Animal Magic

by Carolyn Press-McKenzie

  At HUHA today we have many dogs that come through the system with both old and new injuries and conditions. Our team, who you will meet a bit later, always remembers my story of Murphy, and how he died that night. The animals that need special care we carefully rehome with adults who have no children or who have grown-up children. We explain to owners that if they have a busy day of visitors then to just pop the dog away from it all. We explain it is their responsibility not to put anyone, dog included, in a silly situation. And above all never ever leave children alone with dogs.

  Murphy’s ashes sit in our family room next to those of Haggis and Gerber, who both passed peacefully and surrounded with love.

  CHAPTER 19

  A change of environment

  As Jim and I struggled through the ups and downs of rescue work we noticed that every bad situation always had a silver lining.

  Whether it be a lesson learnt or new relationship built, there was always something. And with Pixie the pony we gained both.

  The lesson we learnt was that it is not always possible to get it right. No matter how careful we were when choosing a new home and no matter how good the new owners seemed at the time, situations and even agendas can change. The most important thing then is for us to stay available and be there if we are ever needed to pick up the pieces.

  I remember like it was yesterday the day Pixie’s owner called us.

  ‘If you don’t come and get this bloody pony, I’m gonna lose it. I’m gonna give her the bash,’ said the voice down the other end of the phone.

  Slightly alarmed by the threat, I talked more with Pixie’s mum, methodically retrieving information so I could piece together the scenario that had led to her making the phone call.

  ‘So are you saying you want to hit your pony?’ I carefully asked in a pleasant tone.

  ‘Yeah, nah, it’s bloody driving me around the bend. The cheeky tart’s pushing all my buttons and, honestly, I don’t damn well trust myself with her . . . can you take her or not?’

  What a character. They were big fighting words, but under all the bravado I could hear in her voice that despite the meltdown she cared deeply for the pony and its future. As we talked further she explained in her clumsy way that she didn’t want Pixie going just anywhere. She told me that she was a very experienced horsewoman and if she couldn’t cope with the brat of a pony then she worried no one else would be able to. She just wanted Pixie safe and out of harm’s way . . . hers was essentially an honest cry for help.

  As I hung up the phone and relayed the content of the call to Jim, I added, ‘If only more folk were brave enough to ask for an intervention.’

  Within the hour we were at her house and Pixie was introducing herself to Jim and me. She was stunning, a steel grey pure-bred Welsh mountain pony, only two years old. Her owner was right, she was a hugely extroverted character and with both of them having opinionated and bolshy natures it was very apparent why they clashed.

  She explained that when Pixie was just days old her mother died after eating something poisonous and that Pixie had to be bottle-fed by her breeder. The lady had bought Pixie off the breeder just six months ago, and she had already broken her to saddle.

  We said our goodbyes and took Pixie home where she took a shine to the motley crew straight away. They kept her entertained and out of mischief, enjoying her cheeky games, and leaving her happy and satisfied. With all her new friends Pixie settled quickly and was a complete angel.

  As we often say, change the environment and you will change the animal, and for Pixie this is exactly what happened. She was just a baby, and didn’t want to work and be pressured. She wanted to enjoy her childhood and frolic, and the sanctuary’s hills and gullies were just the magical playground in which she could thrive for the next few years.

  As she grew we discovered that she loved to ride in horse floats and hopped aboard for an outing at any opportunity. She also loved to be brushed and cuddled by Leah and any visitor she could work her magic on.

  Not wanting to become hoarders, and always needing space for new rescues, we look for a caring new home to place an animal in after rehabilitation. We are very careful to choose homes that continue to provide a fun and enriched environment where the new family member will be loved for life. And we are usually very careful to find a home where the animal won’t be bred (there are enough to rescue without creating more!). And that’s where I mucked up with Pixie. My judgement became clouded and I was about to make a humungous and devastating mistake.

  A woman came to visit us at the sanctuary, and wanted to take Pixie. She had other Welsh mountain ponies for her to play with and was keen to take Pixie to shows. As Pixie loved to ride in the float and loved to play and show off and be groomed and fluffed over, it seemed a perfect match—though we were very sad to see her go!

  The first time we visited Pixie everything seemed fine; she was her usual happy-go-lucky self. Sometime later we visited her again and she had a beautiful newborn foal at her feet. Pixie and the foal looked happy and healthy. But we told the lady that we weren’t keen on Pixie becoming a brood mare and because she had not been taken out for adventures, but left in a small and boring paddock to breed, we would be taking Pixie back once their prize foal was weaned.

  Several months later we went to collect Pixie. Our hearts sank. She was shockingly skinny and very depressed—her foal had been weaned and Pixie had been left on her own in an even smaller paddock. I was inconsolable. I had failed little Pixie. The light had gone out of her eyes, and when we rolled back her lips to check her teeth, we could see immediately that her front teeth were severely worn from grazing the sparse and stony paddock she had been left in. We took Pixie home with us and set about loving her back to wellness. But Pixie found it hard to cheer up and her weight loss remained a problem. We cried and felt terrible that we had ever let her go!

  One day we saw Pixie’s foal ‘Fern’ advertised for sale on the internet. We drove to the property and banged on the door. To this day I don’t think I have ever lost my temper and yelled the way I did at those people.

  ‘You put Pixie through all this to get a foal and now you are throwing that away too? No way, that’s not good enough. That foal does not deserve to be sold like a second-hand toy. How dare you!’

  After my enraged outburst they agreed that we could take the foal away then and there. I took a deep breath and refocused. As we calmly and gently approached Fern her eyes widened with panic, and she thrashed around the pen. It was clear she had had very little or no handling. But with patience and kindness we managed to get a halter on her and brought her home.

  We watched the emotional reunion. Delighted to see her mum, Fern nuzzled and mouthed at Pixie in the submissive way foals often do, then, as she gained her confidence, soon became playful and animated. Fern was definitely scared of people and a little thin but otherwise okay. And, oh, how we hoped that she would help heal Pixie’s broken spirit and broken heart.

  Several months later Pixie had finally started to fill out and look her healthy beautiful self once again. Then one morning, as we were wandering through the paddock, we noticed something moving on the ground by Pixie’s feet. As we edged forward for a closer look, to our amazement and complete horror we found Pixie was standing next to a newborn foal. Once again, I felt the guilt take over as I sat on the ground and sobbed. Pixie was looking amazing; she was truly almost back to her old self—and we were delighted to meet little Punga, we truly were. But it was just so devastating to think that Pixie would have been pregnant with him all the time she was depressed and emaciated.

  So while trying to rehome one pony we somehow ended up with three!

  As we watched cheeky Punga grow and constantly hassle his mother and sister to play, the horror of Pixie’s journey started to fade in our minds and we hoped in hers too.

  ‘So how do we go about rehoming them now?’ I asked Jim, knowing that we had become so very attached to and protective of Pixie and her little family.

 
; ‘We don’t,’ he said with conviction.

  I looked into his eyes to try to gauge if he was serious. And he was.

  So we have kept Pixie, Fern and Punga together here at the sanctuary. And they have a very important job of interacting with visiting children as part of our educational programme. We even use them to help at-risk youth process their emotions through our Equine Growth and Learning Programme.

  But every sunrise, as I watch our terrific trio galloping across the hills in pursuit of Jim on his quad bike, I am reminded just how lucky we are to have had a second chance. We truly are on such a huge journey when it comes to learning about people and animals, and it just goes to show that we can never take our role and our choices for granted, no matter how careful and experienced we think we are at choosing new homes. Things can sometimes go wrong, whether it be a change in circumstances or misjudging someone’s intentions, or maybe a lapse of judgement with a new owner. We are so invested in every single animal that leaves our care and promise that we will always be available should any of them need us for any reason in the future.

  We are just so grateful that with Pixie and her little family we were in a position to put things right.

  CHAPTER 20

  King Kong and some monkeys

  Jim and I were chuffed to be asked to head the animal department for Peter Jackson’s movie King Kong.

  And we were even more excited when we saw the haphazard collection of animals we would need to provide and train. Well, all except for one.

  On the list was a mynah bird for the ship’s galley, a cart horse, and several police horses for the New York City streets, a parrot and a marauding dog. The one we weren’t excited about was a monkey riding a bicycle, which was obviously not an enjoyable natural behaviour for a monkey and against our moral beliefs. After carefully voicing our concern and trying to think of alternatives, we were so relieved when we were told the monkey had been just a vague idea the art department had for one of the early vaudeville theatre scenes, which probably wouldn’t happen anyway.

  The sad thing is that we actually thought we might know where we could get a monkey riding a bicycle, or riding a pony at the very least, and the more we thought about the heinous idea, the more curious we became. So, armed with a good excuse to have a sneaky peek behind the scenes, we took the opportunity to have our first up-close-and-personal experience with the ringmaster of a little New Zealand travelling circus. We correctly introduced ourselves as animal trainers and casting agents and the ringmaster happily showed us around. Stepping back in time and walking past the chained elephant, the tethered donkeys and the tied-up mutant dwarf pony, Jim and I both started to feel uncomfortable. As the ringmaster proudly introduced us to the lions in a makeshift enclosure, I thought inwardly that the male, supposedly the most majestic creature in the world, had such sadness about him and literally no mane, just a scruffy effort that truly didn’t count.

  We approached the monkeys who, like most of the animals, were on chains and tethers. We met three of them: Laurie a ‘badly behaved’ capuchin and the new up-and-coming stars, pig-tailed macaque sisters Joanna and Rachel. Rachel and Joanna had ropes bolted around their necks and were also inside one of the portable chainlink enclosures. Apparently they were only young, just two years old, and the ringmaster was still working on breaking their spirits so they would work well for him and ride the pony. As we made our excuses to leave, the ringmaster pointed inside the tent. There was one more monkey to see. His old boy Charlie, a rhesus macaque, liked to hide out away from prying eyes, and as our eyes pried our hearts sank. Charlie was clearly very old; he was hunched and his limbs noticeably twisted with arthritis. He was sitting quietly on a bench seat under the dark red glow of the unlit tent. It was obvious he just wanted to be left alone, so we snuck out as quickly and quietly as we snuck in. We had had our first look at the reality of a cruel and antiquated part of New Zealand history. We sat in sombre silence all the way home.

  The rest of the animals for King Kong were easily cast and played their parts well. The endless supply of money was a mystery to us and extremely hard to get used to. We flew our star mynah bird Birdy Num Nums down from Auckland to merely sit as a prop bird in a cage in the ship’s galley. When the scenes wrapped, we flew him home. Just a month later he was needed again, so the jet-setting bird was put on a plane and flown back down to Wellington, then back to Auckland, then he was needed again and flew down one more time. This to-ing and fro-ing seemed to be the nature of the film.

  We spent hours casting and preparing the mounted police, both the riders and the horses, for the city of New York scenes. We rode the horses through the city set, desensitising them by getting them used to every aspect of the amazingly detailed city that had been recreated in an old industrial lot in Seaview. But after the crowd scenes were shot, all footage of the mounted police landed on the cutting room floor. Tens of thousands of dollars, and time and effort, were gone, just like that. It wasn’t something to dwell on though; throwing away footage was commonplace, and something I imagined everyone else working so tirelessly on the film had to come to terms with. The director had his vision and the finished product was all that counted.

  One animal that did get a surprisingly large cameo in the final cut was our beloved Ned. We cast him to be a marauding street dog in the slums of New York, right at the beginning of the film. Blink and you’ll miss him, but as far as extras go on a huge budget movie like this, his was a bit of a coup. His little deformed leg made him the perfect tragic scrounger. He looked a little too Australian, so out with the non-toxic black face paint and hair gel, and soon Ned was in character and looking every bit the dirty and desperate New York hobo. The director loved him and asked for one camera to stay just on him throughout the takes. So with Jim and me hiding strategically behind the ramshackle huts, tossing morsels of food among the litter as take after take was filmed, Ned worked his magic and stole the hearts of everyone on set that day.

  CHAPTER 21

  A devastating journey

  Back in the real world I signed up for another locum nursing job, this time at a Wellington vet clinic that had just opened its doors and was not yet fully staffed.

  It was a small clinic and an hour’s drive away but the part-time hours suited me. I could care for and feed all the sanctuary animals in the morning and then leave for the clinic at lunchtime. As the weeks turned into months my locum position merged into something a little more permanent. Well, at least for a few years.

  It was about 7 p.m. and Alastair, the resident vet and clinic owner, and I were about to head to our respective homes for the night. I was so absorbed in mopping the floor after the last rather smelly consult for the evening that I hadn’t got around to switching the phone over to the after-hours emergency message. Alastair was trying to balance my slightly-out-of-whack till takings. The frustrating thing is that the till just never balanced on my shifts, so instead of racing out the door and leaving me to it, Alastair had learnt the drill and would patiently wait for the inevitable cry for help. So as his dinner grew colder at home he would sit wearing a face that resembled Jim’s during his morning Sudoku routine, and work his way through the ledger and receipts. As I put the mop away and walked over to the phone, it started to ring. The caller explained that there was an emergency on one of the freight ferries. He asked if we could please come to the dock at speed. There were nine dogs in a very serious state, with some already dead.

  As we threw the emergency kit in the back of my new old 4x4 people mover I explained to Alastair that the caller had said the dogs had overheated in a vehicle. We loaded up with drip lines, fluids and ice packs and sped down the hill. When we approached the wharf there were very sombre-looking men waving their arms and guiding us towards the back of the freight ferry. We drove up the ramps into the dimly lit hull. It was like a ghost town, no other people or vehicles in sight. We drove up one more ramp to the next parking level and stared in disbelief at what lay before us. There on the cold metal fl
oor were what looked like nine dead bodies, all lined up in a row. I grabbed the stethoscope and threw it to Alastair who started to assess each lifeless body, one after another. As he quickly made his way along the line, he’d pause briefly before moving to the next dog, looking up at their expectant guardian and remorsefully shaking his head. I had been working my way back from the other end of the queue, looking for a breath, feeling for a heartbeat, desperate for any sign of life. And then we saw a dog in the centre of the line-up give the tiniest gasp. He was alive! And to our surprise and relief the dog next in line did the same.

  Only two survivors. Our hearts were aching.

  But we threw everything we had into the frail older huntaway and his younger heading dog friend. Alastair managed to insert a catheter into each dog’s fragile vein with expert precision. As the fluid pumped through their exhausted and dehydrated bodies the young heading dog started to bounce back. The old boy took a lot longer to rally, but eventually his breathing became more deliberate and his heart rate stronger. We had surrounded them with ice packs to help get their temperature down, but it was a fine line and as we monitored them the ice packs were ditched and they were snuggled in blankets.

  While I sat with the two dogs in the back of my 4x4, Alastair took a moment to talk to his guardian. He was a young farmer, no more than twenty years old, and he and a team of cockies and their dogs had been working a farm in the deep south. That job was finished and they were relocating to the lower North Island to start another big muster. The lad had a pretty nice ute. Instead of a canopy over the tray it had one of those flat tops that have a 20-centimetre gap running around the circumference for air flow. It would have been okay I guess to transport a dog or two back there, but the young fellow had jammed nine excited farm dogs into the tray before setting off on a ten-hour journey. Overcrowded was an understatement! And when the ute parked up in the hull of the container ship, the air had stopped flowing and the dogs were overcome by heat exhaustion.