I paid a visit to our dog behaviour specialist’s farm as he wanted me to examine his small herd of cattle to establish whether they may be pregnant. To determine this we were taught to make use of rectal palpation, basically stick your hands where the sun don’t shine and feel for various indicators of pregnancy, some of which take a great deal of experience to find. Practicing as students, this left me fumbling for a good while in-between the cow contracting around my arm, squeezing any sensitivity that my hands had left, out!
One of our Professors at University used to lecture to us in his thick Afrikaans accent about the joys of “Rrrrrrectal tourrrrrism” and that as vets, we are so lucky because on a freezing cold night we can be called out to strip down to next to nothing to have a feel of what is going on in there and at least we have a nice warm place to put our hand!
Our dog behaviourist introduced me to his farm dogs and gave me a demonstration of the incredible help they can be to a farmer, I was most impressed, especially being so used to our beloved staffies Honcho and Sheila that enjoyed a sedentary lifestyle of nice soft beds and walks on the beach!
Phoebe, a very friendly and boisterous young labrador came in to see me as she had been limping. With great difficulty, mainly because all she wanted to do was to play rather than lie still and be examined, I determined that she had a sore shoulder, straining a tendon, and her owner then had the difficult task of trying to limit her activity to give it time to heal. With some help from our behaviourist, Phoebe was reformed…. When I re-examined her a few weeks later, I merely asked her to lie down and without anyone else’s help, I managed to thoroughly assess her shoulder function. I was most impressed, and so was she when she received a massage afterwards!
In a short time I learned a lot about various complementary therapies and especially about nutrition, which was very different to my veterinary training. Some of the therapies I found difficult to understand but I couldn’t deny my observations of clinical improvements in so many patients. Where there was clearly no risk to my patients, offering additional therapies that could potentially help them was an obvious choice and I extrapolated this to our dogs Honcho and Sheila.
Although Honcho was as tough as an ox and had robust health, he occasionally suffered from skin allergies while little Sheila was prone to fleas and had an ongoing battle with skin cancer that had been managed with radiation therapy in South Africa. The latter was unavailable for Sheila in New Zealand, since we’d moved I had regularly performed surgery to remove any new cancer growths. Sheila largely took this in her stride but it was clear that these procedures were taking their toll and I wondered how much longer we would be able to manage her condition.
I embarked on a journey to help Sheila with complementary therapies, the first step of which was to feed her a balanced diet that included good quality, pre-frozen raw meat. This was a foreign concept to me given that my vet training had led me to recommend commercial food and an even more of a foreign concept to our hounds given that they lived with a couple of vegetarians!
Our dogs looked at me in disbelief as they smelled and then saw real meat in their bowls and before their incredible dream ended they wasted no time in gobbling up their new food! From then on it was impossible to contain their enthusiasm at meal times as they ate with great gusto. With this change, over time I observed that Honcho’s skin allergies had improved substantially and Sheila was no longer susceptible to heavy flea burdens. I treated Sheila with a number of other therapies to help her skin cancer and she took me on an incredible voyage of discovery.
To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tales available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/