Bush Vet

by Clay Wilson

  “Hello? I can hear you.”

  Clearly I needed to work on my bedside manner, as I’d never had to watch my PS and QS around animals.

  There was very little blood because the skin around the bite was dead, and once I had cut away as much as I could, I had to scrape the wound until it started to bleed. I sutured the gaping hole together and put her on antibiotics and pain medication. After a few weeks it had completely healed.

  The vaccines had arrived from South Africa, at a cost of P48 000, and we were about to start the mass vaccinations at four locations in Kasane and the nearby border town of Kazungula, on the Zambezi River.

  We had teams of volunteers organised for the day, as well as National Parks people and Veterinary Services, but not a single person from the local SPCA offered to help. Laura was still recovering from the surgery I had performed on her, and I told her she needn’t take part.

  “No, I want to be part of this. It’s important,” she said. I was happy to have her along; she was a real fighter and she cared passionately about what I was trying to do to protect the local wildlife.

  It was barely organised chaos as the crowds started to roll in on the appointed day. Their dogs were mostly tethered with rope, some with wire, but as they queued up there was no stopping the inevitable dog fights. Every time this happened the pet owners would crowd around and start cheering – not so much because they got off on dog fighting, but because this was the biggest thing to happen to and in Kasane for a long time. Amidst the yelping and barking there was laughter and chatter. There was almost a carnival feel about the place and I was pleased to see so many people getting on board.

  Our volunteers were black and white, kind-hearted people who just wanted to help. One of them was a guy named Joy who was a generalpurpose handyman who had done quite a bit of work at my home. One of Joy’s friends came up to him, with his dog, while we were doing the vaccines.

  “Is Doctor Clay paying you for this, Joy?” his friend asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “It is for the community, for all of us,” Joy said.

  As the weekend wore on, people who had been indulging in Kasane’s number one recreational pastime started showing up in increasingly intoxicated states, adding to the general mayhem of the situation. As each dog was brought up to me, a volunteer muzzled it and there was some betting going on about which dog would be the first to bite me.

  Many of the dogs were carrying ticks and I had a few jump off on to me. I stuck myself a couple of times with needles while trying to hang on to jumping dogs, but there was no lasting damage.

  We set up a production line where I would vaccinate the dog and administer worming treatment, and then Laura would put a stripe mark on the dog’s head with white fluorescent paint so we knew it had been done. Every dog owner received an information sheet, in either English or Setswana, with basic tips on how to care for their dog, such as ensuring it was vaccinated and dewormed regularly, cleaned and properly fed. It was a simple thing, but the info sheet went down really well with the dog owners.

  The vaccination clinics were very busy and we had to work fast. Inevitably I found myself calling out to the volunteers for more deworming medicine or a fresh syringe while I had my hands full. Of all of them, Laura was the most efficient, and although she had no training or experience in this sort of thing she seemed to know instinctively what to reach for when I needed it. We worked well together as a team.

  The programme was a success and in all we vaccinated 615 dogs against distemper, rabies, hepatitis and the parvovirus, as well as deworming them. Taking into account the 125 dogs we had culled and the 100 I estimated had died from distemper, this meant we had pretty well accounted for all the dogs in town in one way or another, based on a census that had been done the previous year.

  As well as halting the distemper outbreak, we saw an almost immediate improvement in the health of the town’s dogs. Most of the dogs we vaccinated had probably never been dewormed and this simple treatment was already manifesting itself in the better condition and appearance of Kasane’s canines. I firmly believe we saved not only the lives of hundreds of dogs, but also an inestimable number of wild animals.

  However, there had been a toll. A couple of days after the hubbub of the vaccinations had died down, I suggested to Laura that we take my four-wheel all-terrain quad bike to look for the pack of wild dogs.

  “Have you ever been on a quad bike?” I asked.

  “No, but I’ve ridden a motorcycle,” she said.

  I went out to check on the bike and when Laura came out of the house I wondered how much time she had spent on two wheels. She was wearing a mini skirt and shoes with heels, earrings, her jewellery and designer sunglasses, and she had touched up her make-up. She looked beautiful, but hardly dressed for the bush. “You’ll need a hat.”

  “I hate wearing hats.”

  “It’s hot out there and you’ll be exposed to the sun.”

  “Okay.”

  After she fetched her hat she walked up to the gate of our yard, and stood next to the Land Cruiser.

  “We’re going on this,” I said, climbing on to the ATV and pressing the button to start the engine. I revved the throttle.

  “I thought we were maybe going to drive somewhere and then ride around on a four-wheeler for a while?”

  “No, honey. We’re going on this.”

  Laura climbed on behind me and grabbed me around the waist. From our house I travelled at what I thought was a fairly sedate pace while she made herself comfortable. Moderation, however, is for monks, and I soon succumbed to the urge to gun the throttle. Laura gripped me tighter. I loved the feeling of the wind in my hair and her pressed against me. “We’re gonna go left here,” I called back to her.

  I felt her lean a little but a baboon scarpered out in front of me and I swerved right.

  “WHOA!”

  She stayed on, just, and I decided to go off road for a bit. Laura whooped behind me and I hoped it was pleasure, not fear. It wasn’t until I read her post on Facebook that night that I realised what a scary adventure it had been for her. She’d never been bashing through the bush on an open vehicle, and her only experience of game drives so far had been from within the confines of my sturdy Land Cruiser and Dodge. Here she was open to the elements.

  We came across an elephant and I moved slowly towards it, stopping at a respectful distance. As Laura would later write, this was an amazing experience for her. After we left the elephant I put the four-wheeler through its paces a bit, and nearly rolled it only once.

  On the plus side, we did come across a pair of bat-eared foxes. With their comically large ears, these are the cutest little critters around, and I was so pleased they had been spared the terrible death that distemper would have inflicted on them. However, as hard as we looked that day, we couldn’t find the pack of wild dogs that lived by the water tower, and I never saw them again.

  Gone, too, were the resident hyenas, whose calls had been a starring solo in the nightly symphony. It would be more than a year before I heard another hyena whooping in the dark and just as long before I saw painted dogs again in the national park.

  I also believe distemper wiped out most of the resident lion population. There had been three prides I regularly saw, led by a pair of black maned male brothers, two golden manes and a lovely black mane respectively, but I never saw these guys after the outbreak. In another park these magnificent creatures might have been monitored or collared, but they just disappeared, later to be replaced by other prides that moved into the vacated area.

  “How are you settling in?” I asked Laura as we sipped drinks on the veranda of our house. A nightjar called in the darkness, its voice like a little electric engine puttering away. It was still warm.

  “Okay, but everything is so different. Even when the people are speaking English I still can’t understand them. I hate answering your cellphone for you because I don’t know what people are saying
. It’s not just like a different country here, Clay, it’s like living on another planet.”

  Many of the things she had taken for granted in the us were luxuries here. As I had found when I first arrived, the electricity supply was unreliable and this was a source of constant annoyance for Laura too. She had brought a blender with her to process her vegetarian food, but because of the way our house was wired she couldn’t run the blender in our kitchen as it would trip the circuit breakers. Instead, she would have to carry it into the surgery next door to process her food.

  Laura had never camped before, but with the power and water shortages, at times it seemed to her like she was doing just that in her own house, boiling water from a bucket for her bath and learning to live with intermittent electricity.

  To make things even tougher for her, she had to hit the ground running as a trainee veterinary nurse. She did well. I taught her how to give injections the hard way – by giving me one – and her first attempts were certainly less than gentle, but she got there.

  The chaos of the distemper outbreak was over, and at last I could draw a breath and spend some time helping Laura to settle in. I was lucky and thankful that she had come through the ordeal of the vaccinations without a scratch and without complaints, and lucky that she was still sitting here with me.

  I placed my hand on hers. “You’ll get there.”

  “I know I will. And I love the bush. And I do want to be here, but it’s hard. Even the English words for everything here are different. In the States we say ‘yield’ when you get to an intersection and here they say ‘give way’; instead of ‘restroom’ or ‘bathroom’ they say ‘toilet’ here. It’s weird. It’s so different for me, Clay, but those words, they’re actually more real, better descriptions for those things. It’s like we gloss over things in America, or try to soften them, but that’s not the case here. I like it; it’s all just such a change.”

  I didn’t want to lose her. Of all the women I’d had visit me in Kasane, I knew that Laura was the first who truly appreciated the bush and the wildlife in the same way I did. It might sound a little clichéd, but I really believed I had found my soul mate. The next day Laura and I went to visit the SPCA shelter to see how the rest of the dogs they had rescued were getting on. I was still caring for the ones they had left with me, but my involvement with the organisation was ending. When we arrived, Laura started looking at the dogs and was drawn to some puppies. One, in particular, was under a piece of tin, curled up into a tiny ball and shivering. She scooped it up and I saw the way her eyes lit up as she chatted to it. She looked at me.

  “All right,” I said to her, then turned to the woman running the shelter. “Okay if we take this one?”

  She was more than pleased to see it go to a good home. It was a tiny ball of an Africanis dog and we decided to call her Taca, which was eventually lengthened to Tacaroo. The name came from two derivations: “Taca” because Laura carried her around wrapped in a blanket and she looked like a Mexican taco, and “roo” because later as her legs lengthened and she walked with a constant bunny hop she looked like a kangaroo. Thus “Tacaroo”.

  What I didn’t realise when we took the tiny puppy home, but which subsequently became obvious by her funny way of walking, was that Tacaroo was carrying the disease we had been working so hard to control. She had been infected with distemper, perhaps by one of the other “saved” dogs the SPCA had taken in off the streets when I was culling the strays.

  However it had happened, it didn’t matter. I gave Laura the sad news as soon as I had made the diagnosis – that Tacaroo was going to die. From my textbooks I had learnt that distemper has a 99 per cent fatality rate in dogs once they are showing neurological or nervous clinical symptoms. We both wanted Tacaroo to live, even though the odds were stacked against her. I treated her intensively with antibiotics and BI vitamins, often having to sedate her with valium when she had a seizure.

  Amazingly, our desperately ill little ball of a puppy began growing and thriving. The disease had taken its toll on her, though. Her tongue hung out perpetually on the right side of her mouth, she had underdeveloped teeth, walked with a kangaroo hop, and continually chewed on her gums as she slept. She was incredibly susceptible to temperature changes, even in mild Kasane, so Laura got her a sweater.

  Tacaroo was possibly the ugliest dog I have seen in all my years of practice, but she had big eyes that melted my heart and soul, and she had me wrapped around her finger like a daughter would a father. She was disabled, but she did not know it. She was all love.

  The reality of the new life Laura had chosen continued to hit her. Whereas I was unfazed by the lack of choice in food and vegetables in the stores in Kasane, Laura was aghast. She was a vegetarian, but I didn’t expect that to cause too many problems. I was wrong.

  “You told me the food here is all organic,” she said.

  “It is. It all grows in the ground – that’s organic to me,” I replied.

  She punched me in the arm. “No, that does not mean it’s organic!”

  Laura was unimpressed by the wilted dregs of the fruit and vegetable world that made it on to the shelves of the Kasane supermarkets. She resolved that the only way to source “organic” vegetables was to grow them herself, so we set about digging a garden in the back yard of our house.

  With the help of our gardener we got Laura’s vegetable garden ready and she began planting her crop. What she didn’t realise, however, was that cultivating in Botswana was different from in Florida, not least because of the number of competitors who couldn’t wait for the arrival of more fresh herbivorous foods in the area. Laura made compost from old banana peels and any other organic scraps from the kitchen and spread it around the freshly tilled and planted soil.

  Unfortunately, these scraps of edible material acted like a magnet to the local troop of baboons and within no time they were scaling our brick perimeter walls and ripping out shoots almost as fast as they could sprout. As I was to learn, Laura’s back-yard experiment was a microcosm of much bigger problems facing wildlife around Kasane. The Botswana government had been encouraging farmers in the local area to increase the country’s self-reliance, and while this was a noble ideal, more farms meant more temptation for wildlife in the area.

  It wasn’t just wildlife that I had to deal with. There was a woman who lived on a farm about 20 kilometres out of town who called me to make a house call to check on her horse, which she said was sick. When I got there I found that to be a huge understatement. This horse was in a very bad way indeed. It was covered in sores and there was pus oozing from the base of its hooves. It seemed to have some kind of bacterial infection, so I administered some antibiotics and gave it painkillers and anti-inflammatories. The medication seemed to give it some relief but the woman called me a few days later to say that apart from easing the horse’s symptoms, the treatment hadn’t cleared up the sores or improved the horse’s overall health.

  “Okay, I’ll be out again,” I said. Beyond my professional interest in a client and her horse, I liked the woman and wanted to help her. And this was a challenge.

  The next time I visited, the horse looked just as bad, if not worse. I decided that since it hadn’t responded to the first course of antibiotics, I would have to get some tests done to see if we could find out what had infected it. I cultured some pus from its sores on a cotton swab.

  I sent the culture to the lab and in a few days the results came back. It was a really strange bacterium, unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I could not even pronounce its name. When the lab gives you results, they also tell you what is the best drug to treat the infections their tests have discovered.

  I went back to the farmer, making the 20-kilometre drive again to see her in person. “The good news is that they have identified the bacterium that’s causing the problem, and there is a particularly strong antibiotic that we can order that should be effective in treating your horse’s problems. I have to warn you, though, that it’s going to be expensi
ve.”

  “How expensive?” asked the woman. She was not well herself. Her skin was pale and her features sunken. I later learnt that she was suffering from cancer. I felt bad for her and shared her desire to heal her horse. I guessed that maybe she thought that if she could do good by her animal and heal it, there might be some reciprocal, karma-like effect for her.

  But when I told her how much the antibiotic was – and I was going to give it to her at cost price – she said no. “That’s too much money.” “All right,” I sighed. “Then the best thing we can do now is to euthanise your horse, to put it to sleep.”

  “What? You can’t be serious! Don’t you care about animals? How could you suggest that?”

  I explained to her that I didn’t take the decision to euthanise any animal lightly, but if she wasn’t going to let me fix her horse then she should say her goodbyes and let the horse pass peacefully. Hoping that the horse could be treated with standard antibiotics was futile, and her refusal to listen to my advice was simply going to prolong the animal’s sickness and discomfort.

  “No! I’m going to heal this horse.”

  “Fine.”

  I left her and went back to town, saddened once more at the blinkered approach I’d seen so many times. In fact, the woman did try to heal her horse by turning to a range of alternative therapies. She would call me, often, asking me what I thought of ozone treatment – whatever the hell that was – or changing the horse’s diet to a different type of grass. I told her what I thought, that she was being fed a load of mumbo jumbo and that if she wasn’t careful she would end up paying more for these charlatans’ supposed cures than she would if she had paid for the recommended antibiotics in the first place.

  It was a heart-wrenching situation and, sadly, it took three months for the horse to pass away. I could only imagine the pain and distress it was in right up until the end, as the various sham treatments the woman tried failed. I heard the horse had been taken to the crocodile farm on the river, which was where most dead livestock ended up, as food for the inmates there.