Vet Tails Excerpt – My Childhood Pets: Monkats and Snakes
Vet Tails Excerpt – My Childhood Pets: Monkats and Snakes
I love being a vet! For as long as I can remember I have always wanted to work with animals and most of my earliest memories involve animals.
I grew up in South Africa, a majestic land rich in beauty and so diverse with an abundance of wildlife. I loved learning about animals and their natural environment and was so fortunate to have my Dad, an active conservationist, facilitate intimate and inspiring interactions with wildlife from a young age. We spent hours on game drives observing animals in their natural environment. I relished being so close to a wild African elephant that I could count its eyelashes, involvement with the rehabilitation of orphaned lion cubs, cheetahs, wild dogs, a baby hippopotamus and rhinoceros, eagles and vultures as well as witnessing breeding projects of endangered species and many more humbling experiences.
As a child I had a zoo of pets ranging from a gerbil that I called Bear, a goose called Golda, our tortoise Archie, monkey Ikey, fish, a chameleon called Spike, hamsters, a range of aviary birds, rabbits, snakes, tadpoles, frogs, crabs and of course dogs and cats.
Understanding how things worked was important to me. One day when our monkey Ikey was allowed to run free around our house and garden we saw him “displaying amorous behaviour” with our cat Panther. Shortly afterwards Panther became pregnant and my brothers and I waited anxiously to see what version of monkats would be delivered and were a bit disappointed with just a litter of gorgeous kittens! I knew that I needed to study further so that I could understand more about how this type of thing worked!
My Mom, a very gentle and kind lady who taught kids at nursery school (kindergarten), has always been patient with my fascination with animals, even when I insisted on keeping snakes as pets. She has a great love for all creatures but prefers to appreciate snakes from a good distance and ideally with at least one solid pane of glass in between! Our maid Tatty (her real name was Katrina but since I couldn’t pronounce it when I was little, Tatty she stayed), being a Zulu, had a real fear of snakes. Although Tatty always showed interest in our animals, she kept her distance with my snakes while I studied them and did whatever I could to keep them in an enriched environment.
Although I initially had a fear of snakes too, I found that by learning about them and handling them my fear abated. Snakes make great pets, they don’t need much cleaning or feeding but it can be difficult to purpose-build an enclosure that they can’t escape from! My granddad Sonny, my role model due to his gentle, patient nature and always being there to help any human or animal that he could, also had the wonderful ability to make anything. He would spend hours working on lids for our fish tanks, aviaries for our birds and various other animal enclosures. Unfortunately, the lid for my first snake enclosure needed progressive adjusting over the first few weeks since the resident egg-eating snake had the incredible ability of squeezing out of the tiniest holes.
I remember arriving home from school and panicking that the snake was gone, much to the horror of my Mom and Tatty who, despite their great discomfort in the process, would assist me in finding it again. My Mom tells how she would look on the bookshelf, pull a book out, then look away, hope that the snake would be found but that she wouldn’t have to be the one to see it there. Inevitably we would find the well-hidden snake but sometimes some of them would never be found and had no doubt found their way back into the wilderness or into Tatty’s room for all we know!
In later years my youngest brother David, being seven years younger than me, had another egg-eating snake, much to the disappointment of my Mom and Tatty who must have breathed a sigh of relief when I no longer kept them as I was too busy playing sports. He was a big snake for an egg eater and Davy, always the one with a terrific sense of humour, called him Jaws, naming him after his first girlfriend who talked a lot, he told us!
To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tails available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/