hole cut in the front, which he could make into a hiding space to feel more secure. He had been admitted over the weekend for careful monitoring and treatment, clearly unwell, with a temperature that was through the roof, at 40.5 degrees. He hadn’t eaten for several days, which meant he was now becoming dehydrated and was losing weight. He had a very swollen lip on the right side, and it was difficult to tell whether there was a bad infection and inflammation there or whether it was an infected tumour. The plan was to stabilise his health over the weekend, starting him on intravenous fluids and antibiotics and feeding him high-calorie supportive food, then, if he was in better health on Monday, he would have a short anaesthetic to take a biopsy of the lip.
I checked on him at about 8.30 that evening, as I was leaving the practice after seeing Pepper, then I popped back at 11.30. Bobby was settled and calm, so I told him I’d be back in the morning and went home to get some sleep, hoping there would be no overnight calls.
Thankfully there weren’t, but as always when on call I slept restlessly, worrying that I would miss a phone call. I went back to check on Bobby again at seven the next morning and then headed to the stables to see the horses. I was still concerned about Tammy’s leg, and I was applying the ice boot daily to bring down the swelling from her torn tendons.
‘Poor girl,’ I said, stroking her flank. ‘I won’t be able to ride you for ages. And without exercise you’re going to get even fatter.’
Tammy’s weight was a constant challenge; she was always fatter than she should have been and without being ridden regularly she would balloon. She only had to smell grass and she’d put on weight. But the leg needed rest, so she would have a peaceful winter in the field behind the stables and we’d see how it was doing in the spring.
As for Elli, it was time for her annual clipping. It’s a pain clipping a horse, but it has to be done because they get sweaty when they are ridden and if their coat is long then when they cool down afterwards, especially in the winter, they can get exceptionally cold.
Elli was generally good about it, but she really didn’t like having her chin or head clipped. And unlike most horses, which simply lift their heads up so they’re hard to reach, Elli would let me start clipping and then suddenly drop her head to the floor, so that the clippers ended up making a weird line over her nose. In the end I decided it would be better just to clip all the hair off her head rather than try to leave some on.
This time I was feeling arty, so I clipped her initials LE, into her flank. Her official name is Lynwood Evergreen, hence her name. By the time I finished I was the one in a sweat but Elli looked, I told myself with a degree of pride, positively elegant.
I got away with just one more emergency call that day, for a spaniel with a split paw, and I was relieved to have a quiet Sunday.
Before I finished my five weeks at Dacre House Sue got me in to do a morning of operations. ‘Good idea to keep your skills up,’ she said. I started with a bitch spay and then a mass removal for biopsy before my last patient of the morning – a foxhound that had been eating grass and projectile vomiting for 24 hours. He couldn’t even keep water down. He had been admitted as an emergency during the morning consultations while I was busy with my other two operations.
Dogs eat grass to make themselves sick, it’s a natural cleansing, but when they repeatedly projectile vomit and do not pass stools, an obstruction such as a foreign body is strongly suspected. An X-ray showed only that his stomach was absolutely full, probably with impacted grass, and there was another area on the X-ray that looked more dense, so we needed to open him up to check for an obstruction.
Thirty minutes later the mystery was solved when a huge ball of grass was pulled out of his stomach and then, from a bit further down the intestines, out came half a broken tennis ball! How on earth it had managed to get that down its throat I could only imagine. And a tennis ball isn’t even tasty! But then, no matter how well we think we know and understand our dogs, they can still leave us utterly baffled.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hoping to Help
As we bumped along the dirt road in Maloli’s small truck, heading deeper into the poorest township area, my stomach was twisted into knots of fear. What exactly had I got myself into?
I had flown back out to South Africa the previous week, and after a few days relaxing with Jacques I was arriving for my first day’s work with the Grahamstown SPCA. Dressed in a T-shirt, cargo pants and trainers, I was ready to go with animal health worker Maloli on his daily round of house calls.
Once we’d climbed into cab of the pick-up truck I had asked Maloli, ‘How safe am I?’
He had looked at me solemnly. ‘The townships are not safe at all,’ he said. ‘But because you are with me, you will be safe.’ Nervously I locked the cab door and looked at the sheet of calls Maloli had given me. A long list of brief addresses, consisting of a house number and a township; 89 Joza, 1257 Fingo, with ‘sick dog’ written next to almost all of them.
The township we were entering was a vast maze of small rough dwellings, mostly constructed from large sheets of corrugated iron, crowded next to one another along unmarked dirt roads.
‘How do you find your way around?’ I asked Maloli. ‘Most of these roads don’t seem to have names.’
‘If you don’t know the townships, you will not find the house,’ he said.
Jacques had been concerned about me going to work in the townships and although I insisted he was worrying too much, in truth I was pretty tense myself. All I knew of these densely populated areas was the desperate poverty and that gun crime, knife crime and car-jacking had given South Africa one of the highest crime rates in the world. The figures were coming down, I knew that, but the statistics, alongside Maloli’s warning that I must stay with him at all times, weren’t exactly reassuring.
There was another side to the story, though. Most of the township people were trying to survive on low incomes and most had animals they relied on, but had no access to a vet. If I could help, I wanted to. Jacques was reassured that I would be with Maloli, a township man himself, and so was I. But I still felt unsure about what to expect.
At my feet was a small bucket filled with the limited assortment of medicines that the SPCA could afford: antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, antiseptic and anti-parasitics, plus needles and syringes and the stethoscope and digital thermometer I had brought with me. That was all I had
and I hoped it would be enough.
I’d arrived that morning to a warm greeting from Maloli and the two other staff members, Yasmin and Liz.
‘We’ll be going in a moment,’ Maloli had informed me. ‘But first I have to move the cobra that is by the cat cages. If it gets in there it may eat one of the cats.’
I hate snakes, and a spitting cobra is lethal. If it spits in your eye or bites, you’ve had it. So I watched with a mix of horror and admiration as Maloli put on a pair of goggles, took a long stick and carefully hooked the snake and dropped it into a dustbin. Clamping the lid over the top he took off the goggles and grinned. ‘Don’t worry. Yasmin will drive it to a safe place, a long way from here, and set it free.’ To be honest its freedom was the last of my concerns, but I was impressed that they treated it with the same care they gave all animals.
Our first visit, deep in the heart of the township, was to see a man with a sick cow. We stopped outside a metal shack and I followed Maloli through the gate made of strips of corrugated iron held together with rusty wire. A couple of men, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, pointed us through to the back, where we found two cows inside a small pen with, at one end, a corrugated iron sheet suspended on wooden posts to provide shelter from the sun. One of the cows, a young heifer, had a hind leg so badly injured that she was unable to put any weight on it. She was an Nguni cow, a local breed of small and sturdy cows that I’d come across in farm visits with Thys.
The owner, an older man, appeared and explained that the cows were taken to graze for the day on the common land, or on the roadside, and this cow had come back the evening before with her leg injury. She had probably put her leg down a hole.
The cow seemed resigned, as though she knew there was little hope for her, and a quick check confirmed that her leg had snapped in two. I explained, as Maloli translated into Xhosa, that there was nothing we could do – the cow would have to be slaughtered.
The owner asked if we could make a splint. I told him that even if we could find something to splint it with, a cow is too heavy to manage a splint with a break that severe.
Maloli had told me that there were slaughterhouses in the townships that would slaughter animals and return the meat to the owners, and some owners even did it themselves. I didn’t give her painkillers, which in any case would have helped very little, so that at least once she was slaughtered they could eat the meat.
After a bit more discussion back and forth, the owner accepted that he would lose his cow. He took it stoically, his arms crossed. The loss of one cow, when you only have two, is heartbreaking. I wished there was something I could do.
Our next stop was to see a dog that had been bitten during a fight. As I would soon discover, dogs wounded by other dogs were common; we saw dozens of them in the weeks that I worked with Maloli and in many cases the wounds were severe.
This one was a sweet dog, a small brown female with a deep flesh wound in her side. Her owner, an emaciated man in his late sixties or early seventies, seemed fond of her, hovering nearby as I examined her.
In England I would have admitted a bitten animal to hospital and then, under general anaesthetic, I would clip around the wound and clean it up, stitch it and send the dog home with antibiotics. But in the townships that was not an option.
I turned to Maloli. ‘Do you have any antiseptic? Iodine? Surely you must have iodine?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Does that work?’
I told him it would help. He produced a bottle of iodine, which I diluted with water from almost black to the colour of tea, drew into a syringe and used to flush the wound. Iodine is wonderful stuff – not only is it antiseptic but it flushes out all the pus, hair and dirt within the wound.
I gave the dog an injection of antibiotics and some pain-relief tablets, but I was concerned that the wound was open to flies and dust. It needed to be covered if the dog was going to have a reasonable chance of recovering. I asked the owner if he could give me one of his T-shirts. I felt bad asking for it when he almost certainly had very few clothes, but he clearly wanted to help. He went inside and got one and I put the dog’s front legs through the arms and tied it across her back, covering the wound.
Most of the owners we met were fond of their dogs, despite the fact that in the townships dogs were kept not as pets but as guard dogs, because there was so much violence and crime this was the best way to protect themselves. Many of those I treated were Africani dogs; not mongrels but a hardy breed of survivors that had evolved over thousands of years. The first domestic dogs in Africa were recorded almost 7,000 years ago, and today’s township dogs are their descendants. Medium-sized, with long snouts and short brownish coats, they are intelligent and resourceful and are one of the last surviving natural dog races in a world where most dogs have been selected and bred.
Alongside the Africanis there were plenty of crossbreeds, often Africanis crossed with German Shepherds, as many people believed that these dogs were the fiercest-looking. Maloli explained that the more a dog looked like a German Shepherd, the more desirable it was as a guard dog, but pure German Shepherds were very expensive.
Most of the dogs we saw had been given unimaginative names. All the black dogs were Blackie, the ones with spots were Spotty, and there were plenty of Joeys, Patches, Cocos and Busters. They were kept in their compound areas at night, to guard the homes, but during the day they wandered the streets with other dogs, scavenging and fighting over scraps. None of the owners could afford dog food, so these animals survived on leftovers from the kitchen, often a maize-based mush called pap, and occasionally a bit of chicken or burger.
By the time I had been doing the rounds with Maloli for three days I had seen numerous bite wounds, some really severe, where dogs had torn the skin off one another or inflicted deep injuries. All I could do was repeat the iodine flushing and antibiotic treatment and advise the owners to take the dog to the vets to be stitched up, knowing it would almost certainly not happen.
At least with wounds, even deep ones, the dogs had a chance of survival. When I came across broken bones that were very displaced there was no option other than to put the animals to sleep. And there were plenty of broken bones, mostly because the dogs had been hit by cars. On my first morning we saw a dog with a broken back, its back legs completely paralysed. We carried it carefully to the back of the truck and laid it on the floor. A group of children were playing nearby and they ran over, curious about what we were doing. They patted the dog on the head and then ran back to their game. They knew we were going to put the dog to sleep, but the death of animals is commonplace in townships and children become used to it. Maloli, who was licensed to perform euthanasia and was very good at it, quickly put the dog out of its misery, then put up the back flap of the truck. It must have been in great pain, but at least it wouldn’t have to suffer any longer.
As we drew up outside the next home Maloli turned to me. ‘You must watch this dog, he is very vicious.’ Clearly there had been trouble with it on a previous visit, but when we got to the gate the dog bounded up to us, tail wagging. Maloli still insisted that we couldn’t go inside the gate; we would only look at the dog over the gate.
The owner, a thin man in his fifties, came out and dragged the dog towards us, but it didn’t take a close inspection to see that the dog had a great big lump, inflamed and oozing pus, directly on top of its nose. There was no way to tell whether it was a tumour or a burst abscess without getting closer. Given where the lump was I knew that, even if the dog wasn’t dangerous, it probably wouldn’t let me take a closer look without biting me.
As the owner held it I gave it an injection of antibiotics to get some into the system straight away and then left some Betamox tablets – antibiotic-based tablets that help to control infections – and told the owner to give the dog one every 12 hours, starting the next day. If it was a burst abscess, this would help it to heal. If it was a tumour it was unlikely the dog would survive.
By the end of my first day I felt wrung
out. This was the first time I had worked in an area where the people could barely feed themselves, let alone their animals, and I found it tough – not least because there was often little I could do. With no diagnostic equipment and limited treatment options, in many cases I could only put the animal to sleep, or try a treatment that I wasn’t sure was going to work.
The following day we went to a very different kind of township area. Townships came in various forms. Some were government housing, consisting of tiny two-room bungalows in neat rows, and some were self-built housing, which consisted of anything from metal shacks to one-room houses, but still with some sort of access to water and electricity. Finally there were squatter camps, which were informal, illegally built, run-down corrugated-iron houses, each surrounded by barbed wire, with no water or electricity. So far we had visited all of these, but now we were in a government housing area, where the houses were built of brick, mostly bungalows, and many of them painted in bright greens, pinks and yellows, although they still had no more than two rooms. The residents here were mixed race, the ethnic group known as ‘coloured’ in South Africa.
The townships were created during the Apartheid era in South Africa, which lasted for almost 50 years, when black and mixed-race people were kept out of white-only areas. Thousands of people had been forced to live in these crowded areas. Apartheid ended in 1994, after which anyone could, in theory, live anywhere they chose. But poverty had prevented most of the township population from moving anywhere else.
We stopped outside a pretty yellow bungalow and a very large lady, wearing a bright-green dressing gown, came out onto the porch with a teenage girl. The girl had her face covered in a type of clay, commonly used to ward off the sun. It was thick and orangey-brown and looked like a face mask. During my time in the townships I saw quite a few women and girls with these clay masks.