The Travelling Vet

by Jonathan Cranston

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tim. ‘He was fine in himself yesterday, but just seems a bit quieter today.’

  ‘I wanted you to check him out before he got any worse,’ continued Rich. ‘He’s a particular favourite now with the staff, you know, being a surprise and all – everyone’s taken to him, the cheeky chappie that he is. Aren’t you, Kevin?’ he added, speaking to the crate. There was a thud from inside as Kevin stamped the floor in protest at his temporary incarceration.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Well, let’s have a look at him.’ I bent down and began to open his cage, as I would with any other pet carrier a client had brought in.

  This was an exhausted lapse of my exhausted thinking, however, and ran counter to all the usual protocols that Rich and I had established when dealing with zoo animals. My actions so surprised him that he was too slow to respond.

  ‘Oh, careful Jon, he’s a live wire, this one!’ was all he could muster as I undid the latch on the box and gently opened the door, allowing Kevin a brief glimpse of freedom as he pushed his nose through the small gap. Then, with a massive spring, he powered himself forward. I was caught completely off guard, and in an instant Kevin the kangaroo had barged his way out the box before I had a chance to stop him.

  If he had just stopped there, or if the back door of my consulting room, which led into the pharmacy, had been shut, then it wouldn’t have been too much of an issue, but unfortunately neither of these was the case. Having been cooped up for half an hour, Kevin obviously decided he needed to stretch his legs, and in two hops he had disappeared into the pharmacy, from which, moments later, a catastrophic clattering emerged. I scrambled to my feet and hared after him, Rich and Tim close on my heels. Entering the pharmacy, we saw the trail of destruction that Kevin had wreaked through the corridor – boxes and bottles of drugs, bandage material, scissors, forceps and all the other equipment that had been neatly laid out on the pharmacy work surface now lay strewn all over the floor as we continued in our pursuit. The path Kevin was taking through the practice was now leading him into the prep room, and once again the door that could have helpfully blocked his progress stood open. Bounce, bounce, bounce – he was through the door and round the corner and into the prep room. Where complete and utter chaos ensued.

  Two of my colleagues were busy preparing an anaesthetic procedure for the last operation of the morning. Hannah had just brought through the patient, a little dachshund who was having a lump removed, and was settling her on the table, where Gavin was just checking he had everything he needed. Meanwhile, in the corner of the room, Lucy and Jess were kneeling with one of the patients I had earlier admitted, a large German shepherd, into whose leg they were just about to insert a catheter to put him on intravenous fluids.

  It was into this calm and busy scene that Kevin hopped, with me, Rich and Tim hot on his tail. The first reaction came from the German shepherd, who barked furiously and lunged forward, knocking Jess off balance, pushing Lucy to the side, and scattering their equipment everywhere. Fortunately, the German shepherd was restrained by a lead attached to a wall hook so his range was impeded, otherwise the chase would have been on and we would have met Kevin retreating towards us in panic. Instead, what happened was that Kevin was so startled by the sudden shock and aggression that greeted him that he hopped onto the prep-room table, which startled the daylights out of the dachshund, who now enthusiastically added her high-pitched yapping to the chorus of disapproval. Finding no safe haven, Kevin bounced onto the side work surface, where an array of surgical instruments lay drying on a towel, having been washed after use that morning. Slipping on the towel, Kevin sent the instruments flying in all directions, which of course panicked him still further.

  This almighty commotion brought Jane running from reception. Bursting through the door, she held it wide open and, utterly speechless, her mouth wide open, eyes out on stalks, began to take in the chaotic scene – thus providing Kevin with the only means of escape at his disposal. Panicked by barking dogs, instruments falling all around him and feeling trapped, he hopped off the table and flew like a whirlwind through the door into reception.

  It was at this point that we got our lucky break: there were no clients waiting in reception, the front door was shut, and Kevin decided to hop past the counter towards it, inadvertently cornering himself. A moment of calm descended – though if a new client should happen to walk in at that moment, chaos would come again. With one bound, Kevin could have been out the front door and free, and I doubt we would ever have seen him again. I shuddered at the thought of having to explain myself to the staff of the zoo.

  After a few minutes, though, Kevin stopped bouncing around, unsure where to go or what to do next, and simply stood in the middle of the room, assessing his unfamiliar environment.

  At which point Rich took control. ‘Tim,’ he whispered. ‘Pop back into the consulting room, will you, and get some of that fruit we put in the box with him.’

  Moments later, Tim returned with a handful of mixed chopped-up fruit.

  ‘Good lad,’ Rich said, throwing the first piece in Kevin’s direction. The incoming projectile caught Kevin’s attention and he took a few steps to investigate it. The realization that it was food delighted him, and he picked it up, rapidly devoured it, then looked around for more. Rich threw a second piece, slowly creeping forward as he did so. ‘Stay there,’ he whispered to us. ‘Too many of us will frighten him.’

  By this time Kevin had located the source of the food, and after gulping down the second piece, he took a couple of steps in Rich’s direction. Rich met Kevin halfway with the third piece, and that was enough to re-establish the bond of trust and friendship between them. Holding out his hand with the remaining pieces of fruit, Kevin bounded over and started helping himself. When he was holding the last one between his two paws, Rich was able to pick him up with minimal resistance and carry him back to my consulting-room table.

  ‘Now … where were we?’ he enquired jovially.

  Relieved that the ordeal was over, I quickly reverted to professional mode and started my examination.

  ‘It looks to me like a simple upper respiratory infection,’ I concluded after completing my inspection. ‘Mind you, you wouldn’t realize it from what’s just happened. I fear this little escapade won’t have helped it, though, so I think we’d best start him on a course of antibiotics.’

  ‘Right you are. What form will they be in?’ he asked, as he and Tim gingerly returned Kevin to his container. ‘Are you done with him?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Liquid form – you should be able to syringe it into his food.’

  ‘Great, that’s what we normally do.’

  I calculated the appropriate dose, printed off a label, and went to find the bottle from the carnage-strewn floor in the pharmacy.

  ‘Thanks, Jon. Hopefully this’ll do the trick. See you again – though hopefully not too soon,’ said Rich, as he and Tim carried Kevin out of the room. ‘Oh, and Jon?’ he added. ‘Do us a favour?’

  He paused as I wandered back into reception after him.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Get some sleep.’

  Kangaroos: fast facts

  Macropus giganteus: The eastern grey kangaroo

  Distribution: Southern and Eastern Australia; Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania.

  Names: A male is called a ‘buck’, a female a ‘doe’, and the young a ‘joey’. A group of kangaroos is called a ‘mob’.

  Life span: 8–12 years.

  Habitat: Woodlands or forests by day, and grasslands or scrublands by night.

  Diet: Kangaroos are nocturnal and crepuscular herbivorous grazers, favouring grasses, in particular the young green shoots, which are highest in protein, though they will also eat a range of other plants.

  Gestation: 36 days, after which the joey takes an incredible journey to migrate into the pouch where it attaches onto a teat and lives for a further 9 months.

  Weight: A mere 0.8 grams at birth,
reaching 42–85 kg as adults.

  Growth: At 9 months a joey will start to leave the pouch for short periods; at 11 months they leave the pouch completely, but still suckle till 18 months, when they are fully weaned. Females are sexually mature by about 22 months, and males at 25 months.

  Body temperature: 36.2–37.3 °C.

  Interesting facts: The eastern grey is the fastest of all kangaroos, able to travel up to 40 mph. Females tend to be permanently pregnant, mating soon after a joey has migrated into the pouch. Although during time of drought or food shortage, males won’t produce sperm and females will go into embryonic diapause, in good seasons it is quite possible for a female to have 3 offspring at once, all at different stages: one joey out of the pouch nursing, one in the pouch nursing, and one foetus in arrested development, waiting for the pouch to be vacated. A female is also able to produce two different types of milk simultaneously to meet the requirements of each joey.

  Conservation: The eastern grey kangaroo is now protected by law in Australia, after a period of prolific hunting when Europeans first settled in Australia. Estimates in 2010 put their population at 11 million across Australia, one of the most numerous of all marsupials, and the IUCN do not consider it to be of concern. In fact in some areas they are so numerous that they need to be culled as part of a population control programme to minimize disease and starvation within these groups. However, many other species within Australia are not as fortunate, with over 1,700 species of animals and plants in Australia threatened with extinction, which is why the work of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy is so vitally important: www.australianwildlife.org.

  18

  ZEBRA

  ‘I asked the zebra, Are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits?’

  Shel Silverstein

  ‘We’ll have to use the helicopter.’ Cobus’s distinctive voice crackled across the two-way radio on the dashboard of my Ford Ranger. ‘We’ll never catch them now! Let’s reconvene at the office for a coffee and I’ll call Jacques.’

  At a fee of 6,000 rand per hour, a helicopter vastly increased the cost of any capture operation, but with wildlife work there were so many potential pitfalls and complications that if you wanted to have the best chance of success, then realism, practicality and efficiency had to count above expense. Having eyes in the sky simply made sense and had so many advantages, the main one being that the terrain and vegetation in the bush often left huge areas inaccessible by vehicle. Going in on foot could present dangers when working with wildlife animals, and most large mammals never fear an aerial attack, so are often much more approachable from a helicopter. So, as long as it could be afforded, and unless the operation was a simple procedure on the ground, a helicopter had become an indispensable tool for wildlife work.

  The objects of our search were the two zebra herds on the farm, but in four hours we had only, and briefly, spotted them a couple of times, before they disappeared into dense bush, never allowing an opportunity to dart them. The decision to call in the helicopter was welcome, eminently sensible, and besides, I fancied a coffee. The crazy and immensely frustrating reality was that on every previous day that week we could have darted all twelve zebras with ease. They were always about, whether at the feeding ground, grazing out in the fields, or at one of the watering holes on the farm. But today, the day we’d set out to catch three of the group, they were, of course, nowhere to be found. Conversely, every other animal on the farm was grazing happily and in full view: there were blesboks, giraffes, wildebeest, impalas, ostriches and hartebeest aplenty … but not a single zebra anywhere to be seen. It was almost as if they knew of our plans, and had made themselves scarce.

  In Cobus’s long experience, however – and he knew a thing or two – it was always the same. No matter how tame the animal, or how easy it usually is to find them, on the day you select for their capture, they instinctively vanish. Changes in behaviour, vehicles, people, noises, feeding regimes – it can be any number of things, but no wild animal will hang around to take a chance.

  One of the skills of wildlife capture is therefore to minimize an animal’s exposure to the unfamiliar, always approaching in the same vehicle with the same driver, and from the same direction, for example. However, there are times when such a strategy simply isn’t possible, and it is then that a proper understanding of different species, and an anticipation of how they’ll behave, becomes vital to success. Combined with a bit of talent for the job, this will always give you a fighting chance, and after that it largely comes down to luck.

  That morning we had set out early in three vehicles, with the objective of darting and relocating three of the twelve zebras on the 60-hectare farm where we were staying – a very small game reserve, by African standards. The topography was undulating, with several high, barren, rocky peaks, where true grazing and browsing areas were limited. These factors restricted the number of animals the farm could successfully sustain while the type of flora determined the species that it would support.

  There were plenty of acacia and mimosa trees to keep the four giraffes well fed, being the only browsers on the farm, but when it came to the grazers, there was more competition. Although different grazing species have slightly varied foraging preferences, they still compete for grasslands. The choice is therefore between having more of a few fauna species, or less of several. The greatest biodiversity an ecosystem can sustain is always preferable to a monoculture, so in order to allow for impalas, wildebeest, blesboks, hartebeest, rheboks and ostriches, as well as the zebras, the calculation was that ten adult zebras were the optimum number for this particular area.

  The farm currently had twelve adults and a foal, and three of the mares were heavily pregnant. It had also been an exceptionally dry summer, and the rains still hadn’t come, grazing was diminished and the watering holes were dry, which meant water had to be being brought in every week. So, although all the zebras were currently fit and well, they were overstocked, and with three foals imminent, their numbers had to be reduced before the intense competition for food became a welfare issue.

  A buyer had meanwhile been found, who wanted one young stallion and two mares, and although the zebra numbers would need to be reduced further when the three foals were born, this would temporarily solve the population problem.

  All the animals on the farm had their natural grazing or browsing diet supplemented with lucerne hay every evening. This served several purposes: to accustom the animals to human activity so they were easier to catch; to allow for easy monitoring of their health; and to create an incidentally magical evening spectacle. But as our unsuccessful morning had demonstrated, no matter how used to human activity they had become, they were still wild animals.

  Cobus handed me and Laura a coffee each.

  ‘Well, that’s wildlife capture for you!’ He laughed. ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst. They’re so intuitive.’

  ‘I saw them several times,’ I said. ‘I even tried to go in on foot, but it was almost as though they knew the range of the dart gun and kept themselves just beyond it with a few handy trees and bushes to make any attempted shot impossible.’

  ‘We’re always darting within an animal’s danger zone – that’s the area in which they can perceive a threat. And that’s because no dart gun has the accuracy and range to dart outside it. Seventy metres seems to be the key distance, and if you’re within that, the animal knows you’re there, and with the slightest fright they’ll take off. If you can dart them from further away, which we’ve done a couple of times with a trial system, the animal doesn’t react. They treat the dart as a nasty fly bite, give a swish of the tail and then carry on eating. The giraffe we darted dropped under the very tree it was feeding from. It was extraordinary to see.’

  As ever, Cobus was a wealth of knowledge, experience and stories, little nuggets of conversation like this were priceless.

  ‘What happened wi
th the new system?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Money, politics … It’s a shame. It was a great system, ballistically well designed and thought through, allowing for accurate darting at up to 100 metres. None of this 40 metres and you’re pushing your luck!’

  ‘With that system we could be sitting in the bar at the lodge and dart the zebra while they graze,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘A rum and Coke for me and some Etorphine for the zebra!’ We all laughed as we slurped our coffees.

  ‘Where are the students?’ Cobus now enquired.

  ‘We left them at the lodge, told them to grab a drink and have a rest,’ Laura replied.

  ‘I told Jacques to come at two … Why don’t we have lunch first? It won’t take long with the helicopter. Although it will depend on your darting ability,’ Cobus added, turning to me with a glint in his eye. ‘Do you fancy having a go from the helicopter?’

  I nearly spat out my coffee in shock. I had always wanted the experience, but it had never seemed a remote possibility. What with the expense of a helicopter and the expectations of the client, the opportunity had simply never come up. I felt a churlish excitement but then almost immediately felt my heart racing at the fear of failure and of all the things that could possibly go wrong.

  Almost as though he could read my mind, Cobus added, ‘You’ve had plenty of experience on the ground. You know what you’re doing and we all have to start somewhere. These are my zebras, my darts, my drugs, and Jacques will tell you exactly what to do, and will put you on the animal. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. With a good helicopter pilot, and once you get used to it, it can often be easier darting from the helicopter than the ground. I’ve worked with Jacques for over twenty years and they don’t come much better than him.’