While never fully attuned with the standards, desires and ethics of this last group, I was very much in tune with the sheep dog triallists. More importantly, the technical side of dog breeding appealed to me greatly, so in 1988 I began to educate myself to a higher level on the subject.
A week-long international course in Sydney sharpened my interest and led to a trip back to Melbourne, and eventually to a major round-the-world trip, meeting and working with a lot of the world experts in the field. Eventually I made several round-world trips, honing my skills, and absorbing knowledge in a field that was still pretty new. We were at the cutting edge.
An international trade in frozen dog semen was just beginning as I learnt how to cryopreserve, store, ship and importantly, to inseminate with it.
Unlike many mammalian species, dog semen does not freeze easily and the chemical/technical aspects of the process are still being unravelled and improved upon. I was lucky enough to strike a man in Pennsylvania and a professor in Sweden who were very advanced in their knowledge of that process, and critically, in the use of frozen semen.
As many of you will know, the bitch ovulates or cycles intermittently, every six to eight months at best. Freezing semen and inseminating with it is a tricky and expensive business, so a positive outcome is important to the breeder. Sadly, this is not always the case, oft en for technical reasons (as in human reproduction, we don’t know all the answers yet), and in part because there is a very small pool of vets who are sufficiently educated in the subject. Even today, in the whole of New Zealand, there are possibly six vets who are so trained.
At the time I became interested, there were only one or two, so it was good personally and professionally to be at the forefront of one’s field.
The common factor with nearly all of the dogs I collected semen from is that they all loved me. Afterwards that is, and usually for ever after.
The dogs who had been collected before would strain at the leash to get into the clinic when their owners brought them back next time. This was a fun place and I want to be there again, you could see them saying.
Returning to the good Hamish, he would rush into the clinic ahead of the McCallums, tongue out, almost smiling, and would go home afterwards, slightly wobbly, but very cheerful.
The problem in those early days, and I’m talking about the period from 1979 to 1982 at the Graham Vet Club, was that we didn’t have very advanced equipment for the job.
The collection vessel was a five-ounce beer glass with the HANZ (Hotel Association of New Zealand) logo, a green circle with a map of New Zealand within, stamped on the side. It had no doubt been half-inched from the pub next door, but whatever its origin, it would be roughly warmed up in warm water, dried, then used as a receptacle for the fresh semen, until it was quickly drawn into a warm syringe and deposited into the waiting ‘hot’ bitch.
This glass had been around for many years, lived in the staffroom until required, and was avoided like the plague by all who worked there.
Unfortunately, and I’m sure it was accidental, the glass did get used for drinking from, once. We had a German student, a delightful young woman, working at the clinic for experience. She was with us for a week, possibly two, and I do remember her getting slightly crushed between two cows as I taught her pregnancy testing. She was brave and strong, however, and finished the job.
On the Friday afternoon she was to leave us, we decided to have a bit of a party after work. We got in a few beers and some of the clinic staff assembled with the young German. It wasn’t difficult to round them up; she was rather gorgeous. At 5.30pm the door burst open. It was her male friend back from a week on the West Coast. For the sake of the story, she shall be Heidi and her friend, Gunter.
Gunter strode in almost clicking his heels, head up, very confident, the pride of Aryan youth.
‘So,’ he shouted, ‘you are the wets!’
I’m sorry to say we all fell about laughing and I’m even sorrier to say that Gunter ended up drinking his beer from a five-ounce beer glass with a HANZ logo on the side. I’m sure that it had been washed.
There were plenty of other interesting moments around my new career as a canine reproductive vet, or what some of my less savoury friends called a ‘dog walloper’.
I began to travel all over New Zealand collecting semen from dogs at clinics from Invercargill to Auckland. I would do the collecting, at most six or seven dogs a day, process the semen, chill and freeze it. All this took several hours and I was usually quite spent, in a manner of speaking, by the time the days were finished.
From time to time I would strike a dog who just couldn’t deliver. It was noticeable that many of these dogs had overanxious or overly dominant owners. I would oft en have to ask the owner to go out of the room or to stop talking while I collected. The dogs needed to concentrate on the job in hand, as it were.
Other dogs didn’t like being in the vet clinic, a traumatic experience for them much as a visit to the dentist is for us. I could never imagine getting too randy in a dentist’s clinic although I am reliably informed some do.
The owner of one of these dogs, a woman of ample proportions, kept telling me that she could collect her dog herself, but only at home. I didn’t have the time to pack all my equipment up, then heft it to her place, which was at Ravensdown in Dunedin (I was in Helensburgh, up the hill), set up again and do the collection. So I gave her the collecting gear, a test tube and a plastic collection cone.
‘It is really important to keep it at about body temperature,’ I lectured her. ‘How will you do that?’
She just looked at me mysteriously ‘No problem, Pete. Leave it to me.’
An hour later she was back at Helensburgh. I had collected another dog in her absence, and had just finished measuring the sample, centrifuging it to separate the seminal fluid from the spermatozoa, adding the required volume of extender and putting it in the chiller. I was interested. How had she kept the sample from her beloved small dog warm? With a triumphant flourish she reached into her cleavage, and with a slight twanging of elastic, produced the sample, safely enclosed in the screwtop vial. I checked it under the microscope. It was perfect and I successfully froze it. I can almost guarantee that the designers of brassieres hadn’t ever thought that their product might be used for that purpose.
The last episode I shall recount on this subject, and there are many there is no space for, concerns the lady on the aeroplane.
Travel can be a wearying and lonely business, and as most will know, there is nothing glamorous about long international flights. They are tedious and exhausting, and it’s always a moment of interest when you find your seat and discover who your travelling companion is. (I was once propositioned by a much older French Canadian woman on a short flight from Toronto to Cleveland and was fortunate to be able to escape to the backwoods of Ohio in a taxi, alone.)
On a trip from Washington to London, I found myself seated beside a particularly attractive woman in a business suit. I felt that there would at least be some intellectual company here, and began to talk with her soon after take-off. She was, I think, a lawyer, travelling to London on business, and had her laptop, something pretty rare in the 1990s to a travelling New Zealander. When she found out I was a vet, she was interested and wanted to know what I was doing. I was a fellow professional. It was the first of the four or five major international trips I did with dog reproduction, and I hadn’t thought this through very well.
‘I collect and freeze dog semen,’ I said blithely.
With a shocked look, she turned firmly away from me, and for the next 10 hours, I read my book and dozed. At Heathrow, she gathered her gear and pushed rapidly out of the aeroplane without so much as a glance at me. A city girl, I think.
But I still have friends in the several hundred dogs who I successfully collected. Most of them never forgot me, and although I can’t claim to receive Christmas cards from many, it was satisfying to know that one was loved by one’s patients. Quite unlike dentists,
you know.
LARGE ANIMAL PRACTICE — PA
As veterinarians, especially those working with production animals, we are involved with health rather than disease. While it is important to understand the symptoms and effects of different diseases and how to treat them if practical or economically viable to do so, prevention is far more important. This can, for some diseases, involve a vaccination programme but generally most production-limiting problems in livestock are the result of inadequate feeding or feeding the wrong stuff. As in human health, ‘we are what we eat’. Much of our production animal work therefore revolves around working with farmers to identify what and when nutritional factors are limiting flock or herd performance. Sometimes mineral or trace element deficiencies are involved, but more often than not it is the quality or quantity of the pasture or crop or supplement they are being fed that is limiting production. While intestinal parasites are frequently blamed for poor flock and herd performances, it can be argued that parasitism is more a reflection of inadequate management, such as inappropriate feeding, than the actual cause of poor performance. Controlling parasites using anthelmintics is the biggest single animal health cost on most sheep and beef farms.
For any herd or flock, overall performance is determined by the growth rate of young stock and the productive (wool, milk, meat) and reproductive performance of adults. Optimising lambing and calving percentages, lamb and calf weaning weights, weights of finishing stock, and milk and wool production, is therefore critical to production animal performance and for farms to remain viable. Unfortunately, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, sheep-farming profitability was the lowest it has been since the middle of the twentieth century. While the best way to improve profitability is to invest in those areas that are going to improve productivity, such as fertiliser, fencing, and animal health, it is very difficult for farmers to be enthusiastic about doing this when the price they receive for the product they produce is so low that it is actually below the cost of production.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel and very recently there has been an improvement in international commodity prices. The return for wool and meat has improved to the point that, for the first time in a very long time, we are seeing sheep and beef farmers showing some enthusiasm and optimism for the future. It is much more fun working with happy farmers.
Unfortunately this prolonged period of poor sheep farm profitability has meant many vets have found sheep and beef practice financially unrewarding as well and have left this sector of the industry. Some have become dairy vets, while others have turned their attention to other areas of their practice and concentrated on horses or deer or alpacas or small animals. Hopefully with the improved outlook for sheep and beef farming, more young vets will be encouraged to work in this area and farmers will be more enthusiastic about investing in animal health and the performance of their livestock.
With very few exceptions, to remain viable most production animal veterinary practices have had to rely on the sale of over the counter (OTC) products. But because of competition from stock firms and other traders, the margins for OTC products are small, and to compensate for falling returns from such products, fees have had to increase. As vets we prefer this arrangement and would be very happy not to have to rely on OTC sales to survive. Surviving off fees alone would be great but realistically it is impossible for most practices. One study showed that even the very busiest dairy practices covering many farms, all in close proximity to the clinic, could not charge out more than an average of four hours per vet per day. In extensive sheep and beef practices, it is far less. The cost of travel and the fee to examine and treat an individual animal is far higher than the value of the actual animal, so unless it is a valuable animal such as a horse or bull we don’t end up doing a great deal of ‘treating’ in a sheep and beef practice. Rural vets are often perceived by farmers as being an expense they would prefer not to have to have.
Farmers are price takers. They have little say in what they are paid for their product, and so the only way many feel they can improve their bank balance is to cut costs. This approach is sometimes encouraged by their accountant or banker. In reality the best way to improve their profitability is to increase production, and that may involve investing more, rather than less, in the real drivers of farm profitability, such as fertiliser, fencing and animal health. Tightening the belt invariably leads to a downward spiral and a farm’s failure to be profitable cannot always be blamed on the rising dollar, increasing farm running costs and falling returns for one or other commodity.
As we age, the enthusiasm for pregnancy testing hundreds of cows at the back of beyond under sometimes unpleasant conditions or doing an emergency calving in the middle of a paddock in a cold southerly wears thin. Too many ‘older’ vets who have acquired a huge amount of local knowledge over a whole life spent in a certain locality find that they have to get out. Most cannot suddenly adapt to being a small animal practitioner. However, there may be a nine to five job at the local works or drug company with far better remuneration, so they leave the industry. That knowledge acquired over many years working with farmers is lost. This is a huge loss to the rural industry.
For this reason some of us who enjoy the advisory side of the work, and who start to find the hands-on practical stuff getting a little hard on an ageing body, tend to become ‘consultants’. Improving farm productivity and profitability by becoming involved in all aspects of farm management is where many of us feel we have an important role to play. We can still remain a useful member of a veterinary team without being burdened by what can be stressful after-hours and weekend duties. A minority of rural sheep and beef vets do actually make a reasonable income out of doing solely advisory work. Most are, however, part of a bigger veterinary team supplying a full veterinary service to the local farmers.
Whatever the drawbacks of large animal practice, I wouldn’t have swapped it for any job in the world. It has at times been very demanding but has always been interesting. It has involved a huge range of intriguing and complex production and performance problems which have had to be sorted out. However, for me to pursue my passion for sheep and beef work has required the acceptance and goodwill of initially PJ, and in later years Stuart Burrough and Mark Wiseman. The acceptance that I would not be the main income earner, that I would be spending much of my time under less pressure than them in the countryside, and with people I loved, that I could incorporate my hobby of flying into the job, and that I could continue to operate in later years without the stress of after-hours and weekend work has been a privilege for which I will always be grateful.
ALL AT SEA — PJ
As I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve always loved sailing. My father had various sailing dinghies when I was very small and even had a World War II life raft with a little aluminium mast and square sail which we played in at Blueskin Bay, north of Dunedin, where the family had a crib. (That’s far south talk for a bach and comes from the Scottish people who first came there in the 1840s.)
So I learnt to sail as a boy and then did some more at Te Anau as a teenager. Later with a family of my own, I decided that a keeler in the Marlborough Sounds, one of the world’s great temperate zone sheltered waterways, would be a good substitute for our bach in the Nelson Lakes.
So we bought a Cavalier 32, a solid 1970s design, which had been a revelation in its day and which was forgiving towards learner sailors, as we were. People had even sailed round the globe in them.
After a while I could sail it by myself and one weekend when Ally had taken the children to see her family in Canterbury, I decided it was time I went out by myself on Fulani.
I cast off and motored her out of the berth at the Waikawa Marina, the ageing Volvo diesel growling away. Once out in the bay, I used the autohelm to hold course while I got the mainsail up. Then the furling headsail, and we were away and sailing. The brilliance of that feeling will not be lost on those who sail. Wonderful, exhilarating, harv
esting the winds to take you travelling in beautiful surroundings and to test your skills. I always relax and forget all about the everyday worries when there’s a sail up.
I tacked down to the Bay of Many Coves, dropped sail and motored into the little bay where the yacht club mooring was. It wasn’t there — it must have broken or more likely a clumsy power boat skipper had run over it. But there was another mooring nearby, a white buoy with Searay Charters on one side. There was no one around so I picked up the buoy, then fastened the line to Fulani’s bow, and congratulated myself. I went below, boiled the kettle and read my book, hoping no charter boat would turn up. But about 5.30, near dusk, a putt-putting got me poking my head through the companionway and there was a slightly larger yacht, a Lotus 10.6, approaching. Oh hell.
‘Hello’, I called, ‘I’m on your mooring, I’ll get off.’ A friendly face at the helm was smiling.
‘Don’t worry, we can raft up and share it.’
I knew that face, another vet. And sure enough, Alex McDougall, the head vet of the Meat Division of the Ministry of Agriculture, and in an elevated position in veterinary ranks, was with his wife in the boat, which they owned and leased back to the charter company. They were convivial and welcoming, and the upshot was that we shared a meal and a couple of bottles of red. During the pleasant evening I said we had a scallop dredge on board and we could go for a drag in the bay tomorrow, which we did.
I’d never used it before, but my brother Denis had left it with me only recently, with 300 feet of braided line. So next morning Alex and I experimented with two or three drags across the Bay of Many Coves, caught 30 or 40 keeping sized scallops, and went back to his boat for lunch.
Cock and Bull Stories Page 19
