by Clay Wilson
To make sure I wasn’t overestimating the problem or the solution, I called Doctor Roy Benjes, the former state veterinarian at Skukuza, headquarters of the Kruger Park. He confirmed that the only thing I could do, the thing I must do, was to vaccinate and eradicate.
I feared it might already be too late. I knew that if a dog died in Kasane it would most likely not be buried or burnt or even taken to the local dump, which had at least now been fenced. Instead, a dead dog would probably be dumped in the bush, where it would be fed upon by local hyenas, jackals and even lions wandering out from the unfenced national park.
I put together a comprehensive plan of action and immediately took it to DWNP, telling them what I had learnt. They said they would look into it and, with glacial speed, eventually got the new wildlife vet from Gaborone, Doctor Peter, who had replaced Doctor Wakasu, involved. His reply to me was that this was a matter for the local Veterinary Services people, not National Parks. As often happened, I wanted to scream. Four weeks had now passed since I had made the first diagnosis.
Veterinary Services was headed by Doctor Tsie, the man who had been offended by me when I’d had the temerity to write “bio-hazard, suspected anthrax” on the blood samples I had collected and delivered to his office. I went to see him and convinced him to come to a meeting with Thuto Seema and a few other guys from DWNP and Veterinary Services to hear what I’d found out and what I thought should happen. When we all got together, I told them about the number of distemper cases I had seen so far and what I thought we should do about the outbreak.
I wanted to organise a vaccination of all the dogs in Kasane immediately, and euthanise any dog showing symptoms of distemper, as well as any dog that could not be vaccinated. There was much discussion about this, and the bureaucrats were alarmed about the extremity of my action. It was radical, I’ll admit, but it was also supported by experts who had been through this sort of thing and it was the only sure way to protect the local wildlife population and minimise the number of local dogs killed.
At the conclusion of the formal part of the meeting everyone came to my clinic where I showed them the dog with distemper I currently had in quarantine. I told them four dogs had died from distemper in my care in the preceding three days. Doctor Tsie agreed with my diagnosis and, as the dog’s condition had deteriorated markedly, I made the decision to euthanise it there, on the spot.
While Doctor Tsie did not dispute the dog had distemper, he was not convinced that there was an outbreak or epidemic, saying the disease was endemic to the local area.
“If it’s endemic then how come I haven’t seen a single case and I’ve been here more than two years now?” I replied.
He ignored that point and I challenged him to let me know how many cases of distemper he had encountered in Kasane in his time here as the man in charge of Veterinary Services. He never gave me an answer. To avoid making a decision on the spot at the meeting, I decided to invite Doctor Reuben, the senior Wildlife Veterinary Services vet at the time, to come to Kasane to investigate and adjudicate. I prayed that this delaying tactic wouldn’t cost any more lives, but I knew more dogs would die.
It wasn’t only domestic dogs that were at risk; there was a pack of 23 endangered African wild dogs living near the Kasane water-treatment plant. I knew they had a den with pups there and I was very worried about them contracting distemper. Lycaon pictus, the wild dog – or painted hunting dog, as it is also known – is the second most endangered predator on the African continent, with fewer than 2 500 animals thought to still exist. I had seen this pack a few times, and I went looking for them or their tracks. I found no evidence of them.
Talking to people I knew around town and on the plateau, I also learnt that no hyenas had been heard for the previous three weeks. Their eerie whoop and cackling giggles had been a regular feature of the night around Kasane since I had been there. I later learnt that National Parks rangers had euthanised a hyena in the park that had been seen exhibiting erratic neurological symptoms, but the carcass was disposed of before I could get any blood samples.
I contacted another expert, Doctor Koos Coetzer, the head of infectious tropical diseases, at the Onderstepoort veterinary school in South Africa, and he informed me that there was currently an outbreak of distemper in the lions of the Kalahari, and that this was proof of the devastation that could be caused if the disease entered a wildlife population. Doctor Coetzer also agreed that vaccination and eradication was the way to control an outbreak. The problem I still had was that no one would call it an outbreak. I decided I would take the blood samples from the 10 animals I was sure had died so far from distemper to Onderstepoort myself to have them tested. I didn’t care if I had to drive all the way to South Africa and back.
I delayed my trip, however, when I found out that Doctor Reuben was on his way to Kasane. He arrived the next day and I showed him around town and took him to the homes of dogs I knew to be sick so he could watch me take blood samples from them. He later met with the local council, and while they stopped short of agreeing to a compulsory vaccination and eradication programme, they did decide that an order should be made for all dogs in town to be restrained in their owners’ properties until the non-outbreak of distemper had run its course. As a dog with the disease could not last more than a few days, this was to be the timeframe for the restraining order. They decided that any stray dog seen wandering around town would be destroyed, but they didn’t say who would do this or how.
Neither the Veterinary Services department nor the town council had the money required for a vaccination programme. Even though I had been doing some research and contacting drug companies, and had managed to secure some reasonable discounts, the public funding would never have been available in time in any case, because such a purchase would need to have been put out to public tender from Gaborone. I was climbing the walls in frustration, but hoped the plan to restrain the local dogs might minimise the damage.
Undeterred, I made the long drive from Kasane to South Africa and on to Onderstepoort where, in addition to my fuel and travel expenses, I paid P2 000 to have the blood samples from the 10 infected dogs tested. It was with little sense of satisfaction that I contacted all concerned via email from South Africa, telling them there was no question that all of these dogs had distemper.
A couple of days later I arrived back in Kasane, and as far as I could tell nothing had been done. People may have been restraining their dogs in their homes, but there were still plenty of stray dogs running wild. Up on the plateau where I lived, I counted 136 unrestrained dogs running around, and this was an area that bordered on the park. It was a joke. I decided to take matters into my own hands and to go over Tsie’s head.
I went straight to the man in charge of the local council, District Commissioner (DC) Talo Setombo. I told Mr Setombo that by my reckoning 40 dogs had died already and this thing was getting out of hand. I said that if he would enforce the restraining order I would organise some other people and myself to take care of the town’s rampant stray dog population.
I knew it wouldn’t be popular, shooting every free roaming dog I could find, but there would also be support for it from some quarters. The issue of feral dogs killing baby warthogs and young waterbuck around Kasane had been raised publicly not long prior, during a visit to the area by the president and his environment minister.
It wasn’t just about killing, though. I told Setombo that I would pay for a thousand vaccines myself. I was so sick of the bureaucratic wheel spinning that I had to do something. It may have been brash and politically incorrect of me, but the American in me could not sit by on the sidelines and do nothing while Chobe’s wildlife lived in threat of a silent killer stalking at the edges of their domain.
Tsie was furious when he found out what I was up to and that I was taking charge, but I didn’t care. With DC Setombo on board, the council started advertising that the dog restraint and curfew was about to take effect and that loose dogs would be killed. We told people the sympt
oms of distemper and to their credit some owners then came to me with sick dogs and, if I diagnosed them with the disease, I put them down. A public-address system blasted messages around town about the upcoming campaign for five days and nights.
Before the eradication began, however, and without warning me, another town meeting was called. I found out about it and arrived to discover that everyone was there – all of the players from the council and the government, and the SPCA and another local wildlife organisation. One person got up at the meeting and claimed that lions could not catch distemper, even though I’d had the top man from the continent’s top veterinary school tell me that the lions of the Kalahari were battling this insidious disease while we bickered like school kids.
“So, even if you were right and lions couldn’t catch distemper,” I replied to the guy during the meeting, “what about the bat-eared foxes and the wild dogs and the hyenas, which are all susceptible to distemper?”
Fortunately the DC had seen the light and he shut the meeting down, saying the eradication would continue.
Then began the distasteful business of eradicating the town’s stray dogs. Myself and three other teams in four vehicles set out, mostly after hours, to shoot the feral dogs with shotguns. Our teams consisted of local police, BDF, DWNP and Veterinary Services personnel. We did it cleanly and we did it humanely, and there were no injuries to people or property. We didn’t just shoot to kill indiscriminately; if we found a dog that had a collar on and looked to be in good condition, we did our best to find its owner, in case he or she had missed the public announcements about the lock-down.
In all we shot 125 dogs, of which I personally killed 53. It had been my call and I knew I had to take my share of the responsibility for this grim business, which sickened me. I estimated in my report to DC Setombo that more than half the dogs we shot already had distemper, which gave an indication of how far the disease had spread during the days of inaction.
The SPCA was against the shooting of the stray dogs and they managed to rescue 20 dogs, 10 of which they dropped at my clinic for me to look after. I would have been happy to continue to work with the SPCA, but things became confrontational between them and me. I had done a spay clinic for them with the idea being that a couple of other vets and I would make ourselves available to spay dogs and cats for free. We thought this would be a good way to take care of the pets of people who were poor. As it happened, when we opened the free clinic, the 140 dogs and cats that we neutered mostly belonged to the town’s relatively affluent white community – people who were too stingy to pay me P400 (R450) to do the operation some other time. I discovered this only when the owners came to collect their dogs after the operation.
The 10 dogs the SPCA had “rescued” were still at my house on the plateau. The SPCA people had left them some food, but I was expected to care for these animals.
Then there was still the unfinished business of the vaccination programme. I had thought that since the DC had given the green light for the vaccinations to begin, the local government would come up with the money for the drugs and syringes and a public education campaign. I had already spent a good deal of my own money, driving to South Africa to pay for the blood tests that had proved the presence of distemper, and driving around town and vaccinating the dogs of people who were away. But on the question of funding, I was wrong.
Why had I bothered with any of this in the first place? It was my idea to try to stop this distemper outbreak, but I could never have imagined how intractable and ungrateful people would be. It seemed no one really cared if the disease wiped out the local dog population, let alone jumped across to the wildlife.
To hell with it, I thought. I contacted the company in South Africa that supplied all my veterinary drugs and equipment and placed an order for a thousand five-in-one vaccines that would vaccinate dogs against a range of diseases, including distemper, as well as worm medicine, rabies vaccines and the syringes and other equipment I would need to complete the job. I paid for all of this out of my own pocket.
It was a stressful time, but I knew I was doing the right thing. There was a huge amount of work to be done, and in the midst of all this turmoil my new girlfriend was about to arrive from America.
Chapter 5
A stranger in paradise
Laura really had no idea what she had let herself in for when she signed on with me.
I was just about to start the vaccination programme when she flew in from the States, ready to begin her new life of peace and tranquillity in the African bush. Instead, she walked into a mad house.
I felt bad that I couldn’t spend time with Laura alone as soon as she arrived. She had been emailing and calling me in the weeks leading up to the vaccination programme, asking me what clothes she should bring and a million other questions about what she would need. I had been so busy and stressed trying to get the community to take action over the distemper outbreak that my responses to her had been short and probably not all that helpful. Now she had landed right in the middle of all this craziness. A lesser woman might have thrown a tantrum, packed her bags and got on the first plane out of there, but she said she would help me with the vaccinations.
On her second day in the country I was still frantically trying to gain support for the vaccination programme, and Laura checked the refrigerator and saw it was almost empty. She asked me what she should do about food.
“Why don’t you just drive into town and pick up some stuff from the Spar supermarket?” I said. I told her to take my 4x4.
“Clay! I don’t know where the town is and I’ve never driven on the wrong side of the road before. Plus, all the gear thingies are on the wrong side in your car.” Being a locally bought vehicle, my Land Cruiser was right-hand drive, as opposed to my American left-hand-drive vehicles.
Poor Laura. She was a smart woman, but I had underestimated just how overwhelming and significant was the change that she had made to her life. Clive, a friend who was at the house at the time, and who ran the local coffee shop, volunteered to take Laura into town and show her around. I should have done it, but I was grateful right then for the few friends I did have in town.
Some of the women I knew made a concerted effort to welcome Laura into the fold and ease her entrée into the “wilds of Africa”. Esther, one of my neighbours who was active in the local SPCA, organised a girls’ night out for Laura and when they assembled at her house Laura sat down on a couch and thought there might have been a thorn in the weave of the fabric, because she felt a small jab above her left knee. She thought nothing more of it until the next day, when her skin began to itch.
“I think the thorn’s stuck under my skin,” she said to me.
I checked her skin, using a light, and while it was inflamed I couldn’t see any foreign matter in it. The wound didn’t get any better and eventually started to swell and become redder. It took me a little while but eventually I worked out that Laura had most likely been bitten by a button spider. Its venom is a necrotoxin, which means it kills the skin around the area it has attacked. I had been crawling around for years in the African bush with not one bite from a truly poisonous creature, but after just a week in Africa Laura had been bitten by a really nasty bug.
Medical care for humans in Kasane is not fantastic. As I’ve said, the hospital would often run so low on supplies that they would resort to calling me to ask for basic stuff. They would also often refer people to me for x-rays because I had a machine! There was a doctor who was very professional, but he visited only every couple of weeks. From what I had seen since arriving in the country, Botswana’s claim to the best healthcare in the region was an unjustified boast.
I decided to treat Laura’s spider bite myself, and she was not the first human I treated in Kasane. I never pretended to be a human doctor, but it was inevitable that from time to time people came to me for first aid and care for themselves. Basically the only care I gave to people was that which an advanced first-aider would have delivered, often suturing t
hem up or treating various maladies, but some people in town felt more comfortable coming to me than going to the local medicos or visiting the hospital. Over the years, I was able to save three people from poisonous snakebites, as I was the only practitioner in town who had serum that had not expired. Two of these patients were children from across the border at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, who would have died otherwise.
First I gave Laura some antibiotics and put a topical cream on her skin, but that didn’t really help. The wound deteriorated further, with the poison from the bite causing the skin to putrefy. There was a patch of dead skin about eight by ten centimetres that looked like a badly inflamed boil. The toxin was also making Laura sick; she had been running a temperature and had been nauseous. She needed minor surgery, so I gave her the choice of waiting for the human doctor’s next visit or driving to the capital, Gaborone.
“You do it,” she said to me.
I knew it was for the best and it was a simple procedure. We went into the garage of the newer house we had moved into on the plateau, where I now ran my fully equipped clinic. I had moved out of the premises I had been renting in Kasane town, as my billings weren’t even covering my rent. I switched on the overhead light as Laura climbed up on to the operating table. I cleaned the area of the wound and gave Laura a local anaesthetic. Once it had taken effect, I started cutting away the dead skin.
“Wow, that’s amazing,” she said, as she watched what was going on. She wasn’t squeamish at all.
I wanted to tell her to be quiet, so I could concentrate. This was a really weird situation, as I wasn’t used to have a patient on the operating table who could talk back to me.
“Oh, boy, this is gross,” I said as I worked.
