Old Dogs New Tricks by Peter Anderson

Author:Peter Anderson [Peter Jerram and Peter Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775538875
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

FOOTNOTE

Dave and Lauren told me years later how they had, as instructed, rolled the horse over every hour, until about four in the morning. Then they heard sounds of movement and found it standing. The horse lived, and hunted again. A moment of triumph for all.

TOOTED PACHYDERMS — PA

This is one of the best stories ever of a young vet being thrown in at the deep end. Picture a recent veterinary graduate fresh from university in his first job, alone except for a fellow classmate with even less experience, in a very remote part of the country. He is suddenly faced with a huge animal about which he knows absolutely nothing. Worse than that, this very valuable animal is afflicted with a condition for which there is no proven cure. The vet has a very limited arsenal of drugs and no idea whether the drugs he does have are sufficient in quantity or if they will work. And then to top it off he has not one but three crook monsters to deal with.

This is how a very young Vince Peterson, who soon after would become a well-known and much respected West Coast veterinarian, coped with a very difficult situation, totally outside of his comfort zone. Various versions of this story have appeared over the years but none of them by the person most intimately involved. It is best if Vince himself tells his story as it happened:

In 1964 when I was a new graduate the world was a vastly different environment to today. Many things which we now accept as part of the natural landscape didn’t exist. All telephones were fixed to the wall with pre-dial handsets and they were operated through a manual exchange where the keyboard operators connected the calls as requested. Many of the drugs which we use today did not exist. Many of the surgical techniques we now accept without query had not been developed. Black and white television was just in its infancy and colour television hadn’t yet been developed. And that was the world that existed when the circus arrived at Westport in the spring of that year.

For most of 1964 I had been the sole veterinarian on the entire West Coast since graduating at the start of that year. I had an area that I was responsible for which extended in the north to Seddonville, just south of Karamea on the Tasman coast, and eastwards to the Shenandoah Saddle on the road to Murchison at the top of the Maruia Valley. My territory went as far south as Paringa, a total area that stretched 240 kilometres north and 240 kilometres south. The Haast road opened in 1965.

In the spring, Dick Lim came to the Coast to work as a locum for a couple of months and he became part of what I now call the elephant story. Dick was a classmate of mine from our Sydney days and is Malaysian Chinese. He subsequently worked in New Zealand for several years then shifted to Australia and currently lives near Perth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.