It's a Vet's Life
It’s a Vet’s Life
This is a story of sex, violence and coarse language. You should seek your parent’s permission before listening to this story!
My story starts with a very ‘supportive’ headmaster who advised me not to waste either my time or the University’s by attempting a career in Veterinary Science. His advice was very good as it had the effect of making me more determined to prove him wrong. The outcome of the advice was that after completing my Intermediate year at Auckland University I applied for one of sixteen bursaries to study at the University of Queensland. As only fifteen applications were received I got one! I must say in defence of my headmaster that my academic record somewhat supported his view of my future career. While I had a very satisfying period as an undergraduate I will leave that for another story. The last words from our University lecturer were, that as new graduates, we would need a ‘Good car, good lab and a good wife’ – in that order. The order is wrong – a good lab should come first – just joking!
Despite having been bitten, kicked, scratched, urinated on, defaecated on, rolled on and had attempts made on me of gross indecency by some overenthusiastic rams my period as a practising veterinary surgeon was most satisfying and rewarding! My thanks to all the animals and most of the owners!
We had been married ten days when we arrived in January 1960, to work in the farming town of Pio Pio in the King Country – population 323. When driving through recently the population was still the same according to the notice. It does not look as though the rural recession has affected Pio Pio!
Back to the practice of veterinary science. Harold my senior noted that I could have the first day settling in and could do the night calls - which he noted were minimal at that time of the year.
Ha ha my very first case as a paid practitioner was an owl that had been caught on the extended side mirror of a logging truck. It had a severely lacerated wing. I recollected vaguely that anaesthetics had to be administered to birds with great caution. My entrepreneurial efforts were to use a condom (normally used for ram semen collection) with a wad of ether saturated cotton wool in the business end. The bird's head was stuffed in to the open end with much antagonism. A very professional examination of something I new nothing about led to the conclusion that amputation was the only answer. The hapless bird, on recovery (prolonged), became a star, riding around the country sitting on the crash bar inside the cab. It became a treasured member of the truckie’s family. My ego was very inflated, being recognised as an instant expert on the management of damaged birds! We had a Xmas card from the bird for the next few years!
In the practice area two vets had 990 sq.miles to cover. We each averaged 50,000, miles a year (80,000k to the uneducated), and changed cars twice every year. Friday nights were interesting. My car received a 1000 mile service every week at 6pm.The job consisted of me doing the grease and change with the mechanic doing plugs and points. Once trust was established I was allowed to venture into these latter areas. The ritual was that I took along a few bottles of beer and they were consumed during the process, repeated weekly. During that time I caught up with the local gossip and compared it with the interpretations I heard on my rounds (which sometime differed). They were the good times – now we are scared to look under the bonnet. My tool kit in those heady days was a screwdriver, spanner and points gauge
One of my best vet’s car stories related to my friend Mike from Gisborne. Mike was rushing to a case in his VW (the common car for new graduates), when he rolled it over several times. He came to, opened his eyes and found he could see nothing except a grey haze –“I’m blinded he thought”. When he finally had the courage to move his arms he could feel a sticky ooze all over the reachable parts – “my God I’m also bleeding to death”! His surgical training instinctively told him to desist from further movement till medical services arrived some time later. When they finally arrived they removed the tight fitting cardboard box from his head – blindness solved. The sticky ooze problem was also quickly resolved – a bottle of the very sticky chemical calcium borogluconate had shattered and spread itself over his body! Mike walked away practically unscathed from that VW!
A significant veterinary role was testing the vital parts of rams for their virility. A particular flock of Perendales are not to be forgotten for several reasons. Firstly they belonged to the father of a now famous NZ rower and secondly they had only one thought - when they saw a bent backside in front of them, irrespective of the fact of the status, qualifications or sex of the new vet!
One soon learned that when treating downer beef run cattle for metabolic disorders that you always requested the owner to hold the head end during treatment as often the animal’s recovery was spectacular. The reason for this was that it gave the vet at the back end the advantage of getting over the nearest fence first, whilst the owner was racing away from the active end, often with the ungrateful animal in hot pursuit.
Not all cattle were like this. One stud bull when having his feet trimmed, would kindly lift them like a horse when he knew a manicure was in the offing.
That same property presented an interesting challenge. A stud Hereford cow had a lump on the side of its face. Initially it was diagnosed as 'woody tongue', a treatable condition, due to its firmness and location. Called back a week later, when the animal’s progress had been nil, further heroic examination with a syringe revealed nothing but air. This called for a serious examination. Who would have expected it to reveal a tennis ball firmly embedded behind the back teeth. The family did reveal then that they could not locate one missing tennis ball in the area beside the court where the bull resided.
A philosophy drilled into me by my partner was that if it was good enough for the farmer to be up in the middle of the night with sick animals it was good enough for the vet to be available. It was however surprising the number of calls at the conclusion (not during) of All Black test broadcasts matches from abroad. There were the other odd ones e.g. where a horse had colic in the early hours of the morning. When questioned, the farmer did admit that the animal was keeping his wife awake by rolling around outside the bedroom window. A similar case was where a poodle 30 miles (50k) away had been playing with a marble late at night. Suddenly the sound ceased and the marble was nowhere to be seen. This was serious the owner was told to sit up with the animal and to keep it moving and with a bit of luck the marble would appear sometime the next day. It did not, but the owner did find the marble once daylight appeared!
Another interesting process I inherited from my senior partner was the fact that a bottle of whisky often turned up at cold, wet and late night calvings. History has it that the farmer was originally invited to bring a good whisky along with the other paraphernalia to the calving. When the odd farmer objected to giving the patient the best whisky, they we quickly informed it was not to revive the patient!
Talking of All Blacks reminds me of two prominent All Blacks who had there house cow collapse late one night in the middle of winter. The experience was unforgettable – if only for the fact, when giving instruction that the hapless animal had to be got under cover, these two burly warriors joined their arms under the cow and carried it several hundred metres to cover.
Many 'normal' jobs do occur outside 'normal' hours. Calvings are no exception. One notable occasion was when I had promised my wife a night at the local picture theatre and received a calving call. The calving completed we arrived late at the movies in the pitch dark (it is not all theatres by the way,that have the luxury of a hitching rail outside and a saddle rail inside - to stop your saddle going astray). Out of the darkness, just as we were going to sit down a deep voice said "white honkies on the otherside eh!" Reverse racism was alive and well.
Talking of late nights and not seeing my wife too often during spring calving pressures, I should not have been surprised the night I staggered in to bed and my wife said “who is it”! She also objected to one of my prize possessions being stored under the bed – a probang, which is a long hollow, leather clad tube to stick down cow’s throats to dislodge turnips and treat bloated animals. Unfortunately, it had to be stored flat and coiled and under the bed was the safest place. My wife by the way became a dab hand at describing to farmers where to stab a cow that had bloat – a life threatening disease. However, despite her good intentions the farmer occasionally forgot which side she had noted to stab!
Talking of calving, it was mostly that the vet got the difficult cases. My first calving was an exception. It had been attempted by the farmer for an hour or so before calling us, and as a consequence it was a bit of a mess. The only problem was that the head was turned back. It was simply a matter of pushing the calf back in, turning the head and pulling it out. It only took a few minutes. I had great pleasure in telling my senior partner of this case. He looked at me long and hard. His only comment that I should have left it in there longer to make it look difficult and then the farmer will not be embarrassed and more importantly will
think he has got his money's worth.
A famous story in the district in the spring rush was when my partner was leaving in rather a hurry after a calving and issuing convalescent instructions on the run as he drove a way. When the farmer requested him to wait for him to take it all in, his laconic comment was reputed to he "run faster”
My partner was regarded as the unelected mayor of the town. His pronouncements held great weight in the community but he was less than prepared for school morning talk given by his youngest on the subject of 'what my dad does'. The talk was brief and to the point - "my dad kills cats. If you want your cat killed give him to my dad".
However his other pronouncements to the kids at the local school carried weight when he described to an awestruck class the dramatic effects of treating downer cows and how they apparently arise from the dead. Within days he had a call from a local farmer with a downer cow. The farmer explained that his children had taken in the vets talk and lined up on the back of the cow to stop it meeting a rather sudden death from the farmer. The animal was duly treated and rapidly rose to its feet and staggered away. As my partner was about to leave he was stopped by the farmer. "Hang on mate I've got another one for you”, and with that he grabbed a shovel and started digging. In brief, he found the treated cow's recovery so spectacular that he commenced digging up a cow that had expired the previous week.
We were often invited out by the friendly locals for dinner. One dinner that we were not at, was with old Lloyd. He was asked at dinner how his new, expensive prime rams were, that he had bought the previous week. A glazed look came over Lloyd's face as he leapt to his feet and rushed to the woolshed to find that the rams he had left there a week ago were alive - just. They did survive. Lloyd lived for his farming and all else went by the board. It was nothing for him to come into the stock agents a week after it had been raining with his with his windscreen wipers still running!
Quite a large part of the practice was involved with pigs. One regular job was to castrate the old boars before they went to the meat plant. This was to reduce boar taint - the smell that accompanies the entire animal. One colleague further North had developed a technique to safely subdue these rather ferocious animas for the surgery. It was to inject barbiturate in to the testicle, wait till it was absorbed and the animal fell, and then rapidly performed the inevitable. Everything proceeded well, except that some days later the farmer noted that the boar had only just come around. A further discussion with my colleague revealed that he had given me the dose for the normal barbiturate but recommended the drug form that we used to euthanase animals. One other precaution that one had to take with this type of surgery was to remember to advise the farmer that neither the dogs nor humans have access to the injected surgical remnants. There have been some close calls!
A common experience, especially when dealing with large Lands and Survey blocks and Maori Trusts under development, was to have a horse left at the gate for me to ride some distance into the yards at the centre of the property. I usually insisted that the horse be a quiet one as my riding was rather irregular. The inevitable response was that they would leave the kid's horse. I can tell you that they were usually the most arrogant, bad tempered animals and been taught all the tricks that their owner could muster to get you off their back!
My wife as well as being the local Brownie leader (by default a position reserved for the younger vet's wife) was also the unpaid nurse and general factotum. I have forever recalled the agility she was able to muster climbing over a 2m cattle rail when 8 months pregnant, when a cattle beast turned on her in the yard, while mustering with no other help!
It was also in one of these remote station situations that I performed my first caesarean on a heifer that had ‘accidentally’ become pregnant. The farmer rubbed his hands together with anticipation, in stating that he had never seen this operation before. It took me all my time in my naivety to not state that I had not done one before. However all was well.
You need to be brought back to earth on occasions - the spinster’s cat was my wife’s favourite story. She always says that if I don’t tell the story she will! Any vet who has not had this happen is mendacious! You tend to put off non urgent small animal desexing during the spring season. However, the aging spinster school teacher was insistent that her ‘queen’ tortoiseshell cat was getting advances and insisted on urgent action. After much cursing etc etc during the necessary surgery, my wife quietly said to me 'Alan it has the look of a tomcat! Problem solved and out with the nutcracker! The spinster was most impressed with the time I gave to a most difficult operation!
Vets were a gregarious lot. One practice used to meet once weekly to exchange ideas. They met in the garden shed of the senior partner, and supposedly, unbeknown to the teetotal wife he supplied a few glasses of the Northern Vet Supplies (now Bomac) medicinal wine (50c a flagon). A later outcome of these meetings was the group rushing out of the shed during one meeting frothing at the mouth. The wife had deliberately substituted a flagon of detergent for the wine.
We did have our social gatherings - even though we were sometimes not invited back to places like the Chateau when during one conference the piano ended up coming down the stairs! It was a great conference though!
In the King Country the regional vets got together once a year for a formal social gathering. One gathering caused some embarrassment to Jim when he turned up at the door, in his dinner suit, after attending a calving on the way. The doorman refused him entry. It took Jim some time to be convinced that he would have to remove his gumboots to get entry!
The main difficulty in a remote rural practice was that of running a fire brigade type individual animal service. It was not economic for the practice or the client with the distance we had to generally travel. It made me aware that there had to be a better way to service such areas by providing preventive type information and demonstrating many standard procedures such as parasite control, trace element management strategies and vaccine usage. Animal and pasture management were also built in to these strategies. It was at this time 1 really became aware of the difficulties that geographical isolation imposed on farming families, including their access to, management of and use of information. The germ of an information programme started to emerge in those years. It was some years later, after a number of research and management positions that I had the opportunity to put a programme into place in the Meat Board, as the founding Executive Director of the NZ Meat Research and Development Council.
Leaving practice, I headed to research and was involved in developing the salmonella vaccine that is used today. I continue to maintain that the vaccine works by killing the carrier animals - a system demonstrated with typhoid by the German Army in WW2. It is also of interest to note that related project was the development of a successful genetically modified vaccine. The vaccine relied on the introduction of a gene to salmonella that required the salmonella to die once an antibiotic in the medium was utilised as a food source, having already produced a good immunity but with insufficient survival time to kill the host animal. Unfortunately the antibiotic could produce a rash in the handler!
Off to Queensland to be a University lecturer, untrained but undaunted! A week after arriving I had the task of taking the first 8am lecture to a class of 95 (my final year, at the same university had 14 - it would have been 15 if one student had not dropped a cigarette butt down the surgery sink just as the professor arrived for a surgical demonstration. The sink blew out of the bench as someone had poured the excess ether down the plughole!). On arrival I was confronted with students in pyjamas, noddy caps, comflakes, thermos flasks and newspapers. With a promise to allow them 5 minutes to finish breakfast, I left and returned to find
all was well.
My favourite story was that of a lecturer visiting from the USA who described the use of tranquillisers shot from a bow and arrow, to subdue wild animals in Africa. He was taken on a kangaroo hunt in Western Queensland. A 16 mm movie was made of the event. One shot shows him with a boomerang, leaning out the side of a Landrover. The next shot shows the kangaroo, flat on the ground with a boomerang draped round its neck. Bob (dubbed the ‘Great White Kangaroo Hunter’) lived off that story for many years, with no need to admit the kangaroo had been laid low previously with a rifle shot!
This is a story of sex, violence and coarse language. You should seek your parent’s permission before listening to this story!
My story starts with a very ‘supportive’ headmaster who advised me not to waste either my time or the University’s by attempting a career in Veterinary Science. His advice was very good as it had the effect of making me more determined to prove him wrong. The outcome of the advice was that after completing my Intermediate year at Auckland University I applied for one of sixteen bursaries to study at the University of Queensland. As only fifteen applications were received I got one! I must say in defence of my headmaster that my academic record somewhat supported his view of my future career. While I had a very satisfying period as an undergraduate I will leave that for another story. The last words from our University lecturer were, that as new graduates, we would need a ‘Good car, good lab and a good wife’ – in that order. The order is wrong – a good lab should come first – just joking!
Despite having been bitten, kicked, scratched, urinated on, defaecated on, rolled on and had attempts made on me of gross indecency by some overenthusiastic rams my period as a practising veterinary surgeon was most satisfying and rewarding! My thanks to all the animals and most of the owners!
We had been married ten days when we arrived in January 1960, to work in the farming town of Pio Pio in the King Country – population 323. When driving through recently the population was still the same according to the notice. It does not look as though the rural recession has affected Pio Pio!
Back to the practice of veterinary science. Harold my senior noted that I could have the first day settling in and could do the night calls - which he noted were minimal at that time of the year.
Ha ha my very first case as a paid practitioner was an owl that had been caught on the extended side mirror of a logging truck. It had a severely lacerated wing. I recollected vaguely that anaesthetics had to be administered to birds with great caution. My entrepreneurial efforts were to use a condom (normally used for ram semen collection) with a wad of ether saturated cotton wool in the business end. The bird's head was stuffed in to the open end with much antagonism. A very professional examination of something I new nothing about led to the conclusion that amputation was the only answer. The hapless bird, on recovery (prolonged), became a star, riding around the country sitting on the crash bar inside the cab. It became a treasured member of the truckie’s family. My ego was very inflated, being recognised as an instant expert on the management of damaged birds! We had a Xmas card from the bird for the next few years!
In the practice area two vets had 990 sq.miles to cover. We each averaged 50,000, miles a year (80,000k to the uneducated), and changed cars twice every year. Friday nights were interesting. My car received a 1000 mile service every week at 6pm.The job consisted of me doing the grease and change with the mechanic doing plugs and points. Once trust was established I was allowed to venture into these latter areas. The ritual was that I took along a few bottles of beer and they were consumed during the process, repeated weekly. During that time I caught up with the local gossip and compared it with the interpretations I heard on my rounds (which sometime differed). They were the good times – now we are scared to look under the bonnet. My tool kit in those heady days was a screwdriver, spanner and points gauge
One of my best vet’s car stories related to my friend Mike from Gisborne. Mike was rushing to a case in his VW (the common car for new graduates), when he rolled it over several times. He came to, opened his eyes and found he could see nothing except a grey haze –“I’m blinded he thought”. When he finally had the courage to move his arms he could feel a sticky ooze all over the reachable parts – “my God I’m also bleeding to death”! His surgical training instinctively told him to desist from further movement till medical services arrived some time later. When they finally arrived they removed the tight fitting cardboard box from his head – blindness solved. The sticky ooze problem was also quickly resolved – a bottle of the very sticky chemical calcium borogluconate had shattered and spread itself over his body! Mike walked away practically unscathed from that VW!
A significant veterinary role was testing the vital parts of rams for their virility. A particular flock of Perendales are not to be forgotten for several reasons. Firstly they belonged to the father of a now famous NZ rower and secondly they had only one thought - when they saw a bent backside in front of them, irrespective of the fact of the status, qualifications or sex of the new vet!
One soon learned that when treating downer beef run cattle for metabolic disorders that you always requested the owner to hold the head end during treatment as often the animal’s recovery was spectacular. The reason for this was that it gave the vet at the back end the advantage of getting over the nearest fence first, whilst the owner was racing away from the active end, often with the ungrateful animal in hot pursuit.
Not all cattle were like this. One stud bull when having his feet trimmed, would kindly lift them like a horse when he knew a manicure was in the offing.
That same property presented an interesting challenge. A stud Hereford cow had a lump on the side of its face. Initially it was diagnosed as 'woody tongue', a treatable condition, due to its firmness and location. Called back a week later, when the animal’s progress had been nil, further heroic examination with a syringe revealed nothing but air. This called for a serious examination. Who would have expected it to reveal a tennis ball firmly embedded behind the back teeth. The family did reveal then that they could not locate one missing tennis ball in the area beside the court where the bull resided.
A philosophy drilled into me by my partner was that if it was good enough for the farmer to be up in the middle of the night with sick animals it was good enough for the vet to be available. It was however surprising the number of calls at the conclusion (not during) of All Black test broadcasts matches from abroad. There were the other odd ones e.g. where a horse had colic in the early hours of the morning. When questioned, the farmer did admit that the animal was keeping his wife awake by rolling around outside the bedroom window. A similar case was where a poodle 30 miles (50k) away had been playing with a marble late at night. Suddenly the sound ceased and the marble was nowhere to be seen. This was serious the owner was told to sit up with the animal and to keep it moving and with a bit of luck the marble would appear sometime the next day. It did not, but the owner did find the marble once daylight appeared!
Another interesting process I inherited from my senior partner was the fact that a bottle of whisky often turned up at cold, wet and late night calvings. History has it that the farmer was originally invited to bring a good whisky along with the other paraphernalia to the calving. When the odd farmer objected to giving the patient the best whisky, they we quickly informed it was not to revive the patient!
Talking of All Blacks reminds me of two prominent All Blacks who had there house cow collapse late one night in the middle of winter. The experience was unforgettable – if only for the fact, when giving instruction that the hapless animal had to be got under cover, these two burly warriors joined their arms under the cow and carried it several hundred metres to cover.
Many 'normal' jobs do occur outside 'normal' hours. Calvings are no exception. One notable occasion was when I had promised my wife a night at the local picture theatre and received a calving call. The calving completed we arrived late at the movies in the pitch dark (it is not all theatres by the way,that have the luxury of a hitching rail outside and a saddle rail inside - to stop your saddle going astray). Out of the darkness, just as we were going to sit down a deep voice said "white honkies on the otherside eh!" Reverse racism was alive and well.
Talking of late nights and not seeing my wife too often during spring calving pressures, I should not have been surprised the night I staggered in to bed and my wife said “who is it”! She also objected to one of my prize possessions being stored under the bed – a probang, which is a long hollow, leather clad tube to stick down cow’s throats to dislodge turnips and treat bloated animals. Unfortunately, it had to be stored flat and coiled and under the bed was the safest place. My wife by the way became a dab hand at describing to farmers where to stab a cow that had bloat – a life threatening disease. However, despite her good intentions the farmer occasionally forgot which side she had noted to stab!
Talking of calving, it was mostly that the vet got the difficult cases. My first calving was an exception. It had been attempted by the farmer for an hour or so before calling us, and as a consequence it was a bit of a mess. The only problem was that the head was turned back. It was simply a matter of pushing the calf back in, turning the head and pulling it out. It only took a few minutes. I had great pleasure in telling my senior partner of this case. He looked at me long and hard. His only comment that I should have left it in there longer to make it look difficult and then the farmer will not be embarrassed and more importantly will
think he has got his money's worth.
A famous story in the district in the spring rush was when my partner was leaving in rather a hurry after a calving and issuing convalescent instructions on the run as he drove a way. When the farmer requested him to wait for him to take it all in, his laconic comment was reputed to he "run faster”
My partner was regarded as the unelected mayor of the town. His pronouncements held great weight in the community but he was less than prepared for school morning talk given by his youngest on the subject of 'what my dad does'. The talk was brief and to the point - "my dad kills cats. If you want your cat killed give him to my dad".
However his other pronouncements to the kids at the local school carried weight when he described to an awestruck class the dramatic effects of treating downer cows and how they apparently arise from the dead. Within days he had a call from a local farmer with a downer cow. The farmer explained that his children had taken in the vets talk and lined up on the back of the cow to stop it meeting a rather sudden death from the farmer. The animal was duly treated and rapidly rose to its feet and staggered away. As my partner was about to leave he was stopped by the farmer. "Hang on mate I've got another one for you”, and with that he grabbed a shovel and started digging. In brief, he found the treated cow's recovery so spectacular that he commenced digging up a cow that had expired the previous week.
We were often invited out by the friendly locals for dinner. One dinner that we were not at, was with old Lloyd. He was asked at dinner how his new, expensive prime rams were, that he had bought the previous week. A glazed look came over Lloyd's face as he leapt to his feet and rushed to the woolshed to find that the rams he had left there a week ago were alive - just. They did survive. Lloyd lived for his farming and all else went by the board. It was nothing for him to come into the stock agents a week after it had been raining with his with his windscreen wipers still running!
Quite a large part of the practice was involved with pigs. One regular job was to castrate the old boars before they went to the meat plant. This was to reduce boar taint - the smell that accompanies the entire animal. One colleague further North had developed a technique to safely subdue these rather ferocious animas for the surgery. It was to inject barbiturate in to the testicle, wait till it was absorbed and the animal fell, and then rapidly performed the inevitable. Everything proceeded well, except that some days later the farmer noted that the boar had only just come around. A further discussion with my colleague revealed that he had given me the dose for the normal barbiturate but recommended the drug form that we used to euthanase animals. One other precaution that one had to take with this type of surgery was to remember to advise the farmer that neither the dogs nor humans have access to the injected surgical remnants. There have been some close calls!
A common experience, especially when dealing with large Lands and Survey blocks and Maori Trusts under development, was to have a horse left at the gate for me to ride some distance into the yards at the centre of the property. I usually insisted that the horse be a quiet one as my riding was rather irregular. The inevitable response was that they would leave the kid's horse. I can tell you that they were usually the most arrogant, bad tempered animals and been taught all the tricks that their owner could muster to get you off their back!
My wife as well as being the local Brownie leader (by default a position reserved for the younger vet's wife) was also the unpaid nurse and general factotum. I have forever recalled the agility she was able to muster climbing over a 2m cattle rail when 8 months pregnant, when a cattle beast turned on her in the yard, while mustering with no other help!
It was also in one of these remote station situations that I performed my first caesarean on a heifer that had ‘accidentally’ become pregnant. The farmer rubbed his hands together with anticipation, in stating that he had never seen this operation before. It took me all my time in my naivety to not state that I had not done one before. However all was well.
You need to be brought back to earth on occasions - the spinster’s cat was my wife’s favourite story. She always says that if I don’t tell the story she will! Any vet who has not had this happen is mendacious! You tend to put off non urgent small animal desexing during the spring season. However, the aging spinster school teacher was insistent that her ‘queen’ tortoiseshell cat was getting advances and insisted on urgent action. After much cursing etc etc during the necessary surgery, my wife quietly said to me 'Alan it has the look of a tomcat! Problem solved and out with the nutcracker! The spinster was most impressed with the time I gave to a most difficult operation!
Vets were a gregarious lot. One practice used to meet once weekly to exchange ideas. They met in the garden shed of the senior partner, and supposedly, unbeknown to the teetotal wife he supplied a few glasses of the Northern Vet Supplies (now Bomac) medicinal wine (50c a flagon). A later outcome of these meetings was the group rushing out of the shed during one meeting frothing at the mouth. The wife had deliberately substituted a flagon of detergent for the wine.
We did have our social gatherings - even though we were sometimes not invited back to places like the Chateau when during one conference the piano ended up coming down the stairs! It was a great conference though!
In the King Country the regional vets got together once a year for a formal social gathering. One gathering caused some embarrassment to Jim when he turned up at the door, in his dinner suit, after attending a calving on the way. The doorman refused him entry. It took Jim some time to be convinced that he would have to remove his gumboots to get entry!
The main difficulty in a remote rural practice was that of running a fire brigade type individual animal service. It was not economic for the practice or the client with the distance we had to generally travel. It made me aware that there had to be a better way to service such areas by providing preventive type information and demonstrating many standard procedures such as parasite control, trace element management strategies and vaccine usage. Animal and pasture management were also built in to these strategies. It was at this time 1 really became aware of the difficulties that geographical isolation imposed on farming families, including their access to, management of and use of information. The germ of an information programme started to emerge in those years. It was some years later, after a number of research and management positions that I had the opportunity to put a programme into place in the Meat Board, as the founding Executive Director of the NZ Meat Research and Development Council.
Leaving practice, I headed to research and was involved in developing the salmonella vaccine that is used today. I continue to maintain that the vaccine works by killing the carrier animals - a system demonstrated with typhoid by the German Army in WW2. It is also of interest to note that related project was the development of a successful genetically modified vaccine. The vaccine relied on the introduction of a gene to salmonella that required the salmonella to die once an antibiotic in the medium was utilised as a food source, having already produced a good immunity but with insufficient survival time to kill the host animal. Unfortunately the antibiotic could produce a rash in the handler!
Off to Queensland to be a University lecturer, untrained but undaunted! A week after arriving I had the task of taking the first 8am lecture to a class of 95 (my final year, at the same university had 14 - it would have been 15 if one student had not dropped a cigarette butt down the surgery sink just as the professor arrived for a surgical demonstration. The sink blew out of the bench as someone had poured the excess ether down the plughole!). On arrival I was confronted with students in pyjamas, noddy caps, comflakes, thermos flasks and newspapers. With a promise to allow them 5 minutes to finish breakfast, I left and returned to find
all was well.
My favourite story was that of a lecturer visiting from the USA who described the use of tranquillisers shot from a bow and arrow, to subdue wild animals in Africa. He was taken on a kangaroo hunt in Western Queensland. A 16 mm movie was made of the event. One shot shows him with a boomerang, leaning out the side of a Landrover. The next shot shows the kangaroo, flat on the ground with a boomerang draped round its neck. Bob (dubbed the ‘Great White Kangaroo Hunter’) lived off that story for many years, with no need to admit the kangaroo had been laid low previously with a rifle shot!
posted by Alan at 7:46 PM
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