The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  Then there was the time two baboons escaped and got up into the top of the observation tower behind the lion enclosure. Baboons are a nasty piece of work at the best of times; one of them had already bitten off the finger of a handler who’d ventured too close during feeding time. They’re also super-athletic, and they’re smart. These two had occupied the observation room, which was like a guard’s room in a watchtower. Once there they kept vigil, opening and closing the door to see who might be trying to get to them. It was impossible to go up the ladder because they had that well covered, so my job was to work my way up the back of the tower and then dart them with a blowpipe through a gap in the timber at the rear of the observation room.

  I managed to get a clean hit on the first one, at which point it went absolutely troppo. It started screaming and went bouncing off the walls then reached behind itself and pulled the dart out, though too late to stop the effect of the tranquilliser. Then the other one started going berserk too. It took about five minutes before the first baboon was out cold, and finally the second one calmed down so I was able to get a clean shot on it as well and complete the operation.

  Later it was the turn of the Himalayan tahrs, a large beast which is akin to a wild goat. They staged a mass breakout when ten of them jumped the fence in the company of three Barbary sheep and galloped into the Lerderderg Gorge at the rear of the lion park. A tahr won’t kill you but it was a definite no-no to have an exotic species like that running amok with native fauna. I was told to keep quiet about it in case the park lost its licence and I spent the next six months up early scouring the bushland in a fruitless, search for the AWOL beasts. I left food out laced with tranquillisers and patrolled the area with my dart gun. But I turned up nothing.

  One day a local farmer called to say he had some strange sheep in his paddock and could someone please come and have a look. Sure enough, there were six of the original ten tahrs and a couple of the Barbaries. I managed to dart them from a distance using my gun and bring them back. Who knows? There could be dozens of them out there now.

  The great thing about the lion park was that it gave me the chance to put my skills into practice, though in fact university had ill-prepared me for dealing with exotic animals. The university concentrated on farm and domestic creatures such as pigs, horses, cattle, dogs and cats. I wasn’t trained to be a zoo vet. Instead I had to learn it on the fly, which wasn’t a bad thing.

  Some of what we did was decidedly edgy, and there would have been serious problems if the authorities had known what we were up to. But sometimes you’ve just got to cut through the rules.

  I once took a baby tiger home with me for a couple of days, but as far as I was concerned I had no choice. The little thing was critically ill and I needed to watch it every second.

  On another occasion I had an eight-month-old lion that could barely walk because of problems with the growth plates in the knee joints of its hind legs. It needed treatment that we could only supply at the vet clinic in town, so I tranquillised it, threw it in the back of the car and brought it into the surgery to confirm the diagnosis with an x-ray. We performed the operation in a suburban vet clinic at the back of the Bacchus Marsh shopping centre, returned it to the car and drove back through town to the lion park. Imagine getting permission for that one from the local authorities.

  The lion park didn’t have great medical equipment and there wasn’t a lot of expertise on hand when it came to some of the trickier procedures, so I was forced to improvise. Once I was called out to help in the case of a mare that was having trouble giving birth. Horses are very explosive animals so I had to first calm her down with a tranquilliser. It turned out that the foal had already died and was lying awkwardly inside the uterus. In such cases you need to get in fast and cut up the foal inside the horse so you can remove it in pieces. The alternative, a caesarean section, would carry a very high risk of contaminating the mother’s abdomen, leading to peritonitis and certain death.

  The lion park simply didn’t have the necessary equipment so I went home, got down a curtain rod, cut it in half and pushed a thin cutting wire through the tube. With this improvised tool I could perform the procedure without the right instruments and still protect the uterus and thus the mare from trauma. It could have gone either way and I regarded it as something of a triumph that I managed to get the foal out, and keep the mare alive.

  It was also at the park that I confronted the mysteries of the camel for the first time, though compared with lions, tigers and tahrs, they were far from my first interest. In fact my first experience was something of a disaster.

  I was called on to anaesthetise two camels in the field to prepare them for an operation. The lion park had no information at all on the drugs you need to knock out a camel. I called Melbourne zoo, where I had done some work experience as a student, but no-one there had a clue, either. So I improvised with a bizarre combination of drugs, probably more suited to a horse. It got the job done but in the process one camel got pneumonia and the other went ataxic, meaning it suddenly lost control of its movements and couldn’t stand. The poor thing was all legs and neck buckling in on itself, and next thing it tumbled down the hill and finished in a heap at the bottom.

  And that was probably an appropriate metaphor for my eighteen months at Bacchus Marsh Lion Safari Park: a bit gung-ho, a bit chaotic and lots of the unexpected.

  What I did discover was that zoo vets work very hard, don’t make a lot of money and many of them end up divorced because of the workload.

  But I loved every minute of it.

  Two

  The hand of fate

  I met my wife, Patti, during my final year of vet science at the University of Melbourne, where Patti was studying criminology. The two of us are impulsive, and together we were completely irrational. Wiser heads counselled us to hold on until after I’d completed my degree to get married, but neither of us wanted to wait. I was expected to graduate with honours but in the end it was just a pass, so maybe those cautious souls had a point. But who cares?

  I’m not sure who proposed to whom but it happened during a wine-tasting, which was just perfect. By now my dad had thrown off the shackles of his old job as an industrial chemist in Sydney and moved with my mum, Catherine, who was a microbiologist, to run a vineyard in Glenrowan, Victoria, home of Ned Kelly. My sister, Wendy, and brother, Scott, were still living at home with them. Harry Tinson was on his way to becoming the best maker of fortified wines in Australia. Not bad for a bloke who only ever drank beer at home, Reschs Pilsener at that.

  Wine and animals are the two Tinson passions and it appears Patti was happy to sign up for both of them.

  A year after we married we had our first baby, Katya. All was right with the world, even if it meant I had to ship out the water python, diamond python and carpet python that once occupied Katya’s baby room.

  The pythons all ended up with my uni mate Greg Parker, who was a kindred spirit when it came to snakes. Greg already had taipans and a death adder. He also kept a falcon in his house, so naturally we were frequent visitors at his place. Greg later went on to found the Ballarat Wildlife Park so he was a true fellow traveller in the world of killer beasts.

  It’s one of the occupational hazards of being married to a vet that you also marry his or her animal obsession. When Katya was only two we had a close call at Greg’s place. We went downstairs under the house to the secret place where Greg kept his collection of pythons. These are amongst the deadliest snakes in the world and they were being kept in the middle of suburbia, so Greg had to keep it low profile. We were quietly checking out Greg’s collection when suddenly we came face to face with the crocodile Greg kept in a cage. The croc must have heard us and thought he was about to be fed, because next thing he’d knocked the lid off his cage and was flying towards us, coming up right next to Katya. He wasn’t fully grown yet, but he could easily have bitten Katya’s head off. She just stood there saying, ‘Cocl, cocl,’ before I managed to whisk her away.

&
nbsp; Patti lived through the craziness of my time as a zoo vet at Bacchus Marsh but, much as she was happy to go along with the baby tiger in our home, the lion in the car, my early mornings on the hunt for the missing tahrs and the white peacock convalescing after being savaged by a tiger, we both knew the fun would have to end sometime.

  Reality is a powerful antidote to dreams. In short, exotic animals might be wonderful but they don’t put bread on the table. And like most people we knew, we succumbed to the idea that life was about building your business, buying your first home and settling down to raise the kids. It’s what we do, right?

  We started a new life at Tweed Heads on the far north coast of New South Wales, where I established my first—and only—business as the friendly neighbourhood vet. In so many ways it was the idyllic family set-up. We had the sand and surf at our doorstep and we went about filling the house with kids and animals.

  Baby Erica came along, a sister for Katya. We populated the house with three frogs, lovebirds, a German shepherd, cats and, of course, a small collection of snakes.

  Here, too, I was lucky. There was a zoo down the road that allowed me to satisfy my craving for the weird and wild.

  I had come to believe that as far as animals went, I would never be emotionally involved. If the family dog has been hit by a car or is suffering a terminal disease, it’s always tough to break the news to the owners that putting them down is kinder than keeping them alive. As a vet, if your emotions always came to the surface you simply could not operate. But my experience with the chimpanzees of Coolangatta zoo changed my view of my professional self.

  The zoo was moving so it was destocking its animals, chimpanzees included. All the animals were screened for diseases and, in the process, two of the chimps, who were brother and sister, had shown up as potentially positive to tuberculosis. I doubted the finding, but it was enough for the Department of Agriculture to order that the chimps be destroyed and they asked me to do it. I argued against the decision because, as far as I was concerned, it was an overreaction. My point was that the alleged TB was in fact a shadow on the lung, which was probably the result of pleurisy. The chimps had been regular little stars with the public and it was highly likely they’d got something as a result of all that human contact. The department dug in and threatened to issue an official order, so ultimately I had no choice.

  I had previously managed on a number of occasions to blow dart the chimps with tranquilliser so we could x-ray them. But the more you did it, the harder it became to get a dart onto them. They came to know exactly what was coming. They are so smart. The minute I put the dart to my lips and puffed up my cheeks, they’d leap off in all directions. Once when I looked away for a minute, the male jumped over, grabbed the dart out of my hand and ripped it to shreds. That little episode made the night’s television news under the banner ‘Chimp Attacks Vet’. Another time he literally grabbed the dart out of my hand, bent it over and threw it back in my face. It was frightening how quick and how strong they were. This game of dodgem went on for three months. And more often than not there was always a crowd around having a good laugh at my expense.

  When it came to tranquillising the chimps before euthanasing them, I took to trying to catch them in the early hours of the morning, away from the glare of television cameras or the attention of an audience. Finally, one of them seemed to just give up. I rolled up to dart him one day and, rather than do one of his usual clever moves, he just sat there and looked at me. It was as though he had decided to accept his ultimate fate. It just didn’t seem right. This time I managed to dart him and I reckon before I got in to give him the lethal injection he was dead. He just died straightaway.

  Euthanasing that chimp was one of the most haunting things I’ve had to do as a vet. It was like killing a human—but worse. I still remember that look. He looked at me as if to say, ‘You bastard.’ He just knew. To make matters worse, the post-mortem confirmed what I had been saying: the chimp did not have TB at all. The one good thing to come out of it was that the department decided not to euthanase his sister. But I had taken the life of an animal when it didn’t need to happen, and in so doing I had betrayed the animal’s trust. It has never left my conscience.

  It’s a cliché that sons measure themselves against their dads, but in my case it is true. By the age of thirty I was haunted by how little adventure there had been in my life, compared to my father’s.

  I started to feel that I was on a conveyer belt, heading in one direction. While I enjoyed the challenges of private practice, I had never wanted to spend my life working with Mrs Smith’s cats and dogs, but that, indeed, was where life had led me. More and more I was wondering: is this as good as it gets?

  Dad was born and raised in Harbin, Manchuria, in the north of China on the border with Russia in the 1930s. His father was British, born in Hong Kong, and he married a Russian woman. The family moved to Shanghai where Dad lived the exotic life of an expat kid, moving between the old Chinese neighbourhoods and the British expat compound, which was a slice of upper-class England with its all its privilege and entitlement.

  Japan had been at war with China from 1937, and in 1941 the Japanese entered the Shanghai International Settlement where they lived. Dad was only eleven years old when he and the other expat families who hadn’t got out ahead of time were placed into a prisoner of war camp. To me, Dad’s life seemed like something out of a movie. And indeed it was a movie. Dad had attended school with JG Ballard, whose 1984 novel Empire of the Sun exactly depicted the life my father lived. The movie version of the same name was released in 1987 when we were living at Tweed Heads.

  When the war ended, Dad came out to Sydney from Shanghai as a seventeen-year-old along with his Russian relatives. He managed to get into university and studied chemistry, even though he had never gone to high school because of the war.

  Knowing what I know now about the cruelty of life in the POW camp, I am surprised that Dad could be anything approaching normal. But he was. And though he had a million stories to tell, he hardly ever spoke about what he had seen in the POW camp. He told me once that he was walking down Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, and saw a guy coming the other way who he recognised from the camp. They had paused, looked at each other, said a brief hello and kept walking. I guess neither could see the point in revisiting the past. Or perhaps it was just too hard. In his book, JG Ballard summed up the mental scars by saying it took him twenty years to forget before he could start to remember.

  Dad never had a bad word to say about the Japanese even though we know some of the most horrendous things happened. The fact that he wouldn’t cast judgement on his captors had a big influence on me. I admired him for it. If anything, Dad brought with him that British reserve. He was very proper about things and always had a stiff-upper-lip saying to hand, like ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, just be the best at it’ and ‘never perjure your soul for a penny’, which was one of his favourites. But one thing Dad never said was ‘I love you’. I guess that was typical of his generation.

  It sounds stupid, but to me the fact that Dad grew up in China and had all these adventures in a foreign land (that ended up portrayed in a movie) represented the sort of excitement that I was attracted to. In fact, I think I was even a little bit jealous that he had been in a POW camp.

  I always thought my father was the smartest person I’d ever met. At the same time, I also felt that once Dad came to Australia he was constrained by having to do his best for us. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to go from such an exotic existence to landing in postwar Australia in all its blandness. I never had the conversation with him but I’m certain there were other dimensions to himself that he didn’t get to explore.

  He did the hard yards, slogging it out on a long daily commute in Sydney to get to work and back. Thank goodness late in life he was able to ditch that and become a great winemaker. But I felt like Dad didn’t get to do all the things he wanted to do and I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to me. I
wasn’t going to wait anymore. I was at a point in my life where I wanted—indeed, needed—to do something outlandish. I felt the call to be not just a little bit involved but completely involved with wild animals.

  I didn’t know it at the time but the planets were aligning in a way that would change life as I knew it in very dramatic ways.

  We like to think we can plan our future in neat, unfolding stages. But in the end, life is what comes to us, often unbidden.

  The truth is I never went out looking for camels. They came to me.

  It was another day of cats and dogs at our Tweed Heads clinic when I got a call out of the blue. The man on the other end of the line wanted six camels castrated.

  It’s not every day that your average small-town vet gets asked to remove the testicles of a camel. Dogs and cats? Yes. But camels? I was convinced the call was a joke, maybe one of my mates from Sydney having a bit of fun at my expense. After all, who on earth would even own half a dozen huge humped wild beasts in a town like Tweed Heads?

  So the first time I brushed him off. But he called back. The second time I put it to him that he was having a lend of me. But then I realised he wasn’t. In fact, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  My caller was a man called Paddy McHugh. Why he chose to call me, I’ll never know. I guess he looked up local vets in the phone book and my name came up. I made the trip to see Paddy at his farm about an hour’s drive away.

  Paddy was a shade younger than me, in his late twenties. He was a genuine Crocodile Dundee character, down to the bashed-up leather hat and long, bedraggled hair. Paddy was lean and teak strong, his face and body sun-weathered from a life spent in the outback.