Tales from a Young Vet: Part 3 of 3: Mad cows, crazy kittens, and all creatures big and small

I drove down the motorway feeling really dismal, but when I got home there was cheering news. There had been a call to say that Clunky had settled into his foster home and had received medical treatment just in time to save his sight. It was heartening news. Clunky had his happy ending, and I felt sure Jacques and I would, too.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Grumpy Lizards and Misty-eyed Gorillas (#ufa86acc6-f673-522f-a4ac-ae496b526436)

I had a fair bit of wildlife experience from South Africa, but I wanted to get more exotic animal experience in Britain. I was keen to see what it was like to work with the same animals I’d been around in their natural habitats, and how they had adapted to captivity.

Zoo placements are hard to come by, so I was very excited when I was offered a week’s work experience at a local zoo in Kent.

As the zoo was so close to where Ross was studying I went to stay with him for the week. He was in his last year at university and was living in a small house that he shared with a few other students, who never seemed to be there. The house was down a little side road in the middle of a row of terraced houses. It was tall and narrow, with four floors. Ross’s bedroom was right next to the communal kitchen, which also doubled as their sitting room and dining room, while the bathroom just off it was the laundry room and shower room. I didn’t find this particularly strange as I was used to student houses where limited space meant rooms had to serve several functions. In my second year at university my bedroom was also the sitting room and the kitchen was also the dining room, even though there was barely space for two people in it, let alone a table.

No student house tends to have room for guests, unless they like to kip on the floor, but luckily for me, in Ross’s house there was a basement, which they didn’t use. I imagined it was going to be cold and damp when he first mentioned it, but actually that’s where the heating was, and they had a comfy sofa-bed down there, so I was very happy.

I left early on Monday morning for the zoo. I had no idea how long it would take me to get there, and I didn’t feel like panicking while sitting in rush hour traffic, so in the end I was twenty minutes early. I had no idea where to go, but you had to go through the gift shop to get to the park, so I started there. The woman in charge said she’d radio to find out where I should be, and ten minutes later a girl with a blonde bob arrived. She’d clearly run all the way as she was out of breath.

‘Jo? I’m Gemma. I’m one of the vets here. And I’m late for the morning rounds. Jump in the jeep with me and let’s go. I’ll fill you in on the way.’

As we drove, Gemma explained how the days worked at the zoo. The morning round was filled with routine veterinary treatments, such as worming and collecting faecal samples, plus occasional emergencies that had arisen overnight. That usually finished around 10am, when we would go back to the lab. For the next few hours, we would do lab work, which involved a lot of faecal egg counts, and occasionally a post mortem, as it was a requirement for every animal that died at the zoo, even when the cause of death seemed obvious. That would take us to lunch time, when I would be free to walk around the park, or relax for an hour. In the afternoon, we would carry out planned procedures and do afternoon rounds, visiting every department and looking at any animals they were concerned about.

Morning rounds that day began in the reptile house, where there were six small tortoises, a basilisk – a small Central American lizard that has fins on its head and back, and a rhino iguana, which is a huge lizard, about a metre long, with jaws strong enough to break your bones if he decided he didn’t like you. Our job was to worm them all with help from the reptile keeper, Dan.

Worming is a routine procedure that has to be done for all animals in captivity, whether they are zoo animals, farm animals, or dogs and cats, because living in a limited space, compared with the wild, means a high concentration of animals, a lot of faeces and, as a result, higher numbers of worms.

I thought we were going to put a stomach tube into the tortoises, as that’s generally what’s done in small animal practice, but it turned out we were going to inject the wormer into dead baby mice, known as pinkies, which the tortoises would eat. It meant less man-handling, as the zoo’s policy was not to handle the animals unless absolutely necessary.

While I understood the principle, and I’m not a squeamish person, the whole pinkie operation was pretty off-putting. But once we’d injected the wormer into the pinkies and dropped them into the cage, those tortoises moved so fast it was extraordinary, gathering around us like a pack of begging dogs.

We also had to worm the rhino iguana. He was called Crunch, and crunch he certainly would do if you got your hands anywhere close to his mouth. Unfortunately there was no equivalent to the pinkies for him – he would need to be handled, and the wormer had to be poured down his throat. This wasn’t going to be easy because he was notoriously bad-tempered and didn’t like anyone coming into his enclosure. He was fiercely territorial, and I was told to watch from the other side of the wall, as he didn’t know me and might get even grumpier if I approached. Given the power of his jaws I was happy to sit this one out. Dan, who was about my age, walked slowly up to Crunch, talking to him softly so that he wouldn’t be startled. Crunch’s gaze fixed on him as he came closer, and he gave Dan a few head bobs to try to intimidate him. Dan ignored him, moved behind him and with one quick pounce restrained Crunch by gripping behind his head and around his abdomen. Cue Gemma, who had a syringe with a strong metal tube on the end that she had to put down his throat, to squirt in the worming solution. It had to be metal otherwise he would just have bitten through it. As it was, Crunch decided that he wasn’t going to play along and clamped his jaws shut. It was a good ten minutes before Gemma could prise them open wide enough to get the metal tube in, while Dan continued to hang on to him from behind, but she managed eventually.

Finally, it was the turn of the basilisk, but he was nowhere in sight. Clearly he had seen what was going on and hidden himself. I was absolutely no help as I didn’t even know what a basilisk looked like. I presumed it was a lizard, but I had never seen, or even heard of them before. So I tried to be as helpful as I could, pretending to know what I was looking for, in the hope that if I came across it, it would either be obvious, or it would suddenly move and catch the eye of either Gemma or Dan. They told me, helpfully, that he was bright green, but there was so much green foliage in his enclosure that I had no idea how we would ever spot him. Twenty minutes later we gave up our search and agreed to come back later in the week to try again. Round one to the basilisk.

Although I’d imagined working with tigers and giraffes at the zoo, a lot of my work there was actually with primates. The first of these that I got to know were the colobus monkeys. With their lovely long black and white fur, these monkeys are distinctive. Like all monkeys they live together in groups and are very sociable. A bit too sociable, actually; the monkey population there was growing rapidly, so our job was to put contraceptive implants into some of the younger females. The idea was to cut human contraceptive implants in half and insert them into the primates. This was a fairly new idea and had only recently been tried, but it made sense, as their reproductive hormones work in the same way as humans’, and so far it seemed to have been a success.

In humans the implant is slipped underneath the skin on the underside of the arm. In the monkeys we were going to put them in at the backs of their necks, where they were less likely to remove them. To put in the implants we had to anaesthetise the monkeys as there was no way we could handle them, let alone slip in an implant, if they were conscious. Monkeys can bite pretty viciously.

We planned to implant six young females, and by the time we got there the keeper had already separated them from the rest, using a series of doors that led to different sections of the enclosure. The six monkeys were well and truly annoyed that they were now in the small indoor part of their enclosure, with no food, while their friends were still playing outside, and they were kicking up a terrific racket.

The monkey enclosure looked like a giant jungle gym, full of hanging tyres, ropes and branches. The indoor part of the enclosure was specially designed so that people could work with the animals if need be. There was a tunnel from the indoor enclosure through to the vet room where we were, and we were able to isolate each monkey in the tunnel and administer the anaesthetic via a syringe pole through a grating. Once each monkey was asleep, it was carefully lifted from the tunnel onto the table, where the procedure took less than a minute. A small patch of hair behind the neck was clipped, the skin cleaned and the contraceptive implanted through a very small hole made using the tip of a scalpel. The hole would then be closed with sterilised surgical glue and, once we had moved the monkey into the next-door section to recover, the anaesthetic reversal injection would be given. An hour later all the monkeys had been implanted and had woken up. They were all a bit groggy, so they would be kept indoors until they were alert enough to rejoin their friends.

Gemma hoped that it would be at least a year, maybe two, before they had to do the procedure again.

My biggest challenge of the week came when I was asked to do a post-mortem on a dhole that had just died. I’d only just found out that morning what a dhole was (it’s a kind of wild dog that looks like a cross between a wolf and a fox), so when Gemma said she was really busy and could I do the post-mortem while she did rounds I was a bit daunted. Would I know one end of a dhole from another?

Gemma laughed and said she was sure I’d be fine. She dropped me off at the shed where the dhole was, with a bag of instruments, and said she’d see me in an hour or two, when she would double-check my findings.

There was nothing for it but to get on with it. A post-mortem is not a question of simply cutting up the dead animal; it’s a methodical process, which complements a thorough history from the keeper when a vet is trying to establish the cause of death.

It had been a while since I had been trained to do a post-mortem at college, and my only experience since then had been the post-mortem on the alpaca with Niall. I certainly hadn’t come expecting to do one on my own. But I decided to imagine doing a post-mortem on a dog and as I made the first incision it all came flooding back to me.

I quite enjoy post-mortems. I don’t mean to sound gruesome, and of course I’m always sad that an animal has died, but I like the idea of solving a mystery. Remember that early passion for forensics? I’ve always loved piecing clues together.

In the end this post-mortem didn’t involve much of a mystery as I came to a conclusion pretty quickly; the dhole had had septicaemia, presumably from a large bite I found on its neck. Dholes are pack animals and the keeper’s report made clear that this one had been at the bottom of the pack. It had been picked on by the others, which was terribly sad. There had been a nasty fight about five days earlier, involving this dhole and the pack leader, which this one had clearly lost. The keeper hadn’t been aware that he’d been so seriously injured, and I didn’t blame him as the hair on dholes is so thick that it completely covered the injury. The previous day this dhole had been much quieter, hiding by himself, and sadly this morning the keeper had found him dead.

This sort of situation creates an ethical dilemma for zoos. In the wild, the animal at the bottom of the pack would have plenty of space to get away from the bullying animals higher up the pecking order, but in the enclosure there isn’t enough space to get away. And if the keeper was to remove the bullied dhole, the next in line would take its place at the bottom of the pack.