Mum and Dad never lost the dream to return to the land and kept their eyes open for a new place. They heard about a property at Bundarra in northern New South Wales whose previous owner had gone to jail for growing a huge marijuana crop and, suffering a severe psychosis, had killed himself. The property went to auction and they picked it up for a bargain price. We quickly learnt that there’s no such thing as a bargain when it comes to farming. Bundarra was tough granite country with hard winters. The previous owner hadn’t worried too much about the fences, the shearing shed was actually a marijuana drying shed and the house looked like it had been built by someone smoking the stuff. But at least the country could produce a really nice superfine wool and turn off some beef.
So when I finished high school and went to uni, Mum and Dad packed their bags and went back on the land, leaving me in the capable hands of Toby the Wonder Dog. He was ridiculously obedient. You could tell him to sit somewhere and he’d still be there two hours later. I did everything with Toby. He’d come to barbies and woo everyone he met. He used to love shaking hands, he had this trick where he would shake your hands with one paw and then I’d say, ‘Other paw,’ and he’d give you the other one. Everyone loved it. I would have taken him to lectures if they’d let me.
One day when I was in second year at uni and Toby was about six or seven, he started limping. I felt around his foot looking for a burr or a thorn. Nothing there. I ran my hand up his leg and found a lump on his left radius – the lower part of his front leg. Shivers, this isn’t good. I took him to the vet up the road at Enfield, Jim Allen, a tall, slightly built older gentleman who wore brown RM Williams Craftsman boots – the type intended for farmers but usually worn by city people, including me. Jim put Toby on the table, took his temperature, ran his hand up the leg and prodded around the lump. He gave it to me straight. ‘It’s not good. It’s most likely going to be bone cancer.’
Jim X-rayed the lump and Toby’s chest, confirming the diagnosis. He told me that the options were limited. There was amputation followed by chemotherapy, or there was amputation alone. If we did nothing, euthanasia would soon be the only option. The average survival time with amputation alone was six months, he said. With amputation and chemotherapy it was twelve months.
Funds were tight during those uni days, and the chemo was very expensive and only offered an extra six months of life, so I decided the best I could do for Toby was to have the leg amputated. People are always touchy about having a three-legged dog. They think their pet is going to hate it. They’re wrong. Dogs are resilient; you chop ’em off and they don’t care. We’ve got a specialist surgeon, Eugene Buffa, who visits Berry to perform operations for us. He describes it thus: ‘Dogs are a three-legged animal with a spare.’
Toby came back from the vet a three-legged dog. It hardly slowed him down at all, though he found it difficult to walk at human pace with three legs. He could either go fast or really slow but he couldn’t match my natural stride. So he ended up on a very generous rope and he’d either be a long way in front or a long way behind. He still loved shaking hands; you’d take him for a walk and he’d try to shake with everybody you talked to. One day after the operation, out of habit I said, ‘Other paw.’
Toby looked down and paused, and you could see his momentary confusion, but he handed over his stump and looked pretty pleased with himself. We all laughed so he looked even more chuffed.
In a short time he became a local celebrity around Enfield. People loved the three-legged dog on the enormous old rope.
He was still mad for chasing a ball. The trouble was when he chased it on a slope with his missing leg – the front left – on the downhill side. He would normally have taken all his weight with that leg, but when he was chasing a ball, he was so focused on the task at hand that he just gave no thought to staying upright, and would routinely tumble down the hill. It took him months to figure it out. Precious months as it turned out.
Unfortunately, osteosarcoma, primary cancer of the bone, usually metastasises to the lungs. Almost six months to the day after the amputation, I noticed Toby breathing strangely. I took him back to Jim Allen, who gave him another X-ray. The cancer had spread. Normally such cancers cause coughing, but Toby’s tumours were concentrated on the outside of the lungs. So he’d leaked fluid from the cancer clusters into the cavity between the lung and the chest wall, and the accumulation of fluid made breathing difficult. He couldn’t expand his lungs.
Knowing that I was a student, Jim let me help with an operation to relieve him. We sedated Toby, gave him some local anaesthetic and made a small puncture below the ribs. The vet inserted a tube and immediately a steady flow of clear blood-tinged fluid started draining into a kidney dish. About a litre came out in all.
Once we’d brought him out of the anaesthetic, Toby was like new again. He chased the ball and shook hands like the Wonder Dog of old. But I knew he was on borrowed time. At least it gave me three weeks to get my head around the thought of losing the best dog ever. Inevitably, the chest filled again.
I was away on prac work when they phoned me up and told me Toby was in respiratory distress. It was time to put him to sleep. I was devastated, but it wasn’t fair to expect Toby to wait at home for me to come back. My brother Dennis took him in to Jim.
Poor old Toby the Wonder Dog.
WHEN PIGS FLY
Anthony
We were almost halfway through our final year of uni before I went to my first private practice at Gloucester, three and a half hours north of Sydney. I’d given up my part-time job as a waiter at the local sailing club so I had no money. I chose Gloucester on the basis that I had family out there and therefore free accommodation.
The vet, Arthur ‘Otto’ Pointing, came out to meet me on my first morning. He was shortish, with a thick neck, a thick beard and giant forearms like those of a man who’d done a lot of hard work.
He looked me up and down and without being overly friendly about it said, ‘Pleased to meet you. Jump in the car. Let’s go.’ As we drove to our first job of the day, he explained that it was usually a three-vet practice but his two colleagues had just left. We were on our own. We drove from farm to farm, dealing with all the problems as they mounted up. I felt absolutely hopeless. I’d never been in private practice before. I didn’t know how to put catheters in, how to take blood. Struggling to do the work of three vets, Arthur didn’t have time to teach me. Nor did he have time to be critical of me either. But I tried as hard as I could to learn. I was just an extra set of hands, helping wherever I could.
One day we got back to the clinic at 8 p.m., absolutely beat. An elderly widow came in with a little Maltese terrier, called Trixie. The little white ball of fluff had lost her appetite and was excessively thirsty, dehydrated and lethargic. ‘She’s weeing all over the place,’ said her bent-over owner. ‘And smell her breath. It’s got a real funny sweet smell to it.’
‘What do you think, Anthony?’ Arthur asked.
‘Could be diabetes, Arthur,’ I said.
‘Sounds like it to me.’
Yes! I’d got something right.
For dogs with diabetes you need a strict regime of insulin and food, delivered on a tight timetable. Even in a big practice with plenty of vets and nurses it is difficult to treat, and we certainly weren’t one of those. And Trixie was a vicious little thing. The reality of veterinary life is that savage animals are harder to treat, so they cannot get the same level of care that placid ones get. Arthur never swore, so when he grumbled about this dog it was the ‘Bathplug’. But he had a really good heart. He knew what Trixie meant to her widowed owner so he gave the treatment his best shot. We’d get back from a long day on the road – we might have driven 180 kilometres to deliver a calf – and there’d be Trixie, sitting in her cage waiting for her food and insulin. Waiting to maul the hand that fed her. But we did what we could and got her a little bit better.
Arthur ended up delivering Trixie home too, driving 15 kilometres out to the widow’s place to
deliver the horrid little Bathplug. It was a great lesson for me in hard work and empathy.
I finished up at Gloucester and came back to Sydney to do a month at the Gladesville Veterinary Clinic. Everybody wanted to go to Gladesville. It had a huge reputation as a high-end clinic, and on top of that, the TV vet Dr Harry Cooper was a former owner. Hey, imagine that. I wonder what it was like when he was here. I’m going to come out of this with so much experience. The uni had a ballot system to see who got to go where and I must have come out fairly high up to have scored Gladesville. That place had an aura.
It was so up-market, with everything having to be done in such an exacting fashion that there was no way they were going to let a student near anything that could be stuffed up. The owners, Max and Barry, were fantastic mentors but the overriding thing I learnt there was that I definitely didn’t want to go into small-animal practice in a big city. I wanted to become a vet because I loved animals, but the human element was really important to me too, as was getting out and about. At Gladesville you could go days without actually seeing a client. The only time you went outside was to walk animals from the main hospital to the shed.
After Gladesville, I went off to do my compulsory government rotation with a vet who worked for the Rural Lands Protection Board at Nyngan, in the state’s west. I walked into the office and a slender guy of about fifty stood to greet me. ‘Hi, I’m Aarn.’
‘G’day, I’m Anthony. What’s your last name so I can call you “Doctor” when we’re with clients?’
‘No, it’s just Aarn. There’s no first, no last.’
He told me he was retiring the day I finished, and that he’d stayed on an extra few weeks solely so I could come out and do my rotation. ‘I’ve organised accommodation for you in the nurses’ barracks. The nurses aren’t there any more but you can stay there for $5 a night.’
‘Great, but I would pay $10 if the nurses were there.’
‘I live there as well,’ he said, deadpan, giving the impression that a bunch of nurses was the last thing he’d want. ‘It’s the cheapest place I could get. I’ve got the whole place to myself.’
He told me he was a runner, so I told him I was too. I had visions of us jogging in the mornings and that I’d get to know this guy really well. I suggested we share meals too.
‘No, I don’t want to share meals and I’d prefer to run alone.’
Aarn was nothing out of the ordinary to look at but I soon saw that he marched to a different drum. He suggested I drive everywhere because he didn’t like driving, and that was cool because I loved it. I was struck by the flatness of the land. I’d never seen that type of country before, where the horizon stretches away evenly forever, broken only by the shimmer of the heat haze. Our conversations were halted and awkward so after a few failed attempts at finding common ground, I’d occupy myself on the long drives by calculating how far away in the distance an oncoming car might be. By estimating their speed combined with my speed and the time it took to pass them, I’d figure what the distance had been when I first saw them. This was especially easy at night. My record was 17 kilometres.
One time Aarn said, ‘Quick! Pull over. Right here.’ He jumped out with a big plastic bag and started grabbing lucerne from the side of the road. ‘This is the solution to third-world poverty,’ he said as he got back in with the bag overflowing. He’d read that lucerne was highly nutritious, full of iron and protein, and could be grown almost anywhere. He took it home and microwaved it with garlic and that was his entire meal. The place smelled like rotten cabbage and as the odour wafted through the barracks I was suddenly glad he’d declined my offer to share food.
Though he didn’t conform to the whole rural community thing of tough farm blokes, with their pigging, drinking and footy, he was great for me to work with.
‘Can you preg-test cows?’ he asked one day.
‘Not well enough to be 100 per cent guaranteed, but yes I can.’
‘Oh, that’s good. I’ve got a lot of farmers who want that done. They understand that you’re not crash hot at it, but they’d still like an idea.’
So we started doing the rounds and I’d hop out of the driver’s seat and the farmer would come up to me, ‘G’day, how’s it going?’, thinking I was the vet and the little guy in the passenger seat was the student.
‘No, I’ve just driven here. Aarn’s the vet,’ I’d say.
‘Right. So he’s doing the preg-testing?’
‘No. That’s me.’
‘So you’re the vet?’
‘No, I’m the student. But I’m doing the testing.’
As uncomfortable as it was, all vet students crave this kind of experience. Preg-testing is a numbers game. You have to do a lot to get the feel for it, and thanks to Aarn I was getting my numbers up.
He even teed up a stint for me with the local vet and also to go up in a helicopter to observe National Parks and Wildlife shooters culling pigs in the Macquarie Marshes. Pigs do a lot of damage to the delicate wetlands. All Australian mammals have soft-padded feet that barely disturb the soil, but introduced species have hard, cloven feet and their mere presence causes enormous destruction. Combine that with the pig’s hard snout and desire to root around looking for food, and they are basically a wetland’s worst nightmare.
As much as vets and rangers hate to destroy life, there really is no choice but to remove the introduced pests. It is either that or sacrifice the hundreds and thousands of native animals that rely on the wetlands for habitat. Shooting is thought to be the most humane way to eradicate them, and helicopters are needed to get the highly trained marksmen to their targets in the otherwise impenetrable country. Having done a bit of shooting with an air rifle as a kid, I was keen to see how the professionals did it
I turned up at the local airport not knowing exactly what to expect. When I went to get on board the helicopter, the clean-shaven pilot with Aviators and a big, round helmet asked, ‘Would you like to be sitting inside or outside of the helicopter?’
‘Definitely outside.’
They rigged me up in a harness so I could lean right out. The pilot would swoop down towards thickets of scrub. The chopper had a siren and flashing lights to flush the pigs out into the open, and once they’d break loose, we could fly sideways or forwards as the shooter picked them off with enormous bullets fired from his enormous rifle. The pigs died instantly and with very little stress.
It was quite surreal. Some pigs would take to the water and try to swim. The helicopter flew in sideways – Bang! – a giant bullet into the mother, then – Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! – along the line of piglets behind her. There’d be a puff of blood and the pink pig would sink, disappearing from view. The entire day I did not see the shooter miss once, nor did I see a pig survive after being shot.
For all the excitement, it was very unsettling. I remember the pilot, who didn’t waste a lot of energy with talk, saying, ‘I started my career thirty years ago flying helicopters for people to shoot things, and now I’m finishing my career doing the same thing.’
‘Where’d you start?’ I asked over the thud of the blades.
‘Vietnam,’ he said. ‘And we weren’t shooting pigs.’
I didn’t know what to say.
Despite the fact that the pigs fell instantly, the shooter wanted to ensure that the bullets were having the intended effect and the pigs were actually dying quickly and painlessly. He figured that having a vet student on board was an opportunity to find out. ‘Hey listen. We’re just going to drop you off here so that you can give them a post-mortem. Find out how they’re dying.’
‘Oh . . . rightio. A bullet I’m betting.’
I was handed a white-handled butcher’s knife and a steel to sharpen it with. The pilot dropped down onto a newly shot cluster of animals and they kicked me out of the chopper.
Whump, whump, whump. Off it flew, kicking up a whirlwind of noise and confusion. Then there I was, standing in the sudden silence. The emptiness of the scene left plenty of room for
my imagination to fill it with angry wounded boars brandishing foot-long tusks leaping out of the nearby bushes. The helicopter was so far away I couldn’t even hear it, or the gun. And that was a noisy helicopter and an even noisier gun.
I hope they remember where they dropped me. What if they crash? The rescuers will find them but not me.
I had a bit of a poke and a prod into the dark hairy carcass of one animal, but my feet were in a couple of inches of water, it was stinking hot, ants were darting over the corpse and quite frankly I was more interested in keeping an eye on the four-foot-high reeds surrounding me than cutting up that animal. Every time the wind rustled the reeds I imagined that enormous boar storming through them. By the time the chopper came back I hadn’t achieved much. ‘Look, I’m not doing any more like that,’ I said. ‘You can pick them up and take them back to camp on the helicopter.’
And that’s what we did. We dragged the pigs into a sling and tied that to the chopper with a 6-metre rope.
I did a post-mortem back at camp and found that the bullets mostly entered in the region of the shoulder, right where the shooter was aiming, and disintegrated inside the animal – which indicated a very rapid demise.
LOST IN SPAYS
Village Vets Page 4
