by John Hicks
All credit to Steve, many vets would have hidden the ensuing report from their colleagues, but we were all allowed to share in what, this time, he thought was a huge joke. The report read: ‘These were testicles. Birds don’t have lymph nodes.’ It would have been interesting to see how Steve explained this to the owner, but in his own consummate style he must have succeeded admirably. The owner came in with a new budgie a short while later for a check-up. ‘Is Steve around?’
It is an enormous privilege when others allow you to learn from their mistakes, and I now see it as a guiding principle in developing a team approach in a veterinary practice. I have little patience with ego-driven prima donnas, derisive of their colleagues. Arrogant attitudes lead to self-delusion and the danger of failing to acknowledge personal mistakes, which is one of the keys to individual growth and learning. There has to be confidence, but there should always be an element of self-doubt. There has to be knowledge, but the ability to communicate it is paramount.
Selecting students for veterinary courses purely on the basis of academic achievement may seem fair, but it does not measure commitment, integrity and character. Nor can it assess the physical aptitudes required for the intricacies of surgery, or the taxing lifestyle of a large-animal vet. These days, such is the demand for places at university veterinary faculties, many young people who would undoubtedly become excellent practitioners fail to achieve the examination requirements for entry. There is far more to being a successful vet than mere academic brilliance.
Chapter Twenty-two
Life and Death on the Canterbury Plains
The Canterbury plains, seen from the air, are a neat patchwork of fields and paddocks ranging from rich browns, to greens, greys and yellows depending on the season, and pastoral or arable usage. In the mid-seventies the New Zealand sheep population was around seventy million and the human population about three million—statistics beloved by Australian comedians. Many of these sheep were raised on these plains, ultimately destined for the UK market as Canterbury lamb.
Servicing the sheep industry was a marked contrast to life as a dairy vet. I was happy to meet the new challenge, plus I had the chance to broaden my veterinary skills. Living in a larger town also gave me more scope to see pet animals. Working dogs, from sheep and cattle farms, with their broken legs and other injuries gave me a chance to do more surgery. There was also a reasonable amount of horse work, from station hacks to polo horses, from Clydesdales to the Standardbreds used in harness racing. Gordon Burr was an equine specialist who performed much of the horse work in the practice.
It takes a quantum leap in approach to deal with the horse-owning public rather than farmers. Showmanship can be important, and an inability to talk the language will mark your inexperience. For the novice vet taciturnity is a good ruse. There is a certain type in the racing industry who can sniff out your cover with ease. Don’t say anything!
You espy the stable-hand with the frisky young colt that you are about to castrate. He is a swarthy individual dressed casually in jeans, a dirty shirt and a neckerchief knotted round his throat. Ah! The Romany look. He carelessly chews gum as the colt bounces around beside him on a lead rope. He does not deign to even look at you.
‘So you’re the new vet then.’ (Statement. Not a question. No need to reply.) Not replying may be all you need to break the ice. This is not going to be a cordial meeting. You need to assert yourself.
‘I’ll need a bucket of warm water. If you can fetch that I’ll mix up the anaesthetic solution.’
‘Dr Burr doesn’t use an anaesthetic, he ropes them.’
And he did, it was amazing to witness Gordon’s tremendous skill at roping down horses. But I wasn’t Dr Burr and I was going to have to resort to a conventional anaesthetic. So gauging the company, I said the most appropriate thing: a grunt followed by, ‘OK let’s get on with it.’
Welcome to the world of equine practice. Be assertive, take control. Never say ‘I don’t know’. Substitute a grunt. This is the only exception to my maxim of friendliness and honesty.
The author, Dick Francis would never have been able to make a living writing about sheep farmers, where such flagrant arrogance is extremely rare. It is all so unpleasant and unnecessary. I have never taken a shine to the horse racing industry because of the frequency with which such individuals occur, and so I have had no difficulty following the adage of one of my university lecturers, ‘If you are an honest man, don’t go into horse practice’. I have to temper this by emphasising that it is a generalisation. I don’t wish to tarnish the whole industry, ninety-nine per cent of which gives the rest a bad name.
Equine veterinary practice has taken a long time to catch up with modern ideas but, at the sharp end, money talks and there has been a tremendous amount of research and many impressive advances in recent years. Thirty years ago, a lot of old ideas were fighting a strong rearguard action. The more flamboyant the procedure, the harder it died. For example, the ‘pin-firing’ of injured tendons (where hot needles were passed through them to create scar tissue and promote healing) made as much sense as drilling holes in a steel hawser and filling them with solder to strengthen it. However, it required a major push by the veterinary profession to ban pinfiring by vets who were lured by the showmanship involved. Likewise ‘blistering’, applying an irritant chemical to the skin over a sprained joint. It worked because it made the leg so sore that the horse was obliged to rest it. Telling the owner to rest his horse for three or four months would achieve the same objective, but lacked the mystery of red blister. Different blisters had their ardent advocates.
At the same time as this mumbo-jumbo was considered a requisite part of many an equine vet’s armoury, the thoroughbred industry forbade the use of artificial insemination to breed foals on the grounds that they would be weaker than foals conceived naturally. Such a ruling would seem to defy common sense, until it is appreciated that the owners of valuable sires had no wish for one ejaculate to inseminate many brood mares, especially when they could command such high fees for natural service. It is interesting to note that the Arabs, with their great tradition of horse breeding, had used artificial insemination techniques—with sponges placed in the vaginas of mated mares and transferred to others—as early as the fourteenth century.
Personally, I could never understand the equine practitioner’s love affair with stomach-tubes. Many horses resent the procedure and usually have to be ‘twitched’. With the distraction of a clamp on their nose the tube (roughly the size of a garden hose) is passed over the larynx, down the oesophagus and into the stomach. Great care has to be taken that the tube is not passed down the windpipe, because tipping fluids into the lungs sets up an untreatable pneumonia and is a death sentence for the horse.
As a means of generating business it was the tops. Horse-owners felt well satisfied when you had put the worming drench directly into the horse’s stomach ‘because that’s where the bots and worms are’. It seemed patronising to point out that the mouth has a fairly effective connection to the stomach by its own tube. Adding different coloured powders to the mixture, giving it a judicious swirl in the jug and performing the procedure with a practised panache had a certain appeal, but the logic still evades me. I felt that it was intellectually dishonest to promote this practice for routine drenching once worm pastes were widely available, but the idea hung on for years. A farmer could drench thousands of sheep through his yards by mouth, but when it came to his horses they had to be tubed ‘to make sure it reaches the stomach’. They wouldn’t think of having their children stomach-tubed if they had worms. However, good business necessitates keeping the clients happy. Science and business can be uneasy bedfellows.
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Myths are not confined to the equine world. Our practice was commissioned to do a trial for a drug company assessing the merits of a new form of bloat prevention in cattle. Bloat is a life-threatening scourge of pasture-fed cattle. For a variety of complex reasons the cow’s rumen (stomach) becomes distended
with gas and foam to the extent that she is unable to belch it out as she would normally. It presses on the heart and lungs and can quickly lead to death. In severe emergencies stabbing the stomach and letting the gas out through a short tube (trochar) can relieve the internal pressure. The gas is methane and inflammable. Veterinarians with a good sense of timing have been known to light this for dramatic effect, though there are stories of hay barns being burnt to the ground as an unintended side-effect. Holes in cows have to be repaired; a messy job and the cows are often never the same again. So prevention is better than cure.
Drenching twice daily with surfactants, which prevent the formation of foams that cannot be eructated, is an effective preventative used on many dairy farms. It is also practical, because dairy cows come in twice daily for milking. But this is not an option for beef farmers. On some farms surfactants can be added to water troughs, but in Canterbury, where much of the farmland was irrigated from a network of water races, that was not practicable either.
The new product was in the form of a palatable block containing the necessary chemicals. The idea was that the cattle obtained enough of the chemical by licking these blocks to prevent bloat deaths. All we had to do was monitor any deaths on the farms chosen for the trial and do post-mortems if necessary to establish the cause of death. In the heat of summer, dead cattle from any cause tend to blow up in the sun. Just because she’s blown up like a limpet-mine, with legs protruding at weird angles, doesn’t mean you can assume that her death was due to bloat. It wasn’t always a pleasant job.
When I called in at Trev’s place to investigate the dead cow in the middle of his paddock, I couldn’t fail to notice a couple of other blown-up carcases partially submerged in the water race.
‘Well that one seems to be bloat,’ I concluded ‘but what about the ones in the water race?’
‘Oh they’ll just be suckers,’ said Trev, rather unhelpfully, although it did look as though he was trying.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, we’ve always had those. That’s what me old man calls them.’
‘Really! But I suspect that they’re actually bloat cases that have become incoordinated and then fallen in the water.’
Trev ignored my theory. Generations of cattle must have stumbled into and died in these races, and he wasn’t about to relinquish his faith in his father’s oft-repeated explanation for my novel ideas. The normal rules of anatomy and physiology, which had hitherto been a useful guide to me, were about to be tested by Trev’s more fanciful notions.
‘Na, na. They’re suckers. See? Their fannies are under water. Once that happens they just suck up the water. They’ll be full of water.’
Trev wasn’t going to be easily convinced, but with a bit of rational debate I could see his lifelong faith in his father’s opinion wavering. At times the power of analogy is not to be spurned.
‘Look Trev. You’re a married man aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ It was his turn to be puzzled.
‘Well, don’t you think it would be fair to warn your wife to be very careful next time she has a bath?’ He laughed. The light had dawned before I had to prove my point by stabbing the bloated corpses. I wondered if his old man had told him about Father Christmas yet. And then again, had I been the victim of a subtle hoax? If you had met Trev you wouldn’t have suggested it.
Funny how we can uncritically hold on to long-cherished beliefs. I have done it myself.
Chapter Twenty-three
Return of the Natives
An important element of garden design is to keep the visitor guessing. Straight lines, aside from small, formal features, are to be avoided. Curves beguile; the whole aspect should never be revealed at a glance. Secret places, surprises, rooms within rooms, are required as part of an intimate plan. Inner landscapes inspire the imagination. This is what the best British landscapes still have to offer, overcrowded though they may be. The Canterbury plains just haven’t got it. The pretty patchwork seen from the air is, to all intents and purposes, the whole story. Without the backdrop of the foothills to the Alps it would be soul-destroying. I must add that this is a purely personal observation and most of the inhabitants in the well-kept towns and neat countryside seem to be reasonably sane and happy. The climate, rain-shadowed in the lee of the Southern Alps, is pleasant: sunny and dry much of the time with clear, frosty winter weather. Occasionally nor’west föhn winds blow and these can be hot, dusty and enervating for poor vets wrestling with rams. Rams without whose services there would be no Canterbury lamb.
The biggest source of veterinary income to the Ashburton Veterinary Club during summer was derived from palpating the genitalia of thousands of rams to check they were sound for breeding purposes. New Zealand was unfortunate to have imported the Brucella ovis bacterium, perhaps a fair exchange considering other far worse scourges that it fortuitously avoided in its early farming history. Brucella ovis prefers to inhabit testicular tissue, where it causes scarring and infertility. By carefully running the testicles through his fingers a vet can feel these lumps. Any affected rams are culled. There is no treatment. The trouble is that by the time the lesions are discernible, the ram is likely to have infected several of his colleagues. Sorry folks, but homosexual activity is a fact of life down on the farm!
These days there is an effective blood test that picks out infected rams at an early stage. If it is used on the rams when they are sexually inactive—at the end of their breeding season—those unfortunates testing positive can be removed before they have a chance to infect their mates. The disease can therefore be eradicated from the flock in a single season, since any ewes infected don’t carry the disease from one year to the next. In the mid-seventies this test was in its infancy. So although we were sorting out infected rams, it was but the tip of an iceberg and we were merely slowing the spread of the disease. There were always going to be more to find next year. At the same time as we were feeling for lumps we were also checking for other abnormalities: scrotal hernias, undescended testicles, scrotal mange, pizzle rot (it is impossible to ignore pizzles in paradise) and undersized testicles.
As to the latter, size is a relative thing. Since male egos are delicate it doesn’t pay to dwell on the statistics too much. Suffice to say, a well-endowed ram can service five or six-hundred ewes over a three-week period; although he is usually allotted around a hundred to be on the safe side. If attention is not paid to culling for small testicles, a trait which is heritable, a farmer could eventually end up with rams that can only service fifty ewes. This had happened with some ram breeders who were reluctant to cull fine-looking rams on the basis of testicular size. And here we should leave any unsavoury parallels between ovine and human reproductive capacity, but perhaps we won’t.
A farm with 2000 ewes could have twenty to forty rams. There is no point putting unsound rams with your ewes to compete with the fertile ones. They need to be rooted out by those perspiring vets. Watch them as they crouch in that race full of rams. Each ram’s genitalia is run through their fingers, as they probe for defects. Crouch, palpate the two or three rams within arms’ reach; stand, wade past them and find space to crouch again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. If there is space behind you with only one or two rams, beware! They are not at their most cooperative as the breeding season advances and their minds and bodies become flushed with testosterone. They are preparing to fight as well as mate. Their testicles become more turgid. The skin in the groin turns pink. Is this the origin of the expression ‘in the pink’? Alas, my dictionary of etymology would not have it so. It has something to do with Romeo and Juliet. It must be wrong. What of ‘pizzle rot’, then? Surely that is not also an allusion from Romeo and Juliet? Thank goodness not. Shakespeare had no hand in it. Furthermore, there is no romance in pizzle rot for this is ‘characterised by ulcerative lesions with scab formation on the prepuce’. It is usually predisposed by rams producing alkaline urine when they are on a high protein diet. This damages the delicate mucous membrane lining of t
he pizzle, allowing a bacterial infection to supervene. There, I just thought you’d like to know in case it crops up in your next game of Trivial Pursuit.
If the rams were from a ram breeder and going to a sale, a metal clip was attached to the wool. In distinctive white writing on a red background it stated ‘passed genital examination by a vet’. The shearers didn’t like these because if they weren’t removed after the sale they could damage their finely tuned gear. As a result, the clips were soon phased out, but they retained some value amongst the party set—although unknowingly tagged females did not always appreciate the humour of finding their clip at a later juncture.
One farm completed, on to the next. It could be hard work, more a challenge than a problem for a fit young vet. I enjoyed it. Meanwhile there was the opportunity to see different farming systems and interact with a fascinating variety of farming characters. The large-animal practitioner is fortunate to have a percentage of his time occupied by relatively mindless tasks, where there is time to retreat into mental relaxation, make small talk, and contemplate the inadequacies of his genitalia. Small-animal practice may be less physically demanding, but there is no mental let-up, as I was soon to find out.
Viv’s job as a proof-reader was not particularly inspiring and she still had bouts of homesickness. After a couple of years in Ashburton we had more than fulfilled the three year term of our bond to the Veterinary Services Council who had brought us to New Zealand. I had gained valuable experience in this job, but, once again, we felt it was time for a change. There was another issue looming, for which we felt we needed more support, in spite of the excellent medical care we received in New Zealand: we were childless when we no longer wanted to be, and further investigation was warranted.