by John Hicks
It wasn’t easy to tell our families for a second time that we were emigrating to New Zealand; but the prospect of life as a veterinary practitioner in Britain filled me with dread. The image is not the reality.
I reiterate: the suicide rate for vets in Britain is higher than in any other profession.
Chapter Twenty-six
Dear Deer
By the late 1970s the New Zealand economy was starting to suffer. There had been years of steady prices for agricultural produce due to a dependable trade with Britain. Alas, Britain now saw its future with Europe and the Common Market. It was difficult for New Zealand to adjust from the days when it had, per capita, one of the highest standards of living in the world.
The New Zealand to which Viv and I returned was entering a recession. One consequence for us was that there were very few veterinary jobs available. Our hearts were sold on the South Island, but it looked as though—horror of horrors—we would have to go to Southland. The rest of New Zealand regards this province as a cold, wet wasteland. Next stop Antarctica. The only other South Island choice was a job on the West Coast which is appealingly wild, but also rather wet and, therefore, favoured sandfly territory. With unpleasant memories of Viv’s severe reaction to the bites of these pesky insects, we decided that I should plump for the six-week locum position in Western Southland. At least the discomfort would only be temporary.
With depressed prices for meat and wool, farmers were looking at alternatives to traditional sheep farming. Deer farming held promise and enterprising individuals were laying the foundations of a major new industry. Southlanders were in at the ground floor, they had access to wild deer and wild entrepreneurs abounded. The former came courtesy of liberations of red deer into the bush and mountains nearly a hundred years earlier. Their larger cousins, North American Elk, had also been released into Fiordland. Both had been hunted by generations of vigorous Southlanders, many of them farmers, many of them now attracted to the challenge of farming their quarry. There was the glamour of looking out of the window of your farmhouse and watching them drift past. These new devotees tended to look down on those who still chose to farm ‘ground lice’ though, personally, I would never be so disparaging as to use this expression to describe sheep at pasture. It cannot be denied that the New Zealand economy has grown on the sheep’s back.
For vets, deer were a new challenge. Wild animals were being bulldogged or net-gunned out of helicopters, darted with drugs, or even physically manhandled out of home-made traps at the edge of the bush, and released onto farms. What drugs should be used and at what dose rates? How do you physically handle these powerful animals? What animal health problems are likely to occur and how do we deal with them? Answers to these questions were largely a matter of trial and error.
Deer, for instance, when running in a mob, will keep to the edges of a race leading into a shed. Cattle in similar situations run down the centre. If a mob of cattle runs towards you in a raceway, step to one side and they will rush past you. Witness the laggards at Pamplona during the running of the bulls. But because deer hug the fences, it is better to stand in the centre if caught in similar circumstances and let the mêlée pass on either side. The odd one may take the shorter route over the top of you, but it beats getting rolled along the netting by a mob of panicking hinds or stags. Yards were being designed to work with deer psychology to minimise handling, especially with the larger elk-type deer. These had hybridised with red deer in the wild and the mix, generally called ‘Wapiti’ (an Indian name for elk), are large and often ill-tempered. No matter, in these heady early days there was a shortage of deer for farming and anything resembling a deer was worth a lot of money. Dealers weren’t going to cull a $5000 hind merely because she tried to kill anyone who got in the yards with her. It was a case of caveat emptor. Such animals tended to be sold on to another poor unfortunate as soon as possible.
It was soon evident that deer are susceptible to tuberculosis and the biggest task for vets involved with the deer industry was to keep up with the TB-testing. This involved clipping hair off the neck with noisy clippers at the end of a long flex, not easy in a pen of milling deer, and then injecting a small dose of tuberculin into the skin. In the early days, particularly when selection of animals for good temperament was secondary to building up numbers, and facilities were inadequate, this could be a time-consuming and demanding job. I likened it to one memorable description of warfare—long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of terror.
A crash helmet of some sort was advisable because deer tend to attack by standing on their hind legs and striking down on the head with their front feet. Some heroes disdained such protection but, if they commented on my routine of donning my trusty cricket helmet, I took pleasure in explaining that some people have thicker skulls than others. Footwear is also important. Gumboots used by foresters offer chainsaw protection, ideal against the sharp pointed hooves of deer. Standard gumboots are about as useful as condoms when a 200-kilo stag decides to pirouette on your toe.
With the Marshall brothers there was less danger. You could always rely on them putting their burly bodies on the line first. It was a pleasure to work with such a team. They worked in a cheery atmosphere that they never failed to fill with language that would make a navvy blush.
As a veterinary practice we willingly hosted young students eager to discover if vetting was the vocation for them, just as I had as a teenager with Mr Betts. One morning a particularly demure young lady accompanied me as we set off to develvet some stags for the Marshalls. As we drove up to the shed I warned her about the language she would encounter.
When we got out of the car we could hear the anticipated encouragement the boys inside were giving their stags as they sorted them into pens, from the relatively mild ‘now get in there you fat bastard’ to ‘grind your f***ing teeth at me one more time, you c*** , and I’ll cut your bleeding head off’. We waited outside till the sorting was done. Soon the banging of doors and swearing stopped and one of the brothers emerged sweating but satisfied.
‘Gidday, John. Roughly forty of the bastards to do today. We’ve put some in the new pens on the outside. We can do those c**** first.’ He then noticed the girl following behind me and demonstrated that even the Marshall brothers had chivalric boundaries.
‘You might have f***ing warned me, you bastard!’ he growled.
Develvetting is a misunderstood procedure and was banned in Britain on humanitarian grounds under the mistaken belief that it involved stripping the velvet skin off the antlers which develop each spring. In fact, it is the entire antler that is removed before it hardens, and in a way which is more reliably humane than the similar procedure of dehorning cattle. Furthermore, without antlers stags are less dangerous to their handlers and other animals.
The technique used on the Marshalls’ farm, where they didn’t have a crush to hold the stags, involved going around a set of smallish pens, where they had been sorted-approximately four to a pen—and injecting each with a sedative. By the time the stags in the last pen were injected, those in the first were dopey enough to be approached to give a local anaesthetic nerve block. When each had received his nerve block, it was time to start at the beginning again and saw off the antlers. Mature stags can yield several kilos of velvet and, at a price of over a hundred dollars a kilo, it was a valuable product.
Of course, events don’t always run smoothly. The odd stag required a heavier dose of sedative and would need to be re-injected. Particularly flighty animals could get jumpy and damage the velvet of others in the same pen. There was usually something to keep the adrenalin flowing.
The Marshalls’ new pens were rather makeshift. The walls were made from sheets of plywood. They came down to near floor level with a gap underneath. As we came back to the first pen to saw off the velvet the stags were sitting peacefully, but a couple of them, who were on their sides, had an antler through the gap. No problem. We rolled the first into a sitting position. Funny! It was easier than
expected. The reason was obvious: any velvet protruding beyond the pen had been removed. Same with the next stag. At least the analgesia had worked well. Those two stags had lain motionless while a few hundred dollars’ worth of velvet was gnawed off their heads. A rather pleased-but-anxious-looking dog could be seen on the other side of a gate. The tip of his tail wagged, in a gesture of appeasing enquiry. Soon he was a mere speck in the distance, blasted there by gales of unrepeatable invective. He still looked fit and healthy at my next visit when I remarked on his shiny coat and enquired what they could have been feeding him …
Velvet is widely used in Eastern medicine and not merely as an aphrodisiac, as is widely supposed. Deer farmers who have been overseas and seen deer farming and velvet harvesting in Korea and China for themselves, reported that any spilt blood was collected and drunk on the spot. I had plenty of opportunities to wipe the saw I used for develvetting, so once, and to my regret, I decided to try a little taster. It repeated on me for the rest of the day. The farmer with me declined graciously, ‘Any more and I’d be dangerous!’
Deer pizzles (that word again) are another valuable by-product of deer farming, and also used in Eastern medicine. Unfortunately, harvesting these is a terminal, rather than an annual, event.
~
Jim Kane was more interested in deer capture than farming. An experienced pilot, he had survived a few chopper prangs although, sadly, a fatal one was waiting to claim him before the year was out. Jim installed a manager on his farm while he pursued his vocation—capturing the biggest Wapitis he could out of the Fiordland bush. These were large, mean and valuable. A Wapiti stag could be worth $10,000. This figure is etched in my mind.
It is daunting stepping into a pen with animals of this size. Being able to look down on a stag confers a definite psychological advantage. It cuts both ways. Stags respect size too. You have to look up at mature Wapiti stags. But life as a deer vet became a little easier when we adopted pole syringes. These enabled us to keep a metre or so from the animal we were injecting.
And there I was, sedating stags that a few weeks earlier had been free agents in the mountain forests of Fiordland. They didn’t seem to appreciate the promise of a carefree existence as a sire stag on a farm, and weren’t about to relinquish their velvet to me gracefully. The largest one—‘Look at this one John, Jimmy caught him last month. He reckons he’s worth at least ten grand’—was particularly fired-up and grinding his teeth aggressively. I gave him the standard dose of sedative. When we came back to the pen it was as though nothing had happened. Ten-Grand was unimpressed with my style of chemical warfare. His chemical, adrenalin, was stronger than mine. Nothing for it, I felt, but to repeat the dose. We continued with our routine. When we got back to the pen ten minutes later Ten-Grand was dead. Soon after we heard the throb of a helicopter as Jim flew over and dropped in to review proceedings. There was nowhere to hide.
Jim looked at what had been his $10,000 and at the man who had indirectly prevented him from banking it. It was hard telling him what had happened.
‘No problems, John. These things happen when you’re working with deer.’ True Jim, but it takes great generosity of spirit to contemplate such a loss without a trace of anger or blame.
Such accidents are an occasional and inevitable consequence of working with semi-wild animals. Nobody feels good about them, but every vet will have to face similar experiences at some stage in their careers. How they cope will, to a large extent, depend on the attitude of the owner with whom they are dealing and, especially if they are a young vet, the support they receive from their colleagues.
The increasing risk of litigation needs to be carefully balanced. In the long run, aside from blatant cases of professional negligence or incompetence, litigation is not in the best interests of the majority of the animal-owning public. Funds to pay for the ever-increasing cost of professional indemnity insurance ultimately have to be financed through more expensive vet fees, or withdrawal of services that have been identified as being at high risk of litigious claims, whether justified or not. This has already happened in some areas of equine medicine which, according to our indemnity insurers, is the highest risk area for vets.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Litany and Litigation
Most of the vets I have worked with have been conscientious almost to a fault. Their neglected families will testify to this. At all times they genuinely strive to do their best for their patients. Sometimes it isn’t good enough. Mistakes are made. The first important step is to acknowledge them. A culture of blame and heavy litigation prevents that first step happening. Any insurance policy advises the insured not to accept liability even if he is sure that the mistake is attributable to his negligence.
I have never faced litigation myself but, seeing innocent colleagues keel-hauled through the court system, I have always felt there to be an element of, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.
Soon after the Ten-Grand episode I was called, once again, to examine my shortcomings and write one of the most difficult letters of my life:
Dear Sarah
This is a hard letter for me to write, but not as hard as the upset that you will have been through since the sad loss of Bobby.
What happened was an accident and I hope you can understand that. Despite the best will in the world, they do and will happen. That doesn’t make it any easier to accept when the consequences are the loss of a much-loved pet and I know that if the same thing happened to our own little dog I would also be deeply upset.
Whilst nothing can replace Bobby, or compensate for the hurt you must feel, I have come to an arrangement with your father which may help a little bit. In time I hope that you can accept my sincerest apologies for my part in your loss.
Yours sincerely
John Hicks
It was my fault. When I had returned to the clinic from castrating a colt, I hadn’t re-labelled a bottle of unused anaesthetic solution as ten per cent strength and a colleague had unknowingly taken it off the shelf assuming that it was the usual five per cent. Bobby died of an anaesthetic overdose given for a routine operation.
Explaining this to a little girl was about as tough as it gets, but Sarah’s father, although upset, was understanding and fair. The compensation mentioned allowed him to purchase another Cairn Terrier puppy for his daughter. He sought no more than that. If the claim had been higher I would have been resorting to our insurance protection scheme. Technically I could have been sued for professional negligence.
~
In the USA storm clouds of litigation loom over vets in the same manner as those (often apocryphal) stories about the American medical profession. Vets in practice in the States can even donate to bogus animal welfare societies. These act as fronts whose main function is to dissuade potential litigants from prosecuting.
It may seem an unrelated fact, but in the States there is also a company that manufactures artificial testicles (marketed as ‘neuticles’) to replace those removed when your dog is castrated. One of the benefits claimed being ‘to help your animal’s self-esteem’.
Imagine! Your neutered pet can unashamedly roll on his back, in front of your visitors, and flaunt his prosthetic testicles of appropriate (or inappropriate) size. Different textures are available (‘natural’ or ‘original’) should your guest feel the need to fondle them. The company markets key-rings, tote bags and t-shirts promoting these farcical products. Neutered or cryptorchid dogs (with one or two undescended testicles—an inherited defect) are not permitted in the show ring, so there has been some consternation that owners could use these prostheses to cheat the judges.
~
Putting these two absurdities together, it is possible to imagine how a bogus animal welfare society might try to avert litigation if an operation to insert prosthetic testicles in a dog were to go wrong. This recently happened to a pedigree Boxer belonging to Mrs CO Jones. (I include her initials here for purely frivolous purposes.)
This is the letter she
received:
Dear Mrs Jones
We are disappointed to learn of your decision to sue Dr Rinkle-Sachs following a surgical misadventure that occurred when he was implanting testicular prostheses into your Boxer dog, Conker.
He was deeply upset that the scars are clearly visible after you have cleaned and polished Conker’s scrotum and that this has severely compromised Conker’s chances of competing successfully on the dog show circuit.
You may not be aware, but Dr Rinkle-Sachs has been a life-long supporter of the Ballentire Animal Lovers Liberation Society (Inc), BALLS, a registered charitable organisation. Without his regular and generous contributions we will find it hard to continue our work of capturing testicularly compromised stray dogs and restoring them to testicular normalcy. This prevents them developing the complex of poor self-esteem psychoses that might otherwise result in their euthanatization [sic].
We note your claim for $100,000 damages, including damages for anticipated loss of cheat/prize money from showing/displaying Conker, and loss of tactile pleasure incurred from polishing Conker’s scrotum. We would ask you to re-consider and reflect instead on the effect your action could have on the distinguished career of Dr Rinkle-Sachs, and our coffers.
