Old Dogs New Tricks

by Peter Anderson

  I think I must have been unconscious for a second or two, and I was a pretty sick boy as I clung to the rails of the yard, bleeding like a stuck pig from the wound over my right eye. I felt terrible, and Chid obviously didn’t like the look of me. He was quickly on the two-way VHF radio in his truck. ‘Bluff to Muzzle …’ and in a few seconds Tina Nimmo at the Muzzle, a few miles upstream, was there.

  ‘Pete’s had a whack. He needs stitching. Can Colin take him out to Kaikoura?’

  Colin could, and in half an hour the Cessna 180 was trundling up the airstrip half a kilometre away. I was bundled in beside Colin and we roared off across the valley, up, up and up against the Seaward Kaikouras, then over and down to Kaikoura’s airstrip. At any other time it would have been exhilarating, but I wasn’t in great shape and I didn’t really appreciate it that day.

  Colin and Tina Nimmo lived in one of the most inaccessible stations in the South Island, Muzzle Station. The only road access is either over the Inland Kaikouras then across the Clarence River in a difficult ford, or through Bluff Station on the track I’d come in on. When the rivers are up, there’s no road access, but Colin has a helicopter as well as his fixed wing aircraft, and they’re a hardy, self-reliant, cheerful and lovely couple. They have brought up their two daughters in fine fashion over the last 35 years, while farming a difficult place extremely well. It’s now farmed by their daughter ‘O’ and her husband Guy Redfern, but this was well before their time.

  At the Kaikoura airstrip one of Colin’s mates picked me up and took me to the little hospital. The legendary Geoff Gordon, the town’s long-standing doctor, was there. I was in my overalls, covered in cow manure, bleeding and dazed.

  ‘That needs a few stitches, Pete,’ he said, and in a few minutes had stitched me up.

  ‘How long since you had a tetanus shot?’ was the next question.

  ‘I don’t know, Geoff, a few years I think,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Well, you’d better have one,’ he said, and without further ado stuck the needle of the syringe with the tetanus antitoxin through a layer of solid cowshit on my upper arm and pushed the plunger.

  I was highly amused, if a little shocked. I thought maybe a bit of a wipe with meths on cotton wool might have been the thing. You know, for hygiene purposes.

  Geoff was happily unconcerned. ‘You’ll be right. See you next time.’ He grinned, and that was that.

  We went back to the aerodrome, and half an hour later we were back at the Branch. Chid was concerned about the hold-up, but he could see I wasn’t feeling great. My head, swathed in a wrap-around bandage, was splitting, and I wanted to be sick, and was.

  So the job was postponed for the day, and instead of doing 300 cows at the Branch, and another 200 at the Mead yards, an hour down the track, we’d only done 100 for the day. The men did a few jobs, I went to bed, and at mealtime there was a bit of tension in the camp.

  The next day was the hardest I ever did as a vet. I had a vile and constant headache and felt ghastly. But there was a job to do. With my heavily bandaged scone, I worked my way through the 200 cows at the Branch, then moved to the Mead, and did another 200. By then it was early afternoon. I had to tell Chid I needed food, so we stopped for a bit, but there were still another 300 at Coverham, another hour away.

  I can just recall a pretty horrible three or four hours there, and by the time we were finished the sun was down. I drove home, sick as a dog, and spent the next day in bed. I’m sure I was concussed — I know Ally was a bit concerned.

  But that experience didn’t affect my great love of Bluff Station. I went there many times, both working and on hunting, social or climbing visits. On one trip five of us climbed Tappy, 2883 metres (9460 feet), from the Branch, camping on the tops the first night. Bob Rutherford was 75 at the time, and though he told Bill Lee, his son-in-law, to ‘just cover me up with stones here’ if he didn’t make it, he got to the top and down safely.

  It’s a wonderful property, magnificent country, and I’ve always loved going there.

  But I never forgot the Kaikoura tetanus shot — straight through the cowshit.

  JUST DO IT — PA

  As any young vet in a rural practice will know, dealing with emergencies and unpredicted jobs for which you have no previous experience is not uncommon. In the field you are suddenly faced with difficult situations for which no planning has been possible. You are on your own and you just have to make do.

  I remember in my early days thinking of all the possibilities that might occur out of the blue, and I tried to be well prepared for any potential rare event. I had all the drugs and equipment I believed would be useful packed into my little Subaru, followed later by a second-hand and far too small Datsun Sunny. As a result I travelled the dusty back roads in a well-laden vehicle carrying too much never-to-be-used equipment and too many drugs that eventually had to be thrown out when they went past their use-by date.

  As years passed, my cars got bigger and became air conditioned and more comfortable and I grew wiser and carried far lighter loads.

  Anyway, with time, rural vets become fairly self-sufficient and invariably carry most things they are likely to require during a routine day. It’s when we are suddenly removed from our ‘office’ and another means of transport is required to get to a job that we can find ourselves short of supplies and it becomes essential that we have the ability to improvise. In Cock and Bull Stories I wrote about one of the worst days in my life, at Molesworth Station, where halfway through castrating half a dozen unhandled three-year-old colts and after one had already died on me, another one herniated through the castration incision. I had to catch the colt in the middle of a large stockyard with his intestine dragging in the mud and re-anaesthetise with the remaining drugs and then clean and replace metres of filthy intestine before he came around. Having flown to Molesworth I didn’t have any spare stocks of anything, so had to make do in a difficult situation. Having a horse herniate through its castration wound is an event you hear about during training but hope like hell you are never going to be faced with. They are not the emergency surgical events you can prepare for, but when they do occur you usually find a way to deal with them.

  John Smart tells a wonderful story about being faced with an unusual situation in the Catlins when he was a very young vet, and barely a year in practice. It really illustrates how he adapted to the situation and helps explain why he has become one of the most well-known and widely respected sheep vets in the country.

  The Catlins lie in the southeast corner of the South Island and contain the only area of native rainforest remaining on the east coast of New Zealand. Although well recognised nowadays, the Catlins were almost a forgotten corner of New Zealand when John arrived in Balclutha in 1976. The main reason for this anonymity was the fact that the only way through most of the area was a very rough gravel road and getting into the depths of the country back then was regarded almost as a bit of an adventure. Because of their relative isolation, the farmers of the Catlins were a particularly hospitable bunch and always pleased to have a visitor to talk to. There is still a very strong community spirit in the Catlins.

  In April 1977 John received a call just after lunch about a cut horse down at Ken and Shirley Mackenzie’s farm at Chaslands, deep in the heart of the Catlins. The message was to meet at their house and they would take him to the horse, which was ‘on a beach’ somewhere. After an hour of thumping over endless potholes and corrugations John arrived at Ken and Shirley’s. He was then informed that the horse was at the far end of Waipati Beach and getting to it would first involve driving in on the access road to the Cathedral Caves, a local tourist attraction. After arriving at the Cathedral Caves carpark he would need to collect all the equipment he might conceivably need and transfer it to packs on a horse. The horses would then be led down the winding pedestrian access track through native bush to the beach and once there mounted up and ridden 5 kilometres to the far end of Waipati Beach. Here they would have to cross the Waipati River and
finally it was a short distance up onto a small plateau to where the patient was.

  Horseriding was a novelty for John. As a classmate of his at Massey, I knew John would go to great lengths to avoid anything to do with horses. And he will admit to not having a lot of interest in matters equine. So he had only ever ridden a horse once before, as a small boy and reluctantly. This was to be his first real ride and it was 5 kilometres there and 5 kilometres back. Luckily the horse was a placid one and to John’s relief behaved himself. It was a nice sunny afternoon and he almost enjoyed the 40 minute trek along the beach with the native bush on one side and the breakers of the South Pacific rolling in on the other. Due to lack of recent rains the Waipati River was not too high, and after fording it there was a short trek up onto a small grassy plateau above the river where John’s patient stood by an old rusty one room corrugated iron musterer’s hut.

  Thankfully getting to our patients is not usually this involved. And while that part of the job was enough of an ordeal John then had to cope with his favourite animal, which had more of a problem than he had predicted. This horse had a very deep cut to the back of its front leg near the elbow. What had happened was Ken and Shirley had saddled up the horse with some equipment to go fencing. They had strapped a spade to the saddle and at some point the saddle had slipped causing the spade to dig into the back of its front leg.

  It was an extensive wound that was going to take more than a sedative and local anaesthetic. Back then we didn’t have the wonderful tranquilisers now available and so more often had to resort to a general anaesthetic to cope with difficult-to-stitch wounds. The most common drug we used then was an intravenous short-acting barbiturate anaesthetic — Thiopentone. The recovery phase from this could be long and wild. When you anaesthetise a horse you need a reasonable-sized area for the horse to fall onto but more importantly an area large enough for the horse to recover on. Getting to their feet in a groggy state means they stagger around a fair bit. Unfortunately for John, he only had the one small flat grassy area available, on two sides of which there were steep banks to the river below. John reckons he tried unsuccessfully to put out of his mind visions of a ‘drunk’ horse staggering off during the recovery phase and heading over the bluff and crashing onto the rocks in the riverbed below.

  He organised the gear he would need and sedated and then anaesthetised the horse. It dropped to the ground with the cut leg uppermost, much to his relief. Ken, after one quick lesson, became an anaesthetist’s assistant and, while John cleaned up the area round the cut and the wound itself, he sat on the horse’s shoulder holding a syringe of anaesthetic in the jugular vein. Because Thiopentone only lasts for a short time the horse required several small top-ups to remain under for the duration of the surgery. And it would take some time to suture this mess back together again. When John sensed the horse getting a bit light he would get Ken to push a few more millilitres into the vein. John worked as quickly as possible because the more times you top up the longer and wilder the recovery phase is likely to be.

  It was a challenging clean up and suturing job but once the surgery was finished and all the equipment removed from the vicinity then came the potentially tricky recovery. They waited quietly after the horse first started to stir, not wanting to disturb it — the longer it took for the horse to try to stand the better. Eventually the horse lurched to its feet and stood there wobbling. To John’s relief it didn’t try to take off. In the end the recovery he had been stressing over turned out to be somewhat of an anti-climax. The job ended up being a six and a half hour mission but a very successful one. The wound healed up well and the horse was back on normal duties within a couple of months.

  After the long journey back John stayed for a well-deserved albeit rather late cup of tea with Ken and Shirley. During the course of the conversation the fact that John was marrying his girlfriend Lois in about a month’s time came up. Before he knew what was happening Ken had loaded their old second-hand black and white television into his car. This was much appreciated since Lois and John didn’t have two pennies to rub together but John says that this is typical of the friendly nature of the Catlins residents. This TV did exactly another two and a half years because John recalls it eventually died in November 1979 at the time of the Erebus disaster.

  John had a demanding but memorable day, faced his fears, and was rewarded with lifelong friends and a TV set.

  After dismounting at the end of that day back in 1977 John has never been back on a horse.

  ANGORA ANGUISH — PJ

  The 1980s were a time of significant change in New Zealand. The extraordinary social and monetary changes brought about by the Lange Labour government and its architect of reform Roger Douglas caused an unprecedented blossoming of apparent instant wealth among a middle New Zealand which had lived with austerity for generations.

  Merchant banks (What on earth were they? we said) sprang up, cafés appeared on town and city streets, nightclubs and bars appeared or upgraded, and stayed open all night. People were able to borrow large sums of money, often with little security. You could borrow 70, 80, 90 per cent of the value of your house, something unheard of for our generation.

  In the rural scene the nil standard value of livestock meant valuable stock could be bought and written down with huge implications for tax savings. It was meat and drink for entrepreneurial investors.

  One by-product of that scenario was a huge surge in interest in Angora goats, which produce mohair, the lustrous fibre prized by some designers and manufacturers of garments. The mohair industry at that time was small, but almost overnight, purebred Angora goats, both does and bucks, became highly valuable, based on their scarcity and a lot of hype. At one stage bucks were selling for up to $100,000, and does up to $25,000: very large sums in 1986. Fortunes were made rapidly, and in many cases lost as rapidly later on.

  With purebred Angoras being scarce, the question was: how to get more of those high-value animals? The veterinary profession found itself at the centre of the craze, for that is what it was. The answer, some believed, was embryo transfer. The drive came largely from city entrepreneurs, and a few country people who had Angoras already, and some others who saw it as a way of making a fast buck — no pun intended. In most cases, the hype and expectation turned out to be greater than the reality, but there were some successes, and they were very exciting times to be a vet.

  Embryo transfer, or ET as it became known, involves treating the female animal during her reproductive cycle so that she produces not just one or two eggs, but many. If she is then inseminated at the right time by a top buck, the resulting embryos, potential little goats, become very valuable too. A doe can only carry two or perhaps three kids in gestation, but if the multiple fertilised embryos are harvested from her a week after mating, then transferred two at a time to surrogate does, they can be carried to full-term and produced as purebred kids. The result is that high-performing does may have 10 or 12 or more offspring in one year, rapidly increasing the quality of the Angora population and also providing high-quality animals for sale.

  It’s technical stuff, and while it might be old hat now, in the 1980s it was very much cutting-edge reproductive medicine, both in the understanding of the necessary treatments and in the very delicate surgery involved.

  Our friend Roger Smith, farmer, rural banker and lateral thinker, rang us one day.

  ‘What do you know about embryo transfer in goats?’

  We didn’t know much at all, but after a bit of prompting from Roger on how it would be good for us professionally to know how to do it, we agreed to find out. We could all make some money as well.

  A few vets around the country had just begun to experiment with ET and Richard Lee, our vet friend in Waipukurau, was prepared to share his knowledge.

  Pete and I flew to Waipukurau in a small aeroplane for the day, with experienced pilot Trevor Collins in the left seat, Pete A in the right, and yours truly perched queasily in the rear.

  Learning new and inter
esting techniques was heady stuff and, with Richard’s attention to detail, a good lesson for us. We travelled home in the little aeroplane, confident we could gear ourselves up and use ET to move a significant step forward, professionally and financially. We were broke, both with young families, big mortgages and a new business, so we definitely saw ET as an opportunity.

  Roger had further plans. Errol and Jean Batty farmed Angoras close to Blenheim and were prominent players in the industry. They had won the coveted Diamond Fleece, the premium industry award, and were renowned for having good stock. Roger suggested we approach them with a view to using their goats, our expertise and Roger’s land and premises for an ET programme.

  Jean, a very good client, who had brought her business to Anderson & Jerram when we set up, was a kind but pretty sharp-minded person. Errol, an accountant, was gentle and thoughtful but also a businessman. Convincing them to put their precious animals up for risky surgery wasn’t going to be easy.

  One evening we had a meeting at their house. Carefully, Roger outlined the plan. He would build a surgery to our specification, and provide the grazing and the practical management of the hormone programme. Pete A and I would provide the professional advice as well as the surgery, egg collection and transfer to recipient does. The Battys would provide the donor does, 12 of their best, and a high-quality buck. Roger, Pete and I would buy the recipient does.

  The Battys would own 50 per cent of any resulting progeny, the Smiths and Anderson & Jerram the other 50 per cent. Then came the shock. The Battys wanted us to guarantee the life of the does, at a price of $25,000 each. A written guarantee would be necessary. This was a fair blow to us. At the time, our houses were worth about $35–$40,000 each, all highly mortgaged, and we had a large amount of bank debt in the business. Survival was a monthly challenge.