Cock and Bull Stories

by Peter Anderson

  By the end of the day she appreciated that not all my landings were quite so exciting.

  It is often at the end of the day when flying comes into its own and can’t be surpassed. I have half an hour’s work left and then know I will be strapped into the Pawnee and cruising home, not having to think about the long drive back to town into the night on narrow, winding, dusty roads. The sun has gone down and there is a red glow in the sky to the west, there is not a breath of wind and all is calm. A trustworthy 1940s technology motor throbs away in front of me and I am at peace. In half an hour I am skimming over vineyards to land on our strip beside home. George or Caroline, if at home, will have heard me but not before our two terriers. By the time I have landed, the hangar door is open and I can taxi straight in. The hopper is emptied and materials are already in the back of the ute. I walk a few paces to the house to be greeted by a relieved Chick and a tumbler of Laphroaig or Highland Park. Telephone messages and tomorrow’s arrangements can wait until after dinner. Life is sweet.

  PUNCTUALITY — PJ

  Vets are always late. That is, country vets are always late. In my more recent capacity as a companion animal vet, I have a phobic fear of keeping people waiting, unlike another of my colleagues who in all other respects I admire enormously.

  Stuart is a fantastic vet and a lovely man, but on time? Never. If a meeting is due to start at midday, 12.20 is fine for Stu, while I gnash my teeth in silent fury. If there are two people waiting for me in the waiting room, I have failed my clients. Four is no problem for Stuart, even though they all have scheduled times. He should be called Teflon Stu. It never sticks to him. People who have been angrily checking their watches for 40 minutes come out of their consultation with Stuart smiling happily and thinking of the letter of appreciation they are going to send him. He’s just so thoroughly nice that he gets away with it.

  But I have this old-fashioned belief that as I don’t like being kept waiting, neither should I make my own clients wait for me.

  That is in the controlled environment of the clinic. We have receptionists, we have nurses, we have cages to put dogs and cats in if their consultation reveals the need for X-rays, or minor surgery, or an anaesthetic to check a ligament or a fracture.

  On farm calls, however, it’s very different, particularly in extensive areas such as Marlborough. It can be 20 to 50 minutes from one farm to the next on winding shingle roads.

  There is the ‘while you’re here’ syndrome with which all country vets are familiar. ‘Oh, while you’re here, the daughter’s horse is lame’, or ‘there’s a ram with a foot abscess’, or ‘one of the calves has a bulge under its belly’.

  These things may add anywhere from five minutes to two hours to your call.

  Or while you’re pregnancy testing 200 cows, 100 break out of the yards and have to be rounded up. Another hour gone. We’re always late, and farmers, bless their souls, are mostly understanding and say nowt.

  We don’t have good cell-phone coverage in some of Marlborough’s valleys either (and for a long time there was no such thing), so it isn’t always possible to ring ahead to let them know. In fact, it is my belief that unless farmers have the first call of the day, they expect their vets to be late, and plan accordingly.

  But one morning, at the very beginning of my career, when I was yet a student, and cell phones were as unlikely as The Second Coming, Peter Anderson was heading to see a fairly local dairy farmer, only 10 minutes from town. All this land is now in grapes, but at that time there were a few smallish town supply dairy farms scattered about the Wairau Plain, all close to Blenheim. They were a small but interesting and significant part of our vet practice.

  Danny Garfield had 100 cows, three young children and a mortgage. He was a nice man, but a bit chaotic. Things were always going wrong. If it wasn’t a strong electric current leaking into the cups of the milking machine and upsetting the cows, it was a damaged seal in the supply line to the milk tank.

  There was gear everywhere: old tractors, and various ground-tilling implements from days gone by rusting under a macrocarpa hedge or gathering weeds in the muddle of small paddocks near the house. Fences were ragged and not always stock proof, and some of the gates would swing reasonably well when opened, or when you untwisted the piece of wire keeping them shut.

  There always seemed to be a lot of washing on the line and Danny always seemed to be three steps behind where he wished he was.

  Pete and I headed out to see him at 8.30 this spring morning. As we turned off the road onto his drive, I could see hurried activity ahead. Arms were waving, two dogs were skulking 200 metres away, and 30 or 40 calves were kicking up their heels in what looked suspiciously like the vegetable garden. A milk tanker was parked beside the shed, the driver pacing anxiously. His schedule was tight; the factory didn’t like waiting for the day’s milk. A modern tractor lay at a funny angle, trailer and calf crate attached, in the paddock beside the milking shed.

  As we came closer, we could see the arms belonged to Danny. Normally an equable man, he stopped for only a second, then rushed past. I could clearly hear the words he spat out as he raced by, his oversized gumboots tripping him in the long grass.

  ‘What a bloody day! The calves have got out, the pump’s broken down, the tractor’s stuck, the tanker’s here and waiting, and now the bloody vet’s on time!’

  Sometimes it’s best to say nothing.

  AT THE ZOO — PA

  In 1982 the Marlborough Zoological Gardens opened after five years of fund-raising, bureaucratic obstacles and ridiculous building requirements. It seemed certain members of the local catchment board and their associates had had other plans for the chosen site, on low-lying land near the Wairau River, a short distance from Renwick. The Marlborough Zoological Society’s own plan for an exotic animal park modelled after Orana Park in Christchurch was in the way.

  Nevertheless, the enthusiasts, largely volunteer, persevered and the facilities were finally built and ready for their first residents.

  One of the problems with stocking a wildlife park is that you tend to acquire, often at considerable expense, other people’s cast-offs. Zoos can find surplus animals of some species, black buck, peccaries and even lions, for example, problematic to dispose of, so these were not hard to pick up. However, with others it seemed we were an outlet for the misfits.

  Olly the Ostrich was a sexual deviant who spent his whole life trying to mate anything else with two legs, including visitors observing him through the fence. If we had been able to source a mate for him, he may have improved but unfortunately this was not possible at the time.

  A large dominant male grey kangaroo, Boomer, was also a bit of an embarrassment. He spent most of his day showing off an incredibly impressive erection and masturbating on all the smaller pine trees that dotted his enclosure. This sort of behaviour is difficult to curb. He also urinated through the netting around his enclosure at people as they marvelled at his antics.

  We also tended to acquire a number of older animals that were naturally not as attractive as younger, fitter animals for displaying at zoos. As a result we had to deal with a few degenerative conditions including kidney failure in a lion, kidney stones in otters and teeth problems in a tiger.

  Diagnosing when you are faced with a sick animal in a wildlife park is not without its problems. Firstly it is impossible to have some sort of restraining device in every enclosure and even if we did, getting them into one was always difficult. Secondly, most zoo animals are difficult or very dangerous to handle, and thirdly any restraining or handling often exacerbated the situation and you ended up with an even sicker animal. In a number of cases we had to resort to tranquillising sick animals, and heavily in the case of the lions and tigers, to examine them. The dart gun was very useful for this. However, a tranquillised animal, while allowing easy collection of blood or other samples, does not behave normally or respond much to stimuli, which complicated accurate diagnosis. Equally, making a diagnosis on a stressed-out, pani
cking animal is not easy either.

  While blood tests might help, the results don’t come back for a day or two. Therefore you often opt for on-the-spot diagnoses while the animal is restrained. If you wait, you may have missed your only opportunity to get close enough to treat it.

  We usually used a rather shotgun approach to treatment as we needed to cover all fields. Restraining the animal for daily injections was out of the question, while medication in the feed was invariably unsuccessful. Medicating the feed might mean treating all other animals in the enclosure, which could be very expensive and usually didn’t work because sick animals invariably did not eat.

  However, all the animals were very well cared for and fed and generally in good health. Good programmes were in place to prevent outbreaks of parasitism and those diseases preventable by vaccinating. Some of the diseases we had to deal with were ones that little could be done about. This included two untreatable viral diseases — malignant catarrh fever (MCF) and bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD). These two viruses really took out our water buffalo and bison populations and were quite a tragedy for the park. Prevention by vaccination was not possible at that time.

  Once, over a period of a few months, we had to deal with a series of sudden traumatic deaths of several animals including two Barbary sheep, a chamois and a fallow deer. All had been badly gored and we couldn’t figure it out until early one morning a Himalayan tahr was observed making his way back to his enclosure via the top of deer fence posts — a serial killer with incredible agility and a good head for heights.

  Despite keeping potentially dangerous animals, there was never a major breakout, although we came close once when the head keeper failed to lock a door in the lion enclosure. PJ tells the story:

  I didn’t do much work at the wildlife park. Pete A had been their vet from the beginning, and had done all the exciting things such as vasectomising the tiger in Christchurch before it came to Marlborough. One day, however, I did get my share of the thrills.

  It was not long after PA and I had set up on our own. I was alone in our little clinic on Main Street when the phone rang. It was Murray Robers, the manager of the park. His voice was tremulous.

  ‘Can you come quickly? The tiger is out! Bring the dart gun.’

  That’s quite a dramatic start to a call-out, one that not too many vets will have faced. My mind was racing as I unlocked the safe and retrieved the dart gun, a handful of darts and a bottle of Fentaz, a lethal mixture of fentanyl and azaperone. I didn’t waste much time jumping into my little Datsun Sunny and tearing off westward to Renwick. At Springlands, on the outskirts of Blenheim, I turned left, then right onto Lakings Road, to my house. I had a .243 calibre rifle, barely enough to stop a tiger, but if I got a clean headshot it might.

  The problem with the dart gun was two-fold: I would have to get very close to be accurate and effective, not a pleasant thought; and even if I got a clean contact it would take 15 minutes to knock him out. He could eat a few residents and a vet in that time.

  I didn’t like my chances, so the rifle was going to be the better option. I put a packet of 105-grain ammunition on the seat and hurried towards Renwick again. My mind was running amok. How would I find it? Was it already terrorising the good citizens of Renwick, maybe gnawing on the local butcher right now?

  A vision came into my mind. For many years I hunted deer, chamois, tahr, and wapiti all over the South Island. I pictured myself getting a clean headshot, and could see the picture on the front page of the Marlborough Express of the great hunter, one foot on the dead tiger’s head, rifle resting butt down on the shoulder. The headline would read VET SAVES RENWICK. With the photo it would take the entire front page.

  The thought rapidly dissipated as I got nearer. I was very nervous as I turned in to the road where the park was, cautiously watching for bristling whiskers or a lashing striped tail. I reached the office. Murray was waiting. He looked shocked.

  ‘He went back in,’ he croaked. He was shaking, and looked very, very relieved.

  The story went like this. It was in fact one of the lions, not the tiger, who had escaped. Murray was so shocked at the time that ‘tiger’ came out instead of ‘lion’.

  There were double gates into the lion cage, and a set procedure to follow when entering and leaving, for feeding or any other reason. The keeper would go through the first door, then shut it behind himself, so he was in a secure separate area between the gates. Then, carefully making sure the animals weren’t too close, he would open the inner door, chuck the feed in, shut that one, then open the first door again to go and get more food. On this occasion he had broken the inviolable rule. He’d left the inner gate open as he went back for more food, believing the lion was out of the way and concentrating on the meat he’d just thrown it. When he turned around with the extra feed, the hungry and curious lion was walking through the gate towards him.

  He bolted into the outer enclosure, which was surrounded by a deer fence, and shot out of that via a small gate. The lion was secured only by a two-metre deer fence, an easy leap for an adult big cat. A woolly romney hogget lived in the enclosure. The lion grabbed it, played with it like a cat with a mouse for a few minutes, then tired of the game and strolled back into its cage. The hogget was unharmed but had a tale to tell her many grandchildren, although I doubt any believed her.

  It was a near thing, and Murray knew it. I was pretty damned relieved myself, but I always had just a small hankering wistfulness about the episode. The photo and the headline would have been great to show my grandchildren.

  (PA continues …) Despite the problems the park did work. Animals seemed contented and those that could bred well. Although the area started off bare and stark, it was soon developing nicely with many trees and gardens planted and growing well. It was becoming aesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately it struggled financially although desperate fund-raising activities by service clubs such as The Blenheim Round Table helped keep it afloat. The final straw was in July 1983 when Blenheim had a major flood. Most of the farmyard animals and some water buffalo drowned and though the otters survived, for some reason they died soon after. The peccaries swam in their enclosure for hours but did survive.

  PJ and I managed to make our way to the park at the peak of the flood and spent a full day there wading between enclosures and shepherding the animals to the highest ground. Here the herbivores had to be mixed. However, the floods did produce some amazing scenes of camaraderie among the animals. In a badly flooded area a water buffalo, antelope, kangaroo, chamois and tahr sought refuge by crowding together on a small mound of high ground.

  Nine weeks of rebuilding and repair work were required before the park could be opened again. However, this was a significant cost and the park never fully recovered financially. We had to make a decision on whether to close down or rebuild. Eventually a loan to rebuild was taken out but this finally proved too much to repay in that period of high inflation and interest rates. The number of visitors was just not sufficient to maintain the park and its outgoings. In spite of help from many sources, it always struggled financially and finally the decision to close was made in 1988.

  THE TWO RONNIES — PJ

  Embryo transfer. The very term still makes me prick my ears and sharpen my senses. It epitomised state-of-the-art technology and was something which we had quite a bit to do with in the 1980s and even into the early 1990s.

  Embryo transfer in cattle, sheep, goats and deer involves a complex programme of treating female animals with various sex hormones to make them produce multiple eggs (or ova) during the breeding season. The female is then mated with a bull, ram, buck or stag, and as males have very large numbers of sperm, one hopes there will be multiple fertilised embryos.

  These embryos have to be harvested by flushing them from the uterus of the female at about one week post-mating, before the embryos have permanently implanted into the wall of the uterus.

  The harvested embryos are then implanted, usually on the same day, into numerous
other females of the same species, whose fertility cycle has been coordinated with the original, or donor, female. This ensures that the implanted embryos are receiving the correct hormones for their stage of life. It’s quite complex, yet in the 1980s many New Zealand vets joined the boom of the goat world, and later the deer world, in performing embryo transfer or ET.

  In cattle, the flushing and implanting is comparatively simple, as the vet can palpate the cow’s uterus with a hand in her rectum. The cow doesn’t need an anaesthetic or surgery. But with goats, sheep and deer, much smaller animals, it all has to be done surgically, and usually in a purpose-built surgery on the farm. It demands a high skill level and much attention to detail.

  When we were doing goats, we would have to get a locum vet and nurse into the clinic for a month in April, and adjust everything else we did to fit around ET. It was highly exciting from a professional point of view, and pretty damned nerve-wracking too. There was a lot of money at stake.

  Enter the two Ronnies.

  Ronnie A was one of the first deer farmers in Marlborough. Big, bluff, scary, he bought whisky by the case, sold a lot of stags around New Zealand and by his own reckoning had the best stags in the country. He wanted to do embryo transfer from his top eight hinds to speed up the production of high-quality stock.

  Ronnie B was a real go-getter. He’d had a go at everything from possum trapping for fur to gold mining, from the mussel industry to the grape industry. He had a small deer farm with one outstanding hind.

  The two Ronnies, hard men if ever there were, formed a sort of alliance, and approached Anderson and Jerram to do some ET for them. Ronnie A wanted eight hinds done, and they would bring Ronnie B’s one hind to that farm to programme her with hormones.