It’s all good but the old days were much more exciting.
ROO — PA
I don’t think many veterinarians would be in the animal business unless they actually enjoyed working with animals. However, I always found one of the standard statements people would make when they found out I was a vet, ‘Oh, you must love animals,’ a little naïve. What can you say in reply? Sometimes after a kick or a bite I didn’t feel much warmth at all to certain members of the animal kingdom.
In my generation of vets many of us grew up on farms. Animals, including sheep, cattle, horses, dogs, hens, ducks and a cat or two, were very much part of our lives. Those that didn’t grow up on a farm often had relatives or family friends with farms and so had some appreciation of the farming way of life. Times have changed, and now many veterinary graduates enter employment with very little understanding of what actually happens throughout a year on a farm other than what they learn during the limited compulsory farm practical work in their early student days. Regardless, most vets do enjoy having animals around them and whether or not we ‘love’ them is not the issue. Life would just not be as full and rewarding without them. As a result most of us have a family pet — or three.
Unless we go for a parrot or an elephant, we tend to outlive our pets. When one pet passes on and the grieving process has taken place, most people get another. We remember them all but for many people one particular animal often stands out as the ‘best’ or most memorable. For my family it would definitely be Roo — a tricolour bull terrier.
Soon after I started practice I had a bull terrier come into the clinic. He had a rather horrible skin condition, not uncommon for the breed, so he needed some antibiotics and a couple of injections including a vaccination. Bull terriers cannot be described as delicate or pretty. They are a solid beast with little beady eyes in a wedge-shaped head containing immensely powerful jaws. They have a short coat and prick ears and just look tough. Anyway, this dog sits on the table and takes all I give him. Skin scraping, scope the ears, finger up rectum to check his prostate, squeeze the anal glands, a couple of injections. He just stood there — tail wagging and with a silly grin on his face. I was impressed. I had to have one.
So we got Roo. Roo was a black pup with a white brisket and lower legs and some brown on his head. He grew up with our children, Caroline and George, arriving just before Caroline was born. He was a constant part of their lives when he wasn’t doing the odd farm call with me. He would play with them when they wanted to play and be their pillow when they wanted to rest. Despite his looks he was a calm, good-natured dog and incredibly strong. Both George and Caroline learnt their rudimentary riding skills on him.
Roo often came with me on farm calls. Sitting quietly upright on the passenger seat of the Holden station wagon, he would scan the road ahead and to the side, interested in everything that went past, a constant grin on his face. He never complained. He was a good passenger. Farmers and their dogs, after their initial shock when he jumped out of the car, soon got used to him. Despite his appearance and his breed’s reputation, he was not at all aggressive. He was a pacifist in the dog world. Farm dogs seemed to accept him as something the vet brought and a bit odd but not a threat. Anyway, Roo was more interested in finding things to eat and he wasn’t fussy.
Depending on what the sheep had been eating, their faeces could be a delicacy. Fresh cow pats were worth a lick or two as well, but best of all were bits of some animal that I had removed previously and failed to dispose of. He would never wander too far from where I was working and by the time I had finished the job, he would often be waiting for me by the car, ready for the next call and potential gourmet delights. However, he didn’t always wait by the car. If it was a hot day and I had left the windows down, he could clamber in. Not being that agile meant the paintwork on the car door was ruined by deep gouge marks. If he had had a particularly successful scavenging experience, I would have to put up with a rather unpleasant odour for the rest of the day.
I started to have second thoughts about enjoying Roo’s company on farm calls when one hot summer’s day, while checking a large line-up of cows on a dairy farm, he decided to wander into the settling pond next to the shed. This held the putrid contents of a few years of faeces washed daily from the shed. It had a sort of crust over the surface and weeds grew on it. Roo could be forgiven for thinking it was a nice smelly grassy area to investigate but he wasn’t forgiven for what he did next. After breaking though the surface and floundering around for a while, he extracted himself and then, caked with a black, sticky, foul mess, went straight to the car. What better place to clean himself up than on my seat? He was definitely not a popular dog that day.
I always enjoyed stopping for a cup of tea or lunch while doing farm calls. In the early days it was a good chance to get to know the farmer and family better and you always picked up valuable information and learnt things if you had the time. However, if I suspected it was going to be a very full day and there wouldn’t be any spare time, I would grab a sandwich or bread roll when heading out of town and usually eat it later while driving between calls. A fairly unhealthy way of living but needs must. Needless to say Roo, on more than one occasion, helped himself to my lunch while I was away from the car. If I had hidden it well, he usually couldn’t find it, but that wouldn’t stop him trying. Clambering into the back of the station wagon, he would fossick around amongst overalls and equipment and drugs. Once he came across some plastic bags of freshly collected and carefully prepared post-mortem samples, including bits of intestine, liver, and kidney. Oh, what a feast.
Roo once made himself very unpopular with Ally Jerram. One summer evening our two families camped beside the Onamalutu stream, a small but pretty tributary of the Wairau River. It was a lovely evening and while the children played by the stream watched by their two young mothers, PJ and I started to assemble the tents under a nearby willow tree. Roo, anxious to help with the tent poles, had to be removed from the scene. We bundled him into the back of PJ’s Ford Escort vet van. We didn’t think much more about it, and didn’t even question why he looked so contented, and slightly bloated, when we released him after the tents were assembled. It was only the next day when Ally went to get the two large quiches out of the chilly bin in the back of the van that we realised the error of our ways. She had gone to considerable trouble preparing this lunch the day before and now all she could find were two empty trays — both licked clean. I don’t think Ally ever forgave Roo. We were a little annoyed as well, having to go without lunch.
It was also a memorable camping trip for other reasons. We had not been in practice together for long and that day PJ introduced me to fly-fishing, a pastime I have enjoyed since but far too infrequently. I introduced him to parsnip wine. He has never forgotten or forgiven me for the hangover he suffered. However, neither Roo nor I ruined forever the friendship that was starting to blossom between the two families.
Next to eating, Roo’s greatest joy in life was playing with sticks — the bigger the better. He would dare people to take sticks off him and loved being swung around on the end of a large one. He was hard to shake off. On the odd farm when he got a bit bored and there were no morsels around and no sticks to play with, he would start ripping battens off fences. They could be a challenge but were the perfect size. Once he had them he wouldn’t want to give them up and once tried to take one home, chased by the somewhat amused farmer. Unfortunately for Roo the batten was far too wide for the car door and he was brought to an abrupt halt.
Digging holes was another passion. He didn’t do too much digging at home — the beach was the place and there he was in heaven, with lots of sticks and logs and children and birds to chase. He would knock over small children as he raced around with huge hunks of drift wood and undermine the sandcastles of others. On one occasion we left him contentedly digging his way to China but got a little concerned when he turned up with an elaborately carved but rather mauled walking stick. Apparently he had lined up a ve
ry old gentleman tottering quietly along the beach and hit his walking stick at considerable Roo speed. The poor old fellow didn’t stand a chance and was sent skittling. Although a little shaken, he was very gracious when we returned the stick to him.
Roo filled our lives with humour. Sadly he developed lymphatic cancer when he was around 12 years old and despite some reprieve from chemotherapy, we eventually had to put him down.
FAECAL FACIALS — PJ
Spring is a wonderful time. The days are longer and warmer, trees which have lain dormant for months are springing to life, the grey of winter is changing rapidly to healthy, vivid green. Newborn lambs appear beside their anxious mothers and play wildly in groups in the early evenings.
For veterinarians in rural New Zealand, spring also means something else — calving. Calving a cow in difficulty can be a satisfying and uplifting experience, or it can be difficult, rotten, smelly, and very, very time consuming. Not just that, a large proportion of calves are born at night, so a call on the home phone at that time of year can raise the blood pressure by a few degrees if you happen to be the vet on duty.
But this was a midday call on a Sunday and it was close to town, only 10 minutes’ drive towards the sea. The Boyce brothers milked about 200 cows, grew cash crops and fattened a few store lambs — a typical Marlborough low country property of the 1970s and ’80s.
Alas, today all that land bears grapes. The animals have gone. Row after terribly neat row of vines have replaced the livestock. Winding flax-lined streams have become dead straight, cleanly battered and sprayed drains, devoid of stream life.
But I digress. I drove down the valley, with that all too familiar, ‘What will I find here and will it take 10 minutes or three hours?’ feeling. When you’re the only vet on duty, long jobs usually mean there’s a list of callers waiting for you at the end. And we didn’t have cell phones then.
The Friesian cow was already in the pen and the brothers pushed her into, then locked, the head bail. I gave her an epidural anaesthetic, carefully injecting 5 ml of local anaesthetic into the spine at the base of the tail, lubricated my hands and had a feel. Tight but probably manageable with a good pull.
I slipped the calving chains onto the two forelegs still inside the cow, and attached my calving rope (an ex jib sheet from my old yacht) to them. At the other end I made a turn around a post, then fashioned a ‘truckie’s knot’ to double the leverage — a sort of bush pulley.
‘I’ll steer it through, you guys pull as I call it,’ I said, with an authority I only partly felt. The brothers pulled. I lubricated the calf and even stood on the rope to increase the traction and to give it some downwards motion. This one was really tight.
‘Pull guys,’ I urged.
The head was protruding through the vulva, but it was a big head, and it didn’t want to come. I tried to lever the offending skin over the calf’s head. The brothers pulled on the ropes. The head was moving out!
With a noise like a squawking pukeko, a powerful jet of cow shit burst from the cow’s rear end, hugely pressurised by the calf’s head just below it. The jet caught me midway between the eyes and spread over my face. The calf shot out, and I eased it to the ground, expecting some help from the farmers.
I looked up to ask for assistance, but I was wasting my time. The brothers were rolling on the ground, howling with uncontrollable mirth. The sight of the vet’s face covered in cow shit was far more important just then than the calf.
‘Jeez,’ said the older brother, ‘we’ll call you out again. Now let’s see if we can get this calf breathing.’
DROPPING BULLS — PA
Being one of the more valuable animals on farms, bulls tend to make up a significant proportion of our work. Often it is to check them for mating soundness. This involves testing their ability to successfully serve a cow, blood testing for infectious diseases, and sometimes collecting a semen sample to test quality. Bull testing is done routinely on young sale bulls on stud farms and on the handful of mixed-aged bulls on commercial farms. Who should be culled and who can be retained for another year is an important decision to be made before the autumn bull sales.
The other common job is to trim feet or attend to a foot abscess. Lame bulls do not tend to work too well and it is important they are sound before the mating season. On most jobs with bulls, it’s best to start with heavy sedation. An aggressive or nervous bull can be a dangerous animal and sedation not only makes the job, whatever it is, safer but you tend to do it better. A bull is a heavy beast as well, and unlike the other heavy animal we deal with, the horse, is invariably untrained.
One of the problems we have to deal with when making a diagnosis in the field is that to examine an animal thoroughly we may have to tranquillise it. Unless a handy means of restraining an animal is available, such as a good set of yards and a head bail or crush, then we often have to ‘drop’ it. Not all vets have the same procedure but you tend to stick to the one that works best for you. A common method is to run the bull up a race and inject it in the tail vein with xylazine. In about a minute its head drops, it starts to drool, and then it often urinates. It will stagger around and then lie down — but not always. This vein, a relatively narrow vein running along the underside of the tail, is easy to miss, especially on a moving target. Missing the tail vein means the tranquilliser takes a lot longer to work, sedation is not as ‘deep’ and ropes to help restrain the bull may be needed. But even when they do drop easily, different beasts respond differently.
On one occasion the particular bull appeared sufficiently sedated but after we placed the rope and applied some pressure, he decided it was time to leave. He smashed through the stockyard gate and dragged Jim Allen, the farmer, and me out onto the farm track. Jim bailed out but I was determined not to let go, hoping the tension would finally bring him down. Jim dined out for weeks on the vision of me bounding after the bucking bull hanging onto the rope and disappearing down the track. On this occasion, giving up meant hours getting an agitated bull back to the yards and starting again. In the end I had to, and came back to retrieve my rope and finish the job a few days later.
Another time I was working on what appeared to be a well-sedated bull. I was working on an abscessed hind foot while the farmer, Robert Oswald, sat on his shoulder chatting away, when the bull somehow brought his foot forward and took out Robert’s two top front teeth. They sat out at right angles to his face and I’m sure at the time he reminded me of Bugs Bunny. While the sight of Robert was rather amusing, it was serious enough. We managed to force the teeth back where they looked like they belonged and Robert tells me today that they are as good as they ever were. The little incident luckily didn’t spoil his good looks.
We can usually get around under-sedation by giving bulls more of the tranquilliser. However, overdosing with the drug has its problems. Nowadays we have access to antidotes to most of the tranquillisers, which can get around the problem to some degree, but this has not always been so. At Upcot Station, I was testing all the bulls for a venereal disease, which involved collecting washings from their prepuces (the lining of the sheath of the penis). The race in the yards was not a particularly easy one to work from, so I had decided it would be best to tranquillise them all first and let them all go down in the yard and collect the samples as they lay there.
So we filled the race up with half a dozen bulls and I worked my way down, giving them all an intravenous injection in the tail. After I had injected the second, I asked Bill to open the gate and let them out. Thinking all would be well, I carried on injecting. Unfortunately the first bull had decided he didn’t want to move through and out the race. Before we knew it, the tranquilliser had started to kick in and from not wanting to move, he now doesn’t care if he moves or not. He just wants to go to sleep. Next thing bull number one is down in the race and before we could back the others out the fourth bull went down. So we had two bulls wedged in the race and between them two more steadily becoming more sedated. Eventually we had four bulls do
wn and wedged in the race and, apart from dismantling a substantial construction, could do very little until they woke up.
While it is best to work with bulls in the yards, we sometimes have to make do in the field. They may be a long way from the yards or are so lame that driving them there is painful and unpleasant for the bull. In those cases, we use a pole syringe, a syringe attached to a piece of dowel or aluminium pole, or a dart gun.
In 1990, I was into doing a Country Calendar programme. I guess having a vet flying to work was a bit of a novelty. I thought it would be quite an experience but while I wasn’t too sure how my speaking bits would go, I was more concerned that all the practical veterinary stuff would turn out all right. We arranged to do several farm calls where we had a number of jobs lined up. But for some reason very few of the procedures that I thought worked brilliantly, and which would have even impressed one or two of my colleagues, were never aired. We castrated a colt, vasectomised a stag, post-mortemed a ram. These all worked brilliantly and I made some very profound statements during them about all sorts of wordly matters. It was so good I even impressed me. None of this was shown. Instead, anyone who remembers the programme only remembers Colin Nimmo and me chasing a mildly lame bull through the briar and brambles on his property, Muzzle Station in the Clarence Valley.
Muzzle Station is one of the more remote properties in the country, lying in the Clarence Valley between Muller and Molesworth Stations to the west and the Seaward Kaikoura mountain range to the east. Access is via a long, narrow, winding road from south of Kaikoura or by air. Colin manages the property with great skill using his Cessna 180 or Robinson (R22) helicopter. So we flew by helicopter to this lame bull, holed up in his comfortable little dell in the scrub. However, he was not going to have anything to do with two men with a pole syringe, a cameraman with a huge camera on poles, a soundman with a big hairy sausage on the end of a stick, and the programme director with a big excited smile on his face.
Cock and Bull Stories Page 11