Old Dogs New Tricks

by Peter Anderson

  As the consultation finished, Don Boyle said, ‘You might like this, Pete. It’s our thank you.’ From a bag he produced a wrapped bottle. I unwrapped it there and then. It was a litre of Wilson’s whisky, New Zealand made. Somehow they had known of my liking for the malt.

  It was another example of their amazing kindness, and I struggled with the lump in my throat as I thanked them and said my goodbye.

  I’m struggling with it again as I write this story.

  It was wonderful people like Don and Raewyn who have left me with lasting memories of a life as a vet.

  THE TELEPHONE CALL — PA

  Invariably contact with clients, whether to arrange a visit or to discuss some issue, is via the telephone. Knowing who it is you are actually about to talk to has some real advantages. I was always very grateful if the receptionist at work or a family member at home had found out the name of the person who wanted to speak to me. It did influence the way I answered the phone. However, it wasn’t always that simple.

  One receptionist at work was never really cut out to be a telephonist. She either never found out who it was or, when she did, by the time she had directed the call to me she had forgotten who it was or got the name wrong. Others were very good and sometimes would even apologise that I was unavailable when they knew I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to talk to that particular client.

  My wife Diana, who no one knows as Diana because since she was a very young child her father started calling her Chick (because she spent all day watching the chooks at the bottom of their garden), was great on the phone and always answered it stating her name. However, nothing infuriated her more than the clients — and there were two in particular — whose first words after she answered the phone were ‘Peter there?’ No ‘Hello Chick, it’s John X here. Wonder if I could speak to Peter please.’ While she got to know exactly who they were as soon as they said ‘Peter there?’ she always made a point of asking for their name. They never got the hint, and as a result I would invariably get the phone thrust at me by a teeth-gritting fuming spouse. If only people understood that if they wanted a good response from someone they were after for advice or help, then how they introduced themselves had a huge effect on the response they got — at least from me.

  On several occasions I have been guilty of not knowing who I was talking to despite them introducing themselves. It was easy enough if I didn’t know the person — I just knew I was talking to someone I didn’t know. But when I should have known who it was and couldn’t place them it could get awkward. The longer you delayed getting around to admitting you didn’t quite get their name or didn’t know who it was you were talking to, the harder it got. I have on occasions got through a whole conversation trying to fit the name to a face and place, and yet was confident the person I was talking to was oblivious of my predicament.

  One Saturday morning Chick called me into the house and handed me the phone.

  ‘Rob Todd needs to talk to you.’ A quizzical look on her face as if she and I should both know who Rob Todd was.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, Pete, how are you — Rob Todd here.’

  ‘Good morning, Rob.’

  Who the hell is Rob Todd? Bob Todd? No, I don’t know a Bob Todd nor a Robert Todd. Could it be Bob Todhunter? No it’s not him — I know him well and it definitely doesn’t sound like him. ‘How can I help, Rob?’

  ‘It’s bloody footrot, Pete. Every year my merino hoggets get footrot and I can never clear it up.’

  Ah — so Rob Todd is a merino farmer. He is not a Marlborough merino farmer because I know them all well, so he must be one from down south and someone I have bumped into on one of my trips to Otago. I have a handful of good merino farmer clients in the Omarama–Wanaka area and perhaps he was a neighbour of one of them. He had a ring of authority in his voice and I immediately got the impression he had probably been farming in the high country all his life. His voice also suggested that he was not a young farmer, but one who had probably lived with footrot in his flock most of his farming career and had finally come to the realisation that what he was doing and had always done to get on top of the disease was perhaps not the right approach. Maybe word had spread that I had had some involvement with footrot and some success in helping farmers understand and control the disease.

  Footrot is the bane of merino farmers’ lives. Unless treated it will cause severe and painful lesions in a sheep’s foot and cripple them. It is a highly infectious bacterial disease and spreads under warm damp conditions. The merino and other fine-wool breeds derived from the merino are genetically more susceptible to footrot than others, and mainly for this reason their distribution is limited to the drier areas of the country. Unless a well set-up programme to identify infected sheep, or more importantly to identify non-infected sheep and keep them isolated, is adhered to then the disease will remain in the flock for years. Too often farmers spend far too long in paring and treating infected sheep in inadequate facilities, employing uncommitted staff who hate the job because they know they will be doing the same back-breaking thankless task the same time again next year. Footrot really is a horrible disease with serious impacts on flock performance, and for this reason extensive research is currently under way to identify resistant animals and their genetic markers. It is obviously extremely painful for the animal and quite possibly, if left untreated, a far more important welfare issue than some of the conditions we inflict on sheep such as tailing (tail docking) or even shearing that certain animal rights groups in their ignorance go on about.

  Meanwhile, my approach with farmers is to help them organise a control programme. Invariably before a good programme can be initiated a good facility has to be built. This will involve a bath to wash the feet before inspecting them, a sheep handler to tip the sheep up so that the feet can be inspected properly, and a shallow soak bath where groups of sheep can be stood in a solution, usually of zinc sulphate, to bathe and treat the feet.

  By now I suspected that Rob was a Canterbury or Otago high country merino farmer, perhaps 5000–6000 ewes and possibly a wether flock as well, and running 2000–3000 hoggets. Because those who have trouble controlling the disease have almost always got poorly designed and built handling set-ups, if any at all, he is bound to have inadequate facilities.

  ‘So what sort of facilities have you got and how have you been treating them, Rob?’

  ‘I really haven’t got too much in the way of facilities.’ I was right. ‘I just catch them when they limp and squirt footrot stuff I got from the vet clinic on their feet. Doesn’t seem to help much though.’

  Bloody hell. How does he expect to get on top of the problem if that is all he is doing? He will only be treating a fraction of the mob if all he is doing is treating the ‘limpers’ — the ones with the most severe footrot. Most of the flock might only have a mild foot infection and not be limping noticeably at all, or have it in more than one foot. It is very hard to limp when both feet hurt!

  ‘So every year your hoggets get footrot badly. How are they now?’

  ‘I’ve got rid of them all now. None left. All gone to the works.’

  Rob was obviously a desperate man. Solved the problem by quitting all his replacements. Probably not a bad idea under the circumstances, but nevertheless it was still a drastic measure to sell all his replacements. I needed to arrange a visit soon and spend some time talking about the disease and how to set up a robust footrot control programme. There was an opportunity here!

  ‘So how many hoggets do you normally run and what about the ewes?’

  ‘Usually about 18 and I don’t run any ewes.’

  Things are falling into place. I’m beginning to build up a profile of Rob but still can’t place him. Rob has to be running a large wether flock and every year he buys in 1800 replacement wether lambs. With that number coming in, and after selecting out the best ones to go into the flock, he is probably running a large wether flock of 7000–8000 animals. Some of the harder high co
untry farms run smallish ewe flocks simply to breed lambs to replace those wethers which die from natural causes or are culled for age or for other reasons. The only source of income from these flocks is their valuable fine merino wool. Some like Rob just buy in replacements and don’t have a ewe flock. But where the hell is he? He has to be the owner or manager of one of the larger, harder, more remote high country properties, somewhere in the Otago or Canterbury back country. These large runholders are invariably proud independent sorts who rarely call on advice from vets. Partly I suspect because they think it is a sign of weakness and partly because some of them do not believe we understand their business. Anyway I really needed to get a clue about who this desperate man was.

  ‘Rob — this might require more than a phone call to get on top of. I wonder if it wouldn’t be best if I sat down with you and set up a control programme. Can you remind me how best to get to your property? I assume you have an airstrip on the place.’

  There was a moment’s silence on the end of the phone. ‘Appleby. Pete, you should remember, you’ve been here enough.’

  Appleby!

  Appleby is a district a few kilometres south of Nelson. There are no merino flocks in Appleby. It is an area of fertile soils with small lifestyle blocks, orchards, vineyards and market gardens. Rob Todd from Appleby in market garden country. Then it came to me.

  ‘Toddy!’

  Toddy and Trish are a wonderful couple and are very good friends of Chick’s sister and brother-in-law Ju and Philip, and they run a market garden in Appleby. We had got to know them over the years but he was always just Toddy. Never knew him as Rob Todd. It so happened that every year Toddy would buy in around 18 merino lambs and use them to clean up grass and weeds around his market garden. He preferred merinos over other breeds because they were more respectful of his substandard fences and didn’t eat all the vegetables.

  ‘Toddy — you could have told me it was you. Here I am thinking I am talking to this important Otago high country merino farmer Robert Todd, potentially a valuable new client and it’s you — a bloody market gardener from Appleby running 18 miserable footrotty merinos.’

  We had a good chuckle and I know my sister-in-law dined out on the story for months.

  Nowadays Toddy is known as the Appleby merino farmer.

  BEASTLY — PJ

  In the mid-1980s when Rogernomics had let the grey shoe brigade loose in the financial markets, one of the benefits for us vets was the money that business people, mostly city-based, were prepared to punt. And one of the entrepreneurial schemes which attracted these people was embryo transfer in goats, sheep and deer. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere in ‘Angora Anguish’ (page 47) and ‘Helping the Ram Out’ (page 169), Pete A and I got ourselves educated in this highly technical business, and became firmly involved.

  This meant that for a couple of months in April and May we were busier than we could cope with. For the rest of the year the business was the right size for two of us, and being Marlborough, and mostly dry land conservative farming, the situation didn’t justify us getting another full-time vet just then. The answer lay in veterinary locums. For the three or four years of the goat boom we would hire a locum vet to look after the practice while we were out doing embryo transfer (ET).

  Some were very good, others were not. One of the early locums had a habit of making the nurses take the X-rays while he left the building, so he wouldn’t be exposed to the radiation. We only found that out after he’d gone. He wasn’t employed again.

  The very best one we got was a delightful Englishman named Pete Orpin. The only downside was that it meant there were three Petes in the practice, and it could get a bit confusing. Pete O came to us through an agency. His CV said he played rugby, so he was more than halfway in the door. It also said he could juggle and eat an apple at the same time. That sealed it. We employed him without an interview.

  He turned out to be as good as he promised. He and his lovely Glaswegian wife Bronwen arrived in Blenheim and rented a flat for three months. He was a good small animal vet and a very good large animal one. And he could indeed juggle as he’d claimed. Especially when he’d had a few beers.

  Bronwen worked as my technician when I did laparoscopic artificial insemination in sheep, another practice I was heavily involved in. (She was the one who’d say ‘Blow, don’t suck’ to herself as she emptied the straws.) She was also a good musician, and quickly became part of the folk music community in the region. She was a funny, delightful person to be around.

  Bronwen and Pete O had only been married a few months, and their bright outward-looking attitude and friendly personalities saw them become our firm friends. Thirty years later we still keep in touch, and have visited each other many times. They live near Leicester in the Midlands where Pete is principal of a large practice, and they’ve raised four smart and interesting children.

  Pete O’s one missing area of expertise was in deer. There was no commercial deer farming in the UK then, and New Zealand was very much leading the world. Pete A and I had been in it from the start, and had many deer farm clients. We were reasonably confident deer vets when Pete Orpin arrived. TB testing of deer herds was a significant part of our work in those days, and Pete O was keen to learn. The industry had been established mostly from captured wild deer, and TB was a real problem in some of those. It was a very fast-growing industry, and deer were bought and sold, often rapidly, and sent all over the country. The result was that TB spread rapidly, and became a national problem.

  TB testing involved shaving some fur from the side of the animal’s neck to get a patch of bare skin, and injecting a tiny dose of Tuberculin into the skin. Three days later we had to return to the farm and view and palpate the area to see if there was a reaction to the Tuberculin. If there was, it could mean the animal was infected. If so, it had to be slaughtered and post-mortemed. It was a necessary but unpopular management practice. It was also hard work, and worse, the reliability of the test was not 100 per cent. Healthy animals could give a positive result, and end up being slaughtered unnecessarily. For vets it was either a good or bad job depending on the shed facilities and, consequently, how easy it was to handle the deer, to clip them, inject and read them. Deer are very sensitive animals, and the noise of the electric clippers could be very frightening for them. In good, well set-up sheds, it was a pleasant job. But not every farmer had such sheds.

  On one day in May or June, we sent Pete Orpin off to TB test a herd of deer belonging to the Bristed brothers, aka the Fuzzy Brothers. Bill and Dick Bristed are legendary Marlborough characters. Identical twins, they’ve fooled a lot of traffic cops, and a lot of other people too. The normal rules of engagement, particularly bureaucratic ones, are not something the brothers subscribe to, and their TB testing scene was not of the highest standard. The deer shed at Cobden Farm near Seddon was made from old packing cases, hastily banged together at minimal cost. The gates, a vital part of a deer shed with these highly strung and powerful animals, were old house doors, the hinges nailed to the door frames (what door frames?) with bent-over three inch nails, one or two per hinge.

  What’s more, the Bristeds didn’t just have red deer. They had a herd of fallow deer, small but explosive, and almost impossible to handle. Worse still, they had wapiti, the very large cousin of the red deer. A wapiti bull or cow in confined quarters is a very dangerous opponent and their swinging front legs, or their immensely powerful back ones, can inflict a lot of damage on a human, especially a veterinary one.

  The Bristeds’ herds were known to the Ministry of Agriculture vet as having a few TB problems, not least because the numbers never added up, or equated to previous tests. In short it was a bureaucrat’s nightmare, and only just better for the rest of us. The upside was the Bristeds are good buggers, and I always enjoyed the entertainment when I went there, once I knew and understood how they worked.

  So we sent Pete Orpin to do the TB testing, big strong lad that he was, and he went off in high spirits, ready to tackle a
new job. At 6 p.m. Pete and I were in the clinic, cleaning up from whatever we’d been doing. I’d probably been doing small animals, and Pete might have been pregnancy testing cows, but it could well have been the other way round.

  What I do remember is a very ragged, bruised and dirty Pete Orpin bursting into the clinic, eyes glazed, hair awry. He looked shocked. ‘Don’t ever send me to those bloody Beastly Brothers again. It was a nightmare,’ he muttered. He’d been bashed to bits by stroppy deer in the less-than-adequate shed, and he had had enough. We gave him a beer and sat him down, and in an hour he was back to normal.

  We never sent him to work with the Bristeds again. But we often laughed at his name for them — the Beastly Brothers.

  TRUSTING RELATIONSHIPS — PA

  Trust, faith and confidence all describe the high regard one person has for another. These qualities are essential for veterinarians to maintain a good stable working relationship with our clients. Trust means a client believes in their vet’s work and that he or she will do the right thing. Faith is more to do with the inner qualities of the vet — that he or she is a good person and that the client likes him or her. Both these qualities can be established fairly quickly, perhaps after a visit or two. Confidence, on the other hand, which depends more on a person’s repeated experiences with the vet, can take a long time to establish.

  So while the confidence that a pet owner or farmer has in their vet might have taken many years to develop, a single incident can wreck this wonderful relationship instantly. Sometimes the incident is the result of an unfortunate mistake or a bad decision by the vet, while at other times it may just be bad luck. Or a loss of confidence can be brought about by a different interpretation of an event or poor understanding by the client of the complexity of some of the issues we deal with. Too often, however, a poor outcome is simply the result of bad communication and perhaps a lack of empathy shown by the vet.