Wrestling With Rhinos (eBook)

THE TRANSITION FROM MY cushioned college days to my veterinary career in Kenya began with a bit of a jolt. Less than a month before, I had nervously boarded a plane in Scotland. Now, here I was, staring up at the head of a giraffe some ten feet above me, wondering how I was going to examine his swollen foot, which was about the size of a dinner plate. There was no point in just staring, so with some trepidation I bent down and gingerly felt around the foot. When the animal did not kick out, or try to embed my teeth in the back of my throat, I slipped a finger between the two enormous hooves. In 1965 there was a shortage of giraffes, lame or otherwise, in Glasgow. This animal brought home, in spades, the realization that despite five years of veterinary education I was still a greenhorn. Normally, to examine a dairy cow, one would catch her in a headstall and get on with it. This giant patient needed a different approach. The owner,Tony Parkinson, had climbed a ladder set in front of the pen, and the giraffe had at once come limping around the side and entered its own stall. A bar was slipped behind its thighs and it stood there and started to chew on the fodder. Ignoring the ongoing activity far above my head Icontinued my inspection. The foot was obviously swollen. If the patient were a cow, I would have picked up the foot, taken out a hoof knife, scraped the dirt off the sole, and checked for cracks, sharp objects or other causes of trouble. But there was no way I'd be able to try that with this character. My finger emerged from between the hooves, bringing with it an unmistakable sickly-sweet smell, known to every large animal vet all over the world. The black muck I'd found more or less clinched the diagnosis of footrot, giraffe or not. The opportunity to revisit the country of my birth, and work as an intern for a year in the Kabete veterinary college, had arisen several months before my graduation from the veterinary school at Bearsden, near Glasgow, and I had seized it gladly. I'd been in Glasgow for six years. Prior to that, after living my firstfew years in Kenya, I'd had a typical 'military brat' childhood, constantly moving from one army house to another. From the age of nine I had been educated in British boarding schools, while my father was posted toGermany, English army towns, and trouble spots like Cyprus and Suez, the family either went with him or stayed in the family home on the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast. My mother, perhaps ahead of her time in her view of equal opportunities, had insisted that my sister Brigidalso get a boarding school education. What the double dose of school fees had cost the family I only appreciated much later. While most of the other boys at school had been visited by parents in smart cars, some verysmart,we didn't get our first car in England until I was about 15. This wasa small, second-hand, slab-sided, black Austin 7, promptly christened 'The Matchbox' by my unforgiving housemates. All my life at home, I had been a Jeremy, with its various tones according to mood, or a Dickensian Jem when in good books. In public school tradition, I had, of course, been Haigh, until I reached Scotland. Jeremy was obviously deemed far too English by my vet school classmates, and within about ten minutes of arrival I was Jerry, except of course to the family.