Cock and Bull Stories

by Peter Anderson

  After some extensive practice at home one evening on Roo, our bull terrier, who found the whole procedure a bit of a joke, and once on Chick, who didn’t, I was Peter Anderson, Veterinary Surgeon and Acupuncturist, and ready to use my new expertise.

  I stuck needles into many animals to treat anything I thought was treatable with acupuncture. Many cases were chronic arthritic-type lesions where there had been limited benefit from the conventional anti-inflammatory drugs available at that time, so we were often starting with difficult cases. To my amazement I occasionally got a response. I started with dogs and seemed to get some results but found cats very unrewarding. Horses also amazingly seemed good subjects. Obscure conditions such as ‘sore backs’, which were often unresponsive or only temporarily so to conventional anti-inflammatories or corticosteroids, sometimes seemed to respond to a couple of treatments of acupuncture. I had one or two successes and my reputation spread. Two people didn’t have to be asked if they would like me to give their animal acupuncture. They actually asked me!

  However, I’m not totally convinced they always asked for the true reason.

  Early one afternoon David Gardiner, who had a busy cleaning business and trained a few trotters, asked me to acupuncture a horse with a ‘sore back’. It can take a while placing the needles at the recommended sites but horses seem to tolerate them well as long as you get them in the right spot. If you don’t, a flick of a tail and half the needles are lost in the bedding of the stall. So tying down the tail is an important precaution. Anyway, David starts complaining that he is working too hard and can’t sleep at night. For some reason I knew the acupuncture sites for insomnia. Not for animals, as insomniac animals were not in my repertoire of diagnoses and treatments. I placed and left a couple of needles in his hand while I twiddled with those in the horse and thought nothing more about it.

  I rang David a few days later to check how the horse was and whether it should have another treatment. However, he gave me the impression that for now acupuncturing was disallowed in the Gardiner household. It transpired that after I had treated David for insomnia he had gone home to change, sat down and fallen asleep. A full afternoon’s work never got done and he did not wake until his angry wife stormed home at 6pm, wondering where he had been all afternoon.

  Encouraged by my success, I also gave Fred Rouse the insomniac treatment at the same time I treated his dog. He had a favourite old cocker spaniel gun dog bitch that had had an earlier elbow injury. The joint was now badly arthritic and I felt acupuncture might help. Fred thought so too. The idea was to give the dog three treatments, once weekly, see if there was a response, and go from there. The acupuncture did not seem to help the dog — but Fred kept coming back for his. After the third visit he rather embarrassedly said that really the only reason he was coming back was that his wife forced him to. For the first time in 30 years of marriage, he had slept all night without tossing and turning and moaning and groaning and keeping his wife awake. I gave Fred a couple more treatments. I’m not sure how he sleeps these days.

  Another afternoon I went to see a trotter with an obscure near hind leg lameness. The owner was not there but his wife and daughter showed me the horse and we examined it in the usual manner. It was one of those cases where the horse was slightly lame at times and never when the vet was examining it. So it was difficult to isolate where the pain came from to cause that lameness. Acupuncture to the rescue. I was placing the needles in the strategic spots, which because I felt I needed to cover all areas and joints, included several in the troublesome hind leg. As I said, horses tolerate needles very well — as long as you get the specific acupuncture sites. I guess I got it wrong. The kick was fearsome. It lift ed me up and threw me against the far wall of the stall. I slid to the ground writhing and doubled up in agony because the bastard had got me where all men fear to be kicked. Through the pain and tears I could see the woman and daughter looking very awkwardly at each other, wondering what they should or could do. There really was not much they could do.

  I gave up acupuncture after that.

  The last laugh had to come from PJ. He had always been a little cynical about my interest in ‘alternative medicine’. One weekend about 10 days after the big kick in the groin, he and I went for a fish in the Sounds. It was a beautiful, calm, sunny afternoon and time for a dip. After I had discarded my clothes, PJ started to laugh. Other than a small pink bit at the end of a certain appendage the whole of my lower abdomen, groin and upper thighs was a deep purple black and some areas were also swollen. A very impressive sight. Even today when I go past Blumine Island in the Queen Charlotte Sounds, I still hear his laughter.

  There is definitely a place for acupuncture in veterinary medicine. However, it is a time-consuming process requiring patience and perseverance. The response to a treatment, or course of treatments, may not become apparent for some days to weeks. Invariably any response is not as spectacular as that which we expect after the easily administered shot or course of today’s drugs, of which we have a huge arsenal. Those who do it well find it a rewarding skill and I admire their perseverance.

  DEER THINGS — PJ

  Cervus elaphus. The red deer. The name might not mean much to some, but to those in the deer industry, and to passionate old hunters, it has a mighty ring.

  Pete A and I were lucky enough to do our early vetting during the very beginnings of deer farming in New Zealand. These were hugely exciting times. Many New Zealanders of that era were past or present hunters of red deer in the wild, but few had handled live animals up close, and our knowledge of their health problems was basic, and at the very beginning of a new dawn of knowledge.

  Red deer are not like sheep and cattle, which have been domesticated by man for centuries. Deer have a massive flight reaction, and a very long accepted approach distance, especially approach by humans. As a result, we had some pretty exciting, and at times, damned dangerous adventures in our dealings with these beautiful animals.

  Deer were introduced to New Zealand for sport. As early as 1840, the first deer arrived in Nelson and were liberated into the rugged and wild bush country which covered so much of the country. They quickly adapted to their new home, a wonderland of green culinary delights, vegetation which had evolved for thousands of years in the absence of browsing or grazing mammals. Further releases in Canterbury and Otago enhanced the quality of the antlers, which sportsmen sought so eagerly. By the mid-1920s while species such as fallow, sambar, rusa and whitetail had established in various pockets, it was the prolific red deer which adapted and multiplied the best.

  A release of North American elk, or wapiti (a gift from US president Teddy Roosevelt) was made in wild Fiordland, and these great beasts, a close relative of red deer and able to interbreed with them, soon became famous for their trophy quality heads.

  Until the 1970s, deer were wild animals. In fact it was illegal to keep them in captivity. The Department of Internal Affairs regulated this strictly, and the first applications by the helicopter hunters of the 1960s to farm deer were quickly rebuffed. That was because the deer had become pests. Their huge success in breeding had endangered our native forests and alpine grasslands, a fact recognised in the 1930s and 1940s. Training programmes were devised to produce hunters, or deer cullers, whose sole employment was to kill as many deer as possible. Huts in remote locations throughout the back country were built to give refuge to cullers, and many tracks were cut and swing bridges built to give access into the very rugged country where the deer lived.

  In the 1960s came the helicopters. After decades of fighting a losing battle against the deer, here was a solution. A hunter in a helicopter would shoot several hundred deer in a day. Working in conjunction with a man gutting the carcasses, thousands of deer could be processed and frozen in a week.

  An extraordinary export trade, mostly with Germany, emerged and flourished. Gradually the helicopter operators realised that if they captured and farmed these wild animals, they could grow bigger and better, and could
supply the world at any time of the year. A major added attraction was the production of velvet antler by stags. In the course of growing their antlers each year, stags produce a rapid-growing velvet-covered fleshy, soft antler. This product was, and still is, hugely valued for herbal medicines by many oriental countries, especially Korea.

  So the leaders in the helicopter business began to pressure the powers-that-be to allow deer to be farmed in captivity. I was involved in the first application to farm deer on the West Coast in the 1970s. A committee of no less than 12 representatives of numerous government and local authorities inspected the site. I have no idea what we were looking for, but bureaucracy was still rampant (it was a bloody sight worse than now, although many have forgotten and believe it is bad in 2011) and someone must have believed that captive red deer could spread pestilence and disease to other farmed animals.

  The upshot was that in my first year as a veterinarian, deer farming was extremely new and as I have said, we had to pioneer all sorts of practices to handle them and manage their animal health problems.

  The first aspect was handling facilities. It was found that captured deer settled best in the dark. The result was that every deer shed in the early years was so dark that you had to stop and let your eyes adjust for several moments before you could see anything. Then there was dust. And in many cases there still is. A roof over the top, enclosed walls, bare earth floors, dirt-covered hairy animals, all added up to dust. After two or three hours working in a deer shed, I would develop a cough that sometimes lasted a month. Sedating drugs were also a problem. The early drugs for capture, barbiturates and opioids, are dangerous for the operator and for the animals.

  As deer became domesticated, Rompun (or xylazine) was found to be adequate to sedate animals for velvet removal, for minor surgery or even tuberculosis testing in some cases. But even xylazine is hugely variable in effect and numerous deer have died while under the drug’s influences.

  On many late spring evenings, Pete or I would be called to a fawning. We’d load the dart gun and head for Rai Valley, 45 minutes away, where our first deer farm clients were. Their deer sheds were primitive, and with hinds and young fawns in the paddock, mustering the herd in was impracticable. We loaded darts with Fentaz and sat in the passenger seat or on the back of an old Land Rover or Toyota truck as the farmer drove through the paddock towards the hind in trouble, a head or two legs protruding from her rear end. It was hugely exciting. As a mad keen hunter, I loved seeing deer, and the excitement of being close to animals I’d shot in the wild for years was pure heaven and all adrenaline. You had to get to within about 20 metres to accurately shoot the heavy, drug-laden dart, powered by a .22 blank. A lot of to-ing and fro-ing usually ensued as the farmer would try and manoeuvre into range.

  ‘Now!’ Crack! As the dart got past 25 metres, nearing the end of its range, you could actually see it, before it reached its target, as the projectile slowed down. The aiming point was muscle in rump or neck but a lot of darts hit deer in every part of their body.

  I once shot at a hind who turned right around as I fired. The dart stuck in her right rump despite my firing at her left. It was a sheer fluke but the farmer thought I was Kit Carson. If the dart stuck, we’d back off and wait for up to 20 minutes for the hind to lie down under the influence of the drug. It was pleasant to sit in the beautiful bushclad valley, waiting and talking with the farmer.

  When she was down, we would approach carefully until close enough, and someone would dive on the hind’s neck and hold her. Then I’d get to work. The long neck and long legs of newborn fawns can make the birth process extremely difficult. In a normal presentation the head and two front legs come first. If the head or either leg gets bent back, they won’t slide through the birth canal. And it’s tight in there. A man’s hand is a huge addition to the crowded pathway, and you would have to attempt to push the head or legs back in, then try to get all three forward. It is very difficult and we had to learn to develop new techniques for epidural anaesthetic, for loops to secure the head with one hand inside the hind, and especially, develop methodology for caesarean section. No one had performed C-sections on deer before and while the surgery itself isn’t especially complex, the anaesthesia and after-care of these volatile and delicate animals was all pure learning for us.

  Stags were another matter. They are big, extremely powerful, and during the roar or rut (the breeding season) their normal fear of man all but disappears, making them extra dangerous.

  I once had to TB test 100 stags for one of the Rai Valley farmers. TB or tuberculosis is a lethal, slowly developing bacterial disease which infects the lungs then the whole body. Worse, it is transmissible to man. A national scheme to test deer for TB is now firmly and successfully in place, but in those days we had to devise our own schemes.

  These stags were stroppy. It was early winter, not long past the roar and they all had hard buttons of antler where their velvet had been harvested. These buttons above the permanent pedicle are bone hard and two of them protrude about 10 centimetres above the crown of the skull, between and behind the ears.

  First I had to clip a bare patch on their necks to have some relatively hairless skin to inject the tuberculin into, so that three days later we could read any swellings as a positive reaction to TB. Clippers are now mandatory for this job but in those days we used scissors.

  Nobody had a deer crush or any other devices to secure the animals. The only way to keep the animals still enough was to pack 30 or 40 stags tightly into a dark pen and just wade in amongst them. The stags had shaggy manes, full of dried mud from wallowing during the roar and by the time I’d clipped 30 I had large blisters on my thumb and first two fingers. The farmer, Murray, would try to hold the stag more or less in one place while I clipped the neck and injected the tiny dose of tuberculin into the skin in the centre of the clipped patch.

  It was a nightmare. Every 20 or 30 minutes, one stag would object to our presence in his vicinity, and without warning would thump his head, complete with antler stumps, into my kidneys. It was only the crowded nature of the pen which prevented them from getting a run-up first and really doing me some damage.

  All veterinarians of that era will have experienced this scenario. We all did it. And because we were young, fit and hugely keen, it didn’t seem too bad, even though we knew we had to go back in 72 hours and ‘read’ the same stags. This entailed viewing and palpating the shaved patch for any sign of swelling, the dreaded positive for TB. The reading was, at least, mercifully swift, and with correspondingly less chance of injury.

  On one occasion, Pete Anderson came home with a nasty hole in his face, immediately below one eye, where a spiker, a young stag, had prodded him with the tip of its young antler. Two centimetres higher and Pete would have lost the eye.

  On another occasion, I was velvetting two wapiti bulls. Wapiti are large, almost twice the size of a red deer. A large male weighs in the vicinity of 400 kilograms. And they know it. If you got too close in the yards they would start to grind their teeth with a sort of ominous ‘click, click’. The tongue would protrude out of one side of the jaw, and their eyes would roll back.

  The owner, a professional manipulator of human bodies, was present, but not actually in the pen. He always wore white gloves when handling his deer, although I never found out why. When the deer were dangerous he was usually on the other side of the wall.

  I approached one of these two great beasts with the pole syringe, a device which gave me about two metres’ reach, with a spring-loaded mechanism releasing the sedating drugs when pushed into the animal’s rump. The first bull was no problem. I approached quietly and slowly, talking gently to the animal as I came within range. Brian, the farm manager, was behind me as back-up. I pushed the loaded syringe into the bull’s rump. An explosive kick into the plywood wall. The bull dashed round the corner of the pen. I’d got him! A moment of relieved triumph. He’d be down in five or 10 minutes.

  The second bull wasn’t so easy. ‘C
lick, click, click …’ His head was up, tongue out, eyes rolling, saliva dripping from his angry mouth.

  As I came within range and reached the pole towards him, he charged. In a confined space, 400 kilograms of angry wapiti is not a pretty sight. I retreated, facing him with the pole held out, but he wasn’t stopping. He reared above me on his hind legs, smacking great blows at my head and shoulders with his front legs, as I tried in vain to wedge myself into a corner made by the swinging door. I was in big trouble. One of those blows could kill me. Showing great courage, Brian ran into the fray and walloped the bull across the rump with a broom. The bull turned to face this new foe, then dashed around the corner of the pen. I climbed shakily over the wall to safety.

  Another episode soon forgotten, but one of many close calls we had in the early days as deer veterinarians. Since then, things have changed. Everything has to be super safe.

  I’ve always believed the general drive for life without risks began with the Fireworks Lady, a woman whose child had suffered a bad burn from fireworks in the 1970s. This daunting person began a one-woman crusade to rid the world of fireworks, eventually presenting a petition to parliament. Obviously, it didn’t completely stop fireworks but it encouraged a lot more people to speak up about matters of personal safety and soon we had bicycle helmets, codes of conduct for innumerable workplace practices and finally the dreaded OSH.

  However, deer sheds are one place that have changed for the better. We now have crushes, races, concrete floors for less dust, and catwalks around the pens above the animals so they can be directed or drugged without danger to people.