Animal Magic

by Carolyn Press-McKenzie

  As the X-ray was slipped onto the lightbox he explained. ‘This was an absolute non-healer. But I’ll be damned if it hasn’t gone and healed itself.’

  Mum beamed at the doctor, whose words were music to her ears, and David beamed at Mum. They could breathe again. Mum’s can-do attitude—the one that never let us down—had come up trumps again.

  As the years passed I never forgot the miracle that Mum’s problem-solving and determination produced. I also didn’t forget that although the doctor’s advice and treatment plan was fair and sound it was not the only solution or, as it turned out, the best way forward for my brother. I learnt that even when a medical professional isn’t wrong, it also doesn’t mean that they are right. I learnt not to just accept an opinion or a conclusion if you didn’t like it, but to dig deeper, try harder and to look for alternatives.

  And though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, David’s unplanned trip down that waterfall completely changed the way I chose to live my life. Which brings me to my next story.

  It was like a scene from a horror movie. I was used to being called out to assist animals in crisis, but I wasn’t used to coming home and finding my own charges in that state.

  We had been asked to take in some geese because apparently the father goose was attacking human visitors. On questioning his owners about why they thought this was happening, they drew a complete blank. Their response was that he was just a bad goose, in fact a bad egg, and they no longer wanted him. I asked them about his home life and if they could identify when he played up the most.

  They pondered this and said, ‘It’s probably when his wife is sitting on eggs.’

  ‘So how many other geese do you have?’ I enquired.

  ‘Well, there is the male, his wife, the three male goslings she last hatched and the three eggs she is sitting on now.’

  I explained that pilgrim ganders are particularly protective during breeding season, and he probably had the weight of the world on his shoulders with such a large family to watch over. But the human father insisted that he had had enough and in the usual blackmailing fashion we were getting used to, he told us if we did not take the male geese then they were going in the pot. After further conversations the man stood firm in his decision. The mum goose was settled with her eggs and he was reluctant to let her go. It’s an awful feeling breaking up a family. But dad and the boys needed to leave the property or they would be dead. So we took the bachelor family and strongly suggested to the owner that he collect any future eggs so the cycle would not continue. We settled the gaggle of boys in and set about learning what made them tick. To be honest it was an easy transition and not an aggressive honk was heard between them.

  On this day as I came up our driveway I could see that the animals were unsettled, and when I stepped out of the truck I noticed a trail of blood. My eyes followed the bright red puddles and drips to Orlando, one of the young geese. He had collapsed in the grass and the back of his neck was non-existent. The flesh had been ripped away and what was left was a mess of muscle and veins, with sneak peeks at an exposed vertebrae. I bundled the still breathing young bird into the truck and raced back into town.

  ‘No, there’s nothing we can do, he’s a goner,’ was the opinion of the vet on duty. I could see where he was coming from; it truly wasn’t a pretty sight to behold and to imagine a way out of this horrendous pickle would require a good stretch of the imagination. But it has to be said that imagination is one thing I am not short of.

  ‘What do you think, Jim?’ I felt guilty making the vet wait for my answer while I called Jim on the phone, but my gut told me to hesitate. ‘I know it’s awful, the hawk has done a real number on this little guy, but I think I can heal him.’

  Jim processed what he knew of the situation ‘So he has no skin covering his neck? And you can see the bone?’

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘The wound’s about the size of a crab apple.’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Jim passed it back to me.

  I thought about it. I had just successfully mended the broken leg of one of the local huntmaster’s best horses. He was going to be fed to the dogs, but a friend of mine had told the huntmaster to give me and my herbal remedies a try. The horse had been transported to our block and within months was ready for light work again. I knew that I had the ability to heal damaged bones and tissue, but was I brave enough to try this wound? I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the work involved that made me hesitate, it was the quality of life for the goose. Was I just prolonging Orlando’s suffering while I indulged my own selfish curiosity?

  I decided to give it a go. The vet was not at all convinced but allowed me to take the bird on the condition that we put an axe through its neck at the first sign of decline. I stocked up on pain relief and antibiotics and headed out the door.

  I already had some comfrey tincture in my cupboard but needed to make a healing oil. So as I wandered through the paddocks, I politely asked the plants for permission to pick their leaves. I know it must sound mad, but that is the way I was taught and to be honest it felt nice to stick with the tradition of being grateful for the harvest.

  Plantain is my most favourite herb in the whole world. No, not the green bananas, but the common weed that you walk over every day on your front lawn. This little guy is taken for granted by most New Zealanders, but is one of the most useful herbs that I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

  It is also known as snakeweed in Africa because of its abilities to draw poison or foreign objects from a wound. I was so obsessed with plantain that when on school trips with Leah I would encourage the kids to make their own plantain spit wads when suffering from a graze, a bee sting, an insect bite, a nettle sting or a splinter. I’d show them how to pick a fresh leaf, chew it up and, hey presto, they’d have a ‘spit poultice’. Apply to the affected area, wait a few minutes, and problem solved!

  But mostly I loved plantain because it is such a dramatic and effective cellular regenerator while at the same time drawing out trapped infection. It contains a compound called allantoin, which is also found in comfrey, a snail’s trail and the urine of many mammals. In science research, allantoin is extracted and used to promote cell proliferation, and it is incredibly good at healing wounds. I had used plantain poultices, tinctures, creams and oils on my family and the sanctuary animals very successfully, and was always stunned and thrilled with the results.

  An infused oil of plantain is easy peasy to make and a great basic to have on hand. After washing and drying the leaves I tore and scrunched them up and then immersed them in the top layer of a double boiler containing first-pressed, cold-pressed olive oil. After six hours the extraction of the healing compounds into the oil was complete. I strained out the spent plant material and smiled as I poured the golden green oil into a clean jar.

  For the first few weeks Orlando the goose was cared for in our lounge, where he received antibiotics and pain relief. I set about drizzling the plantain-infused oil on his wound. I had added a few extra goodies such as St John’s wort for topical pain, borage as an anti-inflammatory, rosehip for scarring and manuka as an antimicrobial to the mix. It was working, the wound started to granulate and with physio by way of gentle laps around a lavender-infused bath—our bath—Orlando was back to normal and fully feathered within six weeks. In fact, you’d never know he had ever been attacked; emotionally and physically he was back in top form.

  After that attack, we hung flags from our fence posts to deter the hawks. That year had been a particularly bad year for hawk food and neighbours even reported the desperate birds flying off with chickens in their clutches. We often see them hanging around, but whatever made them so bold that year seems to have passed, and they haven’t needed to brave our land for food again, for which we are extremely grateful.

  CHAPTER 11

  A knack for learning

  My first boss hired me because I was the only applicant for the trainee veterinary nurse position who didn’t reply to his question about w
hy they wanted the job with, ‘Because I love animals’.

  I had said, ‘Because I want to learn’.

  I was only sixteen years old and although I had failed most of my school exams, I had a real knack for learning. I was terrible at retaining anything I’d read in a book. The only way I could learn was from real-life experience. So, for two years I listened to my boss interacting with clients, I watched his manner and technique with patients and I studied my trade at night school. As it was really just him and me at the small but busy suburban vet clinic, I was able to learn from being involved in every part of every animal’s journey. But after two years it started to feel a little like solitary confinement. I had qualified as a vet nurse and at the tender age of nineteen I started to wonder if there was more to life. The next six years were a jumble of cramming in as many experiences as I could.

  I went from working at a law firm to a job as an assistant to Sir Bob Jones, which involved a diverse range of tasks, including serving him his meat pies on ZKRJI, his little blue private jet, until a broken leg in full plaster for nine months saw me bored and back at school topping up my science knowledge. I followed this with a blast through the corporate wonderland that was Fay Richwhite Merchant Bankers in the early 1990s and on to a hospitality course that led me to bar tending. Vet nursing and care-giving gave me my ticket around the world, with an eight-week stint in Africa allowing just enough time for me to be dragged into an alleyway and mugged by seven young men with knives. With no money I had to hitchhike by myself across five African countries, and survive some pretty hairy adventures, much to my poor parents’ horror. Then it was a quick stint as a cocktail waitress on a cruise ship, crossing the triangle from New York to Bermuda several times, before I staged a walkout over poor working conditions and was finally deported back to Wellington where I settled into Central Wellington Vets as their senior surgical nurse. The team at Central Wellington were my home and family for three years before I set off with Leon and marriage number one.

  Looking back, I loved everything about Central Wellington Vets . . . and I still do. The hands-on experience was invaluable; as senior nurse I was abreast of all aspects of the animal’s treatment. I was the anaesthetist, the radiographer and the lab technician. I took bloods, lanced abscesses and descaled teeth. I comforted clients, pondered behavioural issues and on more than one occasion slept all night with the paw of a poisoned dog in my hand so I would know the moment they started to wake from a drug-induced coma and if they were starting to convulse again.

  The most important lesson I took from Central was that anything is achievable if you dig deep and try hard. From time to time we would have clients who had given up on their animals. Maybe it was inappropriately spraying around the home, or maybe it needed expensive surgery, but after a pleading smile to my boss and a nod from my boss to the client, the animal would be signed over to us and I was allowed the freedom to organise whichever treatment or surgery it needed and then find it a wonderful new and understanding home. Usually I would find if you changed the animal’s environment by rehoming it carefully, the problem would disappear. Or if it needed surgery, maybe to have a leg amputated or similar, it would just attract a more dedicated and sympathetic sort of home. Central Wellington Vets allowed me to develop my natural instincts and ability to problem-solve, and I loved every minute of it.

  So when I told my boss Mike that it was time for me to leave and start a new chapter in my life, I cried. He simply looked me in the eye and said, ‘Carolyn, if there’s one thing I have learnt in this life, it’s that no one is indispensable.’ I knew he really meant that I would be missed, but life goes on—and he was right. I had left behind the world’s best job and the world’s best workmates to get married and pursue my passion for animal training and behaviour. The team at Central will always be family to me and even now, years later, if I am ever in a pickle they are the ones who I trust with the lives of my loved ones.

  Fast forwarding through the years, we were all now settled at Pakuratahi Farm Animal Sanctuary, and Jim and I were both working full-time to pay the bills.

  Jim was working as a fire alarm design engineer and I had taken a position as a locum veterinary nurse at the Wellington SPCA. I was so excited; imagine working in an environment where saving lives and finding happy ever afters was the whole point. I naively thought that I was about to enter a romantic world of loveliness.

  A few weeks earlier Jim had taken my big stinky 4x4 ‘off roading’ on our land. I’d asked him not to because I was pretty attached to the old beast and in a killjoy sort of a way did not consider it a toy for his pleasure. Of course it got stuck. It was stuck beyond your wildest stucks and there was no access for another vehicle to get it out until the land dried in summer. So with a new job and no car, I took my neighbour up on a very kind offer and bought her retro Lada station wagon. Hmmm, it wasn’t exactly my top pick to cruise in; it was really heavy though much to the kids’ delight it had this knack of bouncing as I drove.

  My first day at the SPCA started with more of a thump than a bounce.

  ‘But I am a locum nurse, it shouldn’t matter to you if I get burnt out, I’m not your problem.’ I was on the verge of begging the acting CEO of the SPCA to let me keep four little abandoned pups. I was walking a fine line, trying to stay professional and yet trying to convince my boss that he was wrong. Just an hour earlier these pups had been picked up and brought into the shelter. They were weak and cold and I needed to set to work feeding and supporting them immediately. But as bad luck would have it, the acting CEO walked into the tired old cluttered clinic room just as I was taking them out of the cage.

  He looked the small bundles up and down, dropped his chin and shook his head in remorse saying it was a shame they were too young and would have to be put to sleep.

  I looked at him with a professionally masked horror. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  In a sympathetic tone he started to reason with me. ‘We have rules and our rules state that puppies this young are just not viable.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked again.

  ‘Well, they are just too time consuming. We can’t afford staff getting exhausted or sick.’

  ‘But I am not staff. I am qualified and I am available and ready to care for these puppies.’

  As I pitched my case some of the full-time staff rallied around me for support, or so I thought. As I looked to them for reassurance, I saw the same defeated look. Chins dropped and heads shaking, they took the pups from my grasp and set about euthanising them. I was gobsmacked.

  Still trying to stay professional I busied myself cleaning surgical instruments ready for sterilisation. My eyes had welled with tears and I felt very helpless and alone. A million questions were running through my brain. How could no one else see how tremendously unjust this was? Why would an entire staff just accept and comply with these rules? Surely they could see it was wrong? Where was their fight?

  Later that day I was sat down for a debrief. I was told that it wasn’t our fault that the pups died, it was society’s, the ignorant people who didn’t desex their dog, and the cruel losers who dumped them.

  Nope, I wasn’t buying it. Those pups needed us; their lives were literally in our hands. Forget the blame game. The puppies weren’t responsible for their situation and they had perfectly viable little lives . . . and now because of a lot of rules and excuses they were dead.

  One thing I have learnt about myself over the years is that I can’t read very well. It’s an odd thing as I clearly love to write. I remember back in primary school we would have colour-coded reading cards with a story on one side and several comprehension questions on the other. The problem would start when the teacher gave us 30 minutes to read the stories and answer the questions. I’d go clammy and panic. I’d try to start reading from left to right as I had been taught, but my annoying eyes would fly off to the right-hand side of the page and start reading backwards, something over which I had absolutely no control. I was ten years old and maybe that was the
first time I had really been put under pressure to read. But the more I needed to keep up with the class, the more I would panic and race to the end and work backwards. So I learned to cheat. Not cheating in the write-100-times-on-the-blackboard ‘I must not cheat’ way, but more a self-preservation and ‘learning to work within my limitations’ way. Instead of fighting my backward programmed brain, I’d go straight to the list of questions and look for key words. How many sheep did the shepherd shear? I’d just scan the page for the words shear, sheep or shepherd and only concentrate on that sentence. And so far it’s worked.

  With reading being a sticking point I didn’t really take the time to delve into animal behaviour books. I had a reasonable understanding from my vet nursing studies and I watched and listened to the experts and owners around me, but the most important penny-dropping moment for me was when I realised that all the latest trends and techniques from all over the world could not compete with, not even touch the sides of, good old-fashioned common sense. And when coupled with patience, determination and empathy there was really no behaviour problem that could remain unsolved.

  So I’d like to believe that by not reading every behaviour book in town, I was able to develop my own intuition and instinct. My mind was less cluttered and I could go about my business with a relatively fresh and untampered approach. All of which was about to come in handy.

  CHAPTER 12

  Head dog handler

  When my stint as a locum nurse had finished at the SPCA, they invited me to apply for the position of head dog handler.

  I completely immersed myself in the role and set about making changes. When I had first taken the job all of the nine or so dogs kennelled at the SPCA were expected to exercise together and to get along. If a fight broke out then the perpetrator would be euthanised. With the SPCA being such a highly charged and reactive environment I chose to implement another system: to rotate smaller, more compatible exercising groups. The system worked well.