Friday, November 6, 2009

Wildlife Vet joining

Greetings to members.

Rowena Cherry invited me to join as I too am an animal guy.

I have been blogging for just over a year and write about 90% of my blogs on conservation, many of them about issues in Africa. I was born in Kenya, moved to Canada and the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 1975 and have been back to Africa many times. I have written two books about things, mainly wildlife things, on that continent and you can pick up info on them from my web page here where there are extracts, whole chapters, photos and interviews. If you want to dip into the Glasgow Vet in Africa blog you can do so here or through the actual site.

Here are a couple of pics from those works.

I am starting on a new book about work in Canada. The title is Of Moose and Men and here is a short extract from one of the chapters. The scene takes place in Alberta when I had been asked to examine a pet moose that had recently delivered a calf and was not well. The moose (Petruska) had complete trust in her owner but when I approached to about 50 metres in my attempt to examine her...

Petruska let out a loud snort as she set off at a full charge and then I could hear her breath as she crashed through the underbrush, her hooves pounding on the hard ground. It became a sort of Mexican stand-off. Petruska looked at me between the fortunately thick branches of the spruce and tried to get at me, first by stamping her feet, much as she would in killing a predator, and second by trying to move around the tree to get a clearer run. Of course there was nothing I could do about the stamping except be glad that it was occurring twenty-odd feet from me, but I could and did move around the tree to make sure that we remained at exactly opposite sides. Not that she came round all the way. That would have put me between her and her calf, which would been quite unnatural as she presumably viewed me as some sort of predator that was going to get the most precious thing in her world.

Ring-around-the-roses is now a children’s game derived from the grim days of the black death. Ring-around-the-spruce-tree played by me and an irate mother moose intent on reducing me to a thin layer of pulverized flesh on the ground is quite another. While she was determined to protect her new calf, I was keen to protect myself.

3 comments:

Rowena Cherry said...

Welcome, Jerry.

I was riveted by your story. I do hope that you were able to help your reluctant patient!

Jerry Haigh said...

Hi Rowena,
Yes, she came right, although It had little to do with my medical intervention, as I did not do anything except beat a hasty retreat and then offer advice.

yui said...

Hi,I'm behind you.