Vet on the Loose

by Gillian Hick

  ‘I’m really not used to public speaking,’ I replied hesitantly, ‘but I’ll give it a go if you’re sure it’s only for a few of them.’

  ‘You don’t know how much I appreciate it. I know the girls will just love you.’ He shook my hand warmly before leaving me with final instructions about the schedule and how to get to the school.

  The next morning I tried to fob it off on Justin, but he was having none of it.

  ‘Not a chance!’ he laughed. ‘And, anyway, didn’t he want a female vet? Waste of time me going out.’

  Liz assured me it would be ‘great fun’. ‘And anyway,’ she continued, ‘it’ll get you out of doing that fat bitch spay that’s booked in for Friday morning.’

  Every night that week, I planned to prepare my speech, but one day followed another at the usual hectic pace and it was the morning of the talk before I finally found myself putting pen to paper. I briefly described the necessary qualities I thought it took to become a decent vet – such laudable characteristics as having a deep concern for animal welfare, the ability to communicate in a kind and caring way with their owners, the stamina to work odd hours at irregular intervals, and all the rest of it.

  A vividly coloured banner hung over the school gates, welcoming all visitors to World Animal Week.

  There was a buzz of excitement in the air as throngs of schoolgirls milled around the yard, enjoying the freedom of a non-uniform day in honour of the occasion. I secretly hoped that my handful of transition years would be a little more restrained than this lot.

  Mr Walsh, the principal, met me as arranged in the staff room. He looked suspiciously guilty as he announced in a casual tone that there had been a slight change of plan. I got the distinct feeling that I was being set up.

  ‘The girls decided that we should charge a euro per head and open the talk to the whole school. I told them you wouldn’t mind. You don’t, do you?’

  I did actually – a lot. But what could I say at this stage with only ten minutes to go? ‘Exactly how many do you think there’ll be?’

  ‘Oh, only about five hundred or so,’ he replied airily, as though it were only a slight addition to the original number. ‘But don’t worry, I know they’re going to love you. They’re all wound up to ninety, they’re so excited.’

  That was exactly what I had feared.

  ‘There’s only one other thing. To make a bit of a day of it, I’ve invited over six lads and a few supporters from the local boys’ school for a debate on cruelty to animals afterwards. To make it worthwhile, we’ve extended your speech to roughly an hour or so.’

  ‘But my speech is only fifteen minutes,’ I blustered, ‘and it’s for fifteen-year-old girls, not eleven to eighteen-year-old girls and boys.’

  ‘Don’t you be worrying about prepared speeches,’ he reassured me soothingly. ‘Improvisation always works best. Trust me, I’m a drama teacher.’

  Without giving me a chance to object, he marshalled me down a corridor and led me into a hall that to me looked roughly the size of The Point Depot. It was packed with masses of excitable teenagers. A herd of angry bullocks couldn’t have competed with the ear-splitting racket they were creating. He then ushered me up on to the platform. As I stood there surveying the crowd, I noticed that nobody seemed to be remotely interested in my presence. In fact, no one even seemed to have noticed that I was there at all. At that moment, I understood roughly how the Christians must have felt before being thrown to the lions. I was terrified, and would have given anything to be somewhere else.

  As I glanced frantically around the crowded hall, I noticed Mr Walsh discreetly tucked in a corner, waving towards the microphone and beckoning me to begin. I stepped cautiously towards it, tapped on it once or twice and spoke in what I hoped was a clear and confident voice.

  ‘Now if you could all take your seats, please,’ I began bravely, ‘I’d like to introduce myself.’

  No one paid me the slightest bit of attention.

  With an increasing sense of desperation, I tapped the mike again and repeated myself in a louder voice. One or two students briefly interrupted their animated conversation and threw a quick glance in my direction. I smiled hopefully at them – but in vain. They looked away again and resumed where they had left off. A cold sweat was starting to break out on my forehead when one of the older girls, seeming to notice my distress, leapt up on to the stage, grabbed the mike from me and roared into it: ‘For Jaysus’ sake, lads, this is the bleedin’ vet! Will yez ever give ’er a chance?’

  I stared in horror at Mr Walsh, expecting double detentions all around; instead, he smiled encouragingly at the girl, rewarding her initiative. He hadn’t been joking when he told me earlier that he encouraged ‘his girls’ to work things out for themselves. He felt that it was character-building.

  At that moment, my character felt like disappearing into the proverbial hole in the ground. However, the expectant silence that had suddenly been created left me with no option but to falteringly begin my prepared speech – the fifteen-minute speech that somehow I was now supposed to make last an entire hour.

  I’ve heard of padding before, but developing fifteen minutes into sixty was a tall order. I was acutely aware of my audience’s attention drifting in and out of my grasp as I discussed the role of a vet and the basic concepts of animal welfare. Occasionally, I noticed the sympathetic glances from the haggard-looking teachers dotted around the hall. I kept my eye on the clock on the far end of the wall and was fully convinced that it was stopped for about twenty minutes or so. I flirted briefly with the idea of opening the talk up to a ‘questions and answers’ session to fill up the time but dismissed it just as quickly. I could well imagine the sort of questions I would be asked.

  I felt like a cat with nine lives, eight of which I passed through in rapid succession over the fifty minutes. At that stage, I decided enough was enough, and brought the talk to a close by wishing the students luck with their fundraising campaign and thanking them for their attention.

  A rapturous round of applause broke out, probably with relief that I had finally finished and they could now get on to the serious business of getting a better look at the local talent in the shape of the visiting debating team and supporters from the boys’ school.

  As I left the hall, I was intercepted by a kindly group of teachers.

  ‘Well done. They’re a bit of a lively bunch, aren’t they?’

  Understatement of the year.

  ‘Do you know,’ confided one of the younger, more energetic ones, ‘I think you’re marvellous to do the job you do. I wouldn’t swap with you for all the money in the world.’

  The feeling was mutual.

  As I drove out of the school grounds, I felt as though I had worked through a full week on my own, night and day, single-handedly. I couldn’t face going back to work just yet and, knowing it wasn’t a busy day, I switched off the phone and pulled into the local pub for dinner and a pot of strong tea.

  * * *

  Half an hour later I was beginning to feel that I might just about have survived the ordeal. Reluctantly, I rang the surgery to see if there were any calls still waiting to be done.

  ‘There’s three cattle to be skulled up in Joe Lynch’s place,’ Liz told me. ‘Justin is still operating on the Westie from last night but he said if you want, he’ll go out and do the cattle with you afterwards.’

  Skulling was usually carried out in the autumn and involved removing the horns from cattle in order to prevent them from injuring each other or their handlers. In older cattle it was done using either a large guillotine-type chopper known (at least in these parts) as a crange, or by sawing them off with a piece of embryotomy wire. Preferably it was done while the cattle were still calves, at which stage the soft bud-like horns could be simply burned off (a process known as debudding), but in areas like the one I was currently working in, dominated by part-time farmers, they tended not to think about such things until the calves were too old. By that stage the hard, thick, hor
ny material made it much more difficult to do.

  ‘Tell Justin thanks very much, anyway, but I’ll go on up and have a go at them. If I get stuck, I can always give him a shout.’

  I was glad to see the farmer standing waiting for me with the three cattle ready in the crush as I drove up the rough driveway to a field behind a council housing estate.

  ‘How are you?’ I called out as I pulled on the rough wet gear over my boots. Skulling was notoriously messy work.

  ‘Not too bad. And yourself?’

  ‘Ah sure, things could be worse. I see you have the cattle ready for me, anyway. They’re a bit on the big side, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I meant to do them as calves but what with my mother not being well and everything, they got a bit strong on me.’ Joe’s mother had died during the summer after a long battle with cancer. He and his wife had cared for her to the bitter end, despite having an ever-increasing brood of their own to look after. I felt that under the circumstances a lecture on the disadvantages of skulling at such an advanced age would be out of place.

  ‘Not to worry, we’ll soon sort them out,’ I replied, suddenly wishing I had taken Justin up on his offer.

  The crush was a home-made one, but looked to be strong enough for the job. In my four months’ experience of testing cattle to date, it wasn’t unusual for me to spend a large part of my day chasing breakaway rebel cattle across fields as they dragged in their wake the shattered segments of the crush that had once contained them. The part-time farmers whom we dealt with on the outskirts of the city tended not to be as well-equipped as the farmers in the more agricultural areas. My main worry with Joe’s crush was that it had no front gate in which to lock the heads. For someone as inexperienced as I was, you needed the cattle’s heads to be held securely while the procedure was being carried out, and Joe wouldn’t have been the best of stockmen.

  After a few false starts, I dropped a rope halter over the head of the first one and rapidly tied it as short as possible before clipping the nose tongs on to his fleshy nostrils. The tongs were reputedly designed to press on specific pressure receptors, causing the release of natural endorphins which supposedly helped to calm the animal. Unfortunately, this did not have the desired effect on my patient. His mouth opened wide and he bellowed with an indignant roar. His comrades eagerly took up the cause and joined in.

  ‘Just hang on to the tongs for me while I inject him, will you, please, Joe?’

  I inserted the needle just under the bony ridge between the eye and the horn to inject the local anaesthetic, thus ensuring that the process of removing the horn would be painless for the animal. The bullock’s distress was entirely due to the unfamiliarity of being handled and restrained. I repeated the process on the other side before releasing him. Joe warned me about the next bullock – a small, black wiry Limousin.

  ‘Watch yourself with that one – he’s a bit of a bugger!’

  He looked it, too, as he snorted at me while I poised over him, ready to drop the halter over his head. As it fell, he whipped it out of my hands with a menacing shake of his horns. It took three attempts before I managed to catch him and he roared incessantly while I injected him. When I finished the last bullock, I sat back to wait the few minutes before the first one would be ready. It’s nearly easier to do a large number of cattle because by the time you have them all injected, the first one is ready to be dehorned. However, after the traumatic experiences of that morning, I didn’t mind stopping as the minutes passed by with idle chat between myself and Joe.

  All too soon, it was time to start the actual process of dehorning. As I warily eyed the thick horns, I wondered how I would acquit myself. The first bullock was most displeased to find himself ensnared in the halter for the second time and roared balefully, encouraging his comrades to join in the battle. Most vets have a personal preference for either the crange or the wire, but, as I had never tried either of them before, it was a toss of a coin as to which one I would go for. I decided on the crange.

  With Joe holding the mighty head, I angled the blades at what I thought was the correct angle and tried to close over the mighty arms of the vicious-looking weapon. Just as I was about to give up and try the wire, the blades met with an almighty crack and the giant horn shot off into the distance.

  As I stopped to catch my breath, I noticed a slight problem: the side of the crush, until now brilliantly white, was now covered with fountains of bright red blood, cascading down the roughened surface. What I had thought was the correct angle of the blade obviously wasn’t. Jets of blood spurted out of the bony horn base. I wasn’t terribly concerned by the amount of blood – it’s amazing how a little blood can look like an awful lot – but I was wondering how on earth I would stop it. It was usual to have one or two bleeders from the small vessels supplying the horns when skulling and it didn’t take long to grab hold of the vessel and twist the elasticated walls until the bleeding stooped, but in this case I didn’t know where to begin. Joe’s only comment as he watched the vivid display was: ‘By God, that’s as good as any fireworks show!’ Luckily, the bullock appeared to be totally unaware of my consternation. If anything, he seemed to be slightly amused by the bright red patterns on the wall. The other two snorted suspiciously but weren’t enormously put out. I became so engrossed in the fiddly job of pulling the vessels that I didn’t notice the occasional spurt of hot blood that hit my face. When the job was done to my satisfaction, I wiped away the irritating drips that had begun to gather on the tip of my nose and puffed liberal amounts of antibiotic powder onto the freshly-cut horn base. The bullock seemed none the worse for wear.

  The second horn wasn’t quite so bad as I slightly altered the angle of the blades but the bullock was, by now, getting bored and shook his head impatiently while I tried to seal the bleeding vessels.

  Number two proved much more difficult to catch a second time and soon my knuckles were cut and bleeding as he carelessly thrashed me against the rough wall. I finally managed to secure him to the strongest post.

  ‘I think I’ll try the wire on this lad,’ I said casually to Joe. ‘He mightn’t bleed so much. The heat created by the wire tends to seal the vessels.’

  ‘Well, sure, it’s up to yourself. You’re the expert!’

  If only he knew.

  ‘Get a good hold on the tongs there, Joe,’ I told him. ‘I’ve a feeling this one won’t be quite so tolerant.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I have him good and tight. He won’t be able to budge a muscle,’ he replied with a confidence that I didn’t share as two wicked eyes glared at me contemptuously from beneath a mass of wiry hair.

  I didn’t have a proper handle to tie the wire on to and, in my innocence, I wrapped each end around the jaws of a forceps, thinking that would do the job. Carefully, I positioned the wire around the base of the horn and started to draw it back and forward in even, measured strokes. The strong wire, designed to cut through bone, bit into my tender flesh before it started to make any impression on the horn itself. Despite my misgivings, the bullock stood as though immobilised. I was afraid to stop to reposition the wire away from my raw fingers in case he would change his mind. I sawed desperately, back and forth, as the wire ate into the flinty horn. With a sense of relief, I watched the smoke start to billow up from the surface, knowing that at least this one wouldn’t bleed so much. This was definitely a better plan. I was beginning to gasp by the time I had got half way through the horn but I kept on going, ignoring the burning pains in my torn fingers. I fell backwards as the last section broke off and the horn fell harmlessly to the ground.

  ‘By God, you wouldn’t want to do that job too often!’ said Joe, eyeing me speculatively as the sweat poured down my sticky face. I didn’t bother to reply, but just grinned back at him as I tried to catch my breath.

  The bullock was still standing quietly, much to my amazement, so, making the most of the temporary truce, I started on the next horn. I was getting well into it when I suddenly found
myself sprawled on the ground, still grimly holding on to the forceps.

  ‘What the hell happened there?’ I asked Joe, as I watched the bullock plunge and thrash in the rickety crush. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure it would hold this furious beast.

  ‘The bugger! He just lost his wick. I hadn’t a chance of holding him. He whipped the tongs clean out of my hands.’

  Joe looked around him in bewilderment, wondering what had become of the tongs. Then I spied a piece of gleaming metal about twenty yards away. It was half of the handle, snapped right through the metal by the sheer force as it hit the wall. We never found the rest.

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to do without it so,’ I replied, sounding a lot more cheerful than I felt.

  Now that the bullock had scored a point, he was determined to finish the battle. I quickly wrapped the wire back around the remaining horn and sawed as fast as I could but it wasn’t so easy this time with his powerful head thrashing in all directions. The other two on either side, who had seemed relatively docile up to now, were inspired by his temper and did their level best to out-bawl him. For one sickening moment, I heard a sharp crack as one of the upright planks in the crush gave way under the assault. I kept going. If the crush broke now, there would be a one-horned bullock roaming the Dublin mountains for some time to come.

  It was at this stage, with the battle in full cry, that I noticed a young girl making her way up the drive. She stopped some distance off, obviously horrified by the blood-stained walls, the roars of the cattle and my sweating body being lashed around on one end of a long horn.

  I didn’t stop to explain until the horn dropped to the ground and I staggered away from my roaring adversary.

  ‘Hi, you must be Joe’s daughter?’ I panted. ‘This isn’t as bad as it looks. He’s just a mad bullock that resents human handling,’ I added reassuringly.

  ‘Claire loves to help with the cattle, don’t you, love?’ said Joe proudly. ‘This is all my fault, Claire. If I had done them as calves, it wouldn’t have been half so bad.’