As he turned and headed off towards Clydevale it slowly dawned on him that the other vehicle, and the driver at whom he had got a reasonable look as he negotiated his rather inappropriately positioned vehicle, possibly fitted the description of the thief at the clinic. By now well recovered from his dozy state he quickly did a U-turn and sped off after the green car. When he caught up with it he could confirm it was a Mitsubishi Mirage, but he could not remember the registration number so he called up the clinic on the R/T. Sure enough, it was the offending vehicle and, judging by the scruffy-looking driver, the same person. So for the next 30 minutes John followed this car around the district, giving Faye back in the office constant updates over the R/T about which road they were now turning into. Faye in turn was relaying this information to the police dispatcher, who in turn was passing the information by their R/T to the police car.
It didn’t take long before the occupant of the car got a bit suspicious of the red Ford Falcon ute tailing him, speeding up and slowing down and following his erratic progress around the backblocks of South Otago. At one point, he pulled over and stopped on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere so John had no option but to do likewise and just sat in his ute behind him. The man finally got out of his car and approached John, who had the uneasy feeling that things could get a bit messy. He quietly locked the door. The man leaned down and through the slightly opened window, accused John of following him around, a not unreasonable accusation since this had by now been going on for at least half an hour. He then sloped back to his car and took off again. The description given to John by the clinic staff was pretty accurate. He was certainly unshaven, greying, overweight, a bit jowly and wearing old untidy clothes. Combined with being a total stranger he would have stood out like a sore thumb at the practice. It was little wonder the staff were immediately suspicious of him.
Obviously unfamiliar with the geography of the area he fortuitously headed back down the road towards Balclutha, in the direction from which the police would hopefully soon be coming. Very soon, from a high point on the road, John could see across a gully to a rapidly approaching police car maybe 2 to 3 kilometres in the distance, so he relayed their relative positions over the R/T and suggested he stop where he was and block the road. The unsuspecting thief came round a corner to find a police car in the middle of the road, and in a manoeuvre worthy of Starsky & Hutch, John boxed him in between the stationary police car and his vehicle. Lance Nicholas, the local constable, duly arrested the man and then, giving John a wink, suggested: ‘Maybe you’re in the wrong job, John.’
The thief turned out to be a fisherman from Featherston in the North Island who had been doing the rounds of veterinary clinics. Luckily Clutha Vet’s Ivomec Injection was recovered in Balclutha from under a hedge where it had been dumped.
For some time afterwards John kept getting asked about his role in catching the thief, or had his leg pulled in some way by various locals who had either heard the transmissions directly or been told about the episode by someone who had. He was told that for some listening in to the R/T channel, work more or less ceased for the 30 to 40 minutes that the chase was on.
Usually unintentionally, we vets end up being the centre of entertainment and amusement, too often at our own expense. In John’s case, however, he ended up a bit of a local celebrity.
And this time he really did have a good excuse for being late to his next call!
A HARD MAN — PJ
Halfway down the east coast of Marlborough, between Ward and Kekerengu, there is some beautiful fertile limestone-based hill country. It rises quite high to the majestic Benmore at 1244 metres, yet is close to the coast, and the views from the top are magnificent. It’s good farming country too, and land down there stays in the same family for generations. The biggest river draining the country, the Ure or Waima, winds out of some pretty rough country in behind, then cuts through a long limestone gorge before emerging onto a flat riverbed notable for its white limestone gravel, as it meanders its last 8 or 9 kilometres to the sea.
It was late autumn on a cool morning as I turned onto the Ure Road off State Highway One, and cruised up the valley to Blue Mountain, the last property on the road. There are quite a few gates, I think I remember six which I had to open and shut, but at the last, there was the property owner, Dave Buick, opening it for me.
‘Gidday, Dave, thanks for that.’ I was truly grateful that he’d walked down the road to get the gate for me. Then, ‘Hell, Dave, what’ve you done to your hand?’
It was wrapped in a very substantial bandage, with a couple of swollen fingers poking out the end. We had 150 cows to pregnancy test, and I wondered how Dave would work the head bail.
Dave looked embarrassed, but he gave a sheepish grin. ‘Aw, the bloody hippy across the creek was coming over and bothering Lauren a bit, so I went over and fixed him up,’ he confessed, then laughed. ‘He won’t do it again.’ Lauren is a lovely, gentle and very attractive woman, and Dave was doing what most red-blooded husbands would do — protecting his patch. But I still wondered how he’d go in the cattle yards with one hand.
I shouldn’t have worried. Dave is a tough guy, and as I worked my way through the cows, he barely flinched as he used his damaged hand. He’d spent years of his young life hunting deer for skins in the Canterbury high country, and a sore hand was just an inconvenience.
It had been a dry autumn and feed was short. Marlborough went through a prolonged drought in the 1980s lasting several years, and this was near the start of it, so farmers were pretty well stocked still. The upshot was, with feed short, Dave needed to get rid of some hungry mouths. I don’t think he always preg tested his cows, but this year he was doing it to find the empties, so he could both lower the numbers and get a bit of cashflow.
It started with the first cow. Gloved and lubricated, I slipped my arm in, and immediately felt the foetus, bobbing in its sac of fluid.
‘Pregnant,’ I called.
‘Bastard!’ from Dave.
Next cow. ‘Pregnant.’
‘Bastard!’
And so it went for the next couple of hours. Normally farmers want as many cows as possible pregnant and are disappointed with every empty. A calf on the ground is money, and a cow which carries no calf has wasted a year of its productive life and eaten a lot of feed, for no net gain to the farming enterprise. But this time Dave wanted plenty of dry cows, and was looking forward to the cash. I think there were only two or three drys in the whole mob, and a constant refrain of ‘Bastard’ as I worked away, watching Dave’s less-than-happy face with every call of ‘Pregnant’ I made.
At the end of the mob Dave was a bit cheesed off, but with typical hospitality he asked me up to the house for a meal, where Lauren cheered us both up with some nice lunch. I drove off down the valley later, reflecting on the wonderful range of personalities I came across in this fascinating job I had.
There’s a bit of a postscript to this story.
Dave was a keen horseman, and either his or Lauren’s favourite horse, named Donnington, a hunter I think, got pretty sick. Pete A was a much better horse vet than me, and he’d diagnosed an impacted caecum in the animal, which meant a reasonably severe colic, or a very sore tum. That’s a crisis for a horse, one that takes some diagnosis, and one that many horses die from. It’s the equivalent of appendicitis in a human, but the caecum is a very large organ, and horses are not the best patients for abdominal surgery.
The treatment for impacted caecum involves a laparotomy to extract the offending organ and surgically empty it. That’s a major operation for country vets, bordering on heroic, but Pete was never short on accepting a challenge and he wanted to do it. Dave was pretty worried. He’d brought the horse into a paddock near Blenheim, and Pete asked me to come and do the anaesthetic. I had my old father staying with me, so I brought him along too. A retired medical specialist, he often came with me, and was always interested in the task and the people.
As I inserted the catheter into th
e jugular vein, then administered a litre of Glyceryl guaiacolate or ‘GG’, the horse’s knees got a bit wobbly, and a couple of grams of Thiopentone sent it down gently on its side, deeply unconscious. (Younger vets will laugh at the anaesthetic mix, but that was what we had in those days, and we did OK with it.)
As the horse went down Dave cracked open a bottle of beer. ‘Big bastard, isn’t he?’ he said cheerfully. Then, ‘Like a beer, Doc?’ to my father. It was about 1 p.m., so Dad declined.
Dave cheerfully sucked on that bottle, then another couple as Pete carefully prepared the abdomen, washed his own hands, gloved up and made his incisions.
Pete’s a very skilful surgeon, and he made this difficult procedure look simple as he located the caecum in the very large tangle of abdominal contents. He was bang on in his diagnosis and as he eased the considerable mass of that organ, and quite a volume of large intestine as well, to the outside of the skin, Dave’s vocabulary became more colourful, and more frequent. In fact it turned into a running commentary, punctuated with pretty rich language and the ‘pop-clink’ of bottle tops coming off. It was really very funny, but we were concentrating hard, Pete on his surgery — I gloved up and helped him empty the caecum for a while — and me on the anaesthetic.
I couldn’t let Donnington wake up and I mustn’t kill him, so doing all that made me feel, as always, that we had a few balls in the air. The long and the short of it is that Pete completed his surgery successfully and we felt quite pleased with ourselves. We left with instructions for Dave and Lauren to roll the still-anaesthetised horse over every hour, until it woke.
As we drove away I asked my dad how he’d enjoyed the day.
He grinned. ‘Colourful buggers, our farmers, aren’t they?’
Yes, they are.
FOOTNOTE
Dave and Lauren told me years later how they had, as instructed, rolled the horse over every hour, until about four in the morning. Then they heard sounds of movement and found it standing. The horse lived, and hunted again. A moment of triumph for all.
TOOTED PACHYDERMS — PA
This is one of the best stories ever of a young vet being thrown in at the deep end. Picture a recent veterinary graduate fresh from university in his first job, alone except for a fellow classmate with even less experience, in a very remote part of the country. He is suddenly faced with a huge animal about which he knows absolutely nothing. Worse than that, this very valuable animal is afflicted with a condition for which there is no proven cure. The vet has a very limited arsenal of drugs and no idea whether the drugs he does have are sufficient in quantity or if they will work. And then to top it off he has not one but three crook monsters to deal with.
This is how a very young Vince Peterson, who soon after would become a well-known and much respected West Coast veterinarian, coped with a very difficult situation, totally outside of his comfort zone. Various versions of this story have appeared over the years but none of them by the person most intimately involved. It is best if Vince himself tells his story as it happened:
In 1964 when I was a new graduate the world was a vastly different environment to today. Many things which we now accept as part of the natural landscape didn’t exist. All telephones were fixed to the wall with pre-dial handsets and they were operated through a manual exchange where the keyboard operators connected the calls as requested. Many of the drugs which we use today did not exist. Many of the surgical techniques we now accept without query had not been developed. Black and white television was just in its infancy and colour television hadn’t yet been developed. And that was the world that existed when the circus arrived at Westport in the spring of that year.
For most of 1964 I had been the sole veterinarian on the entire West Coast since graduating at the start of that year. I had an area that I was responsible for which extended in the north to Seddonville, just south of Karamea on the Tasman coast, and eastwards to the Shenandoah Saddle on the road to Murchison at the top of the Maruia Valley. My territory went as far south as Paringa, a total area that stretched 240 kilometres north and 240 kilometres south. The Haast road opened in 1965.
In the spring, Dick Lim came to the Coast to work as a locum for a couple of months and he became part of what I now call the elephant story. Dick was a classmate of mine from our Sydney days and is Malaysian Chinese. He subsequently worked in New Zealand for several years then shifted to Australia and currently lives near Perth. Dick and I were at home in Hokitika one Sunday evening, which in itself was a rarity, when the phone rang. It was Joe, the owner of the circus which had just arrived in Westport, and he was in a panic.
‘My elephants have eaten tutu and they are really crook.’
I explained to him that the native plant known as tutu produces a specific toxin for which there is no known antidote. This is still as true now as it was back then. The symptoms in cattle include drooling, nausea, excitement, convulsions, coma and death. They may regurgitate as they cannot vomit. I told him that there would be little that I could do but he was adamant I had to come.
Dick and I had a discussion and decided that any attempts at treatment would be futile and, in addition, we did not have enough useful volume of drugs to attempt to medicate three elephants, each of which weighed in the proximity of 5 tonnes. We gathered what supplies we thought we may be able to use and set off north at full speed in my Volkswagen. The quickest route from Hokitika was through Greymouth then up the Coast road through Punakaiki then on to Westport, a run of about 160 kilometres. Dick hadn’t been to Westport before and the state of the road north of Barrytown came as a shock to him. In those days it was unsealed, barely two car widths in parts and had many tight corners. By the time we arrived at Westport and pulled into the racecourse where the circus had set up its headquarters, Dick was feeling decidedly queasy and was several shades lighter than his normal skin colour. We soon found Joe and the elephants.
Apart from not knowing what is safe for them to eat, elephants are exceedingly clever animals. They were being transported around the country on a low-loader. This was not enclosed and contributed to what subsequently happened, as in those days the Upper Buller Gorge was narrow and unsealed. As the truck slowly wound its way down this road the elephants were helping themselves to anything they could reach. In the springtime tutu sends out long fronds and the elephants found these to their liking.
It was usual when they reached their destination that the elephants unloaded themselves from their travelling platform, via four wooden half-barrel sections. The first three of these were laid down in a triangle with the base against the side of the truck, the fourth section fitting on top of the base. The elephants then stepped down using this construction. When they stepped down it became apparent immediately that things were far from right. Jodie, the baby at 21 years old and the cleverest of the three, collapsed and didn’t move from where she had fallen. The two older females, Lena and Rill, were in the big top by the time we got there but were both obviously very unwell. Rill in particular kept going down and getting up again, accompanied by sounds of great pain.
The diagnosis was confirmed by the local boys who had gathered around to take in these strange sights. They had seen the tutu leaves that hadn’t made it into the elephants’ hungry mouths scattered over the decks of the truck and had announced with some certainty: ‘Your elephants been tooted, mister.’
By the time we got there, a tarpaulin had been erected over Jodie out in the middle of the racetrack and an electric light had been set up so that we could see in what was now a dark night. Jodie was very unwell and every minute or so would convulse and stretch out her legs and neck with the familiar non-productive retching sounds of pain. A council of war followed while we figured out what could be done. It was Joe who decided that he had to talk to Lennie Larsen in Sydney, who provided the circus with veterinary advice when they were winter pastured near to Sydney. Professor Larsen had been my surgery lecturer little more than 12 months earlier and I thought that this would be a vain hop
e but if it gave some comfort to Joe, then that was what we would try to do.
Joe and I drove to the post office, leaving Dick in charge in our absence. We went up to the exchange switchboard and explained to one of the operators what we wanted to do. Somehow, and to this day it is a mystery to me how they did it, they tracked Prof Larsen down at his home in Sydney and he answered the call. Being Australian, the Prof knew nothing at all about tutu or tutu poisoning so he sidestepped the issue and said to Joe, ‘Who is the vet you’ve got helping you?’
‘Vince Peterson,’ Joe said.
‘You’ve got the right man for the job,’ was Prof Larsen’s reply as he hung up.
Good grief, if ever there was a hospital pass!
So it’s all up to me and I knew nothing whatsoever about elephants, nothing of their anatomy, their physiology or anything.
Back at the big top Joe decided that we had to make the animals vomit. I tried to talk him out of it as they probably already had because of the nature of the tutu toxin and not only that, their internal organs had had enough stress and strain for one day. Joe wouldn’t be dissuaded so off to town I went again after having phoned one of the local pharmacists who agreed to open up his shop late on a Sunday night. After the initial apologies for calling him out, I explained my predicament. Any emetics I may have had were designed for use in 20 kilogram dogs and that was a long way short of a 5 tonne elephant.
An examination of his apothecaries threw up one possibility and that was a chemical by the name of bismuth antimony tartrate which was known to cause vomiting in humans. I had never heard of it but the chemist said he thought he might have an old jar of it in his backroom of long-abandoned drugs. Sure enough he found one. It was an old-fashioned wide-mouthed ground glass jar with the corresponding stopper covered in years of dust. Once we had cleaned that off, it was time for some mathematics. Taking the dose for an average human weighing 80 kilograms and multiplying by 60 would be near enough. Once we had determined it could be administered intravenously, we made up three bottles of the drug dissolved in sterile saline and we were in business. Forget about the obvious errors of not knowing any inter-species dose rate differences, the obvious lack of sterility and lack of knowledge of anything whatsoever about elephant physiology; this would have to do.
Old Dogs New Tricks Page 10
