Tales from a Wild Vet

by Jo Hardy

  After that we decided that eating at the campsite restaurant would be a much easier option, which turned out to be just as well because a massive thunderstorm appeared out of nowhere. Half an hour of torrential rain left the most incredible sky, and Jacques’s irritation with me for leaving him to fight off the ants alone soon dissolved as he stood behind me, wrapping me in his arms, and we just looked up in awe at the explosion of vibrant colours in the sky.

  From Karoo we drove to the Valley of Desolation, a sheer 400-foot cliff face, formed over millions of years, which has been declared a national monument. Karoo is famous for its extraordinary storms and as we drove we could see that a huge thunderstorm was gathering to one side of us. ‘Look over there,’ Jacques said, turning towards the other side. I gasped; there was a vast sandstorm. For the next few miles it looked like the apocalypse, with dark clouds of sand whirling on one side and huge bolts of lightning shooting down from a black sky on the other. We kept driving, hoping we could pass between them before the two met.

  Suddenly we realised the tarpaulin on the back of the truck had come loose and was flapping wildly in the wind. If we didn’t secure it, it would blow away or our luggage underneath would get drenched or fly off. Jacques stopped the car in a spot where the road cut through a small hill, to give us some protection, and opened the car door, which was almost ripped off by the wind. He is a big man, built like a rugby player, standing at exactly two metres high, but when he got out he was almost blown off his feet and he struggled for several minutes to secure the tarpaulin. The next challenge was to retrieve his hat, which had been swept off his head. In the end he gave up and, leaning diagonally into the wind, fought his way back to the car.

  We made it through the storms and spent a night in a guest house, which was bliss – no ants, no canvas and nice bathrooms. That evening, after the storms had calmed down and before night drew in, we drove to the top of the valley to watch the sunset and as we stood in its red glow Jacques said, ‘Wait, I forgot something,’ and reached for a small, square object in his pocket. My heart leaped. Had he chosen this wonderful spot to propose? For a split second I waited – until he pulled out his GoPro camera, turned to me and said ‘Selfie!’ I sighed. It was a bit of a running joke between us that I was waiting for him to propose and I was beginning to wonder if he would ever actually do it.

  The week we got back to Alicedale I was due back at the SPCA, but the rain came down in torrents, the dust roads turned to thick mud and it became impossible for me and Maloli to get into the townships.

  When the rain finally eased off and the roads were passable again we got back to work, setting up the mobile clinics and continuing with our house visits. One of the first animals I saw was a little grey donkey that had been hit by a car. He had a soft-tissue pelvic injury which I thought might heal – if the owner would allow the donkey to rest for a couple of months. The township people could only afford animals that worked to earn their keep, so the concept of allowing an animal to rest was an alien one and it took a great deal of persuasion to get the owner, who used the donkey to carry cans of fuel that he sold, to rest him. My heart broke for the little donkey. I felt very unsure that the owner really would keep his word.

  Many of the cases I saw I was never able to follow up on, but in this case Maloli went back a few weeks later and he told me that the man had rested the donkey and it had recovered, much to the owner’s delight, which was lovely news. I got the impression the owner would treat his donkey with more respect now and give him a break every now and then.

  Not many cases within the townships were happy ones. The level of poverty was very high, and animals certainly weren’t respected or treasured, so many were left suffering. It was also a prime hot spot for the quick spread of diseases, particularly in dogs, since all dogs intermingle during the day and none are vaccinated unless they have been seen at one of the SPCA clinics, and even then, vaccines only last a year. One of the saddest cases I came across was a litter of five very pretty puppies, all of which had parvovirus – a highly contagious and lethal disease. Almost all dogs in England are vaccinated against parvo, so I hadn’t seen it before, but I recognised the symptoms: rapid weight loss, lethargy and haemorrhagic diarrhoea. The dogs rapidly become weak and dehydrated and usually died within a few days. The owner said he had already lost two puppies over the previous two days.

  In some cases, if a dog is kept in isolation and nursed carefully and intensively with intravenous fluids and round-the-clock care, it can recover. But for these puppies that wasn’t possible – the owners couldn’t look after them and the SPCA didn’t have any isolation facilities, so the only option was to put all the puppies to sleep. A heartbreaking job, which left me feeling very sad.

  A day or two later we rescued another litter of puppies, lovely little sandy-coloured creatures. The owner couldn’t afford to feed them, so we took them to the SPCA, hoping to find homes for them, but there was an outbreak of parvovirus in the kennels and so we lost them all as well. It was devastating to lose so many puppies in such a short space of time.

  On our round of house calls there was often a need for improvisation to use whatever we had to hand to treat the animals. When we went to see a big dog with an abscess on the side of its face I knew I’d get my hand bitten if I tried to take a closer look. Maloli refused to get near the dog, having been bitten by him once before, and I didn’t have a muzzle. The abscess needed draining, so I asked the teenage boy who was the only person at home if he had anything soft I could use to tie the dog’s mouth shut.

  He disappeared and came back with a rugby sock, which he tied around the dog’s nose. But as the dog growled, the boy got frightened and let go and I had to whip my hand out of the way of its jaws. I took the sock, wrapped it around the dog’s muzzle, crossed it over under his chin and pulled it tight behind his ears, so the boy could hold it there without being scared and stop the dog from moving backwards.

  It worked really well and I was able to treat the dog’s abscess, showing Maloli how to drain it and hopefully giving the dog some relief. Maloli, the boy and several onlookers who had gathered round were impressed with my bravery, but as I explained to Maloli afterwards, it was less heroic bravery and more a case of having to make a plan because I was quite keen on keeping all my fingers.

  Scalded animals became another theme. I was shocked and saddened by how often animals suffered the consequences of disputes between neighbours or rivals. As I treated a dog with serious burns in one front yard, a man came out of the next house and said would I look at his donkey, which had also been scalded with hot water? The wounds weren’t new, the injury had clearly happened a few days earlier. The donkey must have been in terrible pain.

  ‘Who did this?’ I asked him.

  ‘The man in that house over there,’ the owner said, pointing at a shack across the street. ‘He does not like me.’

  ‘That’s hardly your donkey’s fault,’ I muttered. Animals were seen simply as possessions and it was deeply upsetting.

  I had become a vet to help animals, to end their pain and suffering, to heal their wounds and diseases and to restore them to health. And while there will always be animals too ill or too injured to help, back in England in most cases I can do something to make the animal better. In the South African townships, though, I had to face a much harsher reality. Animals were kept not as pets but to work or guard the house, and since the owners were often too poor to feed themselves properly, they simply couldn’t afford treatment for their animals. Anything over the equivalent of £4 was out of the question for most people and the result was that many animals died that could have been saved.

  At least with wounded animals disinfecting the wound and administering antibiotics gave many of them a good chance of survival. I saw several that had nasty cuts on their necks from the wire so often used as a collar and most of them could be saved. But some injuries were impossible to treat. Among them was a little terrier that Maloli and I went to visit in one of the
roughest township areas. We were shown into a small yard where the dog lay in a patch of shade looking pitiful, her eyes pleading. When I got close and saw her injury I felt my stomach turn over. Her foot was so badly broken that all four toe bones were sticking out through the skin. I knelt and stroked her head. ‘You poor thing,’ I murmured. ‘How long have you been like this? I wonder what happened to you.’

  Maloli asked the owner, a young girl of about 15, what had happened, but she didn’t know. She suspected that the dog had been hit by a car, which was an all-too-common scenario in the townships. As was so often the case, the dog had been injured while out on her own and had come home in this state – though how she managed to walk I can’t imagine.

  I explained that there was no possibility of repairing this damage and the dog was in great pain. I would need to put her to sleep, straight away.

  Many owners, when we broke this news, were resigned and accepted it calmly. But the girl looked horrified and spoke rapidly to Maloli. I knew she was asking if there was any way to save her dog, who she said was called Halala, which means happy in Xhosa. Maloli translated and when I said that I was very sorry, but the dog could not be helped, tears ran down the girl’s cheeks. She sat and stroked Halala, whose tail thumped softly on the ground, before Maloli picked her up and gently carried her to the truck. I followed and when I looked back the girl was still sitting on the ground in the yard, wiping tears from her eyes.

  One afternoon Maloli and I went to inspect a pig farm. Part of his job, in addition to house visits, was inspecting premises where animals were bred. The SPCA had received a complaint about this particular farm, so we went to see what was going on.

  The scene that greeted us was worse than I could have imagined. The pigs were being kept in several small pens made of rusty metal, each about four feet by six and most knee-deep in mud and muck. Some had corrugated-iron roofs, which provided little protection; others had no roof at all and the pigs, crowded together, were helpless in the hot sun. Worst of all, none of the pens had food troughs in them and only a few contained a water bucket. Overcrowded, hot, dehydrated and hungry, the pigs were in a pathetic state. About 20 men from the local townships had put this together as a kind of farm cooperative. They bred pigs and sold the piglets in the townships for families to raise for their meat.

  There was not a lot of money changing hands, most of the piglets were exchanged for goods, which meant they had little money to spend on improving conditions.

  Maloli had to tell them that their pigs would be taken away if the men didn’t make brick pens with shade, food and water. The men argued with him and gesticulated a lot, but he held his ground and in the end they walked away.

  ‘They say they will do it,’ he said as we got back into the truck. ‘I have told them we will come back in two weeks.’

  I wasn’t keen to return to the farm with Maloli, given that he was regularly threatened when he told people they could be prosecuted on welfare grounds and have their animals taken away. But in the end I had to go with him since it would use extra petrol for him to come back to the SPCA to pick me up before going on the daily rounds. This time there were even more men and some of them looked menacing, so I refused to get out of the car. Maloli went and talked to them and there was a lot of shouting, but when he came back he was pleased. They were going to start building some pens, he said. They would get some discounted bricks from the quarry next door and they had agreed to build a certain number of pens each month. Maloli would need to keep going back to check on them, but it was a start.

  Incidents like this made me realise just how brave Maloli was. He was just one man, with no weapon or back-up, confronting a group of men who looked aggressive and some of whom visibly brandished sticks, never mind what weapons they might have hidden. He was threatening to take away their business and they didn’t like it, but Maloli did it anyway. He refused to be intimidated. He was on the side of the animals and he was not about to let them down.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Handprint

  One hot afternoon in mid-January I had a half-day at the SPCA, which was nice because it meant I would be back home by mid-afternoon and have a few hours before Jacques finished work.

  I decided to clean up the house, which had become a bit chaotic, with both of us working.

  As a treat I put some muffins in the oven to have once I’d finished, and to welcome Jacques home.

  I liked things neat and tidy and Jacques was the complete opposite, so there was quite a lot to clear up, but an hour later the house looked great and Jacques walked in with a ‘Honey, I’m home’, gave me a kiss and grabbed a muffin from the rack.

  ‘Ouch!’ he said, rushing for the cold tap.

  ‘Um, I was just going to mention that they’ve only just come out of the oven,’ I said.

  Once he’d finally finished his muffin, I could see he wanted to ask me something. Whenever he wanted a favour he would turn super sweet, putting on a schoolboy grin and coming to give me a hug.

  ‘Baaaaaaaaaby. You know you love me?’

  ‘Uh-huh. What do you want?’ I asked dubiously.

  ‘Well, work is doing this community project where all the staff and students are making tiles out of salt dough and pressing handprints into them so that the kids in the township can paint them and turn them into a wall. I think it’s meant to resemble some kind of togetherness. Anyway, I need to make some tiles. Can you help?’

  I was always happy to do things like this. I liked community work, and this sounded like a lovely idea. ‘OK, sure, what can I do?’

  ‘Well, I can make the dough, but my hands are ridiculously huge and I don’t think my handprint will fit on the size of tile I have to make, so can you press your hand in?’

  We did our best to make the tiles to the specification Jacques said they needed to be, with him standing behind me and helping me press my hand hard into them to get a decent shape. They actually looked pretty good. We put them in the oven, which was still cooling after the muffins, to harden overnight.

  While I made a quick pasta supper Jacques, apologising and promising he’d wash up, nipped out to collect some work he’d left with a friend.

  The next day, I was on my way back home from the SPCA when I remembered that we had no food in the flat for supper. Jacques had been working really long hours the past few days, so he hadn’t had a chance to shop either. Hot and tired after more than 15 house calls, I couldn’t face stopping off at the supermarket.

  I rang Jacques. ‘Fancy going out for a pizza tonight?’

  He loved the idea and as our favourite pizza place was close to our special spot, on the dunes behind the beach, he suggested we go there first to sit and watch the sunset. I had been in South Africa for a month and a half and we hadn’t yet found an opportunity to go to the place we both thought of as uniquely ours, so I was delighted.

  Once we’d both had showers and changed, we headed off. Jacques had picked up some quiches and brownies from my favourite café for us to snack on and I was looking forward to relaxing on the sand as the temperature sank from fierce heat to the balmy cool of the evening.

  When we got to the beach we left our shoes in the car and started trekking up the sand dune. Our special spot was an extraordinary place. We’d come across it on a walk one day when we had just started dating and decided that this was where we would always come to be together and enjoy the beauty of the view. It was an opening between the green bushes right on the top of a very large sand dune, covered with wild lilac coastal flowers.

  To the left you could see several miles up the deserted white sand beach with its lush green dunes. To the right you could see for a couple of miles until the dunes became more like cliffs, full of hidden coves. And out in front stretched the sea. It was a prime spot for dolphins and a migration route for southern right whales. If you came when it was getting dark, you’d see the chokka boats far out at sea, shining bright lights into the water to catch squid. Needless to say, the calamari in the a
rea was a speciality.

  It was a beautiful evening; there was a slight breeze, the sun was going down and the sky was filled with pink and gold. The beach was deserted in both directions and there was a school of dolphins playing in the water in front of us. We laid out a blanket and snuggled up together, watching the dolphins, chatting and eating the food Jacques had brought.

  ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ Jacques said.

  ‘Really?’ I was puzzled. ‘It’s not my birthday, Christmas is over, what’s the occasion?’

  Jacques grinned and passed me a square box with pictures of us together on the lid. It was lovely and I couldn’t wait to open it.

  I undid the clasp and opened the lid. Inside was a salt dough tile with my left handprint on it.

  As I stared at the salt tile, puzzled, I suddenly realised what was different about it. A beautiful Celtic diamond ring was pressed into the salt dough on the fourth finger of my left handprint. It was more beautiful than I had ever imagined, I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  There was a moment’s silence and then …

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’