by Jo Hardy
The mum could speak a bit of broken English and, nodding and smiling, she told me how pleased she was that I was there. She was concerned about her dog because it had been doing a really bad job of guarding the house recently; it had just been quiet and had stopped barking at visitors. She took us around the side of the house to where the dog was lying in the shade on its side. It lifted its head up, looked at us and lay down again.
I checked it over and, apart from a little thump of its tail on the floor, it barely moved. A typical lean township dog, its gums were yellow and it was clearly very lethargic. A speeded-up, bounding pulse in the back leg made me highly suspicious that the dog had biliary, known in Europe as babesia, after the parasite that causes it.
Although I had never seen biliary in England, where it’s extremely rare and generally only seen in dogs that have been abroad, I had seen it when I was working with Thys. It’s one of South Africa’s most common infectious diseases in dogs.
Biliary is passed on by ticks. The tick bites the dog and the babesia parasite is introduced into the dog’s blood through the tick’s saliva. The parasite then destroys the red blood cells, leaving the dog anaemic and lethargic, and because the dog is anaemic it doesn’t have enough blood to pump around the system at the normal rate, so it pumps faster, which leads to the pounding pulse in the back leg.
As biliary advances the dog begins to look jaundiced, with yellow eyes and yellow skin, rather than pink, around the anus, gums and conjunctiva. The dog is also likely to feel very sick and, if not treated, it will die. The good news about biliary is that as long as it’s caught early enough it’s fairly easy to cure with an injection of Berenil, which contains diminazene, a chemical that kills the parasite. I mixed the Berenil with vitamin B to help improve the dog’s appetite and advised the owner to tempt the dog with good food and to make sure the dog was drinking, putting a little water into its mouth if necessary.
The owner, still smiling broadly, was clearly very warm-hearted; she cared about her dog and promised to look after it. I told her that it should start to improve within a couple of days, and if it didn’t I would come back.
The treatment I gave her dog cost 50 rand, which is about £2.40. This lady was able to pay it, but many were not. Maloli would ask each owner, ‘Are you able to pay?’ and if they could, they would. But if they couldn’t, treatment would still be given.
One day Liz took a phone call from the local fire department, which was located on the outskirts of Grahamstown. They’d seen a dog hiding in the bushes near the fire station for almost a week. Maloli and I dashed over and found a very young German Shepherd of perhaps six months old. Her ears were flat, her tail was between her legs and she was skin and bone. She was stuck in a thorn bush and it took us some time to coax her out with a bowl of food. Maloli caught her using a long stick with a loop contraption on the end, which he hooked around her neck. This apparatus was necessary for dogs we didn’t know, which could turn out to be vicious, and we certainly didn’t want to get bitten since there was rabies in the area. But this dog, as we soon discovered, was actually timid and desperate for affection.
We got her into the truck and back to the practice, where I checked her over. She was emaciated, covered in ticks and thorns and suffering from early signs of biliary. I injected her with Berenil, dewormed her and picked all the thorns out of her coat. She absolutely loved the attention, timidly wagging her tail and cuddling up to me as I worked on her.
Over the next few days she gradually became more confident, following us around the office. She was nervous about going outside, but we knew that would improve with time. We called her Hondjie (pronounced hon-kie), meaning little dog or puppy in Afrikaans. We all loved her, she was adorable. We advertised her as ‘found’, but no one came to claim her so she was put up for adoption and went to a loving new home with one of Yasmin’s friends.
One morning Maloli and I were called to see another cow. This one was lame in one of her back legs. When I examined her it appeared that she’d had a trauma injury to her upper limb, probably a hip luxation (dislocated hip), which was now back in place. I told the worried owner that the best thing would be to rest the cow, not to let her go out walking or grazing but to keep her in her small pen and bring her food for a few weeks so that the hip would heal and not become displaced again.
‘Why don’t we give it an injection?’ Maloli asked.
‘I don’t think we have any pain relief in the car, do we?’ I replied.
‘No, but can we not give it a different injection?’ Maloli suggested. ‘Owners like to see we’ve given their animal something, as it gives them hope it might get better.’
‘Well, it’s just a waste of drugs if we give the wrong kind of injection,’ I said.
I had already realised that Maloli’s understanding of drugs was limited. He’d had training for becoming an animal health worker, and he jumped at every opportunity to learn from each vet he came into contact with, but in the end he was still very aware that he was not a vet, doing a job that was really better suited to a vet. So what he had been doing to avoid missing anything was mixing together three drugs – penicillin, Berenil and vitamin B – in a catch-all, make-a-sick-dog-better injection, hoping that it would do the trick. Often it worked great, but it was still an excessive waste of drugs.
I did my best to teach him what each drug was for and when to administer it. Maloli loved his job and was keen to learn, he just had only been taught a limited amount of pharmacology as part of his training. Animal health workers are vital in Africa, where there are so many animals and such a shortage of vets, but their training is fairly basic, especially for the job they are expected to do.
Maloli had sacrificed a lot to do his job. He told me that he used to work in another location, but part of his job was to carry out welfare inspections on farms and to give warnings that if mistreated animals weren’t cared for, the farm would be shut down. He started to get death threats from one particular farm and it became so intimidating that eventually he had to change his name and be transferred. I was shocked. It must have been very hard for him to uproot, with his girlfriend and their baby, and move hundreds of miles away from his home. But he had, just so that he could carry on with his work.
We were nearing the end of our callouts one morning when we received an extra call. ‘My dog has arrived back this morning and its neck is a bit pink,’ the owner said.
We thought the dog might have cut himself and needed to be cleaned up and given antibiotics, so we headed over to the house. Before he led us around to the back of the house the owner explained that the dog had been missing for three days and had then returned home that morning, hurt.
When we got to the yard a tiny collie came up and greeted us in a slightly anxious manner, with his head down low and a little wag to his tail as if to say sorry that he had done something wrong. I could see he was nervous, so I crouched down to let him know I was friendly, which he took as a cue that I wanted to play so he bounded the last few metres, his tail wagging.
As he got closer and I saw his neck I suddenly felt I was going to vomit. He didn’t just have a cut on his neck – there was a slash so gruesome and deep that he was almost decapitated.
With Maloli translating, I talked to the owner and we came to the conclusion that the dog had probably been trapped in a snare and had struggled to escape for some time, the wire biting deeper and deeper into his neck. It was the most awful cut I had ever seen. I was amazed that he had managed to get home so badly injured.
There was no way that the little dog could survive. Even if the owner could have afforded surgery, it would have been almost impossible with such a deep wound, which was already infected.
The dog’s owner accepted the news very calmly. We took the little collie to the back of the truck, said our goodbyes and gave him the injection. The last thing to stop moving wasn’t the rise and fall of his chest, but the wagging of his small tail.
CHAPTER NINE
On
the Side of the Animals
‘Do you think anyone is going to come?’ I asked Maloli, using my hand to shade my eyes against the fierce morning sun.
‘They will come,’ he said solemnly. ‘Just wait.’
I was still dubious. We had set up a mobile clinic – actually a fold-up gazebo – on a patch of dry grass beside a road in one of the townships so that people could bring their dogs to be vaccinated against rabies, wormed and dipped to get rid of fleas, ticks and anything else that might be lurking.
Along with Maloli and I there were two government assistants who worked as technicians for the state vets. We set up a production line; the technicians were ready to vaccinate against rabies, I was on the deworming, while Maloli was there to help people dip their dogs in the trough of anti-parasitic fluid or to take over from me if a sick dog arrived needing other treatment.
These clinics were held three or four times a year in the townships around Grahamstown. As I was there it had been decided to set up a few extra clinics this time, to try to cover all of the townships in the area. But we were relying on word of mouth to let people know that we were there, so I couldn’t help wondering if anyone would actually turn up. Would they hear about it? And if they did, would they bother to bring their dogs?
I peered down the empty street. It had been almost 20 minutes since we had declared ourselves ready and there was no sign of anyone.
Then a small boy appeared, dragging a large sandy dog along by a length of baling wire. Close behind him was a young girl with another dog, this time on the end of a piece of rope. By the time they had reached us there was a steady line of people leading dogs up the street.
We sprang into action. Each dog was vaccinated and then passed to me. I had to open their mouths and squirt in Panacur and then pass them to Maloli, who got them through the dip. Each dog needed to be fully submerged in the tub, otherwise any parasites would survive on untreated areas.
It wasn’t easy. Some dogs were compliant, others not keen at all, but we got them through the production line at the brisk rate of one a minute. A large crowd of children stood watching us, fascinated by what we were doing. One little boy, a lovely bright-eyed child with a big smile, decided he would help me. As each dog came along he grabbed it and opened its mouth for me. He spoke only a few words of English, but he told me his name was Mati and we smiled and nodded to one another. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old but he did a fantastic job; he wasn’t at all afraid of the dogs and I liked to think that he might be a future vet in the making.
As the morning wore on the dogs kept coming; a non-stop stream of them, brought mostly by children who yanked them along using wire, chains or rope. We worked well and although it was tough going, my only real concern was that there were no rubber gloves available, which meant getting the saliva of all those dogs on my hands. Rabies was a real problem in South Africa because so few dogs were vaccinated, hence the clinic, and if any of those dogs we treated already had it, any broken skin on my hands would put me at real risk. I had been vaccinated against rabies before I left England, but like any vaccine it is not 100 per cent effective and the advice is that if you are exposed to rabies you should have another course of vaccinations. I just hoped I wouldn’t need it.
Every now and then a dog was brought along that was obviously sick or injured. I would break off from worming, handing over to Maloli, and take the dog to one side to examine it. Most of those that were ill were lethargic and showing signs of biliary, so I treated them with an injection of Berenil and advised whoever brought the dog along, often a child of nine or ten, to let the dog rest in the shade, since many dogs had no shade or had a tin kennel in the sun, and to feed it, make sure it had water and to phone the SPCA if it wasn’t improving in a few days so we could recheck and possibly repeat the treatment.
Towards the end of the morning a young boy appeared with a Staffordshire bull terrier, another breed that was fairly popular. This little dog had clearly been burned; he had open wounds on his back and was in a bad state. The boy told me, through Maloli, that a man who had a dispute with his father had poured boiling water over the dog. I was horrified that someone could purposely make an animal suffer so badly. I gave the dog antibiotics, a couple of days’ pain relief and sprayed the damaged areas of skin with an antiseptic wound spray. There was little more I could do – I only hoped it would be enough to ease the dog’s pain and allow its wounds to heal.
By the time we finished we were hot, tired, filthy and very pleased; we must have treated between 200 and 300 dogs. Maloli and I piled the gazebo and all the equipment into the back of the truck, took it back to the SPCA offices and stored it away carefully, ready for the next clinic the following day. Then we went out on our rounds, catching up with several urgent cases. By midday the sun was baking and the pick-up truck was like an oven. I loved the sun, but I wasn’t used to working in that kind of heat day after day, so I was thankful to get back to Jacques’s house for a long shower and a very cold drink.
It was early January, midsummer in South Africa, and I was back with the SPCA after a Christmas break. I’d taken a couple of weeks off so that we could spend Christmas with Jacques’s parents at their holiday home in Groot Brak, a small village on the coast near the harbour town of Mossel Bay on the Southern Cape, on what’s called the Garden Route. It’s a beautiful area, with miles of unspoilt beaches. For us it was a 400-mile drive, but for Jacques’s parents it was 750 miles from their home in Johannesburg. It’s a vast distance to travel for a holiday break – to put it in perspective, Land’s End to John O’Groats is only 600 miles – but in South Africa it’s the norm to drive for many hours to get to where you need to be.
Jacques and I actually took four days to get there because, being the romantic that he is, he decided to take me via the Baviaanskloof Nature Reserve. It’s a vast mega-reserve stretching over more than a thousand square miles of mountainous, rugged wilderness. The drive through the mountain pass is stunning, the endless views completely unspoilt.
We set up camp each day and then spent our time hiking up the mountains and swimming in the rivers and at night we sat outside our tent and looked at the stars, which, without any light pollution, filled the clear night sky. It was idyllic and apart from a few baboons and buffalo, there were not many animals about so we could relax and enjoy walking in the open without worrying.
When we reached Groot Brak, after a long, hot drive, it was lovely to see Elna and Johan and a couple of days later, on Christmas Eve, Jacques’s sister Sonia arrived to join us.
Jacques and I had to rush out and do our Christmas shopping at the last minute. I love Christmas and I’m normally prepared way in advance. I like making my own presents – things like lavender candles, eucalyptus and mint foot scrubs and spice mixes for different types of meat – but, much to my dismay, my luggage had been too heavy and I’d had to leave all the presents for Jacques’s family behind in England. Jacques always leaves it to the last minute anyway, so Christmas Eve found us racing around the shops of Mossel Bay, trying to find the right gift for each person. Needless to say, both of us were pretty fed up with shopping by the end of the day.
I’m used to cold English Christmases and a big family affair, with lots of relatives arriving, a full turkey lunch, mince pies, games and a fire burning in the grate. But in South Africa, Christmas Day was somewhat different. It started at midnight, when we opened our presents before bed, to avoid distracting from the real meaning of Christmas the following day. Then early in the morning we went as a family for a Christmas church service, but being in Afrikaans, most of it went over my head. At least I could sing the hymns I knew in English while the rest of the congregation sang in Afrikaans. For lunch it was cold turducken – turkey, duck and chicken – salad and a walk on the beach afterwards. It was lovely, but no matter how hard I tried to feel the spirit of it, it just didn’t feel like Christmas.
I was beginning to feel pretty homesick, so I was looking forward to seeing Mum, D
ad and Ross on Skype that afternoon. But it turned out the local phone tower had gone down, so there was little to no internet. I just managed to connect and then the screen froze and all I could hear was Dad saying, ‘At least the picture froze with you smiling,’ which made me cry because I missed them so much.
The week after Christmas was lovely. We ate lots, wandered around markets, tried mini-golf (I lost) and went on a treetop zip-wire adventure in which Jacques kept telling me to ‘hurry up’ as I plucked up the courage to jump off each platform and slide along the zip wire to the next one, 30 feet above ground. I’m normally scared of heights, but I was so busy focusing on what I had to do and telling Jacques to back off and let me do it in my own time that I forgot to notice just how high we were.
One evening we went to a beach restaurant which served a 10-course, all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. They told us to bring our own wine and leave our shoes in the car and all the food was cooked over a fire in front of us. It tasted wonderful and we had a great night, although the owners might have wished they’d thought twice about the all-you-can-eat part once Jacques got stuck in. The chefs were clever, though, and served delicious and very filling homemade bread with the first course. I was warned ‘beware of the bread’, and several courses in I understood why.
On New Year’s Eve we watched the crazy illegal firework display on the beach and had a glass of champagne. I was sure that 2015 was going to be a wonderful year for both of us. I knew I’d found the right man in Jacques and I hoped we’d begin working out how to bring our lives together from opposite sides of the world. I knew he felt the same way, but I worried sometimes that he seemed reluctant to talk about the practical aspects of being together. Whenever I raised the topic of which of us would move countries he said we could think about it later. But when would that be?
With Christmas and New Year over we headed home via the Karoo National Park, a starkly beautiful mountainous desert 200 miles north of Mossel Bay. We spent two nights camping there and it was so hot that we had to stay in the car with the air-conditioning on or lie in the little shade that there was, or swim in the pool at the campsite. On our first full day we started preparing some food for a braai – a South African barbecue. Jacques asked me to go into the tent to get some ingredients, but when I lifted the flap I got a shock. Jacques had left his cold damp towel in the tent and it had attracted an army of red ants. They had gnawed through the groundsheet and infested the tent so that everything in it was covered by a rustling, shifting blanket of ants. I screamed and ran, so poor Jacques had to take everything out of the tent, shake off the ants, dozens of which bit him, and move the tent, all in 40-degree heat! He wasn’t too happy with me.