Old Dogs New Tricks

by Peter Anderson

  All this brings me to Mark Wiseman, who has a wonderful ability to laugh at his own misfortune and some amusing stories about his early days as a vet. Mark joined our practice in 2000. He had arrived back in New Zealand after practising in Britain for a few years and before that had graduated from Massey. Before coming to us he worked for a couple of years in Pahiatua.

  While working on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel during his very early days in practice, Mark overnight became a famous arsonist. He had arrived at a farm to dehorn some calves with a gas-powered dehorning iron. However, to keep out of the hot midday sun the farm workers persuaded him that he should do this in the barn. Unfortunately there were no pens in the barn so the calves were running loose around him as he dehorned each one.

  All was going well until one calf got its leg caught in the gas bottle pipe which yanked the burning iron from his hand. The iron then fell to the straw-covered floor which instantly ignited. To make matters worse the calf also sent the gas bottle flying, snapping the regulator off. The steady stream of gas escaping from the bottle turned it into a very impressive flame thrower, shooting out a flame about a metre long. Mark and the workers immediately evacuated the building. Fortunately all the calves had the sense to follow them.

  This impromptu barn burning happened in a sleepy little village and it took a while for the local fire brigade to arrive. Mark waited anxiously for them, all the time expecting the gas bottle to explode, while the calves happily enjoyed their freedom in the field next to the barn. Fortunately for him the boss was away for the day and much to Mark’s surprise the farm workers thought it was all a good laugh. When the fire brigade did finally arrive they were suitably impressed by the situation and sprang into action, building a make-shift pool into which they dropped the burning gas bottle. All the locals had gathered to watch and Mark became famous overnight as word spread very quickly on this small island. He thinks it was the most exciting thing that had happened in the village for a number of years.

  The barn was a historic building but luckily had been made to last with solid stone walls and a slate roof. The only casualties were a couple of windows and some thick wooden rafters which were a bit charred. No doubt Mark, in future, would think twice about dehorning unpenned calves in a hay barn, even if it did mean working in the hot midday sun. He would also, after his next experience, learn that it’s not just the unpredictability of the patient he had to be aware of but also that of the owner.

  Mark got more than he bargained for when he was asked by his boss to make a house call to visit a sick cat. Mark thought nothing of the fact that the boss was trying to hide a smirk on his face. At his destination a middle-aged lady answered the door, holding her cat in her arms. Mark chuckles when he recalls her asking him if he had come to see her pussy. She ushered Mark in but as soon as he was through the door the cat decided to flee for freedom, scrambling up the lady’s chest, over her shoulder and rapidly out of the cat flap. At this point the lady lifted her jumper right up exclaiming, ‘Ooh! The little bugger just scratched my tit!’ As she was wearing nothing under her jumper, not even a bra, Mark had to admit that yes, indeed, the cat had left a huge scratch all the way across her large breast! And as the cat was nowhere in sight Mark saw no need to hang around any longer and shot out the door himself.

  Back at the clinic his boss asked how the house call had gone, this time unable to hide his smirk. It turned out that this particular client was well known for randomly exposing herself and often requested house visits, a job usually handed over to the newest vet on the block.

  While the rather traumatic barn incident quite possibly influenced Mark’s future, encouraging him to avoid calves and horns and hay barns and farms, the experience with the escaping cat and its owner never stopped Mark from doing house calls or dealing with companion animals.

  Bruce Taylor from Rangiora and I have followed similar paths in our careers. We both entered vet school together as the older students of our class, having had to complete other degrees before the powers that be let us study vet science at Massey University. We both started as general practitioners doing everything, but he eventually specialised in horse work, especially horse reproductive work, while I went almost solely into being a sheep and beef veterinarian.

  Bruce knew it was time to drop the small animal work when he had to deal with a certain dog that really had him fooled. This New Year’s Day encounter made him realise that his days looking after small animals were numbered.

  He received a call at 3 a.m. from dog owners who reported they had run over their chihuahua-cross and that it was paralysed and unable to walk or stand. He got out of bed, dressed, went to the clinic and admitted the dog, where he confirmed that indeed it was unable to move. However, after examining the dog and finding all its cardinal signs normal and not being able to detect any signs of pain, he felt that it would be fine to leave the dog until the morning when he could give it a more thorough assessment and take X-rays if necessary.

  This he did on returning to the clinic, and when he could find no obvious problems tried to see if the little dog could stand — not inside on the slippery floor but outside on the clinic lawn where it would have a reasonable chance of standing upright and moving.

  This the little dog did in a very convincing manner when gently placed on the grass — he was off and away across the paddocks in seconds. Bruce gave chase but his hurdling of electric fences and leaping over ditches was not a patch on the dog’s ability to run under and through them, and in minutes it had disappeared. Losing a paralysed dog is not easy to explain, and the day was spent putting announcements over the radio, endlessly calling around the vicinity of the clinic, and general hand-wringing. Bruce asked one of his partners, Gerry Stone, if his children (he and Jenny had a few) could go out and look for a very fast-moving white part-chihuahua dog. Around 7 p.m. he received a very welcome phone call — the dog had been seen but was proving difficult to catch. Eventually it was captured and discharged to the owners with the diagnosis of sore paws.

  The owners eventually admitted that they had actually run over the dog on their way out on New Year’s Eve at 7 p.m. but waited until they got home to call him. It was only then that they also told Bruce that the dog hated men. That, Bruce reckons, was the final straw — he had had enough of little dogs and some of their owners.

  On the other hand good experiences tended to excite our interests and enthusiasm for areas of work. The ‘insides’ of animals always fascinated me. As a young boy I couldn’t wait for my father to open up a hogget he had killed for mutton or an old ram for dog tucker and have a good play around with the innards. I guess it followed that I got very interested in doing autopsies on animals. Doing a post-mortem on a crook sheep can give an instant answer as to why the rest of the mob might not be thriving. I found this area of veterinary work fascinating and rewarding and became reasonably competent at it. Because of my interests, I identified for the first time in Marlborough — through thorough post-mortem examinations — certain diseases and deficiencies, and this was well before simple diagnostic blood tests were available. These included Johne’s disease in sheep (a chronic debilitating fatal disease), bovine virus diarrhoea (BVD) in cattle, and iodine and vitamin E deficiency in goats and sheep. So it was natural for me to want to spend my time and efforts doing the stuff that turned my wheels: to work with mobs and herds and identify causes of poor health and performance and then help farmers implement management changes to improve production.

  My fascination with looking inside animals was also a very good reason to get out of companion animal work. I would find any excuse I could to do an exploratory laparotomy on a cat or dog. In my companion animal days if I couldn’t immediately determine what was wrong I wanted to open the animal up and have a look inside. This practice would nowadays be frowned on, and rightly so, but it did often give me instant answers. It amazed me, though, how many times I did an exploratory procedure and couldn’t find anything untoward, but on recovering
from the anaesthetic and fairly basic surgery an animal that had been mysteriously off-colour for months suddenly got much better. The only explanation I could give was that I had let the bad air out!

  However, a desire to do exploratory laparotomies on companion animals or just do a post-mortem on them was definitely not good veterinary practice. It really was time I left these animals and their owners to the far more competent small animal specialists.

  The opportunities available to new veterinary graduates are limitless and many vets end up doing the sort of work they never dreamed they would be doing during their university days. Chance and fate and early experiences all influenced which direction we took. Perhaps in the end most of us settled on the sort of work where we were most happy with the degree of predictability of the job. Some found the unpredictable nature of the work they were doing too stressful and had to change direction, while others revelled in the variety and intrigue and excitement. Large animal work tended to be far less predictable than small animal work, and that’s what kept me interested.

  AT THE BLUFF — PJ

  The most common, and the most repetitive, job we ever did as sheep and beef vets was pregnancy testing cows. Most progressive farmers, and even a few who might not be described that way, see the necessity to check the cows, mostly in the first trimester of pregnancy, to see if they’re in calf. There are several reasons for doing this.

  First, an empty (or dry) cow is not going to produce anything to sell. She’s also eating a lot of grass, energy that a pregnant cow could be putting into her calf. Another reason is that the autumn and early winter is a time when there’s not a lot of cash coming in for most sheep and beef farmers, so the sale of any empty cows helps the bank balance. A final reason is that an abnormally high number of dry cows gives the farmer a heads-up that there’s a problem. Is there an infertile bull, or a mineral deficiency? Is the farmer not feeding the cows enough or, worst of all, is there an infectious disease such as vibriosis (a bacterial disease of the reproductive tract) in the cows?

  So pregnancy testing is a crucial part of the rural vet’s life, and every autumn we’d begin to test, or PD (pregnancy diagnose), the herds in the district.

  It’s a tight breeding year for the average cow. Her pregnancy takes 275 days, she then has at least six weeks of post-partum anoestrus before she starts cycling again, which only gives her about 50 days at most to get pregnant if she’s going to calve at the same time each year. She only cycles every 21 days, so she’s got to get pregnant in the first or second cycle. Late calvers lead to all sorts of practical difficulties, and an uneven line of calves to sell, if that’s the management on farm. It’s important for all cattle farmers, beef or dairy, to have a fertile herd which more or less sticks to a schedule, and whose cows calve within a relatively narrow timeframe.

  If all this is a bit tedious to read, I apologise, but it’s a significant job and the practice of pregnancy testing led to a number of stories which we found pretty funny.

  Marlborough is an extensive region, with long drives up and down dusty, blind-ended roads, and often long drives between properties, so we spent many hours on the road at PD time of year. I really enjoyed it. We were working with fine people who became our friends and the job itself was a good one, once you were fit for it. We did it all manually, and it was healthy hard work. These days ultrasound scanners have made the job much less physically demanding.

  In my first year there was an element of anxiety. Like most new graduates, I hadn’t done enough PD to be really confident, and I sweated my way through the first few herds. If I made any serious mistakes, I now apologise to those farmers, but no one ever accused me of doing so.

  Later, it became very routine, but I still enjoyed it, yarning to the farmer, who was probably catching the cow’s head in a crush and holding it while I shoved a lubricated gloved arm into the cow’s rectum, and with my fingers palpated the uterus underneath it, through the rectal wall. A pregnant uterus contains fluid, and after about eight weeks of the pregnancy you can ‘ballot’ the foetus, that is, feel it bouncing in the fluid with the tip of your fingers.

  One of my favourite places to go for PDs was Bluff Station in the Clarence Valley. The front country is in the Kekerengu Valley, 45 minutes south of Blenheim on State Highway One, but the bulk of the property lies out of sight of the casual observer, in the mighty Clarence Valley.

  The Clarence River begins in the Molesworth/St James headwaters, not far from where a number of the big rivers of the northern South Island originate. The Waiau, Wairau, Clarence, and even the Buller headwaters all come from an area the size of one large station.

  The Clarence then runs south towards Hanmer, turns eastward then northeast and courses between the two great Kaikoura Ranges, Seaward and Inland, before cutting out to the east coast at Clarence Bridge.

  Bluff Station occupies a very large area of the more northern part of the river, and lies against the eastern side of the Inland Kaikouras, with the great mountains of Alarm and Tapuae-o-nuku the dominant land forms. We would test the cows at three or four different yards, at various places throughout this long station, usually 200 to 400 at each place.

  One day, sometime in the 1980s, I left home early to go and test all the cows at the Bluff. I’d be away for two days, as it was a good three hours’ driving from the homestead to the back yards at the Branch, the furthest outpost on the station.

  I was, as always, excited to be going there. It’s a magnificent wild place, and Chid Murray, the owner, is a good friend. Sue, his wife, has been a lifelong friend of Ally’s too, so it was more than just a business trip. It was fun. Not many people get to see Bluff Station and I always found it a special place.

  I was at the Glencoe homestead at Kekerengu by 8 a.m. and, I can’t be sure, but I probably left my vehicle there and travelled with Chid in his 4WD Toyota. Or I might have taken mine. Over the hill we went to the major outpost of Coverham, where the married couple lived, about 45 minutes from the front. The road was windy and the going slow; in this modern world it took a special type of couple to live there. They did have power, and could just get TV, but otherwise they were fairly isolated.

  At Coverham we picked up a couple of men, and in two or three trucks headed south, up the valley. Other men were already at the back of the station, mustering the cows. The rough road runs along the back of the Chalk Range, a long and steep limestone ridge which runs parallel as a sort of foothill range to the main Inland Kaikoura Range. A number of sizeable streams draining the range cut through the limestone, and each of these has to be forded, which isn’t always possible in wet weather.

  There is an outstanding geological feature of world significance here, one I knew nothing of in those days, and many times I blithely drove or was driven past it. At the Mead Stream a great twisted and curved limestone face, 200 metres high, has been exposed by centuries of river action. In the middle of this strata, a thick dark line, curved as the earth has twisted it, divides the face. The bottom edge of this dark line, where it transforms back to white limestone below is of great significance. It marks the K–T boundary, the exact year in which the Cretaceous period ended and the Tertiary began. This is one of many sites in the world where this phenomenon, identified by geologists in the late 1980s, can be seen.

  At that point in time, 66 million years ago, a meteorite smashed into Mexico, causing massive and ongoing atmospheric dust, climate change and chemical change to the whole world. It was the event which led to the rapid demise of the dinosaurs and a chain of biological evolution which eventually saw the human race emerge as the dominant species on earth. The evidence is right here in Marlborough and of immense significance to our understanding of the history of our planet. But I knew nothing of this, as we crossed first the Swale, then the Mead and the Limburn, and finally the Dee, and climbed out to the Branch hut and yards.

  It was a beautiful day and I can still see that magnificent landscape, the two great ranges, the men bringing a couple of hundred
cows in from the holding paddock.

  We had a quick bite of lunch, then I stripped, donned my overalls and apron/leggings, taped myself into two pairs of plastic gloves, and we were away. Chid was on the head bail catching the cows to hold them still, and I moved in and out of the vet gate, testing each one in turn, lubricating my arm every four or five cows to make the job easier.

  Each time I pushed my arm in, I could turn my head just a little to the left and see the mighty peak of ‘Tappy’ high above. Chid and I yarned and the job was going well. Most of the cows were pregnant, but a number of young cows were often dry on the Bluff in those days. Chid was developing the country from rough scrub, and it was hard to find enough feed to give the first calvers the preferential nutrition they needed. The result was that a higher number of those cows didn’t cycle in time to get pregnant second time around. It took a few years to beat the problem, but as the development kicked in, things got a lot better. At the time it worried Chid quite a lot, and I was very conscious of that. Pete A and I worked with him for several years to solve the problems, and his farm consultants were important to him too.

  After about an hour, when I’d tested around 100 cows, the pen behind was empty. The men had gone off on horseback to get another mob up, so Chid and I went back to bring another yard full of cows up towards the race. I wasn’t concentrating enough, and as we shooed 30 or 40 cows into the yard, I closed the steel gate a bit fast. The gate touched the hock of a cow and the laws of Newtonian physics were immediately realised as she kicked. Her hoof caught the gate at maximum velocity, the gate swung back violently, and hit me hard on the temple. I went down like a sprayed fly, and I can just recall lying in the mud, with cows running back over me, and Chid standing over me keeping me from further harm.