The Travelling Vet Read online

  I read on. Agricultural animals, elephants, hyrax, loris, alpacas, amphibians, avians, emus, penguins, vultures, fish, chelonians, crocodilians, snakes, lizards … and that was where the list ended. It was time for some lateral thinking. Of all the animals on the list, the closest had to be a chelonian – a turtle, terrapin or tortoise – with a hard shell covering most of its body. I scrolled back up to the ‘chelonians’ section. ‘The left hind limb socket, subcutaneously in small species and intramuscularly in larger species … then the implantation site is sealed with tissue glue.’ Jackpot! I closed the window on the computer and grabbed some tissue glue from the prep-room cupboard, and then with a renewed air of confidence strolled back through the pharmacy, picking up the microchip and microchip reader as I went, before re-entering the consulting room.

  ‘Right, I think I’ve got all I need. It’s quite a simple procedure,’ I said, with an assured authority that suggested I knew what I was doing. ‘The microchip goes into the muscle of the left thigh. I need you to hold Arnie on the table while I first clean the leg and then insert the chip. After that I’ll glue the skin closed to prevent the microchip coming out. Armadillos don’t have elastic skin,’ I added, ‘so there’ll be a hole left from the needle insertion if we don’t glue it closed.’

  ‘Oh, OK, that does sound pretty simple,’ he said, a note of relief in his voice. ‘I wasn’t sure if he would need an anaesthetic or something.’ He picked Arnie out of his box and placed him on the table.

  Arnie was fairly cooperative at first, but having a twelve-gauge 1.5-inch needle thrust into his upper thigh did not appear to be his idea of a fun day out, so when I tried to expose his limb from beneath the armour plating I soon discovered how immensely powerful his legs were, even with Mr Smith helping to hold him down. It took all my strength and both hands to extend the leg into the position I needed for injecting the microchip, but this of course left me with no hands free to prep, inject or glue the wound. A third pair of hands would be required!

  ‘He’s a strong little fella,’ I commented, as casually as I could. ‘I think I might need some assistance.’ I left the room in search of a nurse, and found Louise, our head nurse, seeing to one of the in-patients.

  ‘Any chance of a hand microchipping an … animal?’ I asked, deliberately omitting to identify the exact species I was referring to. I had to keep the element of surprise – the look on her face would be priceless, I thought.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll just be a moment, when I’ve finished with Poppy.’

  ‘Thanks, I’m in the end consulting room.’

  It was only a few moments before Louise knocked on the door and came in. Her reaction was better than I could have wished. When she laid eyes on Arnie her whole body immediately convulsed backwards in fear, shock and disbelief. I think she would have yelled out an expletive, but her professionalism converted it into ‘Oh goodness, not quite what I was expecting.’

  ‘Louise,’ I said, allowing her a moment to regain her composure. ‘This is Mr Smith, and this is Arnie, a nine-banded armadillo. The microchip goes in his left thigh, and so I need some help extending his leg out from underneath his armour. He’s pretty strong, so can you hold the leg while Mr Smith holds Arnie’s body, so I can prep it and then implant the microchip?’

  Stepping over to the table, she tentatively reached out to touch Arnie on the back. As her tactile senses adjusted from the fur she was accustomed to handling, to the unusual texture of leathery shell, and her emotions to the lack of any affectionate response from her human-to-animal contact, she relaxed into the situation and her professionalism took over.

  The procedure was quickly and effectively performed, and after assuring myself that the skin glue had set, and scanning the left hind thigh to ensure the chip was in place, Mr Smith returned Arnie to the cat box, thanked us both gratefully and headed out of the door.

  As the door closed behind him, Louise caught my eye.

  ‘In ten years, that is definitely the weirdest animal I have ever seen in here,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the warning!’

  ‘I was a bit surprised too,’ I admitted. ‘I thought it was going to be a cat.’

  ‘I have one question, though. North Devon isn’t exactly overrun with armadillos, so if it goes missing, it’s not exactly going to be hard to track down, is it? So why go to all the trouble of getting it microchipped?’

  Although I knew there were good reasons, I had to admit Louise had a point.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued. ‘How did you know to put the microchip into the back left thigh?’

  ‘You call yourself a veterinary nurse and you didn’t know that?’ I replied with a grin, taking advantage that I’d closed the window on the computer, hiding the evidence of my Google search. ‘I thought it was common knowledge.’

  Armadillos: fast facts

  Dasypus novemcinctus: The nine-banded armadillo

  Distribution: North, Central and South America.

  Description: Nocturnal mammal. Twenty different species.

  Names: The young are called ‘pups’; a group of armadillos is called a ‘fez’.

  Life span: Up to 20 years.

  Habitat: Armadillos live in burrows, ideally suited to a warm, rainy environment such as rainforest, but they adapt to scrubland, open prairies or grassland. They have a poor amount of fat so can’t cope in cold or dry environments, where they lose heat and water easily.

  Diet: Armadillos are insectivores, feeding chiefly on ants, termites and worms, which they lap up with their sticky tongue.

  Gestation: 122 days, but implantation is delayed for between 3 and 4 months after mating.

  Weight: 85 g at birth, reaching 2.5–6.5 kg as adults.

  Growth: They wean at 3 months, are sexually mature at 1 year, and breed annually.

  Anatomy: Covering the back, sides, head, tail, and outside surfaces of the legs is an armoured shell composed of bony dermal scutes, covered by non-overlapping, keratinized scales connected by flexible bands of skin.

  Body temperature: 30–35 °C.

  Interesting fact: If sufficiently frightened, armadillos can jump 4 feet straight in the air. They can also cross rivers by either floating across them by inflating their intestines, or else by diving to the bottom of the river bed, and running across, because they can hold their breath for up to 6 minutes.

  Predators: Many, including alligators, raptors and bears, but the cougar is the most common.

  Conservation: The nine-banded armadillo is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as being of least concern. Its bigger cousin, the giant armadillo, however, which inhabits the grasslands, forest and wetlands of South America, is classified as vulnerable. On the critical role being discovered about this previously mysterious species, as an ecosystem engineer and advocate of biodiversity through the continual production and abandonment of their burrows, see: www.rzss.org.uk/conservation/our-projects/project-search/field-work/giant-armadillo-conservation-project.

  2

  GIRAFFE

  ‘Wildlife is something which man cannot construct. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Man can rebuild a pyramid, but he can’t rebuild ecology, or a giraffe.’

  Joy Adamson

  I stepped out of my lodge into the darkness of a brisk African morning. It was 5.30 a.m. on Saturday 9 August; sunrise wasn’t for another hour. The chill of the morning embraced me and with that, the last memory of my cosy handcrafted African bed evaporated. Eight days before I would have been about to wake for work as a vet in the Cotswold town of Cheltenham, but for August my home was the Ngonigoni game reserve just outside Nelspruit in the South African province of Mpumalanga. I was assisting Dr Cobus Raath and his team at Wildlife Vets, a practice specializing in the capture, relocation, clinical treatment, research and education of African wildlife, for a month.

  Unlike many African countries, South Africa has established a vibrant game farming industry. Wildlife is not just government property, restricted to
the National Parks, but can be traded by private game reserve owners. Integral to this industry is the ability to safely catch, load, transport and release these animals. Every step requires veterinary supervision, so life is busy for Cobus’s team at Wildlife Vets.

  I headed down for breakfast. It was too early to enjoy the daily spectacle of the farm’s giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, blesboks and impalas all grazing on the feeding ground a mere 100 metres from where we dined. The early start was mandatory due to the 8 a.m. rendezvous at a game reserve two hours north of us in Hoedspruit, a town on the Western border of Kruger National Park. There was a buzz around the breakfast table: today we had three adult male giraffes to catch and transport. Such are the perils of giraffe capture that there are only a few companies in the whole of South Africa with the experience, knowledge and expertize to do it. The hypertensive effect of the drugs used in immobilization can pose a life-threatening risk to an animal whose unique anatomical adaptations already require a vastly higher blood pressure than any other mammal. The complications of the respiratory depressive effect of the drugs used are enhanced by the fact that there is a large volume of dead space created by a giraffe’s immensely long trachea. As well as this, their height can result in serious injury if allowed to fall to the ground unguided.

  As I sipped my coffee the clatter of the convoy could be heard leaving from the workshop at the top of the farm: one HGV lorry, a truck with the giraffe trailer in tow, and Derik’s pickup. That was our prompt; we piled into the minibus and set off to join the procession. The logistics of every single capture are astonishing; permits, five vehicles, one helicopter and a fifteen-strong team were today’s requirement.

  As the crimson glow of the penetrating African sun broke over the horizon, we watched the scenes of everyday life play out before us: the orange and avocado sellers by the side of the road, the men in torn blue overalls walking beside the road on their way to work, the burning sugar cane fields in the first process of harvesting. Then there were the community towns – dusty dirt roads lined with an odd assortment of tin shacks, multiple small square concrete buildings variously advertising a hair salon, funeral parlour, grocery shop or bar. All of these were interspersed with several Coca-Cola adverts, the only link to the Western world I had left behind.

  After two hours we pulled into the designated rendezvous point, a small petrol station just a few miles from the reserve we were heading to. There was time for a coffee while we waited for the HGV and truck to catch up. It was then that the call came through: the helicopter pilot had had to divert to help attend to a white rhino, and he would be delayed by several hours. In a cruel, callous world where rhinos are brutally poached for a commodity no different to our fingernails, they must always come first. So, with no helicopter, all we could do was sit and wait. ‘Hurry up and wait’ is a popular mantra in wildlife circles and this was certainly one of those occasions.

  With coffee, and the prospect of a hearty breakfast, our spirits were lifted and conversation started to flow. What were the pros and cons of legalizing the trade of rhino horn? Does vegetarianism extend to one’s holiday and when travelling? What animals would play which positions in an African wildlife rugby team? These were just a few of the discussions that arose as we surveyed the comings and goings of the petrol station forecourt: mostly ‘bakkies’ (pickup-trucks) and retired German tourists, dressed in the obligatory khaki and heavily laden bum bag, arriving in their hired safari van piled high with enough gear to equip a small army.

  By 12.30 p.m. the table was awash with the remnants of an eclectic mix of fodder, including hartebeest biltong, cashew nuts dowsed in peri-peri sauce, and Mrs Balls’s pickle-flavoured crisps. Bjorn the capture specialist and vet Derik were just finishing their twelfth cigarette, and Bjorn his eighth cup of coffee.

  Into this chaotic scene, order was abruptly restored when Bjorn’s phone rang. Even before the conversation had finished he was heading for his truck and signalling us to head for the minibus. The helicopter was ten minutes away – giraffe capture was go!

  We set off for the short 3-mile drive down a dusty dirt road. Just off the main road were two dilapidated, 5-metre-high wire-meshed gates, held shut by a chain and padlock. The bakkie parked up beside them was the only clue that we had reached our destination. The driver – the reserve’s owner – jumped out, unlocked and threw open the gates, and we followed him through. We had barely stepped from the bus when the distant whirr of the propellers reached our ears. We looked skywards at the growing yellow speck of the helicopter as it raced towards us. It circled once, just above the treeline, and then landed amid the plume of dust generated from the downdraught.

  The farm was 8,000 hectares of scrubland and rocky mountainous terrain. To the human eye, this desiccated environment appeared hostile, offering little shelter from the scorching African sun, with every plant armed and ready to impale, poison or lacerate. Yet this was home to a vast range of African animals.

  Giraffe usually live in relative harmony, sometimes in fairly loose herds led by a single adult male, or else in bachelor herds, while others live as solitary individuals. Generally, fights only break out between males competing for a mate, though on this reserve, males now considerably outnumbered females, and fights were becoming a frequent occurrence, to the extent that an old male bull had been found dead a few weeks previously. It is a beautiful concept to just let nature be and do, but the reality of conservation is that when man builds a fence to contain animals, however big the area, those animals need to be managed. So some of the young males had to go, and today we were after three such solitary individuals.

  Having now seen the size of the terrain we would be dealing with, the requirement of the helicopter was becoming clear. The local contingent, minus Derik, briefly busied themselves unloading the spare fuel canisters and detaching the doors from the helicopter before the now all too familiar habitual ritual played out: reaching for the cigarette packet from the left shirt pocket, tapping out a solitary smoke and embracing it with pursed lips then lighting and relaxing into it, as though they had been working for hours. Derik was oblivious to them all as they leant against the helicopter deep in conversation, smoking away. His exclusive attention was on the large spinal needle in his left hand. It was attached to a 3-ml syringe that was decanting the mixed concoction of Thiofentanal, Etorphine and Hyaluronidase into a small dart in preparation for the job ahead of anaesthetizing the giraffe. Potent opioids Etorphine and Thiofentanyl have become the drugs of choice for in-field anaesthesia of giraffes because they work rapidly, an effect enhanced by the Hyaluronidase, which further accelerates absorption.

  The smoking party disbanded as the pilot jumped into the helicopter and started the engine. As Derik walked towards the chopper into the plume of dust created by the downdraught, dart gun over his right shoulder and carrying his dart box in his left hand, the scene resembled something from an American Vietnam movie.

  Within moments the helicopter was a mere speck in the skyline heading into the mountainous terrain in search of our first giraffe. Loading up the two trucks, we headed out in the direction of the helicopter, down one of the main arterial tracks that bisected the reserve. The giraffe trailer brought up the rear. Even this stage was technically complicated – we needed to position ourselves so that we could respond and intercept the giraffe within two minutes of it being darted. The mounting tension was palpable, and conversation minimal as we each reflected on the questions playing through our racing minds. Would we be able to catch any of the giraffe? Would we get to them in time once they were darted? Would they survive the anaesthetic? The sight of a solitary white rhino, grazing 20 metres from where we passed it, briefly distracted us.

  Then the crackly sound of Derik’s voice could be heard from the portable radio as he updated us on their progress. They had spotted a solitary male and were in pursuit, trying to guide him to a safe area for darting. The convoy pulled into a clearing to wait for the follow-up instructions. It shouldn’t be l
ong now. The helicopter appeared in the distance coming over the ridge, about a mile away.

  This stage, too, was extremely technical. To our untrained eyes and from our vantage point on the ground, the helicopter was just hovering towards us, turning right, then left, now dropping to tree level, now rising high into the clear blue African sky, demonstrating the pilot’s full range of skills. Communication between vet and pilot had to be intuitive, anticipating the giraffe’s every move, gently and skilfully forcing him in a direction that avoided any potential hazards while also controlling the pace of his escape so as not to overexert him and thus induce a fatal ‘capture myopathy’.

  Stress, overexertion and dehydration, combined with the increased blood pressure induced by the drugs that are used to immobilize any wild animal, can be a fatal combination, and the risk is multiplied several fold when capturing under the baking African sun. Capture myopathy is invariably fatal. Degeneration of the muscles induced by hyperthermia, together with an excessive build-up of lactic acid, causes an extreme release of potassium from muscle cells which, in acute cases, results in heart failure. If the animal survives the first stage, then muscle rupture invariably means the animal is recumbent and a fatal acidosis leads to destruction of the muscle and kidney cells, kidney failure and death within a few days. So the stakes were high.

  It was another ten minutes before Derik’s voice came across the radio.

  ‘We have a hit and confirmation the dart has discharged. We’re hovering in pursuit, so you have two minutes from now!’

  Instinctively Bjorn started his stopwatch, knowing the exact time from impact could prove crucial.