The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  ALEX TINSON has lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates as a vet for nearly thirty years.

  DAVID HARDAKER is a former ABC Middle East correspondent and a Walkley Award winning journalist. He has lived and worked for many years in the Arab world and speaks Arabic.

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Alex Tinson and David Hardaker 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760292829

  eISBN 9781952534508

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover photography: David Mitchell

  To my mother Catherine Tinson . . . who gave me the inner strength to deal with my darker moments . . . and always managed to ground me when I got too carried away . . .

  Alex Tinson

  To my wife Bronwen and our boys Sel and Jesse, thank you for your endless love and support.

  My gratitude also to Richard Walsh, Rebecca Kaiser and Simone Ford for your huge encouragement and calm professionalism.

  Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to the memory of my great friend Mohamed Serour, who opened the Arabic language and the Arab world to me through countless coffee-fuelled sessions in the cafes of Alexandria and Cairo.

  What a tragedy that you never lived in freedom.

  David Hardaker

  Contents

  1 Camel tragic

  2 The hand of fate

  3 Augathella to Arabia

  4 A work in progress

  5 Faster, stronger

  6 The unexpected

  7 Harry the Camel

  8 Home, sweet home

  9 Dicing with danger

  10 Million dollar baby

  11 When Katya met Khaled

  Picture Section

  12 Camel vet to desert vet

  13 Leading by a nose

  14 Schemes and dreams

  15 Animal of the future

  16 The ancient explorers’ club

  17 Into the Gobi

  18 Guns and politics

  19 The Dad trail

  20 Time to go

  21 The returning son

  22 City boy to desert nomad

  23 A secret surprise

  24 God’s will

  25 Blood ties

  26 Beauty and the beast

  27 Business and pleasure

  28 The Golden Sword

  29 A rich life

  One

  Camel tragic

  The sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, amongst the wealthiest men in the world, are gathered together. Dressed in crisp white cotton robes, they’ve taken their seats on plush red, gold-edged chairs. The royal box is festooned with flowers of a dozen hues and filled with the scent of magnolia and roses.

  The seating is a study in itself, a pecking order of who holds power in the oil-rich sheikhdom of the United Arab Emirates. The Abu Dhabi royal family is first, Dubai’s royal family second. It’s a reflection of where centuries of tribal history and conflict have led them.

  These rulers of modern Arabia are at peace, but still in a kind of war. Now their rivalry is being played out in a traditional setting, the camel races. It’s a clash of cultures within a culture: the dust, sand and sweat of a desert contest set against the gleaming Rolex watches and Maseratis of the sheikhs. The past in the present.

  Today, pride is on the line. Dubai’s ruler might have the world’s shiniest tall towers and biggest shopping malls and he might have attracted global brands to his glittering city. By contrast the ruler of Abu Dhabi is a study in quiet power. He is the supreme leader, the President of the United Arab Emirates, and in his hands lie ten per cent of the world’s known oil reserves. Everyone knows it.

  At stake is the winner’s prize, the prestigious Golden Sword—an Arab symbol of power and wealth which is handed to the race—plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and cars. But this race is about much more: this is a contest for tribal supremacy in an ancient art. For all their wealth, all their Bentleys and Ferraris and golden palaces, what matters is who wins this contest and who owns the fastest camel.

  In this inner sanctum of Arabia there is one outsider. My mission has been to make the president’s camels the fastest in the Gulf and I am here to carry out last-minute checks on my animals. This is the culmination of close to three decades’ work, a professional life spent as the keeper of the president’s camels, using my science to make his animals faster, bigger, stronger. Success has made me the world’s leading camel vet. And it’s brought me inside the fabulously wealthy but rarely glimpsed world of the Arab sheikhs.

  Camels brought me here and they have kept me here for half my life.

  I am a full-blown camel tragic.

  If you sit in the still desert sands and wait quietly, camels will approach, curious to know more of who you are and what you are up to. Camels are herd animals and they are incredibly vocal. They make sounds that seem scary and nasty to people who don’t know them, but really they are just talking to each other. It is a language I’ve learned and as I move through the herd I mimic the male’s low, grunting call, made by blowing through flapping lips to produce a bubbling sound. If a female raises her tail it tells me she is already pregnant. If not then she is ready to be mated.

  I am at home in the company of camels. Where others see a dirty, filthy, smelly, kicking, spitting beast, I see a thing of pure anatomical beauty, an intelligent and graceful creature that is perfectly adapted to its environment. I see a magnificent animal that comes in various shapes and hues, from the slender and powerful brown racing camel that is capable of galloping at speeds above forty kilometres an hour, to the resplendent and huge black camel that fetches millions of dollars in local ‘beauty’ contests.

  My house is a private shrine to camels. As I look around there’s a picture of my daughters with the cutest baby camels you’ve ever seen. There’s a two-humped camel carved out of a tree root by a Mongolian tribesman. Next to it is a camel fashioned out of a piece of four-and-a-half-billion-year-old meteorite. I keep framed photos of my camels on sideboards and atop my desk as others keep photos of their families.

  Professionally, my role is chief vet for the racing camels of the President of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, His Royal Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed. The research centre we started thirty years ago has been a global pioneer in embryo transfer technology and has produced half a dozen world firsts.

  I also have my own collection of camels including, at the moment, three new babies. Apart from anything else, they’re good fun.

  This is my game. This is what I do.

  Living where I do, camels have helped me merge with the Bedouin of Arabia. In times of personal grief, I have retreated to the world of camels and found comfort there. Because of camels I have gone from rag
s to riches, then to rags and finally back to riches again.

  It’s definitely an obsession, and one that has led me to live close to half my life in a town called Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. Thirty years ago I’d never heard of it. Now I would never leave it.

  The United Arab Emirates is famous for Dubai’s spiralling towers and mega shopping malls. It’s a magnet for westerners who are looking for a fix of Arabia, done in luxury. Alternatively, it’s a tax-free, high-salary haven where Australians, the British and Americans come for a life-changing income—and then invariably leave after three or four years.

  I’ve seen thousands of visitors come and go and have known a fair share of them. But I’ve stayed, on and on and on. In that time I’ve witnessed an extreme pace of development, perhaps unparalleled in the history of the world, as their society has transformed from a poor desert existence to an ultra-modern state.

  Now, as the grandfather of Emirati children, I am also tied to this world by blood.

  Because of camels I have built a life I never imagined possible. And it all happened because I decided to say yes to adventure whenever it came my way.

  Camels might be my grand obsession but they were not my first. I say ‘obsession’ rather than ‘love’ because it’s hard to love these animals of the wild. They’re not cute and cuddly. They don’t roll over on command or fetch a stick or jump on your lap. For me they have something else: they offer the lure of freedom and danger. It’s an intoxicating mix and it lets you know you are alive.

  You could say it was genetically programmed in me; being a vet is now a Tinson tradition. In my extended family I can count more than twenty of us who are vets. My brother’s a vet. His daughter is a vet. My sister’s married to a vet whose brothers are vets. On and on and on it goes. Some of them work on farms. Some run veterinary clinics.

  But much as I appreciate the value of their work, I never wanted to be the family vet down the road, looking after Mr and Mrs Smith’s cat with the runny nose. From as early as I can remember I’ve been drawn, by instinct, to the exotic and the dangerous.

  I grew up in St Ives, the sort of Sydney suburb that produces lawyers, bankers and doctors. It was a white bread, neat-as-a-pin neighbourhood of family cars, big mortgages and grim ambition. But we were also on the outskirts of the city and, lucky for me, our house backed onto bushland and a creek. If you followed that creek for a few kilometres it took you to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, a whole other world untouched and untamed by civilisation. In no time at all you could feel you were in the Amazon.

  This was my private world and I took every chance to escape to it, sometimes with my mates but usually by myself. When I was alone I felt at one with everything around me. Here was a place I could lose myself for hours at a time. I knew the trees, the rocks and the life that lived within it. If you looked carefully, you could pick out the water dragons, lyrebirds, kangaroos and rock wallabies against the browns and greens of the bush. I learned to move noiselessly along narrow tracks and then hold myself still lest the wildlife sensed me in their midst.

  My favourites, though, were the things found hidden under rocks or slipping through the undergrowth, scary little beasts that most people flinch from: the goannas, the lizards and most of all the snakes.

  How can you love a snake? The answer is: you can’t. But everything about snakes fascinated me. I loved how utterly different they were to any other living being. For me they had an otherworldly quality. They were enigmatic. They were exotic. And it made me feel exotic to own one.

  I collected snakes like other kids collected football cards, always trying to catch a bigger one, a rarer one, until I gathered the complete set of species. And of course there was the sheer thrill of the hunt, tracking and then catching something deadly like a tiger snake or a black snake without getting bitten. You needed to be agile, alert and make instant decisions, because it was indeed a matter of life and death.

  Bit by bit I turned our suburban home into my own private zoo. It started in my bedroom, which became home to an assorted collection of snakes and other reptiles. One prized possession was my collection of seven baby goannas with their brilliant black and yellow markings, hatched from eggs I’d discovered in a termite nest at the back of the house. They were a rare find and made me the envy of my mates. I traded most of them away but I hung on to the biggest one, called Chopper, who seemed to enjoy playing a weird game with me. While I studied at my desk, Chopper would climb the bookcase, up the wall and then spring onto my head. Again and again.

  The pythons I found in the bush became way too big for my room so they went under the house in a special cage that I built. And finally I took over the rumpus room, which not only housed the overflow of lizards and goannas but became my special hiding place for the poisonous snakes I wasn’t meant to bring into the house. Mostly I got away with it, though there was the time when the black snake flew for my finger as I was feeding it a lizard. I ended up in intensive care, vomiting and with my arm swollen and blue from the venom. Mum and Dad were generally tolerant of my snake fascination but the episode with the black snake—and finding a tiger snake in my bedroom—pushed my long-suffering Mum and Dad too far. Neither of them was prone to screaming and shouting, but what if it had sunk its fangs into my little sister or brother? How would I feel then? My pocket money was cut off for three months, and so was my snake collecting.

  My animal friends were, in fact, not the least bit friendly. Most of them were actually quite keen on killing me.

  For a kid with a vet’s blood in his veins, growing up in the sixties and seventies was a great time. There were movies like Born Free and books like My Family and Other Animals by the wonderful English zookeeper and author Gerald Durrell. They showed me how a life lived amongst the wild things could be so exhilarating. I fancied that I might live life big with animals, just like Gerald Durrell, and wake up with an ocelot or a chameleon for company in my bedroom. I think I knew even then that these wonderful tales were in fact a nicely packaged reality for those who craved a little excitement in their humdrum lives. It was a romantic notion, and it seemed so remote for a kid marooned in the suburbs.

  It was around the time I had latched on to my Gerald Durrell fantasy that Dad’s work as an industrial chemist took him to South Africa for six months. He would send us snapshots from the big wildlife sanctuaries like Kruger National Park, and on the rare occasion of getting a telephone connection he would tell stories of elephants charging cars and lions approaching to within touching distance. All I wanted to do was go over and join Dad. There was a popular children’s TV series called Daktari at the time, set in a Nairobi animal orphanage, and I dreamed of joining Clarence the cross-eyed lion and the other animals there.

  So it was only natural that after finishing high school I would study to become a vet. At the University of Melbourne, side by side with studying the anatomy and science of animals, my imagination was fired by the British veterinary surgeon David Taylor, who wrote a series of autobiographical books that chronicled his escapades as the ‘Zoo Vet’. These books were later adapted for television as the One to One series. David Taylor was the first vet to specialise in zoo and wildlife medicine and he worked with zoos, wildlife parks and circuses around the world.

  I was captivated by how he worked with his ‘patients’: an elephant with a toothache, a giant panda with stomach ulcers or an egg-bound emu. He had a flair for improvising new treatments; for example, he treated a haemorrhaging whale by feeding it black puddings, and he fitted a prosthetic beak onto an ailing hornbill.

  As a boy, David Taylor had set up a small animal ‘hospital’ in his family home. As he wrote in his book, at first his parents tolerated the ‘toads convalescing in the bathroom cupboard, the paralysed owl that sat on top of the grandfather clock in the hall and the rabbit road accident victims that either regained vitality or wasted away in the emergency wards I established in empty zinc washing tubs’.

  Needless to say, I felt David Taylor’s b
ooks were speaking to me. He did it all with such humour and style. He was my hero and this was when it became very clear to me that I wanted to be not just a vet but a zoo vet.

  After graduating I grabbed the first opportunity I could to work with the big animals. My chance came when a part-time job opened up at the Bacchus Marsh Lion Safari Park, not too far from my home in Melbourne. By a happy coincidence there was also a veterinarian in town who needed a young vet for two or three days a week. It meant I could put a full-time job together, working with cats and dogs half the time and indulging my passion for the wild things the rest of the time.

  The Bacchus Marsh Lion Safari Park was a phenomenon of its times, enjoying a short but colourful life in the seventies and eighties. Now you’ll find it filed under ‘Great Theme Parks We Once Had’.

  The park was an attempt to cash in on a hunger people had to be amongst the big animals, just like the great wildlife parks of Africa. It was a zoo without the cages. Instead you could drive through large open enclosures and experience the animals close up, from the safety and comfort of your car. It was set up by the old Ashton’s Circus, which used the park as a place to keep its circus animals. Ashton’s was on the approaches to Melbourne and its great competitor, Bullen’s Circus, had a similar set-up on the outskirts of Sydney.

  The name is slightly misleading. There weren’t only lions but also tigers, buffalos, monkeys and, indeed, camels.

  In truth the lion park was a bit of a seat-of-the pants operation and it had its fair share of accidents. What happens if people are busy looking at wildlife as they’re driving? They run into the rear of the car in front of them. And what’s the first thing they do then? They get out of their car. Then they realise there’s a lion next to them. So we had some close calls. Indeed, over the years there were instances of people being bitten and even mauled to death.

  Security was a little lax, too, when it came to the animals. There was the time the boys in control of the gates screwed up and let the lions in with the tigers. Eventually we got in with our vehicles and managed to separate them, but the lions had destroyed the tigers and we spent the next week picking up the pieces. In a proper zoo that kind of big cat mayhem just doesn’t happen.