Bush Vet

by Clay Wilson

  “Do what you can for her, and use your discretion to do what you think is best,” he told me.

  There was nothing I could do for this elephant. I brought my rifle up into my shoulder and ended it for her before she could suffer any longer. Just as with the first elephant I’d had to put down, it was a terrible experience. As usual I took blood samples for diagnostics.

  When I went back to town I told the Parks people that I thought the carcass of this elephant, and the others that appeared to have died from anthrax, should be burnt in situ to stop the spread of the disease. Nothing happened, though.

  Elephants were not the only animals suffering from the disease, and from what I saw and subsequently learnt, kudu antelopes were particularly susceptible to anthrax. Vultures would feast on an animal that had died from anthrax and then roost and defecate on the leaves of a tree they were sitting in. While the vultures themselves have immunity to the disease, the bacteria stay alive in their droppings. Kudu, striking animals with beautifully elegant features, big rotating ears and a chalk stripe on their flanks, would then browse from the trees and ingest the infected vulture droppings. It was such a shame to see these stunning creatures die in such a torturous manner. I took samples from all of those that I came across and delivered them to Doctor Tsie’s office, once again with dire warnings on each vial, cautioning people who handled them to take care.

  I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was wrong. Thuto told me he had been informed by his superiors that I had offended Doctor Tsie. It seemed my labelling – warning all and sundry of the potential dangerousness of the samples – had insulted the good doctor because he apparently thought I was treating him like an idiot. I’d labelled the samples clearly and stated the fact they were potential bio-hazards because I had no idea who would be coming into contact with them, and didn’t want someone opening them without taking the proper precautions.

  I was not trying to be condescending, just safe. It just seemed like good practice to me. The little I had seen of the way human illnesses were treated in Kasane did not leave me confident that disease-control protocols were as good as they should have been. There was a rumour that they were re-using needles in the local hospital due to shortages of supplies, and the hospital staff came to me in search of plaster for casts and IV catheters, which was not a good sign. Botswana may have had the best public health system in Africa, but that did not mean that it was up to First World standards. By trying to ensure Doctor Tsie’s staff were safe, I had inadvertently put my foot in it and pissed him off.

  As well as anthrax, there were other ailments I had never encountered in the States. Tick-bite fever was a particularly nasty parasiteborne disease that caused very painful suffering for animals and humans alike, and I came across a range of worms that I hadn’t seen before. Infectious diseases such as parvovirus and scabies were also prevalent, along with the much-dreaded canine distemper virus, which I would soon encounter.

  One of the reasons animal diseases and human–wildlife conflict would become such a big part of my workload was because of the lack of fencing around Chobe National Park.

  Wild animals were free to come and go from the park and sometimes it felt like you could see as much game around the town of Kasane as you did inside the park. It certainly wasn’t unusual to see elephants and the occasional cantankerous old male buffalo wandering around the streets, and warthogs were everywhere.

  With faces only a mother could love, the hogs were a constant presence around town, rooting around in the lawns of the golf course, waddling up the streets or assisting with the gardens of the various lodges and hotels that fronted the river. Warthogs live on roots and grasses but will scavenge trash if available. As I walked or drove around town I would see them crouched down on their front knees, greedily digging up the grass in search of delicacies. Unfortunately, their prevalence and their predilection for sticking their snouts into everything meant that they suffered a disproportionate number of injuries, thanks to humankind.

  While my clinic wasn’t making any money, I was earning a reputation among the community and the National Parks office as the go-to man whenever people encountered injured wildlife. Traffic accidents with warthogs were very common and I was often called out to assist with these. Usually I would sedate the animal and just treat it in the field. On several occasions I sutured wounds in the street, and I found these ugly but oddly endearing animals to be real fighters and survivors. Often there would be a broken leg involved, but I couldn’t apply a splint or a cast as it would just be gnawed or shaken off. What I did see was that the warthogs healed quickly and could function quite well with just three legs. There were several of these limping veterans around town, and they seemed little worse for wear apart from being obese as a result of eating garbage and being fed by tourists.

  Like I said, the warthogs spent most of their days rooting around gardens and bushes with their snouts, so they were often the first to stick their noses into a snare. Usually made of strands of looted fencing wires and placed across well-trodden game trails, this simple but effective trap looped itself around the animal’s neck. As the victim tried to free itself, the snare was pulled tighter the harder the creature pulled. It was a slow, painful, horrible death.

  Warthogs are tough, and often I would be called out to find the wire of a snare had sliced its way deep into the skin, causing infected wounds, though the wire had still not cut or constricted the hog’s windpipe or lacerated its jugular vein. The treatment was relatively simple: cut off the snare and disinfect the wound. More often than not the warthog would recover. Oh, how I wanted to wrap that bloody wire around a poacher’s neck each time I did one of these procedures.

  Another animal that liked to loiter about town, at least in my early days in Kasane, was the spotted hyena. Few animals are as unfairly maligned and hated as this creature. In African legend, the hyena is ridden on at night by witches and, as such, they are reviled as evil. In the rest of the world the hyena suffers from bad press, cast in cartoons and even in wildlife documentaries as a scavenging villain.

  The truth about hyenas is that they are as important a part of the ecosystem as any other living thing. They live in clans dominated by a matriarch and have a pecking order where the lowliest female in the group is still superior to the most senior male. Contrary to popular belief, hyenas are effective hunters as well as scavengers. Unlike other predators they will eat the bones of their prey, thereby acting as an essential part of nature’s garbage disposal system. Their stools are immediately recognisable by the whiteness of the calcium from the bones they have ground up with their powerful jaws.

  But they do scavenge, and this brings them into frequent contact with humans. The hyenas were regular visitors to the infamous rubbish dump, before it was fenced, and would try their luck with the trash cans around town at night. They are nocturnal animals and, as such, are also highly susceptible to being hit by night-time drivers.

  One morning I received a call telling me that a spotted hyena was trapped in a drainage pipe in the middle of town, across the road from the Chobe Marina Lodge. When I arrived on the scene, it was one of total chaos.

  A crowd of about a hundred people had gathered to watch the unfolding drama. Such was the slow pace of day-to-day life in rural Botswana that anything out of the ordinary drew a crowd. A minor traffic accident could command an audience of several hundred as people seemed to come from nowhere to watch an argument or just gawk at something out of the ordinary. This was street theatre of unparalleled excitement, and it was all at the hyena’s expense.

  An explosion went off and a cloud of smoke erupted from the drain. The women in the crowd ululated; small children screamed and men laughed.

  “What are you doing?” I said to a green-uniformed ranger.

  “We’re using thunder flashes, trying to make it move along the pipe. We’ve placed a cage at the other end.”

  I told him to stop it immediately. A thunder flash is a military pyrotechnic that sim
ulates the sound of a hand grenade going off in battle exercises. It also provides a flash of blinding light when it goes off, which, combined with the noise, can be used to stun or disorient people inside a building about to be assaulted. Detonating in the confines of an underground drainage pipe would have magnified the terrorising effects of the device a hundredfold. The hyena wailed from its underground prison.

  This was a dangerous situation. If it could move, the hyena would probably be too smart to enter the cage; they are very intelligent animals. More likely, I thought, was the chance of the hyena bursting out of the other end of the pipe into the midst of the gathered throng of spectators. Someone was going to get hurt here.

  The man in charge of the scene was Jack from the research section in the park. Talking to him, I found out that the rangers had thrown in about 20 thunder flashes. I went to him.

  “Jack, man, there’s no point throwing in so many thunder flashes. If one or two won’t do the trick then 20 is not going to make the hyena change his mind.” Annoyed, I went to my bakkie to get my torch so I could have a better look in the drainage pipe.

  By the time I got back to the scene, just a few minutes later, Jack and his men were gone and the crowd was dispersing. It seemed everyone had lost interest in the stuck hyena. I went back to my truck and drove to Thuto’s office, to confront the National Parks boss.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “I’ve been in the park, so I wasn’t aware what was happening until just now,” he said. “I received a call from head office in Gaborone – they got a call from a member of the public saying the hyena situation was not being handled professionally. Jack says he has it under control.”

  This was turning into a comedy of errors, except for once the hyena was not laughing. I tracked down Jack and he told me he had the situation under control and that he would call me if he needed me. Disgruntled, I went home, telling myself it was not my job to interfere in the internal politics of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks.

  The next morning, however, Jack called me. “We need you to go and dart the hyena.”

  The hyena was still stuck. I went back into town and took my torch and my dart gun with me. Moving slowly, but with my heart pounding faster and faster, I climbed down into the culvert, to the entrance of the drainage pipe. It was nasty down there and stank of sewage and trash, and the sickly sweet odour of infection. The hyena groaned and looked at me.

  It was a nerve-wracking moment. If the hyena suddenly found its feet and charged me, I could be in big trouble, as I had only one dart in the breech of the gun and no backup. I had taken charge of the situation from the rangers and, whether I was having second thoughts or not, I couldn’t back down now.

  My finger curled around the trigger as I slowly edged towards the hyena. It was lying down and seemed to be having trouble moving. I wondered if I had loaded the dart correctly. I had never darted a hyena and I had no idea if the dose I’d read in a book would actually work. I’d already learnt that some of these figures were out, sometimes by a potentially dangerous factor. I was in a stinking storm-water drain in the wilds of Africa staring down a wounded predator with jaws strong enough to snap my femur and eat me for dinner.

  The hyena growled and looked up at me. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Adrenalin fired through my body, producing an electric high more intense than any drugs I’d dabbled with as a mixed-up kid in the States. Its teeth were long and yellow, and the banded light from a grate in the road above caught a silvery strand of drool.

  “Steady, boy.” I raised the dart gun to my shoulder, took aim and fired at its rump.

  The hyena yelped and tried to stand, but I could see now it couldn’t. It cowered in the tunnel and snarled back at me, the source of its latest dose of discomfort. It groaned and growled some more as the M99 took effect. Mercifully, the animal was soon at peace as the sedative took effect. Working on my hands and knees I was eventually able to get my arms around its front legs and lift and drag it to the entrance of the tunnel.

  Its spotted coat was smelly and rank with the smells of the carrion and trash it had last feasted on, and a number of putrefied wounds I could now see on its body as we neared the light again. With help from two of the rangers, we carried it out of the culvert and loaded it into the back of my bakkie. We needed to get it away from the crowd of onlookers that was returning like a surging tide as news of the new development crackled through the village like a bush fire. Once it was on board I started the engine and, nudging my way through the throng, drove to Thuto Seema’s headquarters.

  There, Thuto and I examined the hyena and found that it was in terrible shape. Both its back legs and its right fore-shoulder were broken and it was virtually paralysed. The wounds were badly infected, which led me to surmise it had been in agony for days as its injuries turned septic. It appeared that the hyena had been hit by a car. Its injuries were so extensive that we decided there was nothing we could do.

  I drove a short distance into the bush and, while the hyena was still out with the drugs, euthanised it with a shot to the brain. As I worked the bolt of my rifle, ejecting the spent casing, I reflected on the sadness of the situation. I’d had to put down dogs that I’d treated since they were puppies and that were beloved members of a family. The difference was that in most cases someone had cared for that animal, and the decision had been made with much thought, a lot of tears and some courage to end its misery. The crime with the hyena, it seemed to me, was that from the moment someone had hit it with a car and not reported it to the days that the rangers had left it stuck in the drainage pipe, no one had cared a damn thing for it or about it.

  Angry, I drove back to headquarters. “This needn’t have happened,” I said to Thuto. “I could have dealt with this hyena the same way in less than 20 minutes if I’d been called to the scene earlier.” I pleaded with Thuto to tell Jack and the rest of his men to call me first the next time they came across an animal in distress, before trying to take matters into their own hands. Although the incident happened in town, outside the park, Kasane was always thronged with tourists passing through the area or using the local lodges as a base from which to explore Chobe National Park. Many of these visitors to Botswana would have seen what happened and, probably, been disappointed that nothing was being done to help this animal. It reflected badly on the local authorities, and the damage could have been easily minimised and the animal humanely put down as soon as the extent of its injuries were known.

  It was an avoidable tragedy on every level.

  Chapter 4

  Prevention is better than cure

  Some rangers on a foot patrol had found two dead elephants near Poha in the extreme west of Chobe National Park, about 150 kilometres from Kasane.

  Thuto asked if I would go and investigate, and take David from the research department with me. This was what I had signed up for. It was a long drive that took us half a day, thanks to the sandy roads and the speed limit we had to observe inside the park.

  What made the journey even longer was that the directions we had been given were wrong. Instead of being 20 kilometres from the main road, the track we were supposed to turn down was 38 kilometres from the road, but we eventually found footprints in the dusty road that told us a National Parks patrol had been in the area. David got out and followed the tracks for about a kilometre and a half and eventually found the elephants.

  The elephant carcasses had been stripped by vultures and scavengers, however, so there was very little I could do to determine their cause of death. There were no bodily fluids left, either, for me to take samples from.

  Again, I went to DWNP and told them that it was my opinion that the carcasses of animals we knew had been killed by anthrax – and even the ones we suspected – should be burnt. The latest excuse for this not being done was that the rangers who would do the burning would have to be given prophylactic antibiotics before going near the carcasses, but these antibiotics had not arrived, despit
e being ordered three months earlier.

  I could have screamed. I had taken samples from dead elephants and had not contracted anthrax.

  A buffalo had also been found dead at Serondella and when I went to check it out I could see no obvious evidence of anthrax, but I took blood samples in any case. We were actually given permission to burn this carcass and, eventually, some elephant carcasses were burnt too, but it was a case of too little too late, and animals continued to die of anthrax infections. At least one of those elephants had already been fed on by lions and hyena, so there was the possibility that the scavenging predators had become infected.

  Prevention was better than cure, for sure, but it seemed no one could grasp the importance of burning the dead animals, or make a decision to do so, to stop the spread of the disease. I was finding that working with the DWNP and the local parks authorities was a case of one step forward, two steps back.

  There was one ailment, however, for which I definitely needed to find a cure – a case of missing love life.

  After the anthrax outbreak had abated, I prepared for a trip back to America for a holiday and to check on my house in Florida. I had no intentions of giving up on my life in Botswana, despite my many setbacks so far, and my heart was firmly in the bush, but it was nice to still have the resources to revisit the relative luxury of my former life occasionally.

  I resolved to start afresh and sort out my personal life while in the States, so just before I left Africa, in October 2009, I set up an account on the Internet dating website, match.com, and broadcast my romantic intentions to the American audience.

  Although I considered myself African by virtue of my birthright and my work in Botswana, perhaps what I really needed was an American girl. The trouble was, however, if supposedly bush-savvy women from South Africa found Botswana too hard to take, then how would someone from the States fare?

  Remarkably quickly I came across a woman who was attractive, positive and confident, and who had always dreamt of living in Africa and being amongst its wildlife. Of course, they all said that at the start, but I had a feeling this woman might be different.