Of Moose and Men

A Wildlife Vet’s Pursuit of the World’s Largest Deer

By Jerry Haigh

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Jerry Haigh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-091-6
CHAPTER 1

A BREATHTAKING START

A big move from Africa to Canada; weather as I did not know it; a disastrous start with a fortunate ending.

* * *

UNDERSTAND JOB OFFER SASKATOON STOP ON SAFARI IN RWANDA TRANSLOCATING ELEPHANTS STOP WILL MAKE CONTACT ASAP ON RETURN TO KENYA STOP HAIGH.

Working in the half-dark of a crowded post office jam-packed with Rwandans and three other “Europeans” (as any white person was called), I struggled to compose the telegram. For reasons of economy, it had to contain the fewest possible words and still be intelligible after winging its way through the wires and across the aether to Canada. I arrived at the post office without a writing implement of any kind, but luckily a charming and well-dressed matron loaned me a pencil. After crossing out redundancies like pronouns and other surplus words, I tore the fawn-coloured sheet off the pad. Next, I had to negotiate the throng occupying the room, making my way from the heavily scarred wooden shelf I had been working at toward the metal wicket, where I discovered I was about fifth in line (or maybe tenth, as the line was somewhat disorganized) for attention.

As I waited I looked around at the stained walls that had probably once been cream-coloured but were now a spiderweb-covered dark brown. The brown paint that had once coated the concrete floor showed through in a few places where it was not caked with rust-red mud that had been tracked in on the shoes or bare feet of customers. The streets were mud-puddled from the downpour of the previous night.

Eventually I got to the front of the queue, where I found that I could hardly see the clerk behind the grime-covered glass sheet. I bent down and spoke through the grate.

“I’d like to send this cable to Canada,” I said to him, only to receive a blank stare. I had forgotten that I was in a francophone country. I switched to French, which was also a mistake, as I ran out of vocabulary after the initial “Je veux.” I changed gears again to Swahili, which allowed us to understand one another.

I was in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, in mid-April 1975 and had not long come off the phone with my wife, Jo, who was at our home in Kenya. After the normal greetings she said, “A man named Nielsen called from Canada. They have offered you the job at the vet college.”

“Did you say they’ve offered it to me?” I asked in a mixture of elation and hope that I had not misunderstood her.

“Yes, he wants you to call. It’s wonderful news, isn’t it?”

“Have you got the number?”

She read out the long number, which I tried to memorize, and then I realized that with the nine-hour time difference it would be 4 a.m. in Saskatoon. Not a good time to call. Conversely, by the time Nielsen would be in his office it would be 1 a.m. in Kigali, and I would not be able to use a phone, as the post office would be closed. The times were simply not going to mesh. In those pre-Internet, pre-fax days, a telegram was the only solution to my problem. And I was intent on getting my response to him as quickly as I could.

Dr. Nielsen was offering me a post as a zoo and wildlife veterinarian at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine. I had applied several months earlier and been waiting to hear for some time. Of course, Nielsen called when I happened to be away from home for several weeks.

I was in Kigali on a brief break during a prolonged exercise of culling and translocating the last of Rwanda’s wild elephants. What follows is the story of what happened six months later, and then the thirty-odd subsequent years after my family and I left Kenya to take up life in Canada.

When I finished up the first leg of the Rwanda project I went back home to Lunatic Lane at the foot of Mount Kenya for a brief visit to see Jo and our four-year-old daughter, Karen. I desperately wanted to chat with Jo about our possible future and tell bedtime stories to Karen. As soon as I could arrange the tickets I flew to Canada, not so much to be interviewed for the position as to find out more about the country, the work, and the working environment. I needed to see what this job, which had called for a veterinarian with clinical wildlife experience, was all about. The position advert had also mentioned that zoo work would be part of the mix, and I needed to see what that meant.

I knew almost nothing of Canada, but the job offer was too attractive to turn down without a good look. For several reasons Jo and I knew that we had to move on from Kenya. Not least of these was that we had not only Karen but also another child on the way, and we wanted to ensure they had a good education and future. While Jo’s medical practice at the Nanyuki Cottage Hospital was thriving, my own private practice had shifted to depend to a large extent on intermittent wildlife work. The large animal side of my work—the horse, sheep, and cattle part—had recently taken a serious hit when the farms of several of my clients—those upon whom I relied for monthly, bread-and-butter, herd-health work—had been sold to the Kenyan government in “Africanization” programs. The new owners had been given small plots between five and twenty acres in size, and they had barely enough resources to buy seed, let alone cattle. There had been a rural landscape shift: from a small number of relatively wealthy families owning dozens or hundreds of head of livestock, to a large number of families with practically nothing for a vet to do.

My arrival in Saskatoon on the first of May, late at night, carrying a piece of cardboard on which I had printed my name, sticks in my mind for two reasons. The first is that I was at once approached by a tall, distinguished-looking man with slightly greying hair, who identified himself as Ole Nielsen, Jo’s caller, and dean of the college. That he would take the trouble to meet me personally spoke volumes about him. (Volumes that would be confirmed when he left Saskatoon after a distinguished career that included two terms as dean. He moved on to assume the leadership of another Canadian veterinary school at Guelph, Ontario.) The other reason that evening in May still remains fresh has to do with the weather. I was used to the cold of Glasgow but not madly impressed with the just below zero temperature and the snowstorm that greeted us as we left the airport and headed to Dr. Nielsen’s Volvo station wagon. Luckily Nielsen had had the foresight to borrow a full-scale goose-down parka for me. I hardly took it off for the next week, despite the fact that many Saskatonians were in light jackets or even shirt-sleeves after coming through the bitter cold of the prairie winter, something I had yet to learn about.

“You can generate your own job description on the wildlife side of things. We don’t really have a precedent or example to work with” was how Dr. Nielsen put it when we met next day in his office. “As for the rest, it will be 50 per cent zoo medicine and some teaching. We have fixed up a visit to the zoo later today, and then tomorrow you can meet some of the rest of our faculty.”

What a golden opportunity—to be told to write your own job description!

One highlight of those six days was a trip I took with Dr. Gary Wobeser, a quiet athletic man about 1.78 metres in height, who would go on to win the Canadian Senior Men’s Biathlon championship. Gary had joined the faculty the year before I arrived, after completing his Ph.D. in wildlife pathology. We drove for five hours in his monster bottle-green station wagon to the Cabri Sandhills of southern Saskatchewan, where Gary had been conducting a study of die-offs in one of the province’s most charismatic species, the white-tailed deer. His reputation in the world of wildlife diseases was already in the ascendancy.

Back home in Kenya it did not take Jo and me long to make the decision to move. Our son, Charles, arrived on time in July, but with the somewhat unusual record of my being drafted as second surgeon for Jo’s Caesarean delivery when the resident on duty did not respond to repeated calls over the Nairobi Hospital public address system.

Six weeks later we left Kenya and had a short stint in Scotland and Holland to introduce our new son to his proud grandmothers and other family members. I left for Canada in mid-September to start on the next chapter of our adventure, and Jo and the kids stayed with her parents in Holland for some extra rest time. When she did arrive we stayed with the Neal family, whom we had met in Meru National Park, Kenya, when Dick Neal was conducting research on the breeding biology of kangaroo rats.

I was a total North American greenhorn. The first mistake I made was to buy a Ford Pinto, not knowing about Unsafe at Any Speed, the book consumer advocate and environmental crusader Ralph Nader had written, which focused on the exploding gas tank of the infamous vehicle. Comparing it to the cars in Kenya and Europe, Jo thought it was enormous until she saw a few of the others on the road, most of which dwarfed it.

While with the Neals, we searched for a house, heeding a piece of advice we had never heard before. It was the aphorism that only three things mattered in house purchasing: location, location, and location. In this regard we were lucky because, even though there was a housing shortage at the time, we found a nice bungalow that backed right onto a park. Karen could leave through the back gate and walk across the grass (or snow) right to school. The basement was unfinished so I could put my woodworking hobby to good use. Over time, the African hardwood crate that had carried our goods and chattels across the ocean became a coffee table and matching set of armchairs, with upholstery by Jo, who has great skill with many forms of craft.

In the meantime, I dove into my work at the university. Even before the family arrived, and only three days after I arrived to start my new job, I found myself dealing with an animal crisis that was partly of my own making. It was what would technically be called an iatrogenic emergency: a symptom or illness brought on unintentionally by something that a doctor does or says.

In this case it was the “does” rather than the “says.”

The patient was an emaciated white-tailed deer doe, who stood with drooping ears about five metres from me. She was on the other side of the page-wire fence that surrounded the enclosure she shared with a group of shaggy bison. Bison are about the same size as the Cape buffalo, with which I was more familiar from my years in Africa.

I guessed that hers was not typical behaviour for a deer, but I needed no guesswork to know that she was dreadfully thin and that something needed to be done. Of course this is exactly why Brent Pendleton, the animal foreman at the zoo, had asked me to take a look at her. I had met Brent briefly three months previously when I first visited Saskatoon. In the interval he had grown a red beard, and it took me a moment to recognize him.

It was obvious that the only way I was going to be able to examine the animal was to immobilize her with a drug cocktail. But doing that proved to be a problem. I had little choice in the manner of approach because of the utterly useless design of all the large animal enclosures at the zoo. In every case the open-ended shelters for the animals had been placed exactly in the middle of the pens. With no doors on the shelters, and absolutely no other way of trapping an animal for any kind of examination, I was in a quandary. I mused that such a layout nicely matched the paradigm of “the ideal family home” in Saskatoon, with the single family dwelling in the middle of a garden. The architect who had laid out the plans for the zoo, which was quite new, obviously had no concept of animal behaviour or needs. Indeed, the fences around every pen were set in straight lines, with sharp angles, just like suburban fences in a city. Humans may be the only species on Earth that have created home territories with straight boundaries. The home ranges of animals are never set so rigidly, and of course they often overlap.

The pens at the zoo were a huge step up, however, from those at the previous site of the animal collection. Those enclosures resembled what can charitably be described as a roadside menagerie at the Golden Gate Park in the city’s west end. By all accounts, and from looking at some of the old photos, the park was an eyesore. In 1964 Saskatoon’s city council decided to purchase the animals and equipment from the Golden Gate and held them there until they could be moved across the city to Forestry Farm, which had been one of the very important silviculture sites for the province since 1913. The new animal park opened in 1972, three years before my arrival, and any veterinary work had been carried out on an ad hoc basis by whomever could find the time or had some of the necessary skills.

After looking at the sick deer, Brent and I walked back to the office, and I prepared an immobilizing dart. I had not yet had the time to order the supplies I needed for such a job, but luckily there was a small supply of the right drugs at the college, and I had brought some with me. My choice was limited: either a super-potent morphine-like substance called M99 or a cattle sedative called Rompun. I had used both, separately and in combination, on a wide range of African species from elephants to tiny antelopes half the size of the deer, so I had some idea of where to start in terms of dosage. Moreover, Dr. Ron Presnell, a small-animal surgeon at the college, had recently published an article on the use of this very combination of drugs on white-tailed deer. The big surprise, when I read his paper, was that the dose Presnell suggested was almost exactly what I would have used two months earlier on a white rhino that weighed about ten times as much as the deer.

Armed with a darting pistol, a dart, plenty of experience with similar-sized animals from Africa, and the knowledge from Presnell’s paper, I walked with Brent back to the two-acre bison pen. There we met up with Jureen, one of the older keepers, close to retirement age, who had come over from Golden Gate Park and was on large-animal duty. The deer had hardly moved in the intervening half hour and was still standing looking more or less straight at me.

I tried to manoeuvre to a good spot for a shot at the heavier muscles of her hindquarters, but there was no way to manage it. She was not going to cooperate. After about ten minutes, however, during which time Brent became concerned that she would move out of range, she turned her front end slightly sideways. I now had a chance at a shot into her shoulder or neck. Of the two, the shoulder looked like the poorer option. The ridge on her shoulder blade was clearly visible and the other bones also stood out. A heavy dart there would surely hit the bones and could break something. I took one more look at the neck, realizing that it, too, did not have much muscle mass, and pulled the trigger on the gas-powered pistol.

The dart flew true—it was only about four metres to the target—and the effect was instantaneous and dramatic. The animal fell onto her side as if pole-axed. Jureen had probably never seen a deer immobilization before, as all animal captures at Golden Gate had been done with a lariat. Brent had only seen one or two such procedures and none on a deer. To see this new vet, hot off the press from Africa and hired because of his extensive experience with wildlife capture, achieve such an amazing result was probably quite something.

Something it was, but not something good. I knew at once that we had a problem, but I did not yet know how serious that problem was. Immobilized animals, even under the very best of circumstances, usually take a few minutes to go down. Only in the last three or four years have we come close to achieving immobilizations in under two minutes, and this one was under two seconds. The closest thing I had ever seen to such a speedy take down was the result of a hunting rifle and a lead bullet.

I was over the fence in a trice and placed my stethoscope on the deer’s chest. She was alive, but her breathing was irregular to say the least. One moment she was not breathing at all, the next it was going nineteen to the dozen. Then her breathing stopped again for about twenty seconds before going immediately back to a rapid pattern. I had read of this pattern, but I had never seen it before. It is known as Cheyne-Stokes respiration and is caused by damage to the respiratory centres in the central nervous system. The situation was serious, and I suggested to Brent that he call on the two-way radio to have someone bring the zoo van to the site so that we could take her to the veterinary teaching hospital, about four kilometres from the zoo.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Of Moose and Men by Jerry Haigh. Copyright © 2012 Jerry Haigh. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.