Cock and Bull Stories

by Peter Anderson

  Most cows were locked up in their small barn for most of the day and only let out for a couple of hours of grazing — if they were lucky. Conserved food, mainly hay and meal, was brought to them. As the soil seemed very fertile and grew great lucerne, I wondered why stock were not grazed outside for longer periods. The lack of fencing was probably the main reason. I thought electric fencing would have been very useful but when I finally got one farmer to understand the concept, he proudly told me that my idea wouldn’t work — the fence would be stolen.

  I think another reason the calves were never let outside was because they didn’t know how to control them. I went to one farm where the calf, which was about two months old, was with its mother in a stifling hot, crammed barn with shocking ventilation. It had sore feet and horrible skin lesions and from what I could gather had never been outside. I told the farmer, in fluent Albanian of course, to bring it out of the smelly hovel and give it some fresh air — which he reluctantly did. The calf, on a very long leash, was so delighted that he ran about skipping and jumping and knocking everyone over, and came right immediately — all he needed was a bit of fresh air, exercise and sunlight.

  The Serbs behaved differently to the Albanians and the whole time I was there I never went into an Albanian farmhouse. The Albanian wife, all dressed in black, would usually rush out with coffee after we had finished a job and then vanish. We would sit down in the shade under a tree and quietly drink our thick, black, sweet tumbler of coffee. It was a very male-orientated society.

  The few Serbs I met were very different. One day we visited a Serb vet and his wife at their home under some large old plum trees in an enclave. We were invited inside his house, introduced to his wife and family and before we could get into any meaningful discussion had to try his homemade yogurt, and then his homemade cheese and finally his homemade slivovic, a fermented plum alcohol and a potent brew.

  However, that was after we had waited for him for some time to return from a call on the other side of the enclave to AI a cow. I expected him to roll up in a Skoda but instead he turned up pushing a squeaky wheelbarrow containing his semen tank. We then sat down in his house and memories of my student days flooded back. It smelt like a student flat, was as untidy as a student flat, and we were all drunk by 11am. By midday we knew everything, had solved all the world’s problems, and the four of us—Albanian vet interpreter, driver, Serbian vet and Kiwi vet were exceptionally good buggers. Of course every time we refilled and drained our tumblers we had to leap to our feet, link arms, and give each other a whiskery kiss — right cheek, left cheek, and then right cheek again, and toast something. The Serbian vet sang his national anthem, I did a haka. All good stuff and eventually we staggered out of the house and back to FAO headquarters where I proceeded to tell the project manager, whom everyone seemed suitably terrified of, how to solve the world’s problems, including his own.

  Before I left the Serb vet, with much ceremony he gave me a bottle of the good stuff — all nicely wrapped up in a plastic bag. So after sorting out the project manager I headed back to the ex-brothel and gave the bottle another wee nudge. I felt I deserved it, because in my opinion it had been a very successful day.

  After I had spent a few weeks working with dairy cows and their clients and the dairy vets, I headed south to the pretty town of Prizren. The nicely cobbled, tree-lined streets were only spoiled by the rubbish which lay everywhere. In fact most of Kosovo was covered in rubbish. I spent a couple of weeks in the area looking into how sheep were managed and spent time talking to sheep vets and managers of the flocks.

  Sheep are farmed principally for their milk in Kosovo. The indigenous breed, the Sharri, is oft en crossed with a German breed (Wintemberg), the cross producing a fast-growing lamb. Owners house their sheep at home over the winter but after lambing, the flocks, which are oft en only a handful of ewes, are driven up to beautiful rolling hill country with natural clover-dominant pastures where they join with other flocks and are managed in mobs of around 120 ewes. Here they are looked after by a team of four or five shepherds for the summer. The shepherds live in very primitive facilities, hand milking the sheep twice a day and because of wild dogs and wolves, yarding them at night. The milk is made into cheese on site and then transported to town by horse once a week. Despite the lack of hygiene and the abundance of flies crawling over all stages of the cheese maturation process, the finished product was delicious.

  Kosovo was an interesting experience for me but in many ways quite frustrating. There were a number of diseases that could have been easily controlled, but the lack of enthusiasm of farmers and vets to change could be understood. Farmers were poor as the financial return for their products was generally very low. Bartering between neighbours helped them survive. There was no infrastructure set up to process milk and this was not encouraged or helped by cheap products being dumped into Kosovo from neighbouring countries. There appeared to be a general lack of enthusiasm from local vets to change their ways and improve their services. As one said to me early on in my visit, ‘Why prevent? We make our money out of treating.’

  As there were ‘experts’ from all over the world in all areas of society trying to tell them what to do and how to manage their lives, they were becoming, as one vet put it, ‘experted out’. There were huge changes taking place and what was once, for the majority, a peasant-type existence ruled by an unpopular Serb minority with curfews every night and controlled by an unforgiving military, was now a free society. Just being able to walk the streets at night with their families was a luxury. There were enough changes taking place without the added stress of trying to make them change their ways of farming or vetting.

  As I have mentioned I did find it a challenge to communicate through an interpreter all day but it sometimes had its funny side. One morning we visited a relatively large dairy farm, milking about 60 cows and managed by a woman. This was most unusual. She ran a good operation and I was impressed. At the end of the visit I was, through the interpreter, complimenting her on her set up, how she managed it, the excellent hygiene, how her cows looked and their production, and that she also had very nice breasts. I didn’t for one minute think the interpreter would say everything word for word. Well he did. Luckily she didn’t appear to be too upset with what I said and I heard later that she had wanted me to revisit her dairy before I left.

  My work in Kosovo was meant to be a two-trip mission. Reports from other vets who had worked in the area went to great lengths to justify ongoing visits, but in my opinion our effectiveness was always going to be limited until a milk treatment factory was built and the Kosovo farmers were paid properly for their milk. Then vets might be reimbursed properly, and might be a little more enthusiastic about improving their services. For now they had had enough of experts telling them what to do.

  On my debriefing in Rome, I told them not to waste their money and my time. Advisors were only going to be really effective if they, the local Kosovo vets, knew what they wanted. Up until now, they had been so isolated that most didn’t appreciate how far behind they really were. They certainly didn’t like being told that. Getting a local vet who was well respected by others in Kosovo to gain overseas experience was an idea put forward after I left. This would be far more effective and apparently has since happened.

  Needless to say the FAO has not asked me back. However, I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything.

  THE WALL OF DEATH — PJ

  Although Pete and I were philosophically farmers’ vets, we were part of an era where country vets had to do everything. Whether calving a cow in the middle of the night, foaling a mare (always an urgent matter), examining a guinea pig’s skin or fixing a dog’s broken leg, we did it. Sadly, those days have largely gone. A few old-timers still hang on, but in this era of a population ever ready to complain, and with all the consumer rights to encourage litigation, vets, like all of the professions, are now much more specialised.

  Back in the 1980s and 1990s we were James He
rriot types — we’d have a go at anything, and without being immodest, I think that we can be reasonably satisfied that we were good small animal vets as well. The economy had turned by then and suddenly there was money to spend on the family dog and cat, something which an earlier generation wouldn’t have entertained.

  The result was that the small animal side of our business began to boom and we had to keep current in our continuing education in all aspects of small animal medicine and surgery.

  Pete A was always a very good soft -tissue surgeon, neat and tidy and efficient. I was more interested in the mechanics of orthopaedics and later became quite well versed in dog reproduction matters. But we still had to take what came, day and night.

  Digressing only a little, we once employed an English vet for three months during the embryo transfer season. Peter Orpin (yes, a third Pete) was a tremendous fellow and a very good vet, and with Bronwen, remains a special friend of ours to this day. We chose him because his CV said he could juggle and eat an apple at the same time! The period that he was with us in the mid-1980s, was just as our economy picked up, yet New Zealanders were still practical, sensible people who knew when things could wait and who didn’t like bothering vets after hours unless they had a real emergency. Pete Orpin told us one day that it was not unusual for vets in the UK to be rung at 3am by a client whose cat had diarrhoea. At the time we thought this hugely amusing.

  ‘That will never happen here,’ we chuckled

  By the late 1990s, it was happening here, and still is. We seem to have an increasingly urban population who are less able to solve problems and who always look to someone else for help. So veterinarians on duty for small animals are just as likely, and in fact in our practice far more likely, to be called out after hours than a large animal vet.

  The call could be for all sorts of things.

  Kevin was a good chap, young and go-ahead, running his quite large retail and service business, and with the boom in housing just beginning, he was doing all right. He’d married Laurelle, a professional in the performing arts and a little older than him. She’d been attached previously to a slightly dubious character, but was now happily married to Kevin. We used to see one or other of them regularly with their cat or dog. As with most of our clients, we had a nice friendly relationship with them both. But one day Kevin rang and asked for me. His voice was a bit strained.

  ‘Pete, can you come around here with something to tranquillise a wild cat?’

  Now, Kevin and Laurelle lived in a nice old two-storeyed house in the centre of Blenheim, so wild cats are a bit unusual there. But there were plenty of wild cats about. We quite oft en had them brought into the clinic trapped in a possum cage, where it wasn’t too hard to get a syringe on a pole through the bars to sedate them.

  ‘Have you got it trapped, Kevin?’

  ‘Well yes, but it’s in the downstairs toilet, and I’m not going in there with it.’

  It turned out, the cat had been entering Kevin and Laurelle’s cat door, harassing their own cat, peeing on the walls and floor, then leaving. Every night.

  Laurelle was quite a particular, neat and tidy woman, and Kevin had been given the job of ‘doing something about that cat or I won’t be coming home’.

  Those were her parting words as she headed off three days earlier to hospital in Nelson for minor surgery.

  Kevin had heard the familiar wailing from the family cat the night before he rang me and had rushed downstairs and shut the cat door. The wild tom had charged into the lavatory seeking escape and Kevin had slammed the door behind it. But now he had a real dilemma. The cat was really wild, and an angry cat is a very dangerous beast, let alone a wild, angry and trapped one. And Laurelle was due home from hospital the next day.

  So he rang the vet.

  I packed two pole syringes, a simple push one, and a more sophisticated spring-loaded one that we used on deer to allow us to get a good volume of drug in very rapidly on a moving target. We’d had lots of practice with the spring syringe, but not on cats. Deer are a bit bigger.

  I had to suss out the situation first. I carefully opened the door to the toilet an inch or two. The cat was going wild, doing the wall of death around the walls, which were covered in cat faeces and urine. The smell and the noise were terrific.

  Laurelle’s beautiful lace curtains were torn to shreds and so was the expensive Liberty patterned wallpaper. I was pretty interested in how Kevin was going to get all this cleaned up before Laurelle came home, but he just said, ‘Leave that to me. I’ve got commercial cleaners and decorators standing by. You get the cat out.’

  I’m happy to say that after a bit of excitement and an hour of near catastrophe, I managed to inject some sedative into the poor tom cat and remove it from the premises. I think I took the tom cat back to the clinic, castrated it and let it go near Kevin’s place a few days later. It would find its way home and would hopefully stay there.

  As I packed up my equipment and walked down the drive to my car, a commercial cleaners’ van was already arriving with a large team of cleaners. I didn’t envy any of them their job, but Kevin was a man with a mission.

  Laurelle came home in a plaster and was none the wiser, as far as Kevin has ever admitted.

  IMA DREAMER — PA

  Being involved professionally with thoroughbreds and trotters and with the retail manager at the Graham Veterinary Club, Kevin O’Brien, a thoroughbred trainer, meant the inevitable happened. Chick and I, along with four other couples, leased a young colt named Ima Dreamer for Kevin to train. Kevin naturally had some interest in this arrangement and also in the choice of horse we would lease.

  Those who know about racehorses appreciate that many of them have ridiculous names or what sound like very inappropriate names. However, I am told that many of these names arise when the horse is still a foal and something about its nature stimulates a particular name. One can understand how Bone Crusher or Fiscal Madness might have acquired their names, so we really should have thought twice about the horse when we found out what he was called. He was without doubt the world’s most appropriately named horse. Ima Dreamer was a friendly grey thoroughbred and I cannot recollect what his breeding was or where he came from but we ended up with him.

  After he arrived Kevin put him into training and at the appropriate time, and when Kevin felt he was due for his first start, the syndicate travelled over to Nelson with great excitement to watch his first race. Some of us went the night before and had some pre-race entertainment. We were all quite excited and reasonably optimistic that he might do well. Who knows, we could have another Phar Lap on our hands. ‘He’s worth a bet,’ said Kevin.

  He certainly was, as the tote was paying around $50 for a win and $30 for a place. Obviously no one knew the potential of Ima Dreamer — or perhaps they did. We all bet heavily, something like $5 each way, and went back to the stand excited horse owners, calculating our likely winnings. Older and experienced members of the racing fraternity were giving us knowing looks. Obviously our heavy late betting had had a significant effect because the payout on the tote for Ima Dreamer had crashed. Perhaps our obvious enthusiasm and insider knowledge of the horse influenced those nearby and others put a bet on him as well. We recalculated our winnings, but they still looked not too bad.

  Suddenly the horses were off. There is a grey on the outside of the leading bunch and he is running smoothly. We cheer Ima Dreamer on and by the first corner he has moved up to third place. However, we are becoming a little concerned by now as no one has yet heard his name from the race caller. I happened to look back to the starting box and suddenly a grey leaps out. Sure enough, it’s that bloody dreamy horse. It’s a short race and as the leading horses, including the other grey, flash past the winning post, Dreamer comes around the corner into the final straight, legs going in all directions. While our first start was a little embarrassing, it gave others plenty of amusement.

  Kevin worked on Dreamer’s starting technique and when he had determined all was w
ell we set off to Rangiora for the next start. We were full of excitement and convinced that this time he would be successful, or at the very least, run well. After all he had not shown he was slow — just slow getting away. ‘Definitely worth a bet,’ said Kevin.

  So again we bet heavily on Ima Dreamer, who was paying at least $3 for a place, and then went and waited in the stand with some excitement but perhaps a little less loud enthusiasm than at the first race. The announcer came on and was doing the preliminaries for the race when suddenly a horse bursts through its starting gate. There is no way this horse is going to be late getting away. It’s a brilliant start, the gate doesn’t hold him back and he’s away, but no other horses are. Naturally it’s Ima Dreamer. The jockey finally pulls him up just within the required distance and he is led back to and put back in the starting box. Soon after he has returned the race actually starts. This time he got away when he was meant to. Not late, not early, right on time. Unfortunately he had already run a race and though he won that one, it did not really count. In the real race he came in last, again, and by at least 10 lengths.