Cock and Bull Stories

by Peter Anderson

  The gelding was standing somewhat wobbly in the yard with a mass of intestines dangling on the dirt. He had herniated through the castration wound. This is nightmare territory. I have one bottle of thiopentone left, one sachet of GG, a litre of saline in which to dissolve the GG, a few swabs, and we have a major emergency on our hands and one dead horse already. I came by plane so I have no spares of anything and the head shepherd is irritating the hell out of me. It is becoming not such a good day.

  Action is required. The troughs are full of sludge but the river is close by. One shepherd heads to the river in the ute to collect as much water as possible in the buckets available. The other two are needed to help me restrain the horse before he empties more of his intestines onto the dirt and, worse still, tramples over and ruptures them — a distinct possibility. The first thing was to get him back on the ground under control. More precious thiopentone goes in, an intravenous catheter is inserted into the jugular and hooked up to the last 500 ml of GG, and I give rapid instructions to one of the shepherds about controlling the depth of anaesthesia by taking note of signs the animal is coming around. The kid was good and caught on fast and if he had had another choice for career, it should have been as an anaesthetist.

  We have our patient under control, but we have perhaps an hour’s surgery ahead of us and only 20 minutes of anaesthetic left, if we are lucky. The water has arrived and is turned into saline by throwing a spoonful of table salt into each bucket. We have no surgical drapes but there is an old tarpaulin on the ute and cleaning metres of intestine onto that is better than back onto the dirt. The worst of the dirt and grime is flushed off the intestines and then, as we feed each millimetre of intestine back into the abdomen, flushed again. There are metres of gut to go, it is a slow job pushing slippery, expanding intestine back up the inguinal canal and well into the abdomen, and we have little time. I snip the opening to the hernia to enlarge it (how the hell did all that gut come out that tiny hole?) to speed things up. The head shepherd, doing the job of manipulating the horse’s hind leg and body position to allow easier placement, is still mouthing off. He is told in no uncertain terms to shut up or f… off.

  Somehow we got all that gut back into that abdomen and because of copious amounts of crude saline, relatively clean, repaired the hernia, and covered the horse with a massive dose of antibiotics and tetanus antitoxin. But only just before every last milligram of anaesthetic and sedative had been exhausted. Against all odds, he survived but I cannot recall when we did get around to castrating the sixth stallion.

  My good mate Don Reid was naturally not pleased to hear about the stallion that died but he is an understanding man. Colts there are now handled young and castration takes place quietly and easily at the yearling stage.

  Any veterinary job with any animal of any species, even cats and birds, can be dangerous work, but the danger both to man and to beast increases dramatically if you have to deal with wild, poorly handled animals. Although today’s huge choice of more effective and easily administered tranquillisers and anaesthetics helps in most situations, no vet enjoys working with frightened, uncontrolled and dangerous animals.

  PACHYDERMS AND POTATOES — PJ

  I hadn’t long been in my first job at the Graham Vet Club when the circus came to town. And when the call came to go up and blood test the elephant, my emotions were fear, mixed with excitement. How do you deal with an elephant? I don’t remember any lectures. I was there at the Agricultural and Pastoral Society Park, for Blenheim was still a rural servicing town then, in short order, and the elephant trainer gave me the rundown.

  This female had been tested in Dunedin recently. She wasn’t eating well, and the blood tests had shown a high level of eosinophils. Eosinophils are one of the several types of cells that make up the group known as white blood cells. When you get excess numbers of eosinophils, it can mean an allergic reaction to something like worms, an environmental allergen, or it might even signify cancer.

  I think they had treated the animal for worms after the first test, but the great pachyderm wasn’t improving.

  ‘We want more blood tests, mate’ was the word from the grizzle-headed boss of the circus. ‘Brian’ll look after you.’

  So, trying to look confident, I trudged after Brian, an old stager who looked more like a West Coast fisherman — lived-in face, bulbous nose, and a cigarette permanently parked on his bottom lip.

  ‘Here she is, mate. Hope you can find sumpthin’.’ He mumbled the words through the fag.

  He picked up a large ebony stick with fascinating brass knobs on both ends. The elephant watched him carefully and when he shouted a command which I couldn’t decipher, she grumbled a bit, then got down on her elbows, giant feet protruding forward. He shouted again and she curled the great leathery trunk back onto her forehead.

  ‘Righto, mate, there’s the vein on her ear,’ he called, then, ‘Oi, you do as you’re told!’ as the elephant moved her trunk towards me.

  My heart gave a couple of leaps as I approached the mighty ear. The vein certainly looked big enough. This’ll be like the Otira Tunnel, I thought as I attached the needle to the vacutainer holder, put the vacuum-filled tube in it, and pushed the needle gently through the skin over the vein, seeking the lumen, the tunnel, as it were. The elephant squealed in anger. My heart beat faster as I pushed the vacutainer onto the other end of the needle. The blood should flow in now. But it didn’t, and as I probed desperately with the end of the needle, she squealed again. The trainer was shouting at her and waving his ebony and brass stick at her trunk and forehead.

  I sweated and tried again. A gush of blood squirted into the tube in a moment of great triumph. Brian kept yelling, the beast kept squealing, while the piggy eye was about 10 centimetres from mine, and close to the needle assembly. The tube was full! I quickly removed the needle from her ear and mixed the blood with the anticoagulant in the tube. Quelle relief!

  ‘Good on yer, mate,’ from Brian. ‘I don’t know her too well yet. We got her from Wellington Zoo — she was knocking the keeper round too much.’ Thanks, Brian.

  We were lucky; the Wairau Hospital laboratory chief had a book on exotic animal blood. The so-called eosinophils turned out to be another type of white blood cells, neutrophils, when compared with the literature. They had looked like human eosinophils, but elephant blood is apparently a bit different. High neutrophils signify an active infection. After a thorough examination of her, I could see she was wincing as she ate. Her lower jaw was swollen. It became obvious she had an infection in her tusk.

  I returned later that day with several bottles of sulphur-based antibiotic. Brian shouted and waved his stick, Ms Elephant knelt, put her trunk back on her head and opened her mouth.

  ‘Now, mate!’ he cried, and I threw a loaf of bread, impregnated with the antibiotic, into her mouth. She munched and swallowed it.

  We repeated the dose daily for several days and I’m happy to report that she came right. Pete A even took a photo of me doing something to the elephant but it’s lost, and given I doubt I’ll ever get to blood test another pachyderm, a record of this great moment of history is lost forever.

  The last part of the story is just about the most satisfying. I used to have a potato-growing contest with one of my neighbours each year. That year mine won easily. I never divulged the secret, but I can now tell you that spuds grown in elephant turds will always outperform the rest. They were real montys. Sorry, Grant.

  RACE DAY — PA

  Being the only veterinary practice in the area when I first started meant we were always expected to have a presence or be available at most events that involved animals. This included dog shows and cat shows, the Agriculture and Pastoral Show, endurance riding events, and the races, both trotting and the gallops. Some of these events were a bit of a day out and quite good fun, while others could be a drag and not so enjoyable.

  One day which I always looked forward to with some anxiety was when I was the duty vet at the races. It was all
because I got off to a rather bad start the first time I was ‘on call’. Alan did not really enjoy horse work too much and Henk was the boss, so because I was the new boy at the Graham Veterinary Club, I ended up doing the job at the first race meeting in Blenheim after I started practice.

  We had a few duties at the track, including checking any late scratchings to ensure they had a valid reason for pulling out, and being immediately available during the race in case a horse was injured. Oft en a horse, usually the winner, was selected for swabbing by the stipendiary steward. Our job was to escort the horse to the swabbing box immediately after the race and there collect a saliva sample and a urine sample. These samples would be bottled and sealed in a container and later sent for testing to ensure the horse was not running under the influence of any drugs. Sometimes collecting the samples took a while. Getting the saliva sample was not a problem but trying to get an exhausted, dehydrated horse that had just run a race to urinate could be a problem. There were a few tricks we used including rustling the straw in the box, running a tap and whistling. Some horses were great and gave us a sample soon after they came into the box, while others ran through an awful lot of water and caused one to develop very sore cheeks. Being shut in the box with the horse and the trainer and whistling for an hour while a tap ran continuously oft en meant I ended up very uncomfortable and ready to fill the urine container myself.

  After eventually getting the samples we had to be back for the start of the next race, although if we had a reluctant donor we would end up missing the race, hoping that no horse injured itself. Sometimes a horse that the stipendiary steward had wanted to swab was let off because we would still be working on the horse from a previous race. Usually the vet was blamed and the stipe-vet relationship was not always a harmonious one.

  David Wood, the Cheviot vet for many years and a great mentor to me, tells a story about one stipendiary steward who really annoyed him by making unreasonable demands, including an excessive number of swabs, having to explain why a post-mortem hadn’t been done on a horse and forcing him to work well past finishing time.

  In the bar after the race, David had an opportunity to get his own back.

  ‘Did you know that when men are in the shower 70 per cent sing and 30 per cent play with themselves?’ he asked the group, and then turning to the steward asked, ‘And do you know what they sing?’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Didn’t think you would,’ said David.

  Anyway, my first day at the races was a memorable one for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t because of the stipe, though; he was a very nice man. Kevin O’Brien, the stock manager at the Vet Club, was also a racehorse trainer, and was in the birdcage during the first race. It was a hurdles race and immediately after the race he came up to me and said:

  ‘You had better get out there. Quick. They are calling for you. A horse has broken a leg.’

  ‘Come on,’ I replied. ‘Pull the other one.’ This didn’t happen to a vet graduate during the first race of the first race meeting he has ever been on call at.

  ‘No, look. I’m not kidding. Look out there.’

  Sure enough, on the track immediately in front of the birdcage and grandstand stood a distressed-looking horse on three legs. He had broken his leg on the last hurdle and pulled up just before the finishing line.

  I raced to my car next to the birdcage, jumped in and shot out the gate and went all of 10 metres to where the horse stood. I leapt out, pulled on some overalls and had a quick examination of the horse. It was a horrible fracture and for these injuries there is only one outcome. It was an easy decision. I raced back to my car boot where I hunted around and finally found a bottle of Euthatal, a very concentrated anaesthetic that we used for humanely euthanising animals, a 60 ml syringe and a large needle. This took a wee while and involved emptying half the car boot onto the race track.

  Meanwhile the crowd in the stand had gone very silent. I was on stage and they were watching as I walked back to the horse, filling up my large syringe with ‘purple death’. Two groundsmen stood ineffectively with a tarpaulin, trying to hide the horse from the crowd in the stand and in the birdcage. I placed the large 14-gauge needle in the jugular vein and then injected the syringe full in, and then topped up with another one but the horse just stood there. After a few seconds he should have quietly buckled at the knees and fallen down dead. I waited and he just kept standing and standing.

  The crowd has just witnessed a young, disorganised vet injecting two syringes full of Euthetal subcutaneously in his nervous haste. That is, outside the vein where it was not going to be very effective for quite some time. I had missed the rather large jugular vein and needed to repeat the act. So I sucked up what was left in the bottle and prayed it was enough. I repeated the job after replacing the needle, this time properly in the jugular, and thankfully had the horse lie down and die next to the sledge placed beside him. It was a nervous moment and not a great way to start being a race-day vet.

  Following this I spent a good part of the day swabbing horses and generally being rather busy. The last race also involved a swab and it was well after dark before I had finished. I was invited into the committee room after I had reported in, and offered a very welcome drink. Larry, the head groundsman, was also there and in passing I asked him what he did with the horse that I had had to put down.

  ‘N-n-n-no p-p-p-problem, P-p-p-p-ete. L-l-l-l-yall p-p-p-p—got him.’ Larry had a terrible stutter.

  ‘Lyall who?’ I replied, suddenly getting an uncomfortable feeling.

  ‘L-l-l-l-yall M-M-M-M-M-M—’

  ‘Not Lyall McLauchlan from the hunt.’

  ‘Y-y-y-y-y—’

  ‘Oh hell, where’s the nearest phone?’

  I eventually found one and Lyall’s phone number and rang him. There was no reply. Now I was really sweating. Lyall was the master of the Starborough Hunt, the local hunt club that had a famous hound pack. They were always on the lookout for meat for the pack and welcomed fresh meat from any source. The fresh meat he had just collected would not do the hounds any good at all.

  I kept ringing but still got no reply, so I had to speed out to Lyall’s place where the hounds, were kennelled. It was dark and he wasn’t in the house although the lights were on. I went down to the kennels where I eventually found him. He was on the verge of feeding the hounds a large hunk of fresh horse meat. If I had been a few minutes later, I would have been indirectly responsible for wiping out the whole of the Starborough Hunt pack. The meat of an animal euthanised with Euthatal is lethal to anything that eats it.

  Lyall was not impressed as he had spent a good part of the day collecting the horse from the racetrack and then skinning it. However, he was very relieved that we had not wiped out his beloved hounds. We both agreed we deserved a wee whisky. And Lyall’s whiskies were not small.

  PONY CLUB ANECDOTES — PJ

  I have a confession: I have never enjoyed pony clubs. Horses are not my first love anyway, even though as a young man I rode them in rough fashion in the course of mustering sheep and cattle in the Southland and Otago high country (and enjoyed them in that context). But I’ve never been really relaxed around them, and a particularly deficient senior lecturer in equine medicine at vet school didn’t redirect my energies in any positive fashion. I can cope when I need to treat one, but I don’t go by choice.

  Pony clubs are not just about ponies, however. Dear me, no. Pony clubs are mostly for mothers, who either want to relive their youth or want their child to do what they couldn’t do themselves. The result is a congregation of precious children and anxious, or worse, aggressive mothers on Saturday or Sunday morning. Most vets (not all but most) of my experience stay very clear of pony clubs and I am no exception.

  So when my dear wife Ally began to take our youngest, Pippa, to pony club, bought her ponies, horse floats, saddles and tack, clothing and helmets, the reader will understand my apprehension. To Ally’s credit, I never had the squeeze put on me to attend. Except
once.

  For the first year of their equine adventures, Pip and Ally attended a local Blenheim-based pony club and had a lot of fun there. Pip was a natural horsewoman, Ally was determinedly keen, and they began to travel to various places to competitions.

  One of the things I treasure most about Anderson and Jerram as a business was the relationship we had with our farmer clients — I have mentioned that most were also personal friends. The Awatere Pony Club, based loosely around the small town of Seddon, 20 kilometres south of Blenheim, had several members whose families were our friends. So it didn’t take a lot of persuasion for Ally and Pip to change camps. And because we knew all the families, there came a time when I was persuaded to come along to the end of season Awatere Pony Club camp.

  ‘Just come down for the after match,’ said Ally sweetly. ‘You won’t get caught up in work.’

  I forget what I was doing for the day, but I hitched a ride with another family from Blenheim late on a Saturday afternoon in April. We journeyed over the dry Weld Pass on State Highway One, out onto the beautiful Awatere River valley plain, stretching east to the sea, and west up past the majestic Mt Tapuae-o-Uenuku, noted as a ‘stupendous mountain’ by Captain James Cook in 1770 as he sailed south through the strait later named after him.

  We trundled across the rare combined road/rail bridge over the Awatere River (now replaced by a modern structure), through the sleepy township of Seddon, then veered right, up the south side of the river. Twenty kilometres on, this road ends, and almost at the end was the pony club camp.