tion>
It’s a Vet’s Life
Roy Aronson
Tafelberg
To my wife and family – you are the reason I am driven to succeed,
To my colleagues, the vets – you are the reason for my dedication,
To my patients, the animals – you are the reason for my passion,
To my maker – you are the reason for everything.
Vet in the City
I have been a vet for longer than 25 years, but my patients and my clients never cease to fascinate me. A vet’s life in the city is often quite challenging. We have happy moments and sad ones. Most of the time, we succeed in ensuring that our patients return home to their owners bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. On the rare occasions when we don’t, we share the pain that the owner feels when a treasured pet does not make it.
Over the years I have tackled some challenging cases and I have ended up in a few strange situations. But all have been unique experiences that have enriched my life immensely. These are some of my stories.
Fate almost sealed
When we’re young, enthusiastic and passionate, sometimes we do crazy things. But perhaps this is not such a bad thing. I am a determined person and once I get the bit between my teeth, I don’t like to give up. This story happened a few years before I entered Veterinary School and while I was in the South African Navy. I was young, reckless and not as cautious as I am today. It set me on a path that I would otherwise not have trod.
I graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1976 with my first degree, a BSc with majors in Microbiology and Biochemistry, and successfully applied to join the South African Navy at its base in Simon’s Town, a picturesque fishing village on the stormy False Bay coast. I was seconded to a laboratory that did quality control work in the engineering field. I was given various tasks to do but I was also allowed to choose one or two ‘special interest’ projects to keep me occupied if I had any spare time. I chose to do some investigations into anti-fouling paints that are used to coat ships to prevent barnacles from attaching to the hulls. If not for them, literally tons of barnacles would add massive drag to the ships. This would, of course, slow them down and dramatically increase fuel consumption.
My project involved coating small pieces of steel about fifteen centimetres square with the various anti-fouling paints on offer, hanging these pieces of steel at various depths from a raft and then measuring the number of barnacles that attached themselves. In this way I was able to assess the effectiveness of the paints and compare them so that the navy could choose the best one.
I was given the use a small rowing boat to access a raft moored on one side of the harbour out of the way of passing vessels. My raft was moored next to a number of floating pontoons where seals would sun themselves. There I diligently set up my experiment and hung numerous plates from ropes going down into the blue depths of the Simon’s Town harbour. My experiment was designed to run for a year, through all four seasons.
I spent many happy hours rowing out to my little raft in the harbour and measuring the number of barnacles that had attached themselves to my plates that were coated with a substance designed to prevent just that. It never ceased to fascinate me how those clean, painted plates attracted and accumulated life in abundance. First the plate became slightly roughened as microscopic sea creatures attached themselves to it. Then, over a period of a few days, the rough patches started to take the form of miniature little barnacles that you could see with the naked eye. These tiny barnacles grew until eventually, after nearly a year, they had grown to sea creatures coated in a hard shell a number of centimetres in height and diameter. During the summer months I’d row out with my shirt off and when it was really hot, I’d dive into the water in my shorts and spend some time in the sun drying off before I rowed back to the shore and my lab. Clearly this was a busy time for me. I was hard at work having a good time! During winter it was a lot less fun.
Towards the end of the first summer I noticed that a young female seal had beached herself on a nearby pontoon. She had a distinctive marking, almost like a dark shadow, around her neck. In passing I wondered if there was a species of seal known as a collared seal. I knew there were collared birds and lesser collared birds; perhaps there was a collared seal as well. I did not pay too much attention to her but made a mental note to be cautious because although these sleek and engaging creatures look friendly, they can in fact be aggressive if they feel threatened and can inflict a very nasty bite if you get too close to them. I decided not to swim if she was in the vicinity.
It was three days later when I next went out to my raft. I noticed that the same young female seal was still on the pontoon. She seemed to me to be thinner than before and the dark shadow around her neck had now taken on a reddish tinge, almost as though the colour had run in a dyed garment. Something was not right. It seemed strange that she was still there in the same position. The discolouration around her neck now looked sinister to me and I decided to row back to the lab to fetch a pair of binoculars so that I could get a better look.
I arrived back at the raft about half an hour later and used the binoculars to observe the seal. To my horror, the so-called shadow around her neck was actually fishing nylon that had tangled and formed a noose that was now extremely tight and cutting into her flesh. The reddish tinge that I’d seen was in fact blood seeping from the wound caused by the ever-tightening noose. What was I to do? I only knew that I had to help. I got back into my rowing boat and rowed a bit closer to the pontoon where she was sitting. She must have felt very threatened because she started to bark and vocalise fiercely. Her distress and dare I say anger was very obvious. Well, with the cacophony of sound coming from a mouth filled with large yellow fangs bigger than those of a German Shepherd dog, I too felt threatened. As the gap between my boat and the pontoon closed, she panicked and dived into the sea, her ultimate escape. Clearly this approach was not going to work.
I now had a problem that I very much wanted to solve. But back in ’76 there were few resources to turn to. Today I would have ‘Googled’ the problem on the Internet or asked the aquarium for help but these avenues didn’t exist then. I turned to the Fishing Industries Research Institute. A member of their staff was an expert in marine mammals and, convinced that this was a fairly common problem, I hoped that he would be able to help me solve it. I called him and our discussion did bear some fruit, although in an oblique way. He informed me that there were no quick-acting drugs available to inject or dart seals. Once darted, the seal would take fright, swim away and be long gone by the time the drugs took effect. Now deep underwater and impossible to find, the seal would slip into dreamland and drown. So, to my surprise, he explained that there was no protocol for this problem. Each time something like this came their way it was dealt with on an ad hoc basis. He felt that the only way to save the seal was to actually capture her in a net. Once netted, she could be safely immobilised with a sedative without the risk of drowning. Alternatively, if the seal was small enough, he recommended muzzling her and then wrestling her into a position where the noose could be removed. Given the size of her teeth, the sedative option seemed more attractive to me at the time.
Armed with this plan, I contacted a local vet and explained the problem to him. He very kindly volunteered his help. This was progress indeed. I obtained a large net from the navy store and I made a long pole with a big loop of stiff wire at the end. I sewed the net into a bag large enough to capture the seal and attached it to the wire loop. Once all my equipment was ready, I contacted the vet. He drove out to the dockyard where we boarded the rowing boat and confidently set off to capture our seal. How naïve we were.
Before we could get close enough to net the seal, she sounded her alarm clarion by barking frantically, after which she dived into the water and swam off without a backward glance. The vet kindly offered to wait for a while and so we bobbed up and down in the water just off the pontoon for half an hour. After this time it was clear that the seal was not coming back so we had to abandon the plan and row back to shore. I was now on my own. While pondering the problem, I looked through the binoculars to try and get a view of the pontoon and blow me down but our seal was back on the pontoon sunning herself.