‘Oh my goodness you have got to take a look at the two sugar gilders,’ said Julie as she came into the prep room that morning. ‘They are so unbelievably cute, with their big eyes and little noses.’
‘You’ve admitted them, then?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, they were the first on the list to arrive. The owner’s brought some food for them, and says we have to feed them as soon as they wake up,’ she added, and then, with a slightly puzzled air, ‘And she’s also brought some pouches to put them in afterwards.’
‘Yeah, they’re prone to self-traumatizing on recovery so you have to feed them as soon as they wake up to distract them. Being marsupials, the pouches will probably make them feel secure and less interested in their wound.’
‘Huh. You seem to know a lot about them, Jon. I can see someone’s been doing their homework. I’d never heard of a sugar glider before yesterday.’
‘I might have had a bit of a read last night,’ I admitted. ‘They’re actually really interesting. Sugar gliders are nocturnal, which is why they have such large eyes. They literally glide through the air, travelling from branch to branch in search of sugary nectarous food. Hence the name.’
‘Huh, cool. So where do they come from, and do many people have them as pets?’
‘They originate from Australasia, and they’ve got quite a fan base in the States as a pet, apparently, but are only just starting to gain some popularity over here, which makes them pretty sought after and quite expensive.’
‘Listen to you! You have been doing your homework! So what’s the plan with the anaesthetic?’
‘There are a couple of different protocols that I’ve found, but given their small size I think it’ll be best to just gas them down. I don’t particularly fancy trying to give them an intramuscular injection when they’re awake, it’ll just stress them out.’
‘Sounds logical. And what about analgesia?’
‘Buprenorphine is best. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are debatable, so we’ll steer clear of them.’
‘OK, glad you know what you’re doing. So what order do you want to do the ops in?’
‘Let’s do the cats first, then the dog, then the lump removal, then the sugar gliders and we’ll finish with the dental.’
Two hours later and I was putting the final stitch in a ten-year-old female boxer, from whom I had removed a suspicious-looking lump in her left flank, and the time had come to turn my attention to our two little Antipodean friends.
‘Do you want Sean or Shane first?’ Julie asked.
Sean and Shane the Australian sugar gliders? Of course, what else could they be called? Especially with Socrates and Shakespeare the cats and a skunk called Sally. I wondered how many other animals she had. Simon the salamander, perhaps, Seth the saluki. ‘I don’t mind. Can you tell them apart?’
‘Apparently Shane has a larger black stripe on his forehead and a more yellow tinge to his underbelly compared to Sean.’
‘Good to know. Well whichever, I honestly don’t mind.’
We carried Maisie the boxer back to her kennel where Heather would recover her, and then returned to the prep room to prepare for the first sugar glider. With everything set, Julie disappeared, returning moments later with a small bundle in her hands, which she placed in a small box on the table. A little nose poked out from a green knitted pouch, followed by two beady eyes eagerly searching for something to munch on. I had to admit he was pretty adorable. The box Julie had placed him in was specially designed to anaesthetize any such small animal. Closing the lid on it, I connected up the anaesthetic machine and turned it on, thus delivering a mixture of oxygen and vaporized Isoflurane into the box. After a few minutes the sugar glider was sound asleep. I flushed the box with air before opening it and removed the little fella.
‘So this is probably Shane then?’ I said, seeing the large black stripe on his forehead.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Julie agreed as she connected a small anaesthetic mask to the machine, which we then put over Shane’s mouth and nose to maintain anaesthesia throughout the procedure.
Turning Shane over, I got quite the anatomical shock. None of my extensive reading up on sugar gliders had prepared me for quite how large and pendulous their testicles were.
‘That’s quite the landing gear for these little fliers,’ Julie commented.
‘Indeed. I understand now why they refer to them as the “pom-pom”!’
‘The what?’
‘Apparently a sugar glider’s testicle sac is referred to as the pom-pom.’
‘You serious? I love it. Well, do you remove the pom-pom at the same time as the testicles?
‘I’ve read about both the normal technique and the scrotal ablation, or de-pom-pomming, but I haven’t really decided which I was going to do. I was going to see when I did the surgery.’
‘De-pom-pomming? Amazing! Is that the technical term? So, do you want me to clip up the pom-poms and prep him?’
‘Let’s get him settled in theatre on a heat pad and make sure he’s stable. I’ll draw up some Buprenorphine and scrub up while you prep him.’
‘Sure.’
I calculated the dose – barely a needle full – drew it up and gave it under the skin. Shane didn’t flinch.
‘He seems nicely asleep,’ I said to Julie as she busied herself setting him up on a pile of towels over a heat mat and cocooned in a space blanket.
‘That should keep him cosy and warm.’
I started washing my hands as Julie clipped away at the surgical site. It was a delicate procedure which she took great time and care over. So much so, that I’d finished scrubbing up before she had finished, so she briefly broke away to open my sterile kits, which contained hand towels, drapes and surgical instruments. With my sterile gloves on, I started laying out the instruments and sorting through the equipment, and Julie turned her attention back to clipping.
‘Oops!’ She suddenly exclaimed. ‘I don’t think I meant to do that. I think I’ve just de-pom-pommed him!’
It was true. Despite her best attempts at trimming the surgical site, the clippers had caught and in one movement my surgical skills were no longer required.
‘Well, I guess that decides what technique I’m going to use!’ I studied the wound where moments before the testicles had been. Remarkably, there was virtually no blood. It had been a clean cut.
‘I’m sorry, Jon, I feel terrible. Poor little fella,’ she added apologetically.
‘It appears we have discovered a very efficient way of neutering sugar gliders! If I put one stitch around the vessels, we can glue the skin together and that’s the job done.’ I placed a clamp on the exposed vessels. ‘Can you pass me some 4-0 Vicryl suture.’ Moments later the procedure was complete.
‘There we go, the most efficient castration in history!’
‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she said, looking at the pendulous anatomy now dangling from the clipper blades. ‘Do you think Miss Toyah will want to keep the pom-poms?’
‘I can imagine a fashion world that would go crazy for pom-pom earrings, but I don’t think the time is quite yet.’
Turning off the anaesthetic vaporizer, we watched and waited for Shane to come round. Happy that the wound all looked fine we popped him in his knitted pouch and armed ourselves with the dried cranberry and apple pieces ready to distract him on his recovery. Minutes later he started stirring. Seemingly no worse off for his ordeal, he immediately picked up the scent of the food. Julie offered him a cranberry, which he grabbed with both front paws and started tucking into ravenously, then turning with equal enthusiasm to my offering.
‘Isn’t he so cute the way he holds his food, bringing it up to his mouth to devour it?’
It was indeed a very adorable sight.
‘So what now?’
‘If Heather has finished recovering Maisie, she can continue feeding this little fella and we can move on to Sean.’
Adjusting the technique slightly second time around, Sean was successful
ly and more conventionally castrated using a scalpel blade rather than clippers. He recovered equally well so I was able to discharge Shane and Sean to a delighted Miss Toyah, who also informed us that her week was picking up: Sally was no longer redecorating the downstairs of her house.
‘Miss Toyah was very grateful for our efforts,’ I reported to Julie as she was packing up the surgical kits we had used that day.
‘Oh, I am glad. And how’s Sally the skunk?’
‘Much better.’
‘Sugar gliders and skunks in one week. It doesn’t get much weirder than that, Jon.’
‘I know, not really what you imagine in a rural veterinary practice. Do you think our de-pom-pomming technique will ever make it into the textbooks?’
Sugar gliders: fast facts
Petaurus breviceps: The sugar glider
Distribution: Found throughout the northern and eastern parts of mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and some Indonesian islands.
Names: A male is called a ‘sugar bear’, a female a ‘honey glider’, and the young a ‘joey’. A group of sugar gliders is called a ‘colony’.
Life span: 9–12 years.
Habitat: Rainforest, or dry forests of eucalyptus or acacia trees. They require a dense mid- and upper-canopy cover to enable them to travel through it. Being nocturnal, they are active and feed at night, sheltering in tree hollows during the day.
Diet: Sugar gliders are seasonally adapted omnivores, being insectivorous in the summer and in winter feeding on the sugar gum, sap or nectar that exudes from plants. They are also opportunistic feeders, and will eat small lizards, bird eggs, fungi or native fruits if available.
Gestation: 15–17 days, usually giving birth to 2 joeys.
Weight: 0.2 grams at birth, reaching an adult weight of about 120 grams.
Growth: The joey will migrate to the pouch and latch on to a nipple, where it stays for 60 days. Males can reach sexual maturity as early as 4 months, but females are not sexually mature until about 8 months, neither being fully grown until 2 years.
Body temperature: 35.8–36.9 °C.
Interesting facts: During cold weather, and when food is scarce, sugar gliders are able to enter a state of torpor as an energy-conserving mechanism, allowing their body temperature to drop as low as 10.4 °C without causing any damage. Torpor is different from hibernation in being a short-term daily cycle lasting anything from 2 to 23 hours. They also possess a membrane between their fore and hind limbs, which allows them to launch themselves from a tree and glide for as far as 50 metres. It has been calculated that for every 1.82 metres they travel horizontally, they drop 1 metre.
Conservation: Despite the loss of a lot of their natural habitat in Australia over the last 200 years, sugar gliders have adapted to live in small patches of remnant bush and their numbers have thrived and so they are not considered at risk. The IUCN classes them as being of least concern. However, several of their close relatives such as the Leadbeater’s possum and the mahogany glider are endangered due to deforestation. Since 1990 the world has lost over 129 million hectares of forest – an area the size of South Africa. The World Wildlife Fund is working to lobby governments to improve smarter land use to prevent further deforestation between now and 2030. See: www.wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/deforestation.
20
WILDEBEEST
‘Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.’
Gary Snyder
I was hot, sweaty, hungry and tired, but I couldn’t have been happier. I was back in South Africa again. As I surveyed my surroundings on this 3000-hectare game farm, arid scrubland stretched before me in every direction with just the odd acacia tree to add variety. The only signs of human life were our abandoned vehicles and a group of thirty-odd people busying themselves with khaki tarpaulins and wooden posts. Just twenty-four hours previously this area had been untouched land, but now an enormous v-shaped enclosure stretched out from the bed of a large haulage truck to the brow of a small promontory just visible on the horizon over a kilometre away.
The purpose of this temporary construct was to facilitate the mass capture and relocation of about 400 blue wildebeest. Southern Africa had been in drought for over two years and as such the once-abundant vegetation on which the animals depended for grazing was scarce and waterholes were drying up, critically endangering the wildlife on the reserves. A hundred years ago these animals simply would have migrated to find sustenance, but the continent was different now, the human population having grown exponentially to the detriment of its wildlife. In order to protect that wildlife, animals were no longer free to roam but were instead enclosed within large game reserves, which meant they had nowhere to go when drought struck. As their custodians, the reserve had a duty to intervene so we had been asked to move some of the wildebeest off the farm to other locations where the effects of the drought weren’t as serious – while praying that the rains would eventually come.
This particular area was a ‘big-five’ estate and so home to an abundance of species, many of which also needed their numbers reducing, but today’s task was the relocating of the blue wildebeest. We had found a new place for only about a quarter of the group, which would mean a repeat of today’s complex manoeuvres at a later date. It seemed an inordinate amount of time, effort and manpower for the job involved, but to the capture team and wildlife vets we were working with, this was just another few days at the office; one to load, transport and unload all the kit; another to set up; then probably only a few hours on the actual capture, though that depended on the skill of the helicopter pilot and how far the animals were from this temporary ‘boma’, as these enclosures were called.
The capture technique was a glorified version of sheepdog trialling – herding the animals using a helicopter and boma instead of a dog and pen. The helicopter would round up the animals, coaxing them into the enclosure before sounding a siren signalling to the team on the ground to pull curtains across the entrance to secure the animals within. The helicopter would continue pushing the herd forwards, funnelling the beasts down towards the truck whilst further ground teams ran behind, drawing curtains across the path in their wake to contain the wildebeest in an ever-diminishing area until they reached the truck and had nowhere else to go but on board. Well, that was the theory, at least!
Deciding on where to position the boma, factoring in access, wind direction and camouflage, was the most crucial step in this complicated procedure. It was not unusual to spend a day setting up the large pen, only then to find the animals were spooked at the entrance and would not cross the threshold. When this occurred the whole set-up had to be dismantled, a new location found and the enclosure reconstructed, so mass capture was (and remains) a huge logistical and time-consuming operation.
It was 9 a.m., the temperature was already in the twenties and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, nor was there any shelter to be found. We, the student and vet team, had already been at work for an hour, assisting the capture team in adding the finishing touches to the boma construction. For us it had been a 5.30 a.m. start, but the capture team were already hard at it when we arrived, having camped overnight – seemingly unperturbed by being on a big-five reserve with predators aplenty. I strolled back to the minibus to grab my water bottle, pondering what creatures surrounded me unseen; black mambas, puff adders, cobras and scorpions for sure but doubtless other creatures besides lay hidden in the brush. Was there a lion crouching, invisible and perfectly disguised, studying my every movement? Experience told me it was already too hot for a hunt and such animals would be in the shade somewhere, sleeping soundly, tails gently swatting away any fly that attempted to trouble them, but the mind is a powerful thing and so I felt a surge of adrenaline pulsing through my veins. I studied every tree I passed, hoping to spot a leopard tucking into an impala carcass – its usual reward from a successful night’s hunt.
This was a far cry from my recent stint at Pinewood Studios, where I had been working as the veterinary adviser on the
set of a Hollywood blockbuster, giving guidance on how to operate on and take blood from dinosaurs – as if that was something I had learned in vet school! It had been the experience I had gained working out here in South Africa previously that had secured that role for me; with some lateral thinking and extrapolation from my own professional experiences I had felt confident about the advice I was able to give. And who wouldn’t have taken that gig? The opportunity to see your work translated onto the big screen for potentially millions of viewers across the globe was too great to pass up. It had been surreal but fascinating, working with the director and actors, seeing the manpower and money involved and watching superbly crafted model dinosaurs being brought to life so convincingly by an exceptional team of puppeteers. I had taken every opportunity to understand and involve myself in a world that previously I had known nothing about – and then walked away from it, content that I had made the right career choice; my heart lay in caring for animals and not in movie-making and box-office ticket sales. It had been an incredible experience and I felt privileged to have had it, but it was time to return from the Jurassic period to present-day veterinary work and conservation – and for that, Africa was the front line. I might be the only person to have stitched up a dinosaur, but as I surveyed my surroundings now, miles away from any signs of human habitation, I knew that this was where I belonged.
My thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the all-too-familiar hum of the R44 helicopter appearing as a white speck on the horizon. Moments later it circled above us, its rotor blades creating a cloud of dust into which it landed. Our ‘sheepdog’ had arrived and the pen was now ready – we just needed to locate the wildebeest.
We congregated on a dirt track for our briefing, giving Bjorn, the leader of the capture team, a canvas on which to illustrate the plan of attack. We were each to be responsible for a curtain within the enclosure, he explained. Our task was simple: to keep out of view until the ground vibrated from the stampeding animals and the helicopter siren could be heard overhead, then, ‘run like hell with your curtain and don’t stop until you’ve reached the other side!’
The Travelling Vet Page 28
