Tales from a Wild Vet: Paws, claws and furry encounters

I had to laugh. Wanda was completely nuts but it was impossible not to like her.

The morning passed peacefully with a few routine cases and I felt I was just getting into my stride when Mr and Mrs Thomas appeared with a very subdued-looking Mickey. He hadn’t perked up at all. In fact, the poor little thing looked much worse.

He lay flat out on the examining table, showing no interest in anything at all. Mrs Thomas, her eyes red-rimmed, told me he hadn’t wanted to eat anything at all. He had stopped vomiting, but that was probably because he hadn’t eaten, as clearly he wasn’t on the mend.

I felt so sorry for him, and for the Thomases. He was their world and they were terrified of losing him. I promised I would give him anything I had that might possibly help.

I started with anti-emetics to help with his nausea and vomiting, gastro-protectants to help with any inflammation in his gastro-intestinal tract, and antibiotics in case he had a bacterial infection. As I watched his very downcast owners take him home again, I could only hope that one or all of these drugs would do the trick.

But the following day Mickey and his owners were back.

‘Nothing seems to be working,’ Mrs Thomas told me as she brought Mickey out from inside her jacket.

The little chap was weak and could barely lift his head. Something was clearly very wrong and I was running out of options.

I looked at Mr and Mrs Thomas, both of whom were on the verge of tears. ‘I think I’d better keep him here overnight,’ I said. ‘He’s dehydrated because he’s not eating or drinking much. I can put him on a drip and give him intravenous fluids and that should help.’

They agreed and, shoulders bowed, they left their precious little dog with me. I carried Mickey gently through to the little hospital room in the back and set him up on a drip. I tried to feed him some high-calorie paste from my finger. He ignored it, so I heated it up a little to make it warm and slightly smellier. He showed some mild interest and while he licked at it half-heartedly, I stroked him. ‘Come on, Mickey, you can do it. Please don’t give up,’ I whispered.

I checked on him every hour or so and that night he seemed settled. Wanda, who was staying in the flat over the surgery, promised to come down and check on him again before she went to bed.

That night I talked to my boyfriend, Jacques, on Skype. He was 6,000 miles away in South Africa and I missed him. He listened patiently to all my tales of woe and did his best to cheer me up when I told him about Mickey, but it wasn’t the same as having him there with me. I could have done with one of his warm hugs.

After a sleepless night I arrived at work early the next morning. Much to my delight, Mickey had picked up a little, so I phoned the Thomases and suggested they come and get him and carry on nursing him at home. They were delighted to find him a little brighter and they took him home, along with some of the high-calorie paste. The following day, though, Mrs Thomas rang to say that Mickey was still very ill.

It was Friday. I had thrown every treatment that they could afford at him. I explained to Mrs Thomas that of course it was up to her and her husband to decide what to do, but that if Mickey didn’t improve over the weekend it might mean that he wasn’t going to get better.

‘Does that mean we should have him put to sleep?’ Mrs Thomas asked, her voice shaky.

‘Well, we don’t want him to suffer, so in the end it might be the kindest thing,’ I answered.

That night I went back to my family home in Tunbridge Wells for the weekend. My parents had lived in the same house since I was a year old and it was always good to go home and see them and our dogs: springer spaniel Tosca, and Yorkshire terrier Paddy.

On Saturday I spent time with my horses, Elli and Tammy, riding and grooming them. I’d had horses ever since I was a little girl and I adored them. It was a beautiful summer weekend, the kind you seldom get in an English August, but Mickey was constantly in my thoughts. I knew his owners would be heartbroken if I had to put him to sleep and I wished there was something more I could do for him.

Monday morning arrived and I was back in East London. Mickey was booked in as the last of my consultations that day, and I was dreading it; I hate putting animals to sleep, although I’m always glad to be able to relieve suffering. But when I went out to the waiting room, much to my surprise, there, sitting between his owners, was a decidedly perkier Mickey. And what’s more, Mr and Mrs Thomas both had great big grins on their faces.

In the consulting room they explained that they’d brought Mickey in to show me how much he had improved – and I could see that he had. Relief flooded through me and I thanked goodness that the treatment had worked. As I stroked the rough fur on his small head it took all my willpower to stop myself from shedding a tear.

‘I’m so glad the treatment worked!’ I said.

Mrs Thomas patted my hand.

‘Oh no, dear, it wasn’t you,’ she said. ‘On Sunday one of our friends prayed for Mickey and he started to brighten up right away. It was a miracle.’

I said nothing and smiled. I was just delighted that he was looking so much better. In the end, did it really matter whether it was down to my treatments or a bit of divine intervention?

CHAPTER TWO

Hedgehogs, Doves and a Very Cross Pheasant (#u356210ed-fa4e-5381-af13-04f957448623)

Two beady eyes regarded me intently from a bed of straw inside the cardboard box, and a small, pointed snout twitched curiously.

‘Can you help?’ the little girl asked over the top of the reception desk at Folly Wildlife Rescue, where I was volunteering. ‘It came out of the bonfire Dad lit in the garden. We didn’t know it was in there, we’re so sorry.’ Her eyes filled with tears.

‘We’ll do our best,’ I said. ‘Let me take him from you and we’ll have a look.’

Very carefully I lifted the hedgehog out of the box and onto the table. Some spines were missing on his back and there was a nasty wound on his side, clearly a burn. Heather, one of the animal care assistants at the centre, got to work cleaning the wound with antiseptic.

‘I don’t think he’s going to die, but we need to treat him and keep him here for a little while. The spines he’s lost won’t grow back – they can’t grow through scar tissue – but he can survive without them and the wound should heal. Give us a call in a few weeks and if he’s recovered you can take him home and release him back into your garden.’

The little girl – she couldn’t have been more than eight – wiped away her tears and smiled. ‘Really? Can we come back, Daddy?’ She turned to her father, who was standing behind her.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’ll come and see how he’s doing, and when he’s ready we’ll take him back and let him go. And next time I light a fire at the bottom of the garden I’ll check first.’

As father and daughter left, hand in hand, after generously giving a small donation to the charity, I took the hedgehog through to where an empty cage was waiting for him and laid him gently inside. I had applied antibiotic cream to his wound and would keep a close eye on him to make sure he was healing. I filled in the chart on the front of his cage and a few moments later, Julie, one of the volunteers, came through with a little dish of scrambled eggs.

‘Here’s a treat for him. This should perk him up a bit.’

In between locum jobs I was spending several mornings working as a volunteer at a rescue charity for injured and orphaned wild animals. Folly Wildlife Rescue is an amazing place, home to dozens of hedgehogs, as well as badgers, foxes, deer, ducks and birds. Most of them are brought in by members of the public, and once they arrive at Folly the animals are treated, fed and cared for until they have recovered enough to be released into the wild again.

Open 24 hours a day, Folly was first set up by husband-and-wife team Dave and Annette Risley. It started in their back garden, with sheds, aviaries and hutches, and bit by bit they raised the funds to build the fantastic well-equipped centre they have now.

When you arrive at Folly, in Broadwater Forest, not far from where I live in Tunbridge Wells, you’re greeted with a cacophony of cooing and chirping, because the wall beside the reception desk is stacked with birdcages three or four tiers high.

Go past reception and you find yourself in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Here you will be greeted by two tiers of incubators for younger birds or small mammals or for the older ones that need intensive care, alongside a whole wall of bigger cages for recovering birds and small furries, plus a large examination table in the middle for checking over all the newly admitted animals. Beyond the ICU is the hedgehog ward: dozens of white, glass-fronted, ventilated cages – all of them full – alongside work surfaces for feeding, weighing and examining the animals daily.

Finally there is the ‘other animals’ ward, where badgers, rabbits, pheasants and the odd stoat, owl or duck reside. This ward has bigger cages and two small rooms attached to it where the larger animals can move around a bit better. The charity has a second site for rescued deer and there is another local charity that deals with foxes, so these animals are rarely seen in this hospital.

In all the wards every cage door has a chart attached to it, with details of when the animal arrived, its weight, diagnosis and the treatment and food it’s being given.

I first worked at Folly when I started my vet training, when I did a week’s work experience. Back then I helped to clean cages and feed the animals, but now that I was a qualified vet I was put to work examining and diagnosing the new arrivals and helping to decide on and administer treatment.

The centre is staffed by three well-trained, resourceful animal care assistants, alongside Annette and Dave and several willing volunteers, but there was no vet. They were trying to raise funds at the time to build a fully equipped vet suite, which I was only too happy to advise Dave on, with the intention of eventually employing a full-time vet. In the meantime, though, they were glad of any passing vet who was happy to come in and help out.

The little hedgehog caught in the bonfire is typical of the patients that people bring in to centres like Folly. It is sadly all too common for hedgehogs, which live in close proximity to humans, to be caught in bonfires, attacked by dogs, run over by lawnmowers (or cars), or to slip into garden ponds or be trapped in fencing. Sometimes they’re found wandering about during the day when they should be sleeping. That usually means they’re short of food. Sometimes they are found sick – with mange, lungworm or mites – or simply struggling to survive because they’ve been born too late in the year and haven’t put on enough weight to be able to hibernate and survive their first winter.

Hedgehogs are Britain’s favourite wild creature. Immortalised in Beatrix Potter’s much-loved story of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, as well as in numerous books and poems by literary giants such as the poet Philip Larkin, everyone loves them. Yet sadly they’re becoming a rare sight and are even at risk of becoming endangered. Over the past 50 years it is estimated that hedgehog numbers have fallen from around 36 million in the UK to fewer than a million, largely due to loss of their natural habitat. With fewer wilderness areas, hedgehogs are short of both food and safe spaces in which to live and nest. Thousands of them die on the roads, and while looking for food they often stray into gardens that can be full of dangers to them.

There are 17 species of hedgehog; little mammals whose spines are made of hollow hairs hardened by keratin, the stuff that human hair and nails are made from. A distant relative of the shrew (but nothing to do with porcupines), hedgehogs are believed to have changed very little in the past 15 million years, so it would be heartbreaking if we lost them now.

Folly is one of the places doing their utmost to save hedgehogs, by nursing back to health those injured animals that are brought in and by raising awareness of these little creatures and their habits and habitats. If everyone kept a little bit of wilderness in the corner of a garden, made sure that the animals could get out of the garden through a hole in the fence, and looked out for hedgehogs when building ponds or fires, it would make a real difference to their survival rate.

My next case there that day was a mother hedgehog and her two tiny babies, all of them riddled with mites. Their skin was raw and itchy and they’d lost quite a few spines. Mite infestation is very common in hedgehogs; the mites are parasites that are usually too small to see, but they’re easy to treat with the same spot treatment you use for dogs.

Before we applied the spot-on treatment (to avoid it getting washed off) we gave them a family bath in a washing-up bowl containing an inch of warm water with baby oil in it, to soothe their skin and keep it nice and soft. They loved it and we soon had them settled comfortably in a cage together, tucking into a bowl of cat food. Hedgehogs love cat or dog food, scrambled eggs and, as a special treat, rusks soaked in goat’s milk, as they are unable to digest cows’ milk properly. All of these treats are prepared in the centre’s kitchen, which is just along from the ‘other animals’ ward. Making up a load of delicious food, all served on plant-pot saucers, was a lot of fun. I enjoyed being chef to 30 little creatures!

The hedgehogs were easy to work with, too, as long as you managed to avoid the spines and didn’t mind the vast amount of faeces that came out of them, no matter how much or how little they ate. The birds, on the other hand, well, they could be a bit of a challenge, especially the collared doves. And there were a lot of collared doves.