Vet Tales Excerpt – More Childhood Pets & Time to Be a Vet
Vet Tales Excerpt – More Childhood Pets & Time to Be a Vet
My younger brother Gav’s tank of fish were of great pride to him but one day he arrived home to find one of them floating dead at the top. Upset but accepting that this happens with having fish he buried it (or flushed it down the toilet, I can’t remember which!) and enjoyed his others. The next day unfortunately the same thing happened, he arrived home to find another of his fish dead and floating at the top.
It eventually transpired that while we were at school, Davy, our youngest brother, had been fishing out Gav’s fish, placing them on his toy cars and racing them down a ramp leading to their demise! I later learned that this was a similar fate that my silkworms had met years before – I had found them sequentially curled up, turned yellow and dead because Gav had been racing them in his cars!
Our tortoise Archie, a handsome Leopard Tortoise weighing about five kilograms, would roam around our garden crunching on our succulents, lettuce and fruit that we would put out for him. Years later we had to change his name to Archina as he laid some eggs! Unfortunately our menagerie didn’t always get along and our dog Whopper (a big mutt being a crossbreed of a mixture of most giant breeds of dog that you can think of!) lived up to his name but what he had in brawn he lacked in brain. Whopper found a fascination with Archina so intense that from time to time he would not just observe her but actually scratch at her shell and sometimes damage it, requiring us to take her to the vet for some treatment.
Archina sometimes fell into our swimming pool by mistake or sought refuge from Whopper by diving into our swimming pool. This necessitated a rescue and my Dad would quickly jump in to retrieve Archina who, amazingly enough, was none the worse for this experience. We were also always amazed to observe how Archina used to head for the highest point of our garden at certain times because he/she knew that the rains were coming and wanted to be on higher ground!
My collection of aviary birds I found captivating. I used to watch them for hours… how the canaries being what we call in Afrikaans “Loskop” (forgetful) would make their nests by collecting some grass from the floor, flying to their nest to add the grass but perched on the side they would suddenly remember that it was time for a visit to the food bowl and then drop their nesting material, eat some food and then again remember that they were in the process of building a nest and the cycle would resume.
With so many birds came the occasional drama like a baby cockatiel being mauled by a budgie that needed veterinary care; or my one canary who came to be called “Stompie” (or “Stumpy” in English), after one morning we found that mysteriously half his leg was gone! Thankfully he was bright and happy otherwise and went on to live a full life as a handicapped canary.
At school I was known for my love of animals, any injured or orphaned animal was generally brought to my attention and one day I was given a tiny pink hatchling. Doubting that it would survive, I doted on it keeping it warm and feeding it every couple of hours until I went to bed that night. The following morning I was amazed to find it still alive and day by day it grew stronger and eventually grew enough feathers so that I could identify it as a baby Bulbul, a garden bird with delightful character. Given the little bird’s voracious appetite I named him Guts and at the time I had no idea how he would truly live up to his name, or not as the case was…
I would feed him mulberries and other fruit as well as flies that he would snatch as he spotted them on the wall in the yard from his perch on my finger. As he grew, he began to fly and so I set him up with an open cage that he could use as his base. Each day when I returned home from school I would call and Guts would come flying from the surrounds and land on my head. On the week-end I set up his cage base outside my bedroom window which overlooked our swimming pool so that I could watch him and be close to him. He loved to bathe in the water bath that I provided, a ritual that I delighted in watching as it seemed to give him such joy.
One week-end I was working at my desk in by bedroom. It was a magnificent summer’s day which meant that the dragon flies and butterflies would be out flying around our swimming pool. Gusto our Border Collie, would spend hours running around the pool chasing the dragon flies, trying to catch them but never to any avail. Guts had just had his bath and took off for flight but his feathers were so saturated that he plummeted and Gusto was there to grab him with all her “dragon fly catching hype”. She bit his abdomen and in moments Guts was collapsed on the floor with his guts hanging out. I was devastated to say the least! My Mom and Dad did their best to comfort me as Guts died in my hands and we chose a special place to bury him on which in the years to come, would grow a lovely Mulberry tree.
From that day I vowed that it was all very well to work with animals but the first thing that I needed to do was to learn how to help them and to heal them when they were sick and injured. I knew from that day that first and foremost I would become a vet.