Cock and Bull Stories

by Peter Anderson

  On the night in question the meal was excellent, and by midnight there were four couples left, possibly the partners of our practice (by then The Vet Centre) and a senior staff member, but I really can’t remember; we were cleaning up a few bottles of red at the time, and the memory blurs just a little. There was a discussion about calling into someone’s place on the way home, and because Ally wished to go home, while I thought socialising was a good idea, I drove. Foolishly, as I’d had a few. The result was the unilateral disagreement with a policeman, which I mentioned, an appearance in court and loss of licence for six months.

  Now, while it’s not the end of the world, it’s a degrading, humiliating and embarrassing experience. Which it should be, and lesson definitely learnt.

  The real problem as a rural veterinarian is that you really do need your car. So another visit to court means that it is possible to get a licence, but there are severe restrictions as to how said car can be used. Only for work. Only a certain route to be taken from home to work. A log to be kept of all work calls, and the farmer to be rung when leaving to go there, so the gendarmerie can check on you. All very tiresome.

  And the last restriction is — no passengers. I’m not sure why, but no passengers.

  We fast forward three months. A young, very able and enthusiastic student is spending two weeks in the clinic. Geoff is so keen, he comes in the weekends to get more experience with the on-duty vet. It is Marlborough Wine Festival Day in February. It’s always a hot day, and there are always a lot of police around. I think they spend all of January cloning them somewhere, so there’ll be enough for the Marlborough Wine Festival. Every driver leaving the festival is stopped 100 metres down the road and breath tested.

  I, however, am virtuously doing my weekend on duty, slightly darkly, thinking of everyone else having fun at Brancott Vineyard, scene of the festival.

  Geoff the student has helped me on several cases. At 4pm comes a call from a farmer’s daughter in the Wairau Valley, 40 minutes drive up the valley. She has a horse with colic, abdominal pain and discomfort. This can be a serious symptom for a horse. Geoff wishes to come. I’m not supposed to take any passengers, but Geoff has been very helpful and I know all the cops will be at the wine festival site stopping the drivers about this time.

  ‘Come on, Geoff, we’ll be right.’

  I have nothing against the police. They have a difficult job and some are my friends. But one or two, or possibly hundreds in the traffic division, can be just a little officious. The thought of stopping a restricted driver and finding he has a passenger would be a juicy prospect to some of these gentlemen and women. Just some, mind you. I have no doubt that some are thoroughly nice people, and can even read the newspaper, spot the Southern Cross, and appreciate the Finn Brothers. But not all.

  Off we go, past the growing satellite town of Renwick, up the road running due west along the great fault line towards the Nelson Lakes and the West Coast. The hills to the south are bone dry, a sort of dusty clay colour, while those across the river to the north are green, alternatively clothed in scrub, exotic pine forest, and further up the valley, beautiful native beech forest reaching towards the bushline, before the rocky tops at 1500 to 2000 metres.

  We are travelling along the edge of two of the earth’s great crustal plates, the Pacific and the Australo-Indian continental plates, the joint of which, the main fault line, runs right through the centre of New Zealand, forming the Wairau Valley on the way.

  I am anxious about this horse. The owner is not our usual client, preferring another vet, and I’m only average as a horse vet. So I chat away to Geoff about what we may find.

  Bloody hell! Red and blue flashing lights shoot past me going the other way towards town. I’m doing 125kmh or so and as I check in my rear vision mirror and see him stopping and turning to chase me, I get that adolescent feeling, so familiar when I was at school and always in trouble. What the hell are they doing up here? I can’t do anything but keep on while the boys in blue put on a major spurt to catch me.

  As they approach from behind, all lights, bells and whistles going, I pull resignedly into the side of the road and push the automatic drive lever to neutral. The cops pull up behind me.

  I leap out, an urgent overalled figure, clearly on a mission of mercy. I’m going to tell these cops that this is urgent and I hope desperately that they don’t check my licence with its big ‘RESTRICTED’ stamp across page six saying ‘no passengers’. I stride along the grassy verge back towards the parked police car. As I raise my eyes to make contact with the gentlemen (there are two of them) I can see a look of horror in their eyes. They’re not interested in me, but in my car which is gathering momentum, in reverse, towards their now parked car. I have put the gear lever into reverse, not neutral. Disaster on all fronts is looming.

  Showing admirable presence of mind, Geoff pulls on the handbrake. The Subaru’s rear bumper stops 10 centimetres from the police car.

  ‘I’m in a hell of a hurry, there’s a horse dying.’ I am brusque, a man with a mission. I am also bluffing like hell.

  The driver gulps, his eyes still wide with the shock of the near miss.

  ‘Well, don’t drive so fast,’ he stammers. ‘You were doing over 125.’

  And he waved me away.

  You don’t oft en have a win at the right time. I was feeling a bit tail-down with the loss of licence and loss of face, but I felt a lot more cheerful after that.

  A good student, that Geoff.

  HOSPITAL VISITS — PA

  Working with animals of any species can have its dangers but for some reason I seem to have had a little more time in hospital getting patched up or repaired from animal or unintentional self-inflicted injuries than Pete J. Perhaps he moves a little faster than I do. As a result there have been some times when he has had to hold the fort alone while I have lazed away. On occasions we have had to employ a locum or friend to help out. Once when I was out of action for several months a good friend of ours, Richard Lee from Hawke’s Bay, kindly filled in for several weeks. This fact continues to haunt me to this day. I still get reminded by some farmers about the vet who worked for us while I was out of action. ‘Hey Pete — remember that vet who was here when you were out of action after your prang. Gee, he was a good vet.’ The insinuation being that he was better than me — which is quite possibly very true.

  Anyway, Pete would regularly pay me visits. His good humour usually cheered me up but I’m not always sure to my advantage. Laughter and broken ribs are uncomfortable bedmates. On one occasion I was incapacitated following a rather uncomfortable procedure — a haemorrhoidectomy. While this procedure is uncomfortable for the recipient, if it is anything like removing anal glands from a ferret, it is probably also an unpleasant job for the surgeon. Anyway, before Pete left he attached a large ‘Elizabethan collar’ around my neck, which I had some difficulty removing. Elizabethan collars are collars we place around a cat’s or dog’s neck to stop them licking bandages or wounds or chewing out stitches. So here I am lying in bed with this collar and the nurses start coming in.

  For the rest of my stay in hospital my name seemed to be associated with a good deal of mirth. The image of me trying to chew out my rectal sutures obviously amused them.

  I always looked forward to Pete’s visits over the years because he invariably brought along something to keep me amused, other than himself. If it wasn’t a good book, it was very oft en a small flask of a medicinal compound — usually a special single malt. While it may not have been to doctor’s orders I’m sure it always sped up recovery.

  Together we have also visited friends in hospital. We decided one evening that my sister, who was having a prolonged and difficult first labour, needed some assistance. We arrived at the maternity ward and barged into the theatre all geared up with calving gowns, gumboots, calving jack, chains, and a bucket of lubricant and informed the concerned-looking doctor and nurses that we were here to assist. We are not too sure whether our offer was appreciated
but believe the tense atmosphere in the theatre did improve a little.

  Another time we thought we would cheer up a good mate who had had to undergo painful surgery for prostate cancer. We arrived at his room all properly attired in surgical gear. With gowns, masks, gloves, and surgery caps we would have been a little difficult to recognise. We carried a set of emasculators. Emasculators are what we use for castrating large animals with big testes. Castration is a very effective means of controlling prostate cancers. ‘Hello, Mr Sheild. We have come to fix you.’ (To fix = to neuter.) Tony was not terribly amused, which I guess is understandable under the circumstances. The nurses were bemused. We thought it was very funny.

  One morning early in my career I was given a rather nasty kick below and inside the right knee while pregnancy testing some beef cows in, as was usual for the times, a rather substandard set of cattle yards. My response was understandable and included kicking the cow back, which did neither of us any good. By the time I had finished that herd and was trying to get my leggings and overalls off to drive to the next herd up the valley, my leg had swollen somewhat and the knee was not bending too well. I was developing a sizable haematoma. Methylated spirits cooled things down and after a while we drove to the next job. There were four herds to pregnancy test that day and by the time I had finished it was getting dark, my leg was very swollen, it was rather painful, and driving was not easy. I thought it prudent to perhaps drop in at the accident clinic and see if they could do anything to help. Otherwise it was going to be an uncomfortable night. So smelling like the contents of the rear end of a cow and still covered in much of it, I hobbled into the hospital. There was a young doctor on duty who took one look at my leg and decided that it definitely needed draining. This he said he would do with a large bore needle. For a good half hour he and every nurse in attendance scoured the hospital for a large bore needle. Now and then he would come back with some pathetic little needle and try and suck something out but this was a haematoma — clotted blood does not go through little holes.

  Finally I said that I had a large needle or two in the car — would he like me to go and fetch one? His look was easy to read: ‘You filthy man, all covered in and smelling of cow shit, how can you have a sterile large bore needle that I can use, in your car, when we can’t find one in the hospital.’

  He actually didn’t say anything. I tried to explain to him that I was a vet, that I deal with big animals that have big veins, that I give big doses of thick stuff through big bore needles as quickly as I can because I don’t have time to do it slowly. I need such needles because my patients refuse to sit around patiently reading books for an hour or two while I gently administer their treatments. A couple of hours later and as the night wore on, he got the message and let me hobble back to the car and retrieve one of the hundreds of shiny two inch 14G needles, all individually sealed in their sterile packaging, which I carried. This allowed him to suck enough contents of the haematoma out to relieve the pressure and allow me to get some sleep that night. However, it was not until after an older rural doctor took one look at it the following morning, whipped out a scalpel, made a decent gash in my leg, and released a bucket full of clotted blood that things came right.

  Brain injuries are more serious. Not only do they affect you but they affect your relationship with friends, families, clients and patients. It can be as tough on them as on you. After I had landed on my head on the tennis court in Kekerengu, as detailed earlier, and Rod Heard and his son Andrew had bravely hacked me out of the wreck, fuel dripping, engine hissing, I remained unconscious for several hours. Although I was back working and flying in three months, I do not believe I was back to my old self for a good two years. My short-term memory and ability to verbally express myself were affected, and for some reason I seemed to go through angry periods. I also ‘lost it’ with animals.

  Many of us, but not all, who work with animals all our lives — farmers, stockmen, shearers, stock agents, stock truck drivers, vets, and others — will develop a unique rapport with animals. It may sound trite but we seem to communicate with them on a different sensory level. Our ‘sixth’ sense allows us to safely move amongst mobs of stock or handle individuals and even our presence will calm them. It’s how and where you stand in relation to them, how you touch them, and how you look at them but most of all it is in the mind. One of the first lessons I tell a vet student getting work experience, when his or her presence seems to excite a group of animals, is to ‘relax and think nice thoughts’. Despite what many think I do not believe lots of talking or trying to make soothing human noises to animals that have never learnt human commands is of any help. A command to calm down usually has the opposite effect.

  So, it’s all a bit of a mind thing. And after my knock on the head I lost the touch. My presence seemed to excite rather than relax animals, especially horses and deer. I lost the ability to be part of the mob and to anticipate their movements. I was no longer communicating with them. As a result I went back to my early practice days of arriving home with my daily quota of kicks and bites. Bluey Hope, an observant trotting trainer with whom I had regular contact, kept reminding me that I was ‘not right yet’. He noticed that I was not handling his horses the same and having more difficulty doing basic stuff like examining, stomach tubing, or administering injections. His horses would not relax in my presence. It was also Bluey who one day said, ‘Well done, Pete, you are back.’

  My most recent, and hopefully last, visit to the hospital was for a perforated bowel and resultant peritonitis. It seemed to take an awfully long time before they had confirmed that I had a peritonitis — actually five days of increasing discomfort. In the meantime PJ and Stuart Burrough, who were regular visitors and were becoming increasingly concerned with the decline in my condition, were trying to encourage the medical profession to do something other than just observe.

  At one stage I said to the surgeon in charge: ‘Look, I can’t tell you your job but if I was a dog I would by now be opening me up and having a look, and if I was a horse I would shoot me because this would be an animal welfare issue.’ He didn’t seem to find that amusing.

  Eventually they confirmed I had peritonitis and I underwent emergency surgery. Due to complications my recovery was somewhat prolonged but was undoubtedly smoothed by a daily visit from PJ along with a little bottle of a good tonic.

  DOGS WHO WILL ALWAYS LOVE ME — PJ

  This is not a chapter for the delicate reader. Those who don’t like sex should quickly pass on to the next section …

  It all began with Hamish, a fine West Highland White dog. His owners, Jim and Peg McCallum, were good solid citizens, nothing fancy, retired and into breeding pups for sale. It was both a hobby and a bit of income for them. Jim was a good old chap, cheerful and one of the lads. Peg was the driving force, oft en a bit anxious, but always appreciative of what we did for her as vets.

  What we did for her may shock some readers, but it is something a lot of vets do for their clients. We used to collect Hamish’s semen, then artificially inseminate their on-heat bitch. I can’t remember why they weren’t allowed to do it naturally, but Peg and Jim had convinced themselves there was risk for the dog and preferred us to do it. (PA: If I remember Hamish just didn’t seem to know where to put his penis in the bitch. Remember we had to be quick as he was developing a bloody good erection before he had got onto the table.)

  Dear Hamish. We must have collected his semen at least 30 times, possibly a lot more, as the McCallums had a few breeding bitches. And after Hamish came another male dog, then another.

  To digress a little, I must now include a short description of the process. To collect semen from a male dog, it helps if there is an oestrous (in heat) female present, dog that is. As the male gets interested, the vet has to extrude his — the dog’s, that is — willing member from the sheath, popping out the swollen pars bulbis (the bit that gets them knotted), then cover the whole thing with a plastic collection cone, with a 10 ml collection tube wedged
into the end of the cone. The vet then gently squeezes the pars bulbis a few times until the dog ejaculates into the cone, which channels the semen into the tube. It’s actually a bit more complex than this, and there wasn’t much training in the technique when I was student, but that’s it in a nutshell.

  Over the years this could lead to embarrassment and hilarity, depending on one’s point of view. At one stage a very pretty young female vet was working for us. A farmer came in with his dog for an AI (artificial insemination), and the young woman ushered him into the consulting room and shut the door.

  When they emerged 20 minutes later they were both looking embarrassed, and the client rapidly left the premises. On questioning our vet I found that the client had had to show her what to do. She did come from a good family.

  Now you may think this is all a bit dodgy. My good friend Ron Crosby, a solicitor, once rang me when a mutual farmer client had just left his office, having just been to see me with his dog and bitch, before visiting Ron on legal business.

  ‘You dirty bugger’ was Ron’s opening sentence. ‘Is that what vets do? Disgusting!’ All I could think of at the time was to splutter, ‘Well, it’s not half as dirty as the things you do in your profession,’ which looking back may have been pretty accurate.

  Ron’s and my client was a prominent dog triallist. These people and their dogs are highly skilled and a top trial dog is a valuable breeding proposition, so many of them would come to see me when their breeding programme wasn’t working.

  The other large group we tendered our services for were the owners of show dogs, in itself a semi-major industry. Every weekend, this dedicated band groom their dog or dogs, put them in a trailer or the back of the car, or even a specially converted campervan, put on their glad rags (anything from suit and tie to best dancing regalia) and head off to a local or national show. Cruft s, the British dog show, is the most famous of these, but it begins in the suburbs and goes local, provincial, national and international. It’s their whole life and extremely important for them to have their dogs judged better than everyone else’s.