‘Okay,’ said Geoff, ‘but what’s that red gunk coming out your ear?’
‘Oh that. That’s another story.’
ALL PIGS GREAT . . .
James
As uni drew to a close and everyone’s attention turned to what they were going to do next, I started to think about putting a CV together. Before I did anything, I figured I’d better call the Inverell and Barraba clinics for references. That turned out to be a good time-saver because instead of writing a reference, both of them offered me a job.
It was a big decision to make. Whichever one I chose, it was going to affect the rest of my life, so I didn’t want to get it wrong. I am terrible at making decisions. I overthink everything. If I have a problem, I go from the worst possible outcome and work my way backwards to the best. Until such time as I have thought through every single permutation of what could happen, I can’t sleep. It might be 3 a.m. before I decide I can switch off.
I had loved working with Bob at Inverell and with Ben at Barraba. The mix of smallies and largies was similar at the two clinics, but I knew Bob had a tightly managed structure at Inverell, while I was likely to be cut loose a little bit more at Barraba. Barraba Veterinary Clinic had an excellent reputation with graduates and, as far as I could tell, they were all still on good terms, so that was a positive sign. On top of that, Barraba was two hours closer to Sydney, where my girlfriend lived. Such things matter when you’re twenty-three.
So I went for Barraba. And if it was responsibility I was seeking, I got it. On my second day there, Ben called me over. ‘Well James,’ he said. ‘You did a month’s prac work here. You kind of know where everything is and how things work, so you can handle the branch clinic at Manilla on your own today. Good luck. Call me if you need me.’
The fear must have shown in my face. He adopted a very soothing tone. ‘Don’t worry. You know more than you think you know. You’re better than you think you are. Just get out there and do it.’
So that’s what I did. I jumped in the car and drove the 45 kilometres south to Manilla and waited for things to go wrong. I spent that first day in abject terror that something complicated would come through the door or, worse, that I’d stuff up something simple and make it complicated.
Fortunately for me, Manilla Veterinary Clinic was staffed by an amazing nurse. Suzanne Barton was a bubbly, enthusiastic Englishwoman in her late thirties. She’d come to Australia on a working holiday and when she was due to go home, a badly broken leg intervened. She ended up getting married and making her life here. Eventually, most of her family had followed her out. Without Suzanne I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have survived those early days. We became good friends. Her kids would get dropped off at the clinic by the school bus and would kick around in the afternoon, so I got dragged into the orbit of the family.
Later that first day, Jessica Taylor, a slightly built redhead came into the clinic and chatted to Suzanne before walking towards me. ‘G’day James, I’m Jessica. Welcome to Manilla. We play touch on Wednesdays. So, ah, yeah, you’ll be playing?’ It wasn’t really a question.
‘Ah, okay.’
‘Good. After the game you’ll come back to our place for dinner. I’ll cook one week, you cook the other. So we’ll see you Wednesday.’ My predecessor, Tim, had played, so I had no choice. That was how everyone seemed to treat me. I loved the feeling of being involved and being thrown straight into the mix of what was happening. And I still owe Jessica and her husband, Paul, quite a few dinners.
I handled everything the animal kingdom threw at me on that first day and I started to allow myself to think that maybe Ben had been right when he had talked about me being better than I thought I was.
On my second day at Manilla, he dropped in to see how I was going and we were chatting away when Suzanne came in with a call to go out to a property to euthanase a dog and a pig.
Ben quickly ran through his preferred technique for putting dogs to sleep. ‘Now, with the pig, it’s very straightforward: you go through the ear vein. You’ll see the big vein. Just put it in there. You’ll have to guess the pig’s weight to figure out the dosage.’
I must have looked unconvinced. My knowledge of pigs was probably less than sound. In our crucial fourth year at uni, the pig lecturer had left suddenly, so they had had to get in a replacement, and all his instruction was compressed into one big porcine week. Unfortunately, I had missed pretty much that entire week. It just happened to be the week before Barbie Grog, the vet revue. Anthony and I, plus a bunch of others, were on the organising committee. We took our responsibilities very seriously and dedicated a lot of time to them. It was a matter of inter-year pride to put on a good show. On top of that, I was still trying to hold down a part-time job and so my pig-lecture attendance was poor to say the least. Our contribution to the revue – titled ‘Blinding Nemo’ – went down a treat. Unfortunately, that didn’t translate into marks.
With the pig test looming on Monday morning, I’d had to work at the call centre on Sunday afternoon in Sydney. I got back to Camden at 9 p.m. and opened the pig text book. It was stiff and clean smelling because its pages had never before been turned. I started reading it that night and asked a few questions of one of our more diligent mates who explained some things to me about the peculiarities of the pig’s digestive tract. I continued reading the book into the quiet hours, long after everyone else’s lights went out. I finished the last page at 4 a.m., got up at 7 a.m., put on my cross-dressing outfit – into which I’d put more time than I had my studies – stumbled into the exam in my ill-fitting heels, found the test pretty easy with all that fresh info bubbling through my brain, got a distinction, and hardly retained a single piece of pig knowledge.
This all flashed through my mind as I stood there wondering how I was going to put this pig to sleep, and perhaps Ben recognised something in my expression – a peculiar mix of grimace and grin.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you. I’ll come with you.’
Ben was an incredibly bubbly, energetic kind of guy. He said everything in short, sharp sentences, often repeating the conclusion of the sentence. ‘Do this. Do this.’ It was almost a mumble. He had a head full of knowledge, but his brilliant mind went too fast for his mouth to keep up, so the words often came out as a deep rumble and sentences merged into each other. You’d look at him, wondering what on earth he was talking about, and there were plenty of conversations that left me slightly more confused than when I started. He did everything at pace. He lived opposite the Barraba clinic and he’d drive across the road at high speed, pull up and say, ‘Ah crikey! Forgot my bag. Forgot my bag.’ Then he’d turn around, run back to his house then back to the clinic. There was no walking. We called him The Big Red Chief.
So we drove out to the property like we had a siren on the roof. That was good, as it gave me less time to ponder my shortcomings. At least this job wasn’t going to require any deep understanding of porcine biology. We just had to insert a needle, after all. And I actually knew a little bit about killing pigs. Our university rotations included piggeries, where you were exposed to the brutal nature of intensive pig production, and I had assisted in the euthanasia of many unfortunate piglets.
This, however, wasn’t a piglet.
A lovely middle-aged couple, Joan and John, came out to greet us. Their 1200-acre farm in normally fertile country was turning to red dust as a mid-summer dry spell took hold. They led us into a shed close to the house. It looked like it was intended for vehicles but was mainly being used for the storage of corrugated iron, old fridges and bookshelves.
‘Fred’s over here,’ said John, clearly upset, guiding us to a large kelpie cross lying on a mattress by a wall. Fred looked old and tired and didn’t bother shifting from his bed as we approached. He examined us with forlorn eyes that appeared to say it was time to go to doggie heaven, but as Ben reached down to touch him he bared his teeth and emitted a savage, low growl that told us maybe he wasn’t so ready.
; ‘Mmmmm,’ said Ben. ‘Mmmmm. Didn’t bring a muzzle. No muzzle. Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm. James, you hold the dog. I’ll inject the vein.’ Fred had been urinating on himself because he hadn’t been able to get up off the bed. So he wasn’t going to get up to bite me, but each time I reached towards him, he showed me those broken yellow fangs.
I grabbed his stinking yellow mattress and put it over the top of him as his teeth bit hard into the old foam. That allowed us to pull a front leg out and Ben managed to get the needle in.
‘Thank you so much,’ Joan said, through gentle sobs, as Fred drifted off. ‘Sorry he was so difficult. He’s not normally like that. But it was nice and peaceful in the end.’
‘Yes, it was very sad,’ Ben said. ‘But he’d definitely reached the end. You made the right decision.’
‘We’d better go and do the pig now,’ John said. He had the air of a man who knows he’s got to keep busy lest he show any more emotion.
‘What’s wrong with the pig?’ Ben asked in a more farmerly voice.
‘Well Winston’s eleven months old. We got him as an orphan and we fed him . . . and we, ah, fed him a lot. Winston’s gotten so big his joints are collapsing under his weight. He’s got some sort of early arthritis. He’s just too big.’
They took us around the back of the farm buildings and Joan banged on a food tin. At first nothing happened, but then off in the distance I made out a swirl of red dust with a great pink mass in the middle of it, lurching and heaving towards us in a half-run, half-stagger kind of motion.
As it got closer, I realised it was the biggest pig I’d ever seen: a white landrace with huge testicles hanging out the back and huge tusks at the front. The hint of food had made Winston forget the pain in his joints but, with no food to be had, he began to hobble like a cripple as he came to inspect us. I realised Winston was also the friendliest pig I’d ever seen in my very limited experience. He wanted to be pals.
‘Okay, I can see what you’re talking about with his size and his joints,’ Ben said. ‘We could try to get him better. Put him on a diet and give him some medications. Yes, a diet and medications.’
‘No, he’s too difficult for us to handle,’ Joan said. ‘He keeps breaking out. We’ve tried fixing him up, but we’ve reached a point where we just can’t do any more.’
‘Have you thought about sending him off to the abattoir?’ Ben asked.
‘We couldn’t do that,’ John said. ‘We couldn’t eat Winston.’
‘Okay,’ Ben said, turning to me. ‘You hold Winston and I’ll inject him.’
‘No problem.’
Joan brought a bucket of food out and Winston tucked in with squeals of delight, as if never before had such exquisite pig pellets graced the plate of man or beast. I took hold of Winston’s flapping pink ear, trying to hold him steady. But between each mouthful of his most excellent pellets he flicked his head around to check out the visitors and the action, knocking me – all of 65 kilograms – around like I wasn’t there.
Ben couldn’t get the needle anywhere near the vein. ‘Has he ever had a snout rope?’ Ben asked.
‘No. We tried once, but he went ballistic,’ Joan said.
Ben and I swapped places. He tried to use his greater weight while I took the syringe filled with the lethal green barbiturate anaesthetic Lethabarb – commonly known as Nembutal. But it didn’t make any difference. We must have spent fifteen minutes trying different ways to restrain the pig, but Winston could not be contained. We attempted sedating him with injections into his muscles but he wouldn’t cooperate and the injections were only going into the enormous rolls of body fat instead of his bloodstream. They had no effect.
Eventually, Ben broke off and went over to Joan and John. ‘Look, we can’t inject the pig, so a clear gunshot to the head may be a humane solution.’
‘Yeah, we understand. That’s okay,’ said John. ‘We realise it’s our fault that we’ve never handled the pig before. We have no facilities.’ So John went away to get the gun.
‘Yes, yes,’ murmured Ben. ‘This will be much easier. Much easier. We’ll shoot the pig. Definitely shoot the pig.’
Ben’s from a practical farming background and has had to use guns to euthanase animals many times before. He’s a brilliant surgeon and a great vet, and one of the most pragmatic people I’ve ever come across. But his thinking was so ingrained with pragmatism that I suspect he sometimes struggled to understand how emotional some of our clients could be in their decision making. His outlook on life was obviously much treasured by our clients, as he was not only respected in the profession but was seen as part of the furniture by the local communities.
John came back with a .22. I looked at it doubtfully. That’s not gunna work. Though I could remember little about pigs, I did know that they have a very thick, bony casing on the front of their skull so that they can attack things with their heads. This makes it very difficult to shoot a pig in the cranium.
Ben looked at the gun in much the same way as I had, but then he seemed to start convincing himself that the task was possible. ‘He’s only eleven months old, so his bony plates won’t have properly fused yet. Yes, this gun should do the trick. Yep, it’ll do the trick if fired at the right spot.’
Ben was one of the most respected vets in Australia. Who was I to argue?
We put some more food in the trough, and Joan and John retired to the other side of the open-fronted shed.
‘Have you shot him yet?’ one of them asked. Ben and I looked at each other, not quite believing the question. These were solid country folk, but emotions were obviously playing on their faculties.
‘No, you’ll hear the gunshot when we do,’ I called back.
Eventually, Winston stopped snorting and sniffing and doing all that pig stuff long enough to present a target. Ben lined him up and was just about to fire when Winston suddenly twigged to what was happening. He ran like a racehorse to the far side of the paddock, his arthritis remarkably improved at the sight of the .22.
Winston was gone, along with our chances of finishing the job. I heard a rattling noise and saw Joan advancing onto the edge of the paddock with the food tin. Winston pulled up in his tracks like a showjumper refusing to take a hurdle. He turned around and proceeded to trot back towards us as though nothing had ever happened.
‘How did he know?’ I asked, but Ben wasn’t listening. I could see his mind churning at high speed.
‘Okay, looks like the gun’s not going to work, so here’s what we’ll do. We’re going to inject him in the testicles with Lethabarb. It’s what some vets did when they were castrating pigs in the old days before we had good anaesthetics. They’d inject the pig there, it would fall asleep, we’d cut out the testicle with the Lethabarb in it, and then the pig would wake up.’
Ben suggested I should hold the pig still. But once again I contributed almost nothing to the process. Ben snuck up behind Winston and jammed Lethabarb into his testicles. Once again, Winston shrieked and ran like a racehorse to the far side of the paddock, but Joan shook the tin and he turned around and came trotting straight back. She filled the bucket again and Winston pigged out blissfully. We’d almost shot him. We’d stabbed him in the testicles. We’d given him two buckets of food. And he was still hungry. No wonder his joints were collapsing.
The Lethabarb took about ten minutes to kick in, then Winston started to look woozy.
‘Right, James, see if you can hold his ear now. I reckon you can get that ear now.’
And I could. Ben came in with the big green syringe, put the Lethabarb into the vein and Winston promptly passed away. In doing so, however, he fell onto Ben, wedging him with his giant pink corpse against the corrugated-iron wall of the shed.
John, Joan and I contemplated getting the tractor to drag Winston off, but we managed to shift enough of the pink ripples of fat and meat for Ben to pull himself free and climb over the body.
‘Yes, well, he appears to be dead,’ Ben said.
The owners were once again very than
kful for our efforts but we didn’t make much eye contact with them as we picked up our gear and headed for the car.
‘Okay, we’ll be off then. We’ve got a lot of work backing up at the clinic.’ Which was true. We’d been gone for hours on this five-minute job.
We drove in absolute silence to the front gate. I got out to open it. Ben drove through. I shut it behind him and got back in. He was sitting there looking blankly at the steering wheel. He put the car into gear, but didn’t move forwards.
‘Let us never speak of this again,’ he said. And off we drove. Slowly.
. . . AND SMALL
Anthony
When you’re a new vet, you get the quirky jobs. If a call comes in for a macaw or a hermit crab, the senior partners take off like ducks in hunting season. And so it was when Geoff Scarlett handed me the phone one day: ‘Here’s one for your run to the Heads.’
There was a woman on the line with a warm voice. ‘Hello love, I was hoping you could drop some Baytril off for our guinea pig. He’s got a bladder complaint.’
Being a diligent young vet, I felt the need to set her straight. ‘I can’t just sell you antibiotics. We’re not a pharmacy. I need to come out and examine the guinea pig first.’
I was expecting my suggestion to meet with resistance. People think you’re trying to overservice them. Or at least they think they know better and that all they need is the antibiotic and they’ll be on their way. But to my surprise it wasn’t like that at all.
‘That would be great,’ she said. ‘How soon can you come?’
The caller lived in the quiet seaside village of Shoalhaven Heads, about ten minutes’ drive from Berry. I did a run of house calls out there every Tuesday afternoon. So I made the appointment for early in the run. It was two sisters who lived in a flat little house on Oval Drive. It had almost no front yard, but what they did have was manicured. I walked through the front door into the living room and there on the floor were a fluffy white rabbit and a brown guinea pig with a striking black stripe. The animals appeared to live a harmonious life, grazing grass and pellets off the carpet. The house was surprisingly clean, all things considered, and I noted the animals had a designated toileting zone on newspapers, which they appeared to frequent. They weren’t at all startled by my entry, and when I sat on the floral-patterned lounge, the big fluffy rabbit hopped over, seeking attention like a cat or a dog.
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