Old Dogs New Tricks

by Peter Anderson

  Two weeks later, on a beautifully calm morning, Ray Patchett flew me, the propeller and my son George back to D’Urville, where we put the now straight prop back on my Pawnee.

  For some reason, although I really can’t blame him, George flew back with Ray. While his Cessna 180 was a lot faster than the Pawnee I did pass them after half an hour because Ray was flying around doing steep turns up a side gully. He was showing George some of the intricacies of ag flying, and while George had always shown an interest in that type of flying after that experience he really was hooked. He is now a very experienced ag pilot in Gisborne and amazes me with his skills and ability in a very demanding flying job. Secretly I had also always wanted to be an ag pilot but knowing the attrition rate for the job in those days and knowing my nature I probably would not still be around.

  So while my story had a happy ending it would, however, have all been very different if I had better assessed the dangers of landing on that strip that day. Andrew Whelan, a very experienced local ag pilot with an exemplary safety record, wouldn’t have made the same mistake. Some weeks later on another trip to D’Urville Island to finally catch up with Steve and Janet at Ragged Point, I flew past Andrew who was spreading fertiliser on Paul Newton’s property near Havelock. I wagged my wings and said a cheery ‘Good morning, Andrew’ over the radio.

  ‘Where are you off to this beautiful morning?’ he said.

  ‘D’Urville.’

  ‘Should be a good day for D’Urville.’

  ‘I hope so — I don’t like that Waitai strip in a nor’wester. It’s not a nice place to be.’

  ‘Oh no — it definitely is not!’ he replied, and I could almost see him smiling.

  While Andrew would have no doubt made a perfect landing under the same conditions he would more than likely have flown over, taken a look and wisely headed back to Blenheim.

  WACKER — PJ

  Wacker Anderson was a legend in Marlborough, long before I arrived in 1979.

  A generation older than me, Wacker lived and sort of farmed at Mount Patriarch, at the end of the Northbank Road in the Wairau Valley, Marlborough’s most substantial catchment.

  We would occasionally be called to do something on his farm, TB testing cows or castrating a colt. More often Wacker would arrive in his genuine old London black cab to purchase something at the vet club, where I worked for three years when I first arrived in Blenheim.

  He was a man of medium build with jet-black hair slicked back, and his swarthy skin had all the hallmarks of a heavy smoker. In short, Wacker looked like a bit of a rogue, and readers may recall Private Walker, the character in the TV show Dad’s Army, who he closely resembled. Walker was always on the make. As was Wacker.

  Legend had it that he’d been in the New Zealand Army in Italy during World War Two, where he engaged heavily in the black market. Petrol, cigarettes, food, army vehicles of all sorts, including tanks, and army stores were all traded with who knows whom. Wacker had returned after the war with a bulging bank account, however he’d achieved it, and bought Mount Patriarch, a pretty tough place in the shadow of the rugged Richmond Range. The flats were fertile but unmaintained and the hill country was rapidly reverting to scrub when I first visited. A few rangy cattle and some ragged-looking sheep grazed quietly about the flats.

  In Blenheim, Wacker was famous for his past, but he’d done a few dodgy deals in town too. He was particularly famous for raffling the same Christmas turkey around numerous pubs. He and his mate would travel from pub to pub in the old London cab, selling a two bob raffle for a turkey.

  ‘Fifty tickets, to be drawn tonight.’

  At each one he’d read out the winner, who just happened to be there at the time. It was Wacker’s accomplice, unknown to the patrons, and he won it at each of at least 10 pubs.

  It was probably small change to Wacker, but that was the man. If there was a bob to be made, he’d make it.

  Like most rogues and conmen, Wacker had a gentle side. He really did love his animals, and he took in a lot of young men who had been either in prison or in trouble with the law. He would give them lodgings and a small stipend in exchange for work on the farm. And he might even get them to be his accomplice around the pubs.

  When I arrived at work at the vet club one morning, I looked at the workbook. There was a very unusual entry: Mount Patriarch, vaccinate 15 cats.

  Now most people brought their cat to the clinic for its annual, or more often triennial, cat flu and snuffles vaccine. We would examine the cat, check it was healthy, and give it a subcutaneous injection of the vaccine in the scruff, behind the neck. Most cats never know they’ve had it. But a vet visit is a stressful time for a cat. They don’t like leaving home, travelling in a car, or meeting strange people, as a rule.

  So to go to someone’s home for multiple cats was a reasonable request. But 15 cats? At Mount Patriarch, 60 kilometres up an unsealed road? It was certainly novel, so I put my hand up for the job. I’d been to the farm before, and it was always an adventure to see Wacker.

  I loaded up the rather small Ford van the vet club committee had decided was suitable for their new vet. (It wasn’t. It was too small and light for rough country road, and I was very pleased after a year to hand it on when a new graduate arrived.) I took off up the valley to Renwick, along State Highway Six to the Wairau Bridge, then turned left up the valley once over the river.

  The North Bank is very different from the rest of Marlborough. It’s made up of a series of steep streams running out of the very rugged forested Richmond Range, which divides the Wairau catchment from the Pelorus to the north and west. It’s a rough and magnificent range rising to Mount Richmond at over 1700 metres and is nowhere less than 1100. The underlying geology is schist and semi-schist, and when the forest cover is removed it’s very erodible. In the nineteenth century the Richmond Range was the centre of major gold rushes, mostly on the Pelorus side, but some on the Wairau.

  The North Bank, lying under all this, is shaded from the sun, particularly in winter, and the frosts are harder, the rainfall higher than the land to the south of the Wairau. Over 150 years it’s proved to be a bad place for farming on the hills, just too tough, demanding and unproductive. So the hills are either reverting to native, or adorned with Pinus radiata, another issue. Forestry has stabilised the hills, but after harvest, that geology is susceptible to the effects of heavy rain. (Part of my life as a rural councillor, that is years after this story, has been to try to convince foresters to think more about environmentally friendly harvesting and planting methods.) The flats are better, but are now being rapidly covered in grapes.

  However in 1980, the time we’re discussing, the North Bank was a serious, if minor part of Marlborough’s pastoral farming community.

  As I sped up the winding unsealed road, past the bushed headlands and into each successive narrow side-plain of farming, I thought of the farmers and the gold miners of the past. I wondered and mused about the very tough pioneers who had trekked these valleys and made their harsh lifestyles here.

  After Top Valley, the last of the series of side streams, the road became even rougher as it wound for 45 minutes up the tight steep bank, never far from the Wairau River. Eventually I broke out onto the rather scruffy plains under Mount Patriarch and before long the old homestead was in sight.

  The day was a bit dismal, misty and grey. There were some nice cattle in a paddock by the homestead as I pulled into the yard. Wacker emerged from the house to greet me.

  ‘Gidday, young man.’ He was brusque but friendly. ‘Grab your gear and come inside.’ His brilliantined hair shone in its ebony blackness as he led me inside. ‘Watch your head, mate,’ he called as he went through the back door.

  Hanging from a meat hook in the middle of the doorway at head height was a huge ox liver, quite fresh, and dripping blood onto the concrete floor. I eased my way past this curiosity and entered the kitchen.

  A tough-looking young man sat at the table, and a multitude of cats roamed the
old room.

  ‘Shut the bloody door, mate. Don’t want to let the cats out.’ Wacker was slicing strips from the liver and placing them on a plate. The cats gathered. Feeding time.

  And then I noticed there was something odd about the cats. Each one had a small neatly shaved patch on the back of its neck.

  ‘Hygiene, mate,’ said Wacker. ‘Don’t want them getting infections from the needle.’ Using a safety razor he and his man had carefully shaved a 2 centimetre square patch from every cat, down to the skin. It was all very neat and tidy.

  I’ve never seen that before or since. Wacker had learnt something from the army: neatness, order. And as Wacker and his mate brought the 15 cats to me, one at a time, and I carefully vaccinated each one under their watchful scrutiny, I mused what a rich and wonderful life I was exposed to in rural Marlborough.

  DRUG SHRINKAGE — PA

  Deer had never really been farmed on a large scale anywhere in the world before we started it here in New Zealand in the early 1970s. As a result there was very little published information or knowledge about deer farming for any of us to fall back on. We had to learn alongside the farmers as we went, about all aspects of deer health and performance and how to manage them in captivity. We were also involved in one way or another with their capture. In the early days of deer farming, yards and sheds were often primitive affairs and any means of restraint like crushes non-existent so resorting to the dart gun was not uncommon. Using darts which are only capable of holding a small volume of liquid meant a small dose of tranquiliser had to be effective to heavily sedate a wild animal for capture or to remove the new season’s antler growth from stags in captivity. We were suddenly introduced to a new range of potent tranquilisers, the demand for which we soon found exceeded our immediate requirements in the veterinary field. Others, including those capturing deer from helicopters, some deer farmers, and those wanting to experiment on themselves, were all desperate to get hold of these ‘restricted’ drugs.

  As stags first start to grow their new season’s antlers this rapidly developing tissue goes through a phase during which its surface has a soft velvety appearance. This unique, soft and very vascular tissue, known as ‘velvet’, is a valuable dietary supplement used extensively in Chinese medicine. Because of this value it is harvested at a critical time during the late spring and early summer period. The other reason for removing velvet at this stage is that if it is left on it is prone to damage and causes discomfort for the stag. This is not an uncommon occurrence when running large mobs of stags. The new season’s developing antler is very sensitive and cannot be removed without anaesthetising the velvet. This is usually achieved by first tranquilising the stag and then injecting local anaesthetic around the base of the antler before removal.

  So the drugs used for capture and for develveting were very powerful and under strict control, with only vets and specially licenced operators using dart guns, usually operating from helicopters, having legal access to them. This created a problem. As well as there being a bit of a black market among farmers and hunters for the drugs there was also a demand for them from drug users who obviously saw an opportunity for a whole new range of experiences. Self-administration must have been a wonderful hallucinatory experience in some cases while for others it would have been lethal. The result was a spate of burglaries around the country and even some recorded deaths of users of these stolen drugs.

  One drug that the burglars for some reason seemed to target, or perhaps it was just because it was invariably kept with other restricted drugs, was Euthatal or as we commonly called it — ‘purple death’. This is a high-strength pentobarbitone, coloured purple, but was in the early days primarily used at lower strengths as a long-acting intravenous anaesthetic. As its name suggests this drug is used for euthanasing animals and is an essential in the drug cabinets of all veterinary practices. I have no idea why anyone would want to play around with it. It has a horribly drawn-out recovery phase and I always felt for my patients when we used it as an anaesthetic for long procedures before gaseous anaesthesia became routine. There is a very fine line between knocking yourself out for a few hours of sleep and knocking yourself out forever.

  Some drug users did get their calculations wrong and went to sleep forever. In Cock and Bull Stories we tell how our clinic was broken into soon after Pete J and I set up on our own and several drugs (including our deer tranquilisers), two bottles of beer, and a dart gun were stolen. While the police did recover the dart gun it was not before a person had killed himself with the Anderson & Jerram clinic takings. It wasn’t the pentobarbitone but a drug we used for inducing vomiting in dogs called Apomorphine. They obviously thought it was a sort of morphine and I suspect that person had a rather unpleasant death.

  Another time my car was broken into while I was away with the family for a weekend. We found this a little disconcerting, suspecting our house had been watched and that they knew my car would have held drugs. On returning home and opening the garage door I found the boot jemmied open and all the drugs from inside laid out on the garage floor. They had systematically gone through them all and taken the ones they wanted. These days we are far more careful about carrying such dangerous drugs in our vehicles. Only when they are known to be a likely requirement for a job do they make it to the car where they are by law placed in locked safes.

  Luckily the era when practices needed to carry large quantities of high-potency deer capture drugs has also passed. As the economics of deer farming have become more marginal, and the number of farmed deer is more than enough to provide replacements, the value of wild captured animals has plummeted and there is not the same demand for these drugs. No doubt word has spread throughout the underworld that the returns from breaking into veterinary practices are not worth the hassle.

  In those early days, Noel McGirr, a North Canterbury vet, good friend and real character with a wonderful sense of humour, tells of the time he arrived at his Amberley clinic one morning to find the back window jemmied open. On cautiously entering the clinic through the rear entrance he could hear what sounded like one of the kennelled dogs groaning. However, he soon realised the groaning was not coming from the kennels but from the surgery. The first thing he noticed when peering into the surgery was that the drug cabinet was open. He then became aware of a very neatly dressed intruder lying on the floor below the cabinet from whence came the groaning. Beside him were two carry bags packed with a load of deer sedatives among old clothes and a tidy pair of shoes.

  The intruder having found what he had come for obviously couldn’t wait to try the product before leaving. He had already changed his clothes but hadn’t got around to changing his shoes or making it to the door before the effects of the drug kicked in. While Noel waited for the police and ambulance to arrive he had an incoherent conversation with the robber. The latter did make some apologetic gestures to Noel as the police took him away and Noel believes he even promised reparation, but, not surprisingly, none was ever seen.

  CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONALS — PJ

  It’s a strange old game, our one as vets. We’re highly trained science-based professionals and mostly we earn the respect, and sometimes even the affection, of our many clients and often our patients too, especially the smaller ones.

  Large animal vets are in an unusual situation when it comes to seeing our clients. We make house calls rather than our patients coming to us; most other professionals are visited in their offices, clinics or workplaces.

  Being at our clients’ farms means that we’re slightly on the back foot. You have to tread very carefully on someone’s home patch. On more than one occasion in my early career I was made to feel like the schoolboy visiting the headmaster by a couple of clients. While most of the farmers we saw were welcoming and generous, some were pretty standoffish, and one or two just damned rude. Many later became our lifelong friends, and it was very noticeable after Pete A and I set up our own private practice that the vast majority of our farmer clients did indeed become cl
ose to us. There was a respect for our being in private business, like them. The few who had been hard on us when we worked for the vet club generally stayed with the vet club.

  These friendships meant that large animal work was rewarding and interesting and we looked forward to our farm calls. We would arrive and leave on the best of terms.

  But just once I didn’t. My professionalism slipped under some unusual stress factors, and I’m only slightly ashamed to admit I behaved inappropriately and lost a client. (Not that Graham was the only client we ever lost. We sacked a couple, who were just too hard to do business with, and in the big melting pot of human nature, a few probably didn’t think we were good enough for them, for myriad reasons.)

  The year 1989 was a horribly dry one in Marlborough. The south of this lovely region has a pretty dry climate anyway, but that year was a doozy. And when it’s dry, farmers can struggle to feed their stock, and that understandably worries them. It can be very stressful. Their finances are often affected, and most farmers feel deeply for their animals. They hate seeing them suffer.

  So that summer of 1989 and 1990 was a bad one. In March we were really busy pregnancy testing cows, with the empty ones going to the works to relieve the pressure on feed and to generate a bit of income.

  Then Pete A crashed his aeroplane. He was flying in a very strong nor’wester, and had already had a big day when a gust tipped him as he was landing at Rod and Perena Heard’s place at Kekerengu on the south coast. He landed upside down on a tennis court. The plane didn’t bounce far from the point of impact.