Tales from a Wild Vet

by Jo Hardy

  I saw cows, goats, pigs and dogs. All the pigs had lice, most of the puppies had worms and some of the cows were sunburned, as photosensitisation of the white patches was common from eating plants that they simply shouldn’t have been eating. I treated a coughing pig that had, I hoped, just a bacterial infection, and two dogs with mange. Many of the animals I didn’t get to see again, except the pig, whose cough I could regularly assess as the owners let it run loose in the day and it was often on George’s land.

  As in South Africa, people would say, ‘My animal is sick,’ and I would need to question them to find out what was wrong: ‘Is it eating and drinking?’, ‘Has it got diarrhoea?’, ‘Was it like this last year or is it something new?’

  A lot of people said their cows had no appetite, but it was difficult to assess whether that was due to illness or the intense heat. Several had East Coast Fever (ECF), another potentially fatal tick-borne protozoal infection in which cows have a really high fever and swollen lymph nodes followed by a cough and weight loss. At first when I saw these cows I wasn’t sure of the diagnosis, because I’d never seen it before, but Maurice would confirm that it was ECF. All we had available to us to try to treat it was an antibiotic that was good against tough tick-borne diseases, although we knew that it was likely to be only 50 per cent effective. I felt frustrated that I didn’t have the range of treatments to hand that I did in English practices, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be successful in every single case, but Maurice assured me that doing something was better than nothing. At least we were giving the owners some hope.

  By midday we would have been working for six or seven hours and I’d go back to George’s, where Lucy had prepared lunch of rice, bananas and leftover meat. From the start I had a lot of difficulty with the food in Uganda because my system was not used to the conditions and the way in which it was prepared. The meat especially was unappetising and tough to start with, and once cooked it was kept in the food hut – there was no fridge – and used for each meal until it was gone. Between that and the muddy water used for cooking, I had an almost constant bad stomach and violent cramps. I began to wish I’d said I was vegetarian, because the fruit and vegetables were really good. But as meat was considered a luxury I knew it would be rude not to eat it, so I persevered.

  Everywhere I went the people were welcoming. One of the biggest households I visited was run by a lovely old lady named Kijai, which Maurice told me meant ‘first girl born in a family’. Kijai’s house was a rectangular building made of mud that was home to several adults and young children. Kijai, who was the grandmother, came to me and knelt down, offering me her hand to shake. I was gradually becoming less surprised by this welcome, as it was the custom in the Luo culture for women to greet men and visitors like this. She led me outside to where five or six goats were tethered in a yard with a small shelter in the corner, built of wooden poles with twigs across the top and, in with the twigs, a tennis racquet.

  All the goats needed deworming and their feet needed trimming. I did one and showed Kijai how to do the others, watching her and teaching her as she had a go, laughing with delight at learning a new skill. She asked me to look at her dog afterwards, but it was cowering and snarling, as if it was terrified. Several men ran after it for about 10 minutes until one pinned it down by almost smothering the front end and wrapping his arms really tightly around it so that it couldn’t run away. I just injected in whatever skin I could get from as far away as I could with Ivermectin, the drug of choice in many African countries for treating and preventing mange and worms. I checked over the dog’s two puppies as well; they were gorgeous, but had big wormy bellies, so they also got a jab.

  Finally we went to look at the family’s four cows. I was already discovering that all the cows in the district were wild and they could kick. The only way to examine them was to tie them between two trees, with a rope around their necks and another around the back leg on the side where I was working, which meant that sometimes the poor cows fell over. Two of these cows had diarrhoea, so I wormed them all and one more that I suspected had anaplasmosis, a little protozoa parasite transmitted by ticks through their saliva. With this disease the cow just looks depressed, apathetic and thin, so it’s not always easy to diagnose. Occasionally, when it’s really bad, the cow looks jaundiced due to the breakdown of red blood cells and the eyes look yellow. I had plenty of oxytetracycline with me, as it was the one antibiotic that would penetrate cells and treat an intracellular pathogen like anaplasmosis. After a long-acting injection of this drug the cow starts to pick up and makes a good recovery, so I was able to give hope to Kijai that her cows would get better.

  As we left, Kijai, smiling and nodding, handed me a rather startled-looking chicken.

  ‘It is to say thank you,’ Maurice said.

  I felt so bad taking one of the family’s precious chickens, but I knew I couldn’t refuse as it would appear rude, so I thanked her warmly and Maurice took a photograph as I held the chicken in my arms, the family all crowding round and the children squeezing and shoving to make sure they were included.

  As we walked back I thought, This is amazing, my first ever chicken! I would have liked to take it home because Dad always wanted chickens, but as that wasn’t an option I took it back to Lucy and gave it to her, and she promptly wrung its neck and cooked it for supper. Sorry as I was about my chicken, it was the freshest meat I’d tasted in days and as I tucked in I silently thanked Kijai. I was already discovering that the Ugandan people, despite having so little, were incredibly generous. Wherever I went I saw that people’s doors were always open and, no matter how poor they were, what they had they would share.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Margaret the Pig

  Not many of the animals we met in Uganda had names, but for some reason the pigs did. And Margaret was an impressive pig.

  Felix was a young man who was a relative of the woman who led group C, and when Maurice and I visited the group it was Felix who showed us round. Before starting the rest of our visits we went to his home and met the fully-grown 200-kilo sow he had named Margaret. Pigs, along with cows, were the most valued animals in the community – cows for their milk and pigs to breed piglets, which could be sold. Goats were next in the pecking order, kept for breeding, for milk and for meat.

  Felix was having trouble with Margaret because she kept digging up all his crops, so to solve the problem he had put a homemade nose-ring on her. This was something quite a few people had done with their pigs – sticking a piece of wire in through the top of the nose, out of one nostril, in the other, then out the top again, where the two ends of the wire were twisted together. With a nose-ring like this in place it hurt the pig if it tried to dig. The problem was that in most cases the wire was old, dirty and rusty so, unsurprisingly, it caused an infection in the pig’s nose.

  In Margaret’s case it could have been a lot worse, there was just a small amount of crustiness from some dried discharge and the skin was a bit pink. I wanted to give it a clean and spray some antiseptic on it, but Margaret was not having it. The moment I tried to gently take hold of her nose she began squealing at the top of her lungs and charged through the crowd of onlookers – there was almost always a crowd wherever I went – heading off up the road.

  Several men took off after her and eventually they managed to catch her and bring her, still protesting, back home. As there was no pen and nothing to tie her to, the men had to hold her while I treated her, by sitting on her back and holding onto her by the base of the ears. I was beginning to think it was going well, but Margaret had clearly been lulling us into a false sense of security because a moment later she shoved her very large bulk forward, knocked me flying and took off up the road again, galloping surprisingly fast for such a big pig.

  By this time the residents of half the households in the area had come to take a look, most either standing around watching, or joining in the chase. A few minutes later Margaret was reluctantly returned, squealing loudly enough to alert
everyone in the local area to her plight. With twice as many people hanging onto her and a lot of laughter from the rapidly growing audience, I managed to finish the job of cleaning her nose.

  Poor Margaret. I would have liked to ask Felix to take the nose ring out, but I knew that his crops were too important to him, so we came to an agreement that if it started to look infected again he would get rid of it.

  Leaving a rather disgruntled but hopefully more comfortable Margaret to rest under a tree, Felix took me next to the house of a woman named Afiya. She had two pigs named Katie and Engamagod (or so it sounded), which I was told meant ‘trust in God’. Katie had just given birth to 12 healthy piglets – a huge litter in Uganda. Pigs can have up to 14 piglets in a litter, but in hot conditions there are often more like four to eight and some are likely to die soon after birth.

  Afiya also had two cows, called Okello and Caroline. They were brother and sister and Afiya wanted my advice as they kept trying to mate with one another. I told her not to let them as any faults in related parents would be highlighted in their offspring and neither cow looked particularly strong or healthy. They were typical of the small, hardy cows in the area and I imagined a lot of interbreeding went on, since all the cows were free-roaming during the day and only tied up at the homesteads at night. It’s always better not to mate two cows so directly related, though.

  Like so many others in the community, Afiya was touchingly generous. I had done very little – treating her pigs for lice and advising on how to improve Caroline’s milk production – but she insisted I leave with a chicken and a large bag of nuts. Not wanting to hang a live chicken upside down from the handlebars of my bike, as many Ugandans did, I wrapped the chicken’s wings in vet-wrap bandage so it couldn’t flap and placed it on the rack on the back of my bicycle.

  One morning, after a long, hot walk, Maurice and I reached one of the final houses of the day. The heat was scorching and I was tired from walking so far, so I was looking forward to the afternoon rest. Sometimes I found it hard that everything stopped for several hours in the afternoon – life in Uganda was not fast and I wasn’t used to slowing down so much – but that day I was looking forward to cooling my hot, tired feet while I watched the chickens that played on the front step outside my room.

  We had come to the house of a widow; a wonderful large lady with a big smile on her face who told us her name was Omondi, meaning ‘born at dawn’. She was kind and welcoming and she told us that since her husband had died, her animals were her family. She had a dozen goats, several cows and a calf. I started by checking her goats. Most were healthy, they just needed worming, but the last one I looked at had a big bony mass on one of its back legs and the poor goat couldn’t put any weight on it at all.

  I wished I had an X-ray so that I could differentiate between a bone tumour, a callus around a break and osteomyelitis, but I couldn’t, so I did what I could and gave a decent penetrating antibiotic and some pain relief, advising her that if there was no improvement the goat should be slaughtered.

  We moved on to Omondi’s gorgeous little calf that had been orphaned. The cow had died so the calf was now drinking water instead of its mother’s milk and was being given food that its immature digestive system couldn’t handle. I gave Omondi a rubber teat and taught her how to bottle-feed the calf with milk. This posed a problem for Omondi, because since the mother had died she had no lactating cow and so she would have to buy milk from a neighbour, but if she did that she would not have the money to feed herself. She was faced with the choice of going without food or watching the calf die. I felt so sad for her.

  The following day Maurice and I cycled to group D, which was the furthest of the group areas and so too far to get to on foot. The group leader was a wonderful woman named Leonie, who must have been in her sixties. She was exceptionally resilient and wouldn’t let her ill health get the better of her. She explained to me in broken English that she was HIV positive, very arthritic, and wasn’t at all well. She had good days and bad, but no matter how she felt, she absolutely insisted that she was coming with us. Maurice got her to ride on the back of his bicycle so that at least she didn’t have to walk.

  The first family I saw had a litter of eight very new puppies in a washing-up bowl, along with a bony and very scared dog. They said the dog was the puppies’ mother but I really wasn’t convinced, as she didn’t pay any attention to the puppies and she appeared to have no milk. I hoped that the real mother was in the vicinity because the puppies needed her.

  As soon as I had given it a wormer the dog ran off, so I turned my attention to the puppies. I checked them all over, and they all looked well – full of life and bounce. They had obviously been feeding well from something. I wormed them all before the owner took them back to his hut and came back with some eggs to thank me before we hopped on our bicycles, waved goodbye and cycled away down the bumpy path.

  Most households I visited had at least a couple of goats and a couple of cows, but the very poorest didn’t even have that. One lovely young couple I visited had only five chickens and a rooster. Susan and Michael were probably in their late twenties and, despite having so little, they smiled warmly and made me welcome. They were worried about their chickens and explained that in the rainy season, when the crops were growing, they brought their chickens inside and the chickens would get ‘coughs’. Since they were outside at the moment, though, and all looking healthy, there wasn’t much I could do except give them advice on housing to ensure they had proper ventilation. Hopefully that would curb the problem next time. I also talked to them about the diseases that chickens routinely get and that are easily prevented, mentioning in particular that birds can get a parasite of the intestine called coccidia, and I gave them a medicine that could prevent it or treat it. They were so pleased that they insisted on giving me one of their chickens. I would have loved to say no, but that would have caused deep offence, so I took the chicken, hoping very much that this young couple would soon have one of the World in Need goats when a new batch was donated.

  My next visit was to a family that was not much better off; they had just a few chickens and a cow. All the cows were tethered to trees at night, either by their necks, horns or leg, but one had tried to escape several months earlier. The owner explained that the rope had cut through the cow’s leg one night just above the hoof, and the cow had lost her whole foot. I was shocked. I couldn’t imagine how she was getting by without a hoof, despite the owner insisting the open wound had healed. But I had underestimated the cow. She was managing to get about pretty nimbly on three feet and a stump and wasn’t easy to get hold of. Maurice and I tried herding her into smaller areas but it turned out she was still able to run very quickly through small spaces, and so half an hour later we agreed that we were wasting our time. She was clearly coping very well, and I couldn’t see any obvious wound, so we agreed to move on to the next house before the day got too hot and the animals were led out to grazing.

  The next morning was Saturday and George had arranged for me to give a lecture to the community on trimming goats’ hooves, at which I planned to hand out the goat goody bags that I had put together before I left England. People started to gather outside George’s house early on and soon there were more than 100 sitting on the ground in the shade of a large mango tree.

  I had been told that after my talk and the giving out of the bags, people would celebrate, and I could see that many of the women had lit small fires and were cooking food. It was going to be an event, and I was the main attraction. I suddenly felt very nervous.

  George was going to translate for me, but just before we were due to start he was called away to help a friend take his mother to hospital. He was one of the few people with a car in the region, and the taxi system in Uganda (large motorcycles called bodabodas) wasn’t suitable for an elderly woman in ill health. He didn’t return for an hour and in the meantime a lot of people decided to go ahead and eat. They sat on the ground eating, chatting and not in the least worr
ied about the delay, while I got more and more edgy about my looming talk.

  Eventually George returned and we began. To start with I was absolutely terrified, and very grateful that George was standing next to me. But after a few minutes I relaxed into it because my audience was so attentive and interested.

  I had prepared a leaflet, with pictures, that I went through with them. At first they found it really funny that I wanted to teach them how to trim the feet of their goats, but when I told them what would happen if they didn’t, they were shocked.

  I explained that hooves continue to grow, and that overgrown hooves make it difficult for the goat to walk. Eventually their feet would become deformed and many goats become crippled. I showed them some pictures of badly deformed goats’ feet and then showed them how to use the hoof-trimmer in the goody bag. I told them I would teach them to do this themselves, so that they could look after their goats.

  I pointed out that some of the hooves I had already seen were wildly overgrown, so much so that I could hardly find the tip of the goat’s toe and in at least one case I had actually broken the trimmer and had to use a second one.

  My audience was rapt, they laughed at my jokes, gasped at the pictures of deformed hooves and showed great enthusiasm for learning how to trim their goats’ hooves. Someone had brought along a goat, so I demonstrated the use of the trimmer. I also talked to them about general care, neonatal care, how to look after kids, what to look out for if the goat was sick and a bit about worms. When I had finished and had invited questions, a lot of hands shot up. I answered them one at a time and finally, an hour later, it was time to hand out the goody bags. The group leaders told them to line up in their groups and I gave the bags to the leaders, who then handed them out.

  I’d ended up putting the bags together in the World in Need office the day before I flew out to South Africa in December and David Shamiri, the head of WIN, had brought them out on a trip he’d made while I was in South Africa. They were just little white carrier bags and in each one I’d put a copy of the booklet, plus basic equipment such as a rubber teat, the hoof-trimmers, rubber gloves and a calendar and pencils so they could circle the date when they needed to worm their goats or trim their feet.