Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  ‘No you can’t,’ Kate said. ‘If the client has specified that he wants them euthanased, then we have to euthanase them.’

  ‘Why does he want them put down?’

  ‘He’s a breeder and he’s trying to protect his genetics.’

  Dalmatians have a susceptibility to deafness, especially the ones with blue eyes, the same as white cats and other animals with less pigment.

  ‘Can we say we put them down but really re-home them?’

  ‘No, that’s illegal. We have to do it.’

  ‘Can we call him and ask if we can re-home them?’

  ‘No. He’s a breeder and he thinks that if word gets out that he’s had a litter of deaf puppies then everyone will know his dogs are carrying that defective allele.’

  I helped put those beautiful little pups down. It was horrendous. Not the euthanasia itself. Most of us were reconciled during the course to the inevitability that euthanasing was a necessary part of our job. But this was euthanasing them just to protect a human’s financial interests. That rocked me.

  This happened towards the end of our three months at the university clinic. James and I then stuck together during a month of artificial insemination and embryo transfers at Camden and then another month doing horses, but after that we went our separate ways.

  As far as we knew, we’d never work together again.

  ZOMBIE SHEEP AND FLYING CATS

  James

  I was a bit of a sickly kid. I had bad asthma when I was little and was always down with some respiratory disease or other. So I saw a lot of doctors and was fascinated by medical stuff. Right from the beginning I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up and it sure as anything wasn’t a doctor. I hated those guys for what they put me through. But I loved the idea of medicine and I also loved animals.

  Pretty much every photo of me as a kid has me with a dog or a cat or both. So I can’t ever remember wanting to be anything but a vet.

  We lived in a beautiful Queenslander right on Moreton Bay. Mum – Peg Carroll – was a nurse and Dad – David Carroll – was a mechanic. He used to work at home, and with Mum at work a lot, I was largely raised by Dad in the workshop, handing him tools, learning the intricacies of the internal combustion engine and tradesman-like language. Dad rarely swears, except when he’s working, and some of that rubbed off on me, much to Mum’s disgust.

  My first pet was Bob the Dog, an old cattle dog who’d come off my uncle’s farm because he was no good at rounding up cows. He was a great friend even if he’d get a bit cranky when I pulled his tail or his ears or stuck my finger in his eye.

  It was a different time. Dogs were still roaming the streets. And even though Bob was locked in, he had a knack for getting out. Not that he did anything once he won his freedom. His idea of a good time was to go and lie in the middle of the road so all the cars had to go round him. Having grown up on a farm, when he saw the council dog catcher pull up and open his truck, he’d happily jump straight in, as if he was going to do some farm work. Poor old Mum and Dad would have to claim him back and rebuild the fence. I remember once when Dad couldn’t find the dog, he went out the front only to see Bob jumping in the back of the council truck about a hundred metres away. This was Bob’s second trip to the pound that month, and Dad wasn’t happy. ‘We can’t afford to get this dog out again,’ he said, exasperated. I was only about three at the time and I thought he was dead serious. Everyone else knew Dad was so soft he’d never leave Bob at the pound.

  Having recently learnt about the miracle of photocopying I put forward the idea of just making our own money using a copier. Everyone laughed and Dad said not to worry, he’d sort it out. The next day Bob was back and the fence was fixed again.

  Then there was our pet cat Smokey. Smokey was a quiet animal who would occasionally get a crazy glint in his eye. Often after eating fish. Smokey had a track where he’d run up the big steps at the front of the house, in the front door and then do a crazy lap of the house before leaping out the window onto the garage doors which cantilevered upwards when they were open. He’d then run along the garage roof, onto the hedge and off he’d go to maybe do another crazy lap. Except every so often the garage doors wouldn’t be open. So Smokey would leap out the window and fly splendidly through the air until he hit the hard concrete driveway.

  He went to the vet a few times over that, mainly with leg injuries, but I can’t help thinking it didn’t do his brain any favours. One day he went missing and we found him under the car. Dad took him to the vet who diagnosed him with a brain tumour and that was it for poor old Smokey.

  By that time Bob the Dog had gone too. I was told Bob returned to my uncle’s dairy farm where he lived out his days. (In later life I confirmed that he really did go there and it was not one of those proverbial ‘trips to the farm’.)

  Mum and Dad shared a dream to live on a farm. And when I was about six, they took the plunge, sold the house, got a mortgage and bought a sheep property near Wee Waa in northern New South Wales. It was probably the worst time in history to buy a sheep property because wool prices were at near record highs when they did it, but soon crashed at the same time interest rates ballooned and drought moved in.

  As a kid, such matters were irrelevant. All I knew was that I was in some sort of paradise, surrounded by animals and freedom. And I got to drive a car.

  Our house was 7 kilometres from the front gate where the school bus stopped. In the morning, my older brother or sister would drive the restored Ford Prefect due east into the rising sun, having to dodge the kangaroos that feasted on the sorghum Dad had planted along the driveway. The roos would scatter before us three kids in the white fridge on wheels with no seatbelts.

  In the afternoon, when the risk of roo collision was gone, I’d sometimes be allowed to drive it home. My sister, Jenny, taught me. I was so short I’d have to go under the steering wheel to press the clutch in and wrestle with the two-foot-long gearstick with a little ball on the end, before climbing back up onto the seat. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t see where I was going because it was pretty flat and there wasn’t too much to hit.

  One day, Dad was fencing the paddock where the ewes were lambing and was halfway through digging a strainer post hole when something went wrong and he had to come home. When he returned to the fence next morning, he found two dirty little newborn lambs about a metre down the hole. He pulled them out. One was pretty good but the other was at death’s door. Dad’s a soft touch, so he thought he’d nurse them along and give them to us for something to do. Miraculously, we brought the sick one back from the dead and we called him Lazarus. We called the other one Lucy.

  We hand-fed them till they were old enough to rejoin the flock. On a day when Dad had all the wethers in the yard for docking and marking, we put Lucy and Lazarus in with the mob and opened the gate for them all to go streaming back out to the paddock to their freedom. Amid all the chaos of the jittery sheep and dogs yipping away, Lucy and Lazarus made it about 50 metres before they dropped out of the flock, turned to look at us, and came running straight back. We never got rid of them from the home paddock.

  My chores in the afternoon included feeding the dogs. And every time I put the food in the dogs’ bowls, Lucy and Lazarus heard the sound of that kibble hitting the metal and sprinted for me, thinking that they were going to be fed their lamb pellets. They were meant to just be eating grass now, but they mustn’t have got the memo. I’d hear a mad bleating that rarely came from sheep, not a sound of distress or communication, but of pure, crazy excitement. They’d leap the gate and just knock down the shed door. Lazarus would head-butt me out of the way and he clearly had me covered. I was only a scrawny seven-year-old. He’d bury his head in the feed bin before knocking it over, allowing him and Lucy to gorge themselves on the scattered dog feed, oblivious to their cannibalism. I would come back at them with whatever was at hand – brooms, shovels and, later, a cattle prodder. Anything to get them out.

  We had countless fights, but the bette
r at it I got, the more cunning Lazarus became. He was my nemesis. And much to my family’s amusement I’d plan over long hours how to keep him away from me and the dog food. I’d reinforce the gate and the door, but my opponent was always one step ahead. He would lie in wait for me to make the journey from the shed to where the dogs slept and ambush me. I had to learn to think like a sheep and I’m sure this experience came into play when, years later, I won the HC Belschner Prize for Wool and Sheep.

  If I was learning a lot, Dad was learning more, transitioning from mechanic to farmer. He’d spent years travelling around western Queensland with our neighbour from Brisbane, Archie Campbell, who owned vast tracts of land and had farmed all his life, but all the research in the world can’t prepare you for the hardships of rural life. Things got really tough after we’d been there about a year and the drought started to take hold. Feed was scarce and the sheep were starting to go backwards, but as we weren’t overstocked they were holding on okay. Then one day Dad found two sheep dead. The next day there were three more.

  Dad happened to be talking to the stock and station agent who asked him how things were going. Dad told him of the deaths and that he wasn’t sure what had happened. There were thousands of sheep at risk and he feared the dead ones might just be the tip of an iceberg.

  ‘Well you should talk to your neighbour, John Melton,’ the agent said. ‘He’s one of the biggest sheep farmers in the district.’ Dad was a little confused because he hadn’t come across that name and he thought he’d met all the neighbours. The agent gave Dad John’s address and phone number, and Dad realised that the properties did back on to one another, but to get to the Meltons’ place was about a 25-kilometre drive. Dad called John and had a chat, with John saying he’d be over first thing in the morning to have a look.

  When John said ‘first thing in the morning’, he meant it. He was governed by the sun. He rose with it and just about went to bed with it, too. He arrived with a stockman as the sun breached the horizon, and made pleasant introductions. John was a stumpy bloke, a three-pack-a-day smoker with a red nose and spider veins cracking through his face. He always looked hot and bothered.

  ‘Right, let’s go have a look at these sheep,’ he said in an excited country drawl. I tagged along and watched as he surveyed the mob. ‘Not too bad. Shouldn’t be dying,’ was his quick summation. What he didn’t like was what he saw growing in the paddock.

  ‘See this, Dave – it’s a weed, and while it looks like there’s still a bit of feed, there’s only this bloody weed. Shit of a stuff it is. And these buggers will be eating it and they’ll all be bloody dead in no time. Got to get ’em out of here quick smart.’

  With that John jumped in his little Suzuki ute, about half the size of the Hiluxes that everyone else drove. ‘I’ll be back in a few hours. Got to make some calls,’ and off he sped in the clunky little vehicle, which, like all John’s machinery, was never more than a few revs away from breaking down. Maybe he saw the benefit in befriending a mechanic, but whatever his motives, we soon saw the results.

  Within a few hours he was back with a team of stockmen and a plan to get the sheep out on the stock route – that vast network of thoroughfares designed for cattle and sheep to be walked all over the country, but which, in the age of cattle trucks, now offers a safety valve against drought. Dad and my eldest brother, Simon, had them out there on the ‘Long Paddock’ for what seemed like an awful long time. It was tough for Dad, Simon and the sheep, but better than the inevitable death that awaited the flock at home.

  When you’re in a hole that deep, you remember the people who pull you out and John Melton is someone our family will be forever indebted to.

  During that time, I got exposed to some of the even less fun aspects of raising animals. I remember one day on the stock route Dad was trying to find some grass for the sheep. Skinny lambs ran around their skinny mothers all battling to get some nutrition out of the brown stubble sticking out of large patches of bare earth. Even as a kid I knew the animals were under stress and I knew Dad was too.

  One of the ewes had cancer – a whopping pendulous growth on the end of her ear. Conventional farming wisdom would have been to cull the ewe because the mass was infected and fly-blown, but she had a young lamb at foot and Dad couldn’t afford to lose any sheep. We wanted to at least get her through long enough to wean the lamb. We caught the ewe that night and Dad cut off the ear tip. The smell of the Dettol and the sound of her brief sharp bleating remains scarred into my mind. The ewe survived; however, given what I know now, the cancer would most likely have spread and she would have died a few years later.

  Another one of the problems we had was fly strike – when flies lay their eggs in the flesh of living sheep. The smell of fly strike and the chemicals you use to treat it haunt me more than Dettol. It’s an awful, awful smell. The drugs back then were way more effective than now, but way more dangerous for people. I remember one day we had the chemical everywhere and I complained that it was burning my hands. John Melton turned to me and said, ‘You Carrolls are soft. We used to drink a bit of arsenic every day. Made you healthy.’

  John was always ranting against our softness, while his wife was always telling him to shut up. ‘You’re all bloody soft, you Carrolls. It’s just a cut. Bit of blood never hurt anyone.’ He was a real character. Mellowed as he aged, though. Gave up the smokes and the arsenic.

  While this was a really tough time, it also produced some of my happiest memories. But not so happy for Mum and Dad: juggling the drought, rock-bottom wool prices and a 23.5 per cent interest-rate bill. Eventually they succumbed. They would have been better off going bankrupt but were too proud for that, so they sold the place, paid all their debts and left with nothing. It was a disaster for the family.

  We said goodbye to our horse, Thirsty, and to Lucy and Lazarus. We left our working dogs, Joe and Sally, but we kept the runt of their litter, Scrawny. None of us wanted to move to Sydney, but my uncle had offered us cheap rent on a house in Ashfield and when you’ve got no money your options are limited. And just to top it all off the Ford Prefect carked it on the drive down.

  When I started school at St Francis Xavier at Ashbury I had to wear my old yellow and brown Wee Waa uniform for a while because Mum couldn’t afford the new one. All the other kids were in dark and light blues. I didn’t complain because I knew the dire financial predicament we were in. The early ’90s were a tough time economically for a lot of people.

  I was one of only four or five Anglo kids at that school. So it was a bit of a shock coming from Wee Waa where there was a strict monoculture. For a lot of the kids, English was their second language. I helped some of them learn to read and write. It was a big change.

  Mum went back to nursing and Dad went to work as a mechanic for someone else. It was tough for him. He was pushing fifty and he took what had happened pretty hard. We’d owned a waterfront house in Brisbane that would be worth a mint today. They’d gambled on a dream and lost everything. But deep down, he never gave up that dream.

  None of us were happy. My sister, Jenny, had had great friends in Brisbane, and she’d made great friends in Wee Waa, and now she’d been uprooted again and she didn’t like it. My eldest brother, Simon, started studying law at Sydney Uni, but as money was tight he had to work long hours to pay for it so he ended up stopping his studies to work full-time. Poor old Mum was the rock. She just kept working away. My middle brother, Dennis, went to school, and I was the youngest so the least affected, but even as a ten-year-old I was well aware of the difficulties.

  It was around this time that Scrawny, the reject working dog, got sick. We took her to the vet at Croydon Park who diagnosed her with kidney failure. She was only a few years old. It’s a rare condition in dogs, and the vet hoped that it was an acute case that might respond to treatment. Dad was always close to the animals and took great solace from his dog. So Mum and Dad spent money they didn’t have trying to save Scrawny. They paid for blood transfusions and other treatment
s, but Scrawny didn’t respond. In hindsight it was probably congenital. Being the runt of the litter, she would not have been destined to survive in the natural scheme of things.

  I remember leaving for school one morning while Scrawny was sitting at the front door with the light streaming through the Federation-era glass like it was a cathedral. She lay there looking finished. She’d had enough. I knew she had an appointment at the vet that morning, and even if the grown-ups hadn’t said as much, I sensed that she wasn’t coming home. As I said goodbye I looked into her sad eyes and saw blank submission. The spark was gone; replaced with a dull, grey listlessness that in future years I would see in many old dogs when their time was up. Tough as it was, I knew it was for the best.

  A THREE-LEGGED ANIMAL WITH A SPARE

  James

  Dad rebuilt the Ford Prefect and eventually he and Mum rebuilt their lives. Dad went back into business for himself and they bought their own house in Ashfield. By this stage I’d finished primary school and got myself into a selective high school, North Sydney Boys, which I loved.

  My sister and brother both got to use the Ford Prefect when they were going to uni but the gearbox had given up the ghost by the time I got my Ls and the old car cluttered the driveway of our house for a while. Dad still has it and assures me he will restore it again.

  When I was fourteen, the champion working dog that belonged to our old friends the Meltons in Wee Waa had pups. They brought a black-and-white one down and gave it to us. He was a hairy kind of dog, a border collie crossed with a huntaway, which is a New Zealand breed of sheep dog very like a border collie.

  He was nominally my dog and I called him Toby. Toby the Wonder Dog.

  Toby was as smart as all get out. The life of the party, always the centre of attention who hung with anyone. He was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of dog.

  I also had a black mini lop rabbit called Jack, which was a poor choice of pet because after a while we figured out all the wheezing and sneezing I was doing was caused by an allergy to rabbits. Dad built Jack a hutch and we’d let him out so that he could graze the backyard. Jack didn’t have a lot of personality but he was adventurous and would poke his head into everything. Then we’d have to catch him to put him back in his hutch, which was difficult because Jack was both shy and fast, and I was both slow and wheezy anywhere around him. But it didn’t take long for Toby the Wonder Dog’s breeding to come to the fore. He figured out how to herd Jack back into his hutch. I never had to touch Jack for the next two and a half years – at which point the neighbour’s dog got him in the middle of the night.