DOCTOR IN THE ZOO

David Taylor is one of the world’s few independent zoo

veterinary consultants. Among his clients are Royal Windsor
Safari Park, Madrid Zoo, Knie’s Kinderzoo, Switzerland, Trust
Houses Forte Dolphinaria, Rio Leon Safari Park, Spain,
Marineland Majorca, Marineland Cote d’Azur, Ouwehands
Zoo, Holland, Stukenbrock Safari Park and Florida Dolphin
Show, Germany, Billy Smart’s Circus and Austen Brothers’
Circus. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary
Surgeons and of the Zoological Society of London. He lives
within a short car dash of London’s Heathrow Airport with a
bag constantly packed to answer emergency calls for exotic
animals in places as far flung as Europe, Asia or Latin America.
He frequently appears on radio and television talking about
animals.
By the same author

ZOO VET: THE WORLD OF A WILDLIFE VET

CATS

DOGS
DOCTOR IN THE
ZOO
The Making of a Zoo Vet

DAVID TAYLOR

With line drawings by

Frankie Coventry

London

UNWIN PAPERBACKS

Boston Sydney
 To

Stephanie and Lindsey

Table of Contents
 The Dwonikers
 Grandmother
 Red-letter Wednesday
 Parrots and Pythons
 Belle Vue
 “Not Bad, Young Feller”
 Widening Horizons
 Dolphin Handling
 The Burning Bear and Other Crises
 Julius
 Of Bishops and Babies
 Lee
 “Everything Marvellousest”
I

The Dwonikers
Fifty yards away I knew by the high-pitched bleep-bleep
coming from my car that someone, somewhere, was looking
for me. I unlocked, sw itched off the bleeper and called up the
radio telephone operator.

“Call for you from Holland, Dr. Taylor,” she said. “A dwoniker
has escaped from an animal dealer near Utrecht. He wants you
to go over straightaway with your dart-pistol to anaesthetize it.
Over.”

“Roger, wilco,” I replied, according to protocol, and drove

home wondering about the meaning of the peculiar message.

“Shelagh,” I called to my wife as I walked in the door, “what

the dickens is a dwoniker?”

Shelagh had no more idea than I did. I called up the operator

again to check the name of the beast. Yes, she was quite
certain. A dwoniker was on the loose in the land of windmills.
As we made our way to Manchester Airport, Shelagh and I
went over the possibilities concerning the identity of the
mysterious animal. Brand new kinds of animal are discovered
every year, and it is not all that long ago since as large and
spectacular a creature as the okapi was first reported, but I
thought it unlikely that the dealer had stumbled across a
completely new species. Assuming I was right, the dwoniker
might be a beast that I had never heard of, the name of
something that had been mangled in the process of
transmission by phone from Holland to England, or the Dutch
name for something mundane like a deer or a llama. I plumped
for the last alternative. “It’s a typically Dutch word,” I stated
confidently. “Bet it’s a rhinoceros gone berserk.” Although
“dwoniker” did indeed have the ring of a Dutch word, my
knowledge of the language was in fact limited to the three
words for “yes”, “no” and an unmentionable part of one’s
anatomy.

Shelagh was convinced that the answer lay in the name being
scrambled by the telephone operators. “Think of some animals’
names that are similar to ‘dwoniker’,” she advised, “something
that sounds roughly like it.” We tried, but the best we came up
with was duiker, the English name coming from the Dutch for
a genus of small African antelopes.

The more I thought about it, the more I came round to the idea
that duiker was right. But if one of those fleet-footed,
minuscule creatures had done a bunk, it would be incredibly
difficult to pursue it, stalk it and fire an anaesthetic dart
successfully at it in open countryside, even assuming I could
find it in the first place. I had chased escaped red deer, ten
times the size of duiker, enough times and been lucky to get a
momentary glimpse of them after hours of searching. Nor did I
know much about duiker. I had seen them at London Zoo but
most other collections in Britain did not exhibit them. This
would be my first encounter with one: that was about all I
knew. I hoped that these small, frail and probably highly
expensive individuals would agree with my anaesthetics if I was
lucky enough to get within darting range. God forbid that they
should be one of that “awkward squad” among antelopes for
whom certain knock-out chemicals paralyse the heat-control
centre in the brain so that the unconscious creature suffers a
rocketing rise in temperature that can easily and fatally cook the
vital central nervous system.

At Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport the animal dealer, Mr. van

den Baars, was waiting. As we walked to his car I forgot that
the real identity of the “dwoniker” still hung in the air. “Where
is the duiker, exactly?” I asked.

“Duiker, what duiker? Oh, do you mean dike?” said van den
Baars, slightly puzzled.

‘“The duiker, the one that’s escaped.’*

The Dutchman laughed. “I really don’t know where you got

that from. My duiker are all safely tucked up. No, the problem
is with two onagers that have slipped out of my quarantine
farm.”

Onagers! Two onagers. “Dwonikers”. Listening to the dealer’s

rapid, accented English, I understood how the radio telephone
operator might easily have created a mythical beast. At last I
had the solution to the mystery and knew my quarry: a couple
of onagers, the rare and valuable wild asses of Central Asia
which always reminded me of sandy-coloured and rather
unspectacular mules.

"They’ve been sighted on a water meadow about a mile from

the farm,” said my companion. “It’s open country and they’re
grazing quietly, or at least they were.”

We swept along the motorway past the neat, dull townships

outside Amsterdam with the evening sun flashing off the black
water of the narrow canals that ran everywhere. Onagers were
also a new species for me, but they were nice-sized members of
the equine family. I had doped a good number of horses and
zebras and even the odd Przevalski’s horse, another wild
species. I was carrying drugs which could be used safely on all
the equines, although some needed comparatively bigger doses,
pound for pound, than others.

Mr. van den Baars stopped the car in a narrow lane and pointed
across a low hedge. At first all I could see were acres and acres
of green grass in one gigantic field. Then I spotted the onagers.
They were right in the middle, looking like two creamy-
coloured mice from where we sat and cropping happily at the
lush pasture in the golden light. “There they are,” said the
Dutchman, “and here come Piet and Kees with crates on the
tractor. I’ll stay here in the car. What do you plan to do?”
I squinted into the distance. There was no cover anywhere near
the onagers. I would have to try the disarming, nonchalant
approach. “I’ll go alone to see if I can dart the pair,” I said.
“Keep your men back here till I wave. Then send them over.
Shouldn’t be much problem, if I can get within forty feet. But if
they start to run. ...” I shook my head. With night coming on
and so much room to manoeuvre, the onagers could stay out of
range until I had to give up. I wished I had a dart-rifle, for in
that vast field my pistol seemed about as potent as a
peashooter.

Loading two darts with anaesthetic, I climbed over a gate in the

hedge and ran down a bank onto the billiard- table surface of
the meadow. I marched off towards my prey, cocking the
pistol, screwing the gas-control knob to maximum pressure and
keeping one finger on the safety catch. The sun was an orange
semicircle on the horizon. I realized that I was working several
feet below sea level. As I came nearer to the grazing onagers
one of them looked up, munching, pricked its ears and alerted
the other.

From 250 yards away they stared at me. Now for my display of
cunning, a simple device which I had found effective three
times out of ten and idiotically useless the other seven. It relies
on my ability to impersonate a harmless rustic out for an
evening stroll with nothing but innocent thoughts in his head.
The yokel ambles along and pays not the slightest attention to
the odd hippopotamus or aardvark—or onager—that might
cross his path. So bucolic a fellow, gazing at the sky, humming
to himself, is the very opposite of the predatory human, the
pursuing keeper or beady-eyed veterinarian, whom such
creatures can spot from a mile away. It is essential when using
this ploy not to approach the animals head on. I shuffle along
on a course which will take me at an angle across their bows
and not too close to them.
This is what I did as I came closer to the onagers. My dart-gun
was hidden in my arms folded idly across my chest. I seemed, I
hoped, to be deep in thought, thought far removed from
onager hunting, as I flicked at the occasional tussock of grass
with my toe, watched birds fly by and sang a low, gentle song.
Having taken a furtive glance at the onagers to establish their
position, I gazed steadfastly at everything else and studiously
avoided being seen looking at them. I was quite pleased with
my performance. “Dum de dum dum,” I carolled softly. I was
reducing the distance slowly but steadily. I picked a stem of
grass and chewed it like rustics are said to do. Great acting— I
reminded myself of the young Olivier. “Dum de dum dum.” It
must have been plain that if there was one thing I was not
interested in, that thing was wild asses. “Dum de dum—aaagh!”
With a great splash, the rustic found himself up to his knees in
water and sinking deeper as his shoes hit mud. I had wandered
into a narrow, straight-sided dike running across the meadow
with banks so close together that it was almost impossible to
see from twenty yards. Dripping, I struggled out and looked
around. The onagers were still standing peacefully, eating and
keeping an eye on me as I tried with one hand to wring some
water out of my trouser legs. Yes, they must have been
thinking, that’s the village idiot for sure. They shook their heads
and chewed on.

I resumed my quiet ramble but kept a sharp eye open for more
dikes and ditches. I found them. It became apparent that the
whole area was neatly subdivided by water channels in place of
fences or hedges, and each time I discovered one I was almost
on top of it. The harmless peasant had to do some jumping,
but I was getting almost within range of my quarry. Eventually
I judged I could risk standing still and glancing out of the
corner of my eye at the two onagers. They were watching me
but were obviously not alarmed. The range was thirty-five feet,
I guessed. Close enough. I released the safety catch, followed
the flight of a heron against the sky, let my face turn slowly
with the bird until I was looking at the onagers, and unfolded
my arms. Humming disarmingly, I took aim down the barrel of
the pistol and pulled the trigger. Plop! A dart embedded itself in
the plump haunch of one of the animals. Swishing its tail, it
trotted off a few paces and looked round at its flank. By then I
had turned my back on the onagers, apparently unconcerned
but in fact hurriedly loading my second dart. Slowly I turned
again.

The second onager was staring at me uncertainly, ready to beat

it at the first inkling that I was up to any skullduggery. It
watched me bring the pistol up, sensed danger but made its
move to wheel and flee too late. A red-tasselled dart thwacked
into its shoulder muscle.

Both animals were injected and should be unconscious within

five minutes. I waved furiously towards the road where van de
Baars and his helpers waited. By the time they arrived, the
onagers should be ready for the crates. Once they were loaded,
all I would have to do would be to reverse the anaesthetic with
a stimulant antidote and my work would be done. The onagers
began to stagger and to trot round with the peculiar high-
stepping gait that equines show when an anaesthetic begins to
make the world spin before their eyes. Then, suddenly, they did
what so many animals do when darted with potent
anaesthetics—they went straight for the nearest hazard. Be it
zebra, deer, antelope or domestic horse, if there is barbed wire
or a rocky hole or a marsh or a pool of water in the vicinity, a
half-doped creature seems more often than not to be uncannily
drawn towards it.

The two onagers, high-stepped their way towards the nearest

canal. With a frantic dash I managed to catch up with the closer
of the two and grabbed its tail to try to brake its progress. No
use. The onager blindly pulled me along behind it. I tried
hauling the tail to one side to steer it away from trouble, but the
wild ass was too powerful for me. With a great eruption of
green water, my onager plunged into the canal. Seconds later its
mate did the same twenty yards away.. Now I had two
expensive and rare creatures about to lose consciousness in five
feet of water. Both seemed likely to drown.

I looked desperately towards the road. Van den Baars’s men

were just driving the tractor with the crates through the field
gate towards the narrow, grassy bridge across the first dike.
“Come on, schnell, schnell!” I shouted, hoping that they
understood German and could hear me at that distance over
the roar of their engine. The head of one of the onagers, eyes
glazing, rested against the muddy side of the canal. The other
was repeatedly dunking its muzzle. It was almost fully
unconscious. There was only one thing to do. I jumped into the
canal alongside it and grabbed the heavy head. Slithering
frantically on the soft mud bottom, I tried to hold my balance
and keep the nostrils above water as the onager pitched all its
weight onto me. Straining, I pulled myself from under the
animal and tugged its muzzle until the tip of it just rested on
the bank. The other onager was going under. I dragged myself
like a dishcloth out of the water, squelched quickly along the
grass and then leapt into the canal again to grasp the second
beast’s head. “Schnell, schnell!” I kept yelling.

After what seemed like years, the men arrived, jumped off the
tractor and dashed over to me. “Get the boxes off the tractor,
quick!” I gasped. “I can’t hold the head up much longer.” I was
going to have to reverse the anaesthetic with the animals still in
the water. The three of us could not lift the heavy, unconscious
onagers bodily out of the vertically sided waterway, but if 1
could bring them round enough to help themselves, maybe
between their efforts and ours we could get them out and box
them before they were awake enough to disappear over the
horizon and start the hunt all over again. Underwater I fished
in my pockets for plastic syringe, needle and antidote. There
was no hope of sterilizing or disinfecting anything. The two
asses and I were all covered in slimy water from top to toe.

Getting my head under the space between the lower jawbones

of the onager, I managed to support the animal’s head painfully
on top of mine, thus freeing both my hands to load the syringe.
That done, I punched a clenched fist into the base of its neck
somewhere under the canal surface and raised the jugular vein
where it emerged from the water. A minute after I had inserted
the needle and pressed the antidote in fast, I felt power
returning to the onager’s muscles.

It lifted its head unaided. Looking quickly to see that its mate
was still breathing above water, I told the men the next step.
“I’ll go under, grab one foreleg at a time, bring them up and
shove them on the canal bank. Then you position the forefeet
and haul on the neck. With me behind and the animal getting
thrust back in its hind end, it should clamber out.”

They nodded. I dived under the cold water; up to that moment

I had not noticed how chilled I was. Groping blindly under the
stocky body of the wild ass, I found a foreleg and hauled it up
to the surface. The men reached down to help. I repeated the
procedure, then waded round to the onager's rear. Slapping it
on the rump and hauling its tail forward, I encouraged it to
move. The drug was now almost completely reversed. With a
great heave, the beast lunged over the edge of the canal, the
men clung onto its neck, and before it could fully regain its
senses it was bundled into one of the waiting crates.

I refilled my syringe and for the fourth time that day did my
impersonation of a cumbersome water sprite by jumping into
the water by the second onager. We went through the same
routine. The reviving animal scrambled out and was pulled
towards the crate. This time, as it went over the edge of the
canal with me manipulating the tail, it lashed out smartly with
one of its hind legs. The unshod but solid hoof caught me
squarely on the chest and I crashed backwards under the water
for yet another thorough immersion. Picking myself up from
the mud beneath the water, I wondered momentarily what on
earth had made me choose a life which led to floundering in
the depths of a Dutch canal with water weed over my eyes and
up my nostrils.

When both onagers were safely restored to the quarantine farm

I darted them again, this time with long-acting penicillin, for
fear that my insanitary injections in the canal might have
introduced germs along with the needle.

“Now, Dr, Taylor,” said van den Baars as I stood shivering in

my underpants and put on my spare clothes, ‘‘perhaps you
would like to warm up with a glass or two of our good Holland
gin. You’ve certainly earned it. I must thank you most
sincerely—on behalf of the dwonikers.”
2

Grandmother
The first steps along the road to that muddy Dutch dike were
taken as a young schoolboy with an absorbing interest in
everything which flew, swam, crept or crawled. Wandering the
fields and moors of the Pennines around my home in
Rochdale, near Manchester, I would find no end of creatures
obviously in trouble, especially sheep. Unable to rise, often with
inflamed and swollen vulvas, frequently being eaten away by
blowfly maggots, these pitiful animals lay alone on windswept
hillsides or at the bottom of quarries, or struggled in moorland
streams. It was no use trying to find the owners of the sheep.
The moors are vast and the flocks wander for miles, gathered in
only once or twice a year by shepherds who miraculously know
where they are likely to be. Besides, the farmers did not bother
to do anything for these fallen individuals even when they came
across one. “ ’Twon’t do no good, lad,” they would say, turning
their back on the animal’s misery and trudging off. The moor
was common land and the grass free food. Losing a few sheep
from disease or foxes or thieves was part of the game. They still
made enough to live by.

School homework would be forgotten as I crouched in the rain

over yet another sodden woolly body, thumbing through a
book called Veterinary Counter Practice. This slim volume was
written to help chemists give first-aid advice in their shops to
pet owners. It was illustrated by Edwardian engravings of
bearded men in frock coats solemnly holding unprotesting and
improbable cats with linen-draped heads over bowls belching
medicated steam, and of ornately coiffed ladies using what
looked like armoured gauntlets to thrust pills down dogs’
throats. Certainly it was the Gospel on veterinary matters as far
as I was concerned. I did not know that I was looking at sheep
dying of gas-gangrene brought on by difficult lambing, with
livers riddled with fluke parasites or with bloodstreams lethally
deficient in calcium, none of which was mentioned in my book.
I just covered the animals with my jacket, treated their inflamed
parts with Germolene ointment, picked the maggots off them
and forced Dad’s brandy between their lips.

I do not think a single one of my sheep patients ever recovered.

Once, twice, sometimes three times a day I would go out to
them and sooner or later I would find them dead. On one black
occasion I came across a ram that had fallen into a quarry but
was still alive. The jagged ends of its shattered femur poked a
full four inches through the skin, alive with industrious
bluebottles. Trembling and sick with fright, I killed my first
patient, suffocating him with my jacket wrapped tight round his
nostrils and mouth. He took a long time to die. I walked home
dizzy with remorse and did not sleep at all for two nights.

In addition to the Germolene and brandy, my box of

medicaments included vitamin tonic and tincture of arnica, a
stinging brown herbal preparation which was my grand-
mother’s cure-all. Grandmother seldom walked out on the
moors with me, but was my ally, mentor, co-conspirator and
assistant in all my surgical work at home on small beasts. She
was a spirited, bustling woman with features the colour of pale
honey and homely as an oven-bottom muffin. She knew
alcohol, tobacco and cosmetics to be works of the Devil and
had stormed out of church in mid-sermon when the new curate
had revealed himself to be an evolutionist. Sturdily built, with
grey gleaming eyes in a round face, she ate little other than a
sort of unbleached tripe, a diet which she never appeared to
find monotonous and which she augmented on Mondays with
cold fatty mutton and mint sauce. The small boys of the
neighbourhood held her in great respect for the way in which,
if she were so minded, she could strike a brilliant shower of
sparks from the cobblestones in our back street by clipping
them expertly with her iron-soled Lancashire clogs. Lots of the
lads, myself included, could kick atoms of fire from the stones
like this as we lounged outside on a summer evening, but none
of us could approach the effortless pyrotechnic display put on
by the old lady as she passed us on her way to or from the tripe
shop.

There was a second reason why the small boys held her in great
awe. Along with the strictly seasonal hobbies of “swaling”
(burning the dead grass on the moor edges), “conkering”
(duelling with horse chestnuts hardened and threaded onto
pieces of string in which the object was to split one’s
opponent’s nut away from its string), cricket, and whipping
tops along the flagstones, we all kept mice. The problem was
that getting hold of tame mice was almost impossible during
the war years, and there was a serious dearth of the small
rodents in the hutches, pockets and private hideaways of the
boys in our street. Grandmother solved the problem. Somehow
she found out that they kept mice, both white and chocolate
coloured, at the Rochdale gasworks, presumably to test for gas
just as canaries were used in coal mines. One Saturday morning
she led a band of us down to the gasworks. We each carried
some form of small container, a tin or a cardboard box.
Ecstatically, we came home with mice; Grandmother knew the
man who had the key to the room where the mice were kept.
Normally a surly individual, he was genial in Grandmother’s
presence and chuckled as he put one or two of the velvety little
creatures into each of the containers thrust urgently under his
nose. After that breakthrough, we tried visits to the gasworks
alone, but without Grandmother it never worked. They had
none to spare, they did not keep any mice, the man was too
busy. But for Grandmother, persuaded by a gaggle of imploring
six- and seven-year-olds to make a detour from her Saturday,
trip to market, mice were always forthcoming.

Hardworking and practical, she was at the same time highly

sentimental. She paid me three pence a week to sing for her
each Sunday evening a sugary ballad entitled “I’ll Walk Beside
You” while my mother accompanied me on the piano. This
excruciating ritual regularly brought tears to Grandmother’s
eyes (and had the same effect, though for different reasons, on
the rest of the household); mercifully it ceased when my voice
began to change.
In her youth Grandmother had been a seamstress, and she
insisted that I learn to sew and knit, arguing that the art of
surgery on which my heart was firmly set was just cutting and
stitching, and that neatness in weaving threads in and out of
living flesh could be developed on pieces of flannel, silk and
worsted. I spent hours grafting squares of cloth together under
Grandmother’s grey, hawk-like eyes and had my knuckles
painfully rapped by one of her thick metal knitting needles
whenever I grew careless. Her wisdom was confirmed years
later at university when the Surgery Professor, watching the
students clumsily practise their first simple operations on the
chill, unbleeding bodies of already dead animals, urged us to
dam our socks and sew on buttons at every opportunity. “Less
beer and wenching and more needlework, gentlemen,” he
would roar as we cobbled away at the corpses.

Grandmother and I made a good team. She was adept with the
only anaesthetic we had, a freezing spray of ethyl chloride. With
one hand she would hold the struggling form of a thrush I had
found fluttering and tumbling frantically through the
undergrowth, and with the other would direct a stream of the
numbing liquid onto the bird’s shattered wing bone. As
hoarfrost formed on the bloodstained flight feathers, she would
tell me to begin splinting the limb with matchsticks and strips
of sticking-plaster, her eyes following the movements of my
fingers through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

My parents tolerated well enough at first the toads convalescing

in the bathroom cupboard, the paralysed owl that sat on top of
the grandfather clock in the hall and the rabbit road-accident
victims that either regained vitality or inexorably wasted away in
the emergency wards I established in empty zinc washing tubs.
But as the number of patients grew, so did the problems. The
owl on the hall clock stopped the ancient timepiece when I
forgot one day to replace the sheet of newspaper on which he
squatted and his droppings slipped through a gap in the
wooden casing and completely clogged the brass works. With
the greatest difficulty Dad cleaned them up, but the clock never
worked properly again. Still, if any member of the family raised
the matter of the luckless clock, Grandmother would fold her
arms, heave up her bosom and tetchily remind all present that it
was her clock, that it suited her very well and that it never had
kept good time: a preposterous statement that all knew, but
none dared say, was the very opposite of the truth. With the
grumblings silenced, Grandmother would slip me a solemn
wink.

When the war came, our house’s old coal-cellar was converted
into the family’s air-raid shelter. Its ceiling was reinforced by
bracing beams and pillars, and bunk beds and supplies of
tinned food were put in there. In fact, Rochdale was never
attacked and the family did not seem to make use of the shelter
during the infrequent air-raid warnings. I soon saw how this
could be turned to my advantage, for there had been more
trouble with my parents over my veterinary activities. My
father, going into the garden to inspect the rows of glass
cloches under which he grew radishes and lettuce, had found
not only that his ripe, fresh salad had been requisitioned for
essential victualling of the rabbit wounded in the zinc tubs, but
also that two recuperating old hedgehogs were actually bedded
down within the line of cloches.

Grandmother to the rescue again. She stood between my irate

father and myself and defended her beloved seven-year- old
grandson. “Enough of that, Frank,” she said to my father,
wagging a stern finger. “There’s a war on, you know.”

That was all she said. The power was in the way she said it. I
can still remember clearly the sheer force of her words as she
stood, arms akimbo, grey eyes unblinking. Nothing could have
sounded less unreasonable or more obvious: with a war on it
was time for every English man and woman, and every English
rabbit, owl and hedgehog, to stand shoulder to shoulder in the
common cause.

Next day, as Grandmother replanted Dad’s garden with salad

seeds, I took her into my confidence and outlined my idea of
putting the more contentious species of mammal and bird in
the apparently unused air-raid shelter.

“Your mum won’t have it, dear,” Grandmother murmured as

we discussed the possibilities. “I know we don’t often use the
shelter, but suppose we do, some time?”

I argued that it was most unlikely that we would and that, apart
from the old lavatory in the yard, I had no alternatives.
Grandmother eventually agreed to help me but suggested that I
bring my patients into the room via the chute which had been
the means of delivering coal from the street when the coal-
cellar was being used for its original purpose. In this way I
would avoid the front and back doors and the attentions of
other members of the family. It was a sound idea. My
accomplice waited in the big room next door to the coal-cellar,
bottling fruit, squeezing clothes through the mangle in front of
the high open coal fire or doing a bit of whitewashing. With my
patient in a sack or wrapped in my jacket I lifted the heavy iron
grate from the coal chute at pavement level and slid down into
the new hospital ward. There on the bunk beds I had the
boxes, tins, jars and cages that held the sick and infirm. When
the coast was clear, Grandmother would slip in and we would
get to work.

Grandmother to the rescue again. She stood between my irate

father and myself and defended her beloved seven-year- old
grandson. “Enough of that, Frank,” she said to my father,
wagging a stern finger. “There’s a war on, you know.”

That was all she said. The power was in the way she said it. I
can still remember clearly the sheer force of her words as she
stood, arms akimbo, grey eyes unblinking. Nothing could have
sounded less unreasonable or more obvious: with a war on it
was time for every English man and woman, and every English
rabbit, owl and hedgehog, to stand shoulder to shoulder in the
common cause.
Next day, as Grandmother replanted Dad’s garden with salad
seeds, I took her into my confidence and outlined my idea of
putting the more contentious species of mammal and bird in
the apparently unused air-raid shelter.

“Your mum won’t have it, dear,” Grandmother murmured as

we discussed the possibilities. “I know we don’t often use the
shelter, but suppose we do, some time?”

I argued that it was most unlikely that we would and that, apart
from the old lavatory in the yard, I had no alternatives.
Grandmother eventually agreed to help me but suggested that I
bring my patients into the room via the chute which had been
the means of delivering coal from the street when the coal-
cellar was being used for its original purpose. In this way I
would avoid the front and back doors and the attentions of
other members of the family. It was a sound idea. My
accomplice waited in the big room next door to the coal-cellar,
bottling fruit, squeezing clothes through the mangle in front of
the high open coal fire or doing a bit of whitewashing. With my
patient in a sack or wrapped in my jacket I lifted the heavy iron
grate from the coal chute at pavement level and slid down into
the new hospital ward. There on the bunk beds I had the
boxes, tins, jars and cages that held the sick and infirm. When
the coast was clear, Grandmother would slip in and we would
get to work.

The air-raid shelter hospital survived a first discovery by my

young sister, Vivienne, who stumbled on it one day but was
bought off by Grandmother, who gave Vivienne a little locket
in exchange for her silence. Shortly afterwards, however, an air
raid over Manchester led to Rochdale having a long alarm call
on the sirens. The sound of bombing could be distinctly heard
in our house that night and my parents decided we should all
sleep in the shelter. Piling through the doorway in their
pyjamas, the family found the place of refuge already fully
occupied by things furry, scaly and feathered. Worse, my father
discovered that I had used almost the whole cache of tinned
corned beef on feeding the hedgehogs, and my little sister was
bitten through her nightdress as she sleepily sat down on the
bottom bunk and on the orphan fox cub to whom it belonged.

Grandmother miraculously soothed everyone’s shattered nerves

and fearlessly admitted opening the tins of corned beef for me,
but then and there my long-suffering father decided to convert
the lavatory in the yard into a recognized and approved wild
animal hospital. The problem with the lavatory/hospital was
that there was no room for Grandmother and me to do any
actual work. That still had to be done elsewhere.

Our favourite place was the kitchen. The light was good and
that was essential, particularly for our regular hedgehog clinics.
Together we would set about painting with chloroform the
bloated blood-sucking ticks clinging to the bellies of our prickly
patients. After waiting a few moments for a parasite to loosen
its hold, Grandmother would stand back while I, as head
surgeon, picked it off with tweezers. The trouble with
hedgehogs, particularly sick ones, is that they often carry a hefty
load of fleas around with them as well. The warm kitchen
seemed to encourage these prodigious jumpers to leave their
hosts, and on one potentially disastrous occasion my mother
found scores of energetic little varmints leaping about on some
pastry she was rolling out. Grandmother seized one, cracked it
between finger and thumbnail and pronounced it to be a
mosquito. Since it was late January, she had to add that it was
an unseasonably early mosquito, but after that we began to use
DDT powder on the animals before putting them into the
hospital shed. Grandmother always made sure my mother was
out or busy somewhere else in the house before we began
hedgehog clinics. We used the kitchen table and spoke in low
voices.

When things went well, Grandmother would hum gleefully and

give me a hug. Just having me to herself pleased her
enormously and, al though she undoubtedly loved the animals
we dealt with, her principal reward I think was to feel that in
some way she was helping to lay the first tiny foundations of
what we both wanted me to become—a veterinarian. We
would never dream that I might do anything else or that I
might not be able to qualify for veterinary school. “Why,”
Grandmother would tell her cronies, “one day David’s going to
treat tigers.” She was dead right.

When it came to goldfish, newts and frogs with skin diseases

we at first did not do very well. I painted their ulcers with
creams and antiseptic lotions but the water quickly washed
these away. Time after time I had to bury my failures in the
garden.

“I’ve an idea,” Grandmother said one day, as she watched me

dispose of the most recent victim, a goldfish. “Go and get me
the paste I use for my false teeth, David!”

I went upstairs for the ointment that Grandmother, locked in

the bathroom, used in the mysterious ritual of her toilet each
morning.

“Now,” she said when I gave her the tin of tacky grey stuff,
“next time we have a goldfish with one of those nasty sores,
we’ll paint on the arnica as usual but then, before putting him
back in the water, we’ll smear on some of this denture paste.
It’s funny stuff; as soon as it gets wet it sets like wax. That’s
how I keep my teeth in, young feller. Here— try a bit.”

I took a little of the grey paste and put it on my tongue.

It was tasteless but I could feel it changing its consistency

andsticking tight. I ran my tongue along the top of my mouth
but the paste did not come off, and it was still hanging around
when I went to bed that night. When I found the paste still
unpleasantly tacky on my gums the following morning I began
to realize the possibilities of the stuff. Now all we needed was a
suitable case.
Some weeks later a friend brought me a lovely big frog. He was
green, glistening and impassive as he sat on the palm of my
hand, gulping. One of his front toes was swollen and had a
parboiled appearance. Serum oozed through the skin. I showed
him to Grandmother. “The false-teeth stuff,” I reminded her.
“This is our chance.”

Grandmother was enthusiastic. “Get the paste from my room,”

she instructed. “We’ll put it on over some comfrey ointment.”

Comfrey ointment was only one of the herbal preparations

whose virtues Grandmother preached. As well as arnica
tincture, she taught me how to use quinine, senna and ipecacuanha
wine. I was supervised in applying iodine and gentian violet and
sticky kaolin poultices. Sometimes we would take animals with
respiratory troubles and go out to seek the municipal road-
menders with their smoking tar-boilers. Grandmother would
tip the wide-eyed workmen a shilling as we stood letting an
armful of sniffling hedgehog breathe in the pungent vapour for
a quarter of an hour. “What’s good for whooping cough in
children will be good for hedgehogs,” she would say
confidently.

Grandmother held the frog gently while I smeared soothing,

dark-green comfrey ointment on the inflamed toe. Then I
covered the whole of the delicate foot with the false- teeth
paste and placed the frog in a large glass jar with a couple of
inches of water and a stone to climb on. I was pleased to see
the paste stick to his foot as he paddled about. Next day it was
still holding the comfrey ointment in place. Grandmother
seemed very pleased and patted my head.

Three days later we wiped away the paste and the ointment and
looked at the toe. There was no doubt about it; the swelling
was going down and the toe looked healthier. I repeated the
double application, returned the frog to his ward and presented
him with half a dozen fat bluebottles that I had caught for him.
The frog and Grandmother mad$ veterinary history, for the toe
healed completely in a week, a record for frogs attending my
clinic, and we released him in the pond of a nearby park. I still
use Grandmother’s denture paste on dolphin and sea-lion
wounds.

Grandmother also hit on a novel way of treating tortoises and

similar creatures that had taken a tumble or received blows
hard enough to crack their shells, exposing the soft tissues
underneath. Nowadays I happily cut away great windows in
tortoise and terrapin shells to do operations; the window in the
shell is repaired with modern epoxy resins and glass fibre and
heals perfectly in a few months. When Grandmother and I
were in practice, we had no such thing as epoxy resins and
plastics, but she was on the right track. I must have been about
twelve years old when she came up with the notion.

“It occurs to me,” she said one day when we -were surveying
the septic, irregular hole in a terrapin carapace caused by the
bite of a cat, “that to protect the soft stuff underneath once
you’ve cleaned it up, we should seal the hole in the shell
properly. Get the Bulldog kit.”

My Bulldog kit for repairing punctures in the tyres of my

bicycle consisted of a small tin containing sandpaper, glue,
french chalk powder and discs of inner-tube rubber. I fetched
it. Inner tubes, fine, I thought as I returned with the kit, but
terrapins?

But there was no arguing with Grandmother. “Now, my boy,”

she said, “cut out the diseased flesh.” She sprayed a fine stream
of freezer on the spot. “Dab on the arnica.” I did as she
directed. “And now go ahead as if the terrapin was just an
ordinary tyre puncture.”

The terrapin pulled in his head with a faint hiss, apparently

resigned to reincarnation as a bicycle. I sandpapered the edges
of the hole in the shell, dusted them lightly with the chalk,
applied the sticky glue and pressed on a rubber patch of the
appropriate size. A perfect job.

Grandmother beamed. “Now," she said, “judging by the size of

the hole and knowing how long it takes one’s fingernails to
grow half an inch and allowing for the fact that terrapins are
cold-blooded and likely to heal slower than mammals like us, I
reckon you ought to be able to take a peek in about a month,”

The punctured terrapin, with the black patch looking like a

trapdoor covering his machinery, re-extended his head and legs
when he was certain that he was back in his vivarium and not
likely to find himself caught up in the Tour de France. He
looked unconcerned and began nibbling a tiny pond snail.

The patch held underwater, and each day I checked the edges
to see they were secure. As the days went by, “Black Spot”
seemed destined to be a good deal luckier than the name I had
given him. One month to the day I brought the terrapin into
the kitchen.

Even Grandmother held her breath as I snipped the rubber

patch with her nail scissors. I peeled the rubber back and we
bumped our heads as we bent for a closer look. I let out a gasp
of delight; the shell had knitted together completely and healthy
new carapace covered the hole. “Black Spot” did not allow
himself to get excited as Grandmother and I hugged one
another and laughed with relief—we took our work very
seriously and shared our occasional successes with no less
intimacy than when we commiserated with one another over
our frequent failures.

“Grandma,” I said, “one day they’ll award you the Nobel Prize
for Medicine.”

I had total faith in Grandmother’s knowledge, and only slowly

did this state of affairs reverse itself. By the time I went to
university she was laid low with chronic heart disease and
would not take a pill or a drop of medicine prescribed by the
most eminent of specialists until her grandson and one-time
partner had given the OK. She was immensely proud when I
made it as a veterinarian. She hung my degree scroll above her
bed and lived for me to go and talk about the old days and
check the latest advice of her doctor.

Some years later I tackled my first giant tortoise case, one of

the massive and rare 300-pound Galapagos tortoises at Belle
Vue Zoo, Manchester. Not having had experience of the
immense contractile power of their hind-leg muscles, I had let
the beast trap my hand securely within the shell where I had
been injecting into the soft skin of the groin. I wonder what
Grandmother would have to say about patching up monsters
like this, I was thinking as the keepers dragged on the rapidly
disappearing leg that was pinioning me. I would tell her about it
when I visited her that evening, now bed-ridden but alert as
ever. I could imagine her softly wrinkled golden face breaking
into a wide grin as I reminded her about “Black Spot” and
compared him with his huge Galapagos relative.

The telephone rang. The head reptile keeper took the call and
then came over to me.

“Dr. Taylor,” he said, “bad news, I’m afraid. Your father rang
to say that your grandmother has just passed away.”
3

Red-letter Wednesday
Thanks to Grandmother’s encouragement, my passion for
animals stayed with me through school and university, and at
university I found myself being drawn more and more towards
the care of the exotic species, the wild, sometimes rare animals
who, it seemed to me, demanded veterinary work of the most
challenging and the most rewarding sort. After graduating in
the late fifties I took a partnership in a , veterinary practice in
my home town of Rochdale, Lancashire. Rochdale is a grey,
lustreless town of around 100,000 souls lying beneath the damp
western slopes of the desolate and rocky Pennine moorland,
with the big industrial centre of Manchester situated on the flat
land twelve miles to the west and surrounded by smaller towns
and villages, all of which saw their heyday in the industrial
revolution and the reign of King Cotton, when the moist
climate of Lancashire was so perfect for the spinning of yarn
before air-conditioning and humidifiers were dreamed of.
Above Rochdale’s cobbled streets rose a forest of tall mill
chimneys, but what sorts of animals were to be found in those
drizzly streets, in the shabby smallholdings and on the bleak,
windy moorlands? Certainly none of the wild, exciting creatures
of which I dreamed: tigers, buffaloes or armadilloes.

A typical veterinary practice in Rochdale consisted of a mixture

of household pets and farm animals, and it was on dogs
involved in road accidents, sows that got into difficulties when
giving birth and sheep struck down by mysterious lethal
epidemics that I learned the arts of surgery, obstetrics and
medicine. 11 was useful, reward ing experience in a general
practice like hundreds of others in the north of England— but
there was something else, something of vital importance to a
young vet who had already developed a consuming interest in
exotic species. Among the clients of the practice I had joined
was the large zoo in Manchester, Belle Vue. There were other
practices nearer the zoo but the connection went back to the
nineteenth century, when Rochdale was the veterinary centre of
that part of England. The vet in the practice who had for
several years done all the work at Belle Vue was Norman
Whittle, and with him I had visited cases at the zoo as a student
and had first gained some idea of the problems of exotic animal
medicine. Now that I was qualified, surely I could achieve my
ambition and get to grips myself with the diseases of the wild
animals in the zoo in Manchester. But how? The zoo director
had a good working relationship with Norman Whittle and
trusted him. If an elephant was sick or a python poorly, it was
Whittle he sent for. What possible good could Taylor, the new
boy, do? There was apparently no escape from my
predicament. I could not get in to do the work because my
experience was virtually nil, but unless I did achieve a
breakthrough and treated some zoo animals I could not begin
to get the experience.

Wednesdays began to assume an immense importance in my

life, for Norman had his half-day off each week on Wednesday
afternoon and I was on call for Belle Vue. This might be my
chance, I thought, but for months I was disappointed. Unless
the zoo needed him urgently they would leave a message asking
Norman to call on the Thursday morning, and in the rare event
of an emergency, Edith, our receptionist, would manage to
contact him wherever he was and that was the end of his half-
day relaxation. It was most frustrating; my one chance to
deputize for my senior partner was if he was out of contact on
a Wednesday afternoon or away, on holiday abroad for
instance, but on these occasions Belle Vue’s animal stock
seemed to be strictly on their best behaviour and paragons of
blooming health and vitality, right down to the weediest
chipmunk in the small mammal house.

Then it happened. It was Wednesday afternoon. Norman

Whittle had gone to the coast and was not expected back until
late. The zoo director, Mr. Wilson, rang. Edith explained that
Norman was away. Yes, OK then, was the reply, if it had to be
Dr. Taylor, Dr. Taylor it would have to be. But hurry! One of
the chimpanzees had lost a thumb. I jumped gleefully into my
battered old Jowett van and set off.

It had all started over the asparagus. Each day a rich variety of
fruits and vegetables was sent up to the great ape house at Belle
Vue from the wholesale market in the city, depending on price,
availability and what was in season. Out of the day’s selection
Len, the senior ape keeper, would build up a balanced and
attractive diet for bis collection of chimps, orangutans and
gorillas. A slim, phlegmatic individual with grey eyes blinking
behind spectacles and a chirpy Manchester accent, he had to
make sure that the apes received essential protein, vitamins and
roughage. Whenever possible he included delicacies which his
charges could enjoy for the sheer fun of eating—grapes,
pomegranates or peaches. An odd case of eggplants or
avocados left unsold at the end of the day would usually end up
at the zoo, and on this particular day a crate stuffed with tender
asparagus bunches had arrived. Len took a few bunches down
to the ape house to see what his chimps would make of them.

Robert, the big male chimpanzee, shared quarters with two

adoring females, Sapphire and Chloe. Robert was a highly
successful chimp Casanova who had sired a number of healthy
infants at Belle Vue. As his reputation for a reliable, no-
nonsense approach to the business of breeding grew, he acted
as surrogate husband to a number of females sent in from
other zoos. Whether they were ugly or pretty, placid or
cantankerous, intelligent or somewhat simple-minded, it did
not matter to Robert. He accepted all comers with equal
decorum, and the erstwhile barren females would leave after a
few weeks’ amorous holiday in Manchester, indubitably and
uncomplainingly pregnant. As well as being a most gallant and
gentle begetter, though, Robert was also a gourmand; in fact he
was downright greedy. Woe betide anybody who came between
him and his victuals. If he fancied something tasty he had to
have it, and none of his companions dared indicate that
perhaps Robert’s eyes were too big for his belly.

When Len gave a bunch of the tender white and lilac asparagus
shoots to each of the three chimps who stuck their arms
through the bars, it was the first time that any of them had seen
this vegetable. Robert shuffled through his bundle of succulent
stalks, sniffed the buds, took a bite and found them exquisite.
Sapphire and Chloe were doing the same. Robert gulped down
his share and craved a second helping. Sapphire’s had all gone
but Chloe still held a few pieces; like Gladstone, she believed in
the virtue of thoroughly chewing her food. Grunting, Robert
shuffled over to Chloe and imperiously thrust a hairy hand
towards the remaining asparagus stalks. Chloe whipped them
smartly behind her back and screeched at the importunate
male, her lips curled back and her white teeth chattering. For a
second or two Robert was nonplussed—he was used to getting
his own way without resistance. He put on one of his menacing
looks and pushed his face close to Chloe’s. Eyeball to eyeball,
unblinking, Robert glared one of his most meaningful glares, a
glare which in the past had never failed to bring mischievous
adolescent chimps and timorous keepers to heel, and which
had quelled many a nagging old matriarchal ape. Chloe did the
unthinkable; she bit his ear, neatly punching a small but painful
hole through the middle of the flap. Astounded, Robert backed
off half a pace. This was too much! With a short, sharp rush he
threw his 150 pounds at Chloe, bowling her over and grabbing
with both hands at the stalks she was tenaciously clutching.
Struggling and screaming, she refused to let go as Robert pulled
her clenched fist towards his bared teeth. His enormously
strong index finger could not winkle its way into her palm, nor
could his conical yellow canine teeth prize open her grip.
Thwarted, Robert was driven to desperate measures, and with a
single easy scrunch of his jaws he bit off Chloe’s thumb; it was
sliced off as cleanly as a severed stalk of celery. Chloe at once
released the remains of the asparagus. Robert quickly gobbled
them down, then picked up the amputated thumb, sniffed in-
differently at it and threw it out of the cage in the direction of
Len, who had watched the drama helplessly.

Those few sticks of asparagus resulted in Chloe being maimed

for life, although she learned to make do with nine instead of
ten digits in no time at all. They were also the reason why I was
bouncing in the Jowett through grimy streets of small terraced
houses and steaming fish-and-chip shops, on my way, alone, to
my very first unaided zoo case at the age of twenty-two.

The twelve-mile drive to the zoo gave me time to think. The

message had said something about a thumb being lost by a
female chimp. I knew little else at that stage. Still, fingers were
like toes and I had treated dozens of cases of domestic animals
which had lost toes or had had to have them surgically
amputated. The operation was comparatively simple.
Bandaging the injured zone after treatment presented no
complications, and 1 had long ago mastered a handful of little
tricks using lacquer, sticky tape, repellent aerosol sprays, leather
bootees or plastic bags to protect dressings against the teeth,
claws and persistent ingenuity of indignant tabby cats and
frantic poodles. Yes, I reassured myself as I wound my way
through the traffic, fingers were indeed like toes.

Then the snags started to occur to me. Tabby cats and poodles,
even for that matter cows, were all fairly easy to anaesthetize.
There was always a fond owner or burly farmer to hold the
creature while I injected the anaesthetic. Dart guns were still
years in the future. Who was going to hold the chimp? Again,
my arts of wound dressing had been developed in animals
which had no manual dexterity. Might not a wily ape remove
whatever dressing I used in little more time than I took to put it
on? It dawned on me that I did not know the best dose for
chimpanzees of the one anaesthetic that I might have to use:
barbiturate. At the time all my other anaesthetics were either
gases like ether and halothane— and I could hardly walk up to
a 150-pound great ape, slap a mask on its knowing face and ask
it to count backwards from one hundred—or other injectable
knock-out drugs which were old-fashioned, risky or corrosive.
Barbiturate, the latest anaesthetic for veterinary use at the time,
was at least safer but one needed to know something about
dosage. Supposing I lost my first zoo patient! I gulped. It was a
prospect too awful even to contemplate. Take it easy, I told
myself, what am I worrying about? Drip it into the chimp’s vein
a little at a time until the desired level of sleep has been
achieved. That way, providing I don’t rush it, I’m bound not to
exceed the safety limit.

Two miles to go. I tried not to think about the anaesthetic

problem; the dripping-in method would be just the thing. But
hold on a minute, the slow drip into the vein is all very well, but
what is the chimp going to do during the seconds or even
minutes when she begins to sense the first hint of dizziness,
when she sees double or the room gently begins to spin? She’s
going to have ample time, if you don’t knock her straight out,
to part company with your carefully implanted intravenous
needle and play havoc with any homo sapiens in the operating
theatre—particularly the anaesthetist. Less than confident now,
and for a fraction of a second cursing my stars for arranging
that the thumb should take leave of its owner on a Wednesday,
I swung into the zoo entrance. The commissionaire peered
suspiciously through my side window and beckoned to me to
wind it down.

“Yes, sir,’’ he growled, “what can we do for you?”

I tried to shake off my apprehension and put on a professional

face. “It’s the vet,” I replied loudly.

“You’re not Dr. Whittle.”

“No, but I am the vet.” And then, as an afterthought— it

sounded rather grand—“To see the chimpanzee, an
emergency.” The gates were opened and I drove into the
grounds.

As I stopped the van outside the great ape house, the face of
Matt Kelly, the head keeper, peered from the door. Grabbing
my bag I climbed out of the van. My heart was hammering in a
mixture of excitement and dread. This was it. Another face
appeared at the door as I approached. It was Mr. Wilson, the
zoo director. Just my luck, I thought, to have this pair of Celts
to deal with on my first zoo case. I had met both of them at the
zoo with Norman Whittle when I was still a student. Kelly was
a tough, experienced and shrewd Irishman and Wilson an
acerbic Scot with a face like a walnut. Both knew a lot about
animals, were intolerant of fools and amateurs and did not
seem much impressed by veterinarians in the zoo. Students, it
had seemed to me, were held by both of them in some
contempt, and both of them undoubtedly considered me still
very much a student where exotic animals were concerned. It
was true, but dammit, I had to begin somewhere. The trouble
was that they knew this was my beginning, and I knew they
knew. 1 crossed my fingers under the handle of my medical
bag.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Kelly,” I began, "Dr.

Whittle’s away and out of contact, I’m afraid, so you’ve got
me.” I gave a rather tentative jolly laugh.

The two zoo men greeted me stonily. “Yes, well, come and
have a look at Chloe,” Wilson said, and led the way -into a
corridor flanked with a number of intricate barred gates that
opened onto small cells lit solely by electric bulkhead lights. It
was like walking along one of the gangways at Alcatraz, All
around me the chimpanzees and orangutans set up a deafening
din, screeching, rattling and beating food dishes against the
walls. One big male chimp burped as I passed him and pressed
his face close to the bars. I smiled at him and put out my hand
to tickle one of his knuckles clenched tight round a bar.

“Careful! Don’t do that!” hissed Kelly, walking behind me.

“He’ll have your arm off if ye don’t watch out! That’s the feller
that took the thumb off this afternoon.”
I looked at Robert the maimer, inside for life. He gazed at me
intently, eyes never blinking. As I continued on down the
passageway, I felt a warm moist patch soaking through my
trousers. Robert had urinated on me through the grille.

Chloe sat alone in her sleeping quarters, banging a stainless

steel drinking dish on the floor with her good hand. The other,
mutilated hand she held high above her head so that all the
world could see the damage wrought by the evil Robert.

“That’s it,” said Wilson, pointing. Kelly said nothing. Both men
stood looking blank. They did not seem to be anxiously
awaiting my words of wisdom. I looked hard through the bars.
The diagnosis was clear and simple: the thumb was off. So far
so good. Now for the next stage: treatment. There were some
drops of blood on the floor but the hand did not seem to be
actively bleeding at present. It looked as if Robert had
performed his amputation rather neatly straight through the
bottom knuckle joint, so there was no surgical operation for me
to do, but he had left a rather irregular edge to the skin. Ought
I not to straighten that up, stitch up the hole and put a
dresssing on? And was there not a risk of infection?
Chimpanzee mouths normally contain a rich variety of nasty
microbes, some of which can cause serious diseases when given
the chance to invade healthy flesh. Yes, it looked as though I
would have to do something.

1 decided to broach diplomatically the subject of how to get to

grips with Chloe. “Hmm,” I murmured wisely and subtly.
“Hmmm.” I hoped the “Hmmm” was of a tone, pitch and
duration perfectly calculated to suggest not that I was at a loss
but rather that such cases were well within my province. Wilson
and Kelly said nothing and stared blankly on.

“I see," I continued, again trying to convey optimism and

confidence rather than sterile perplexity. Still they said nothing;
they were forcing me to the point where I would have to make
a positive suggestion for treatment. I decided to approach the
nettle obliquely before grasping it. “What’s she like?” I asked. It
was a suitably vague question.

Wilson frowned. “D’you mean what’s she like to handle?” he

snapped.

“Er, yes,” I replied brightly.

“Can’t,” said Kelly lugubriously. “Can’t.”

“Well, I think we ought to stitch up the hole if we can, dress it

and give her a shot of antibiotic,” I went on. “What would be
the best way, do you think?”

A distinctly aggravated look appeared on Wilson’s walnut face.

“Can’t,” he said. “There’s no way of doing it.”

I had to say my piece. “Is there no way you can hold her long
enough for me to get some barbiturate into her vein?” I asked
in my politest voice.
Both men broke into a burst of humourless laughter. “Catch
hold of her? Chloe? Impossible. Impossible.” Wilson’s nae-
nonsense Glasgow accent seemed stronger than ever. “How do
you suggest we do that?”

The ball was back in my court. “Well, if you’ve no way of

trapping her, and we’ve no way of getting a drug in by injection,
the only thing is to try doping her food.”

“No chance.” This time it was Kelly’s turn. “She’s fed up for
today, won’t take any more. Anyway, Chloe’s as sharp as they
come at spottin’ doctored food.”

If I had to wait until the next day, and then still use the
imprecise and unpredictable way of introducing barbiturate in
the food, I would have lost valuable time. Infection might have
set in and the stitches might not be so certain of holding. What
would we have done if the animal had been haemorrhaging
severely? Waited until she was so weakened by blood loss that
she had no more will to resist?

I stood looking in at the wounded chimpanzee. The case was a

supremely simple one, the type of therapy obvious, but there
was nothing I could do. The zoo director and the head keeper
knew that I would be unable to make any positive, constructive
contribution; they must have known it when the call had been
put through to my office. With a first personal taste of gnawing
impotence, I began to realize the futility of veterinary medicine
as applied to zoo animals. It seemed in those days before the
invention of the dart gun that the zoo vet had only two
alternatives: to inject, dose, lance and anoint only small,
relatively non-violent creatures such as lizards and turtles,
whose problems were obscure, unstudied and baffling to the
veterinarian familiar with the workings and ways of domes tic
animals; or to stand at one side of the bars and guess what
might be wrong with the choleric gorilla or tiger that lay on the
other side, obviously ill or injured but just as obviously an
ungrabbable and ungrateful patient.

Chloe was one of the latter cases. I knew that with some
animals it had been possible to immobilize them for treatment
by using sheer brute force, casting nets over them and then
having seven or eight of your heaviest men sit on the captive
until it was almost suffocated or someone was severely bitten
through a gap in the rope mesh. Even if such humane barbarity
worked, the effect on animals and staff was utterly
demoralizing. The end result was a terrified, exhausted patient,
still virtually unexaminable. No point in taking his temperature;
it was roaring up in panic. No chance of feeling with one’s
fingers for the liver abscess or ball of cancer that might lie in
the abdomen; the body wall was held hard as iron. And even if
one could get the bell end of the stethoscope into the right
position without it being bitten off, the galloping heart was
masking much else which might be significant. I was not going
to begin by treating my first zoo case that way.

There was nothing more to be done for Chloe except to give

the zoo director a broad-spectrum antibiotic which could be
added to her fruit drinks for a week or so. The three of us
retraced our steps. Robert was still hugging the bars of his cell
closely. I looked at him as I passed, keeping close to the
opposite wall of the passageway in the hope of staying out of
range. Was there in his gaze the merest hint of mockery? He
grimaced and stuck his tongue behind the barely parted rows of
yellow teeth. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” said Robert.

The two zoo men and I went outside and stood for a moment
before I climbed back into my van.

“Well, thanks anyway for coming,” said Wilson.

“Yes, it should heal up without any trouble,” Kelly reassured

me. “Oi’ve seen these chimps do terrible things to one another.
It’s amazin’ what nature can do. Healed up in no time at all.
Baboons, too—wounds ye could put your hand into after
fightin’. But they heal up with no bother in a couple o’ weeks.”

“Well, I’d like to have sutured Chloe’s hand,” I replied.

“Perhaps one day we’ll have ways of doing such things easily
enough.”

I still wondered why they had bothered to send for me in such

a hurry in the first place, since they did not seem the slightest
dismayed by my non-performance. Having just achieved my
dearest ambition, my first zoo case, I found myself driving
home to Rochdale in a black depression. Could it be that after
all I should stick to cattle and horses?
That evening I told my wife about my uncertain debut with
Chloe, Mr. Wilson and Matt Kelly. Shelagh and I had met while
we were both still at school and had courted for six years while
she qualified as a therapy radiographer and I carried through
my veterinary studies. Her green eyes and strong determination
bear witness to her Irish ancestry, and she has a deep love and
understanding of animals of every kind; I had seen her move
earthworms from footpaths with the concern of a devout
Hindu lest they be trodden upon and injured, we had wrestled
together over many a dying animal brought to our doorstep,
and we had worked side by side over pregnant ewes needing
Caesarians in the middle of the night when I had no anaes-
thetist or surgical assistant available. Her optimism was un-
flagging and her judgement of the right approach to animal
patient and owner impeccable.

“Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly, “you’ve not lost Chloe.

There will be other times. One of these days you’ll show ’em!
There’ll be new ways of getting at these animals and then you’ll
get the upper hand. Men like Kelly and Wilson have been in the
business all their lives. You know the problems you’ve had with
old-fashioned Pennine farmers in the six months since you first
started in practice—they didn’t want the young feller with the
new-fangled ways, laughed when you sterilized the skin before
injecting a cow down with milk fever, wanted you to cut the
tails of tuberculous cows to get out the ‘worm’ that was sucking
the meat off the beasts’ bones—you’re getting over all that with
time and battling on. Same with the zoos. You’ve got to keep
reading about exotic animals, keep going if you get the chance.
One good success can make all the difference.”

Shelagh was right. It would be a long haul before I could ever

move about the zoos with the same growing confidence in
handling every kind of case, together with the right
psychological approach to the owners, that I was developing in
general practice. The idea of one day working solely with exotic
animals seemed the most tenuous of dreams. Even Shelagh
doubted whether we would ever be able to achieve that.

On the day after my first visit to Chloe, I also tackled Norman

Whittle about the affair. Norman was a quiet, elegant individual
ten years my senior, with a fair moustache and, if the term can
be applied to animal doctors, a superb bedside manner.

“Why do they bother to call us at all when they know there is

little we can do?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Quite simply to cover themselves. To cover

themselves for the sake of the Board. Happens to me all the
time. Something ill, they fiddle about with it as best they can
for a few days until it looks as if the poor sod’s going to die,
then they send for the vet. If there’s going to be a corpse,
they’ve got to be able to report to the Board that ‘the vet was
called in but the animal expired’. As for Chloe, she wasn’t likely
to die, but the same principle applies. A high-value animal they
can’t get to grips with and so, just in case something goes
wrong, or if a visitor reports the presence of a nine-fingered
ape to the RSPCA, they’ve got to be able to say that the buck
was passed to the vet.’’

“So what you’re saying is that we’re professional fall guys for
the zoo?”

“Yes, essentially. OK, so we supply them with drugs they can

put in the food of animals with diarrhoea and vitamin syrup for
things that look out of condition or down in the mouth, but
basically we go so that on the monthly reports it can read
something like ‘Despite veterinary treatment, x number of
mammals, y number of birds and z number of reptiles cocked
their toes.’ ”

“Don’t you feel you do some good for the zoo animals,
though?”

“In a few cases, yes—calving a giraffe that’s in difficulties,

lancing an abscess on the occasional elephant—but they’re few
and far between. Mostly I haven’t any way of knowing what’s
wrong with these creatures and they, people like Matt Kelly,
know I don’t know. I don’t think zoos in general have much
time for vets.”

“But they need us to rubber-stamp the losses?”

“Afraid so.”

Not only was Matt Kelly right about Chloe’s hand—it healed
perfectly without any infection or discomfort and within three
weeks the skin had closed the gap completely— but I knew
that Norman’s analysis of the relationship between zoos and
vets was basically true as well. Perhaps it was partly the
profession’s fault for paying too much attention in the past
exclusively to domestic animals. Not many years earlier,
veterinary education had concentrated almost solely on the
problems of the horse. Gradually, as the automobile seemed
likely to be more than a nine-day wonder, farm animal and then
later the dog and cat received a more appropriate proportion of
a student’s time. Even today the handling, diseases and therapy
of exotic creatures are squeezed into a total of one or two
hours’ instruction out of a five- or six-year course in some
veterinary schools. When I first treated Chloe not even that
amount of tuition was available.

The more I thought about Norman’s remarks the more crystal

clear it seemed to me that I had to have three things if I was
ever going to progress in zoo medicine. First I had to look into
new ways of getting drugs accurately inside the bodies of
creatures too dangerous or too nervous to be injected by hand;
secondly I needed powerful, compact, safe sedatives and
anaesthetics for every possible class of exotic patient; and
thirdly I would have to learn everything I could from old-timers
like Kelly at Belle Vue about the lore of zoo craft, about
moving among and handling difficult and dangerous animals.
Matt Kelly might not know the exact location of the sinuses of
Rokitansky-Aschoff in a rhinoceros’s liver, or the dental
formula of a binturong, but he knew a hell of a lot about the
care of wild creatures. I must pry some of it out of him.
4

Parrots and Pythons

For a long time after the incident of Chloe’s thumb, Norman
Whittle’s Wednesday afternoons, vacations and odd days in bed
with influenza came and went with the same monotonous
absence of disease at Belle Vue. Freezing snaps accompanied
by choking yellow fog on November Wednesdays never
seemed to provoke the acute lung emergencies in giraffe or
antelope that sent Norman dashing out in like weather on every
other day of the week, and in summer the milling crowds of
visitors who fed the elephants with mouldy sausage rolls,
umbrellas or cigarettes, or threw contraceptives, pins or bits of
glass into the monkeys’ cages, seemed to be on their most
civilized behaviour whenever Norman was away and
unavailable to deal personally with the resulting cases of colic
and acute enteritis.

There was just one source of practical experience: the trickle of

wild and exotic animals that ran fitfully through my daily work
with farm animals and domestic pets. Even in darkest
Lancashire there were folk who preferred keeping slow lorises
to Siamese cats or who had a penchant for pythons. If their
pets needed medical attention, more often than not they
telephoned Belle Vue Zoo, who referred them to us. It was not
much compared to the experience with real zoo animals that I
longed for, but it taught a callow young vet a thing or two the
hard way—and sometimes more about humans than about
animals.

Most numerous among my exotic patients at this time were

parrots, the choleric, beady-eyed individuals that perch behind
the bars of numerous pubs in-Greater Manchester, sweetly and
ever so gently take peanuts placed on the capacious bosoms of
the landladies whom they adore and, cursing raucously, try to
take the fingers off all other members of the human race who
come within reach. Without exception, these birds of glorious
plumage and lengthy lifespan dislike me and, as I count a fine
collection of old scars on my hands, I am not sure that I am
very partial to them. Parrots were small beer, I thought, but the
beer soon turned distinctly sour.

Thus it was after I had been working with Norman Whittle for
about a year that I met Charlie, a fine blue and gold macaw
with claws overgrown as a result of twenty years without
exercise behind the bar of a Manchester pub and a surfeit of
fattening sweet sherry, his favourite tipple. Would I kindly trim
his toenails? Certainly. The macaw glowered darkly in his
carrying cage, which had been set in the middle of my surgery
table. His owner, the pub’s landlady, stood smiling proudly at
her “cheeky little Charlie”. She was a large lady with a bosom
like the prow of a galleon and with peroxide-blond hair rolled
tightly in curlers.
 “Er, can you hold him for me?” I asked. Cheeky little Charlie
turned his head to one side and fixed me with a malevolent,
red-rimmed eye. A low, sinister, grating noise came from his
scraggy throat and he thoughtfully honed one half of his beak
against the other.

“Oh goodness, no, my dear,” exclaimed the landlady. “Charlie’s

a darling little boy but he won’t let me handle him. He’d tear
me to bits. And he hates men.” I reflected that I had known
more promising cases. I had yet to learn the art of mastering
parrots by using a piece of stick and a kung-fu-like flick that
renders them harmless and unhurt in the twinkling of an eye.

Charlie rocked slowly on his perch from one foot to the other,
like a boxer limbering up for a fight.

“Well, can you at least entice him out of his cage?” I asked. I
was not going in to fight, so how about him coming out and
settling this thing man to man?

“Well, he might come out for his favourites, after-dinner mints.

He adores those. He sits on my shoulder and takes one that I
hold between my lips. He’s ever so gentle!”

It turned out that we had no after-dinner mints between us and

I sent Edith, my receptionist, across the road to buy some; I
would learn in time that a zoo vet carries a variety of delicacies
in his medical bag along with the drugs and instruments; one’s
essential first-aid kit must include after dinner mints for a wide
variety of monkeys, parrots and small mammals, clear mints for
wallabies, sugar lumps for elephants and small cheroots for
aoudads and other members of the goat tribe.

“Now,” said the landlady when we had the mints, “I’ll put a
mint between my lips, Charlie will come out, and while he’s
nibbling it perhaps you can clip his toes.”

The macaw acted absolutely according to phase one of the

plan. As soon as he spied the sweet he waddled along his perch
and out of the door of the cage, and sat squarely on his owner’s
shoulder hard by her ear. With one golden eye he watched her
place the mint between her lips and with the other he kept me
under unblinking observation. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, he
reached round the woman’s cheek and began to nibble the
mint. Slowly I sidled up and, feigning nonchalance, began to
raise the clippers towards the parrot’s long toenails, which were
perfectly displayed against her dress just below her left
shoulder. Six inches, three inches, one inch; I was getting closer
to the curved talons. They certainly needed chiropody, with
some grown almost to full circles. Somewhere inside them was
a core of flesh with nerves and blood. I must avoid cutting into
that area and simply trim back the dead, overgrown portion.
But how could I tell exactly where the core of each shiny, black,
opaque nail was? I would have to compromise to begin with
and snip off just a little bit, see how that looked and then
maybe take a sliver more.

As I reached the first claw and gingerly touched it with the tip
of my clippers, Charlie kept his eye fixed firmly on me but
continued to crunch at the mint without budging. ’ Very gently
I slipped the toenail clippers over the end of the first claw.
Suddenly Charlie decided he had had enough. Something
dastardly was afoot, and he was not going to stand by and let it
happen. In order to lean forward and launch a pre-emptiye
attack on me-and my clippers he would have to have a more
secure base to perch on, so with the black claws of his left foot,
Charlie dug through the landlady’s dress and deeply into the
flesh of her shoulder. The poor woman spat out the mint and
uttered a piercing shriek that set the waiting dogs in the
reception room barking and howling. A nimble tactician,
Charlie was determined to bring his steely bill into close
combat with the foe, but to stop himself from pressing the
attack too far and too fast, with the result that he might fall off
his defensive position, he needed another good secure hold for
his right foot. The object he sought was right there—his
owner’s ear. Charlie grabbed it tightly and dug in his curly nails.
The lady let out a second, more raucous shriek and clutched the
parrot with both hands, whereupon he bit a plump finger and
drew blood. More shrieks.

All this flurry of action had taken only a few seconds, during
which time I had seemed to be transfixed, incapable of action,
but now I moved forward. Impotently waving my clippers, I
tried to separate the struggling mass of feathers, hair, claws and
fingers on the landlady’s shoulder. Scrunch, scrunch—I was
painfully bitten on two fingers. Wild-eyed, ruffled and
squawking, Charlie launched a new attack on my clippers.
Clang! His gaping black beak punched sharply forward and
knocked them from my grasp. They slipped neatly down the
inside of the landlady’s dress.

With the enemy now in complete disarray, Charlie was still in

command of his redoubt. The ear, bright red and resembling a
crushed strawberry, remained under requisition for essential
military purposes, and he had given up not one inch of ground
on the left shoulder. He had sacrificed a few green feathers and
in the excitement of battle had elected not to desert his post to
go to the latrine but to obey the call of nature just where he
stood. It improved neither the lady’s appearance nor her
morale.

“For God's sake, can’t you do something?” she yelled. “Get the
little beggar off me!”

Charlie bit the back of one of her scrabbling hands. When I

tried again to grab him he reinforced his hold on ear and
’shoulder, whisked his beak to and fro and deftly removed a
piece of nail from my left index finger.

I looked desperately round for something to help me. A towel

hung by the sink; perhaps I could use it to keep his deadly beak
occupied long enough for me to unpick him from his owner
and get him back into his cage. The nails would have to wait. I
grabbed the towel, tossed it over the bird and stood back.
Somewhere underneath, Charlie wriggled, screamed, chewed
and blustered furiously.
“Don’t worry,” I gasped with some relief, “I think we’ve got
him now.”

“He’s still got my ear, though!” the landlady wailed as the

towelled mass on her shoulder threw itself about.

Before picking up the entrapped parrot it would be prudent to

ascertain where the beak-bearing head end was. I took a pencil
and gently prodded the stuffed towel. With a crisp crack the
pencil was split into two and fell apart; I had found the head
end. Without losing more time I grabbed hold of the part that
was probably the plump little belly and tugged hard. The parrot
tugged hard at the lady’s ear. Her shrieking resumed. Feeling in
need of reinforcement, I took off my white surgery coat and
threw that on top of the towel, completely covering the
woman’s head. As best I could I felt for the parrot’s head, held
it and set about releasing the grip on the mutilated ear. The
landlady put both her hands on the hidden bird and allowed me
to try to detach the claw dug into her shoulder. When I got
beneath the towelling I found that the other claw was now also
firmly attached to her shoulder. Charlie was no pushover.

Suddenly I realized that I was touching the very things that had
been the cause of all the bother: the overgrown nails. I carefully
lifted a corner of the towel and looked at them. There they all
were, side by side. A perfect opportunity! With the vicious end
of Charlie still gurgling and spitting somewhere higher up in the
folds of material I might well be able to do my stuff—if I had
my clippers. Then I remembered that they were still lying
somewhere in the dѐcolletage of the buxom lady who stood
before me, my white coat draped over her head and both hands
clasped to a jumble of protesting towelling on her shoulder.

“Er, I can do his nails very well now,” I began. “I’ve got his
claws out perfectly. Can you hold on like that for a few
moments more?”

“Yes, but get on with it. My ear’s hurting like hell. Little beggar.
Get on with it!”

“Er, well, my clippers . . . you’ve got my clippers in your ...”

“I know. Get them out. I can’t hold him much longer!’* “I’ll
have to put my hand down your dress, madam... .’* “Of course
you will. GET ON WITH IT!”

Squeezing my fingers together rather as if I were preparing to

lamb a ewe, I entered the talcumed valley and probed
downwards in search of my instrument. When my unwilling
hand was completely within her dress and I was beginning to
worry about just how far down I was going to have to go, I
mercifully felt metal lodged behind some item of twangy
underwear.

“I’m awfully sorry about all this,” I was saying in embarrassed

confusion as I pinned the clippers between two fingers and
began to extract them. Then the surgery door opened and
Edith, the receptionist, came in. My hand was still down the
front of the landlady’s dress.

“Just cutting the parrot’s toenails, Edith,” I explained brightly.

Edith was a non-conformist lay preacher, and I often wondered

whether she treated her Maker with the same brisk and
relentless efficiency which could be a source of terror to both
slow-paying farmers and ham-fisted young veterinarians. She
glared icily through her spectacles and backed briskly out again.
Meanwhile I had re-armed myself with the clippers and started
to trim the bird’s claws. Following my plan to cut back a little at
a time, I pruned them bit by bit to what seemed a more
reasonable length. When I had finished I noticed that the end
of each nail was showing a little blood. It was only the merest
drop but I had obviously cut back just a fraction too far. I
dabbed each nail with a styptic liquid to seal it up neatly.

At last Charlie, almost apoplectic with rage, was securely back

in his cage. The landlady adjusted her dress, I put some
antiseptic on her abused ear, bandaged her wounded fingers,
sponged her down and talked soothingly about what lovable if
naughty little fellows these parrots were. She seemed reassured
and even grateful, and if anyone’s dignity had suffered wounds
from our experience, it apparently was not hers.

To my dismay, Charlie’s owner and his vet did not beat the
only physical wounds from our encounter that morning, for
Charlie had not been gone from my surgery for more than ten
minutes before his toenails began to bleed again. It was only
after ten days and considerable care that the intermittent
bleeding completely stopped. On subsequent visits I learned to
handle him more deftly, and the experience also taught me
something about cutting the sensitive nails of other Charlies to
come.

There were plenty of them, for Manchester parrots seemed

particularly prone to overgrown toenails, to diarrhoeas that
resisted treatment because the uncooperative birds steadfastly
refused to take their medicines, to coughs and sneezes that
resisted treatment because the unco-operative microbes causing
these complaints just as steadfastly ignored my medicaments,
and to baldness. The baldness was self-inflicted—the parrots
persistently plucked

and relentless efficiency which could be a source of terror to

both slow-paying farmers and ham-fisted young veterinarians.
She glared icily through her spectacles and backed briskly out
again. Meanwhile I had re-armed myself with the clippers and
started to trim the bird’s claws. Following my plan to cut back a
little at a time, I pruned them bit by bit to what seemed a more
reasonable length. When I had finished I noticed that the end
of each nail was showing a little blood. It was only the merest
drop but I had obviously cut back just a fraction too far. I
dabbed each nail with a styptic liquid to seal it up neatly.

At last Charlie, almost apoplectic with rage, was securely back

in his cage. The landlady adjusted her dress, I put some
antiseptic on her abused ear, bandaged her wounded fingers,
sponged her down and talked soothingly about what lovable if
naughty little fellows these parrots were. She seemed reassured
and even grateful, and if anyone’s dignity had suffered wounds
from our experience, it apparently was not hers.

To my dismay, Charlie’s owner and his vet did not beat the
only physical wounds from our encounter that morning, for
Charlie had not been gone from my surgery for more than ten
minutes before his toenails began to bleed again. It was only
after ten days and considerable care that the intermittent
bleeding completely stopped. On subsequent visits I learned to
handle him more deftly, and the experience also taught me
something about cutting the sensitive nails of other Charlies to
come.

There were plenty of them, for Manchester parrots seemed

particularly prone to overgrown toenails, to diarrhoeas that
resisted treatment because the unco-operative birds steadfastly
refused to take their medicines, to coughs and sneezes that
resisted treatment because the uncooperative microbes causing
these complaints just as steadfastly ignored my medicaments,
and to baldness. The baldness was self-inflicted—the parrots
persistently plucked out all their feathers (except the ones on
the top of their heads, of course) until they became pink-nude,
pot-bellied and scrawny-necked. They reminded me of bellicose
miniature Colonel Blimps emerging from the Turkish baths. I
could find no itchy skin parasites or nutritional deficiency to
cause this craze for full frontal exhibitionism.
My failure to counter what seemed sheer cussedness on the
part of my malevolent parrot patients was underlined by the
raucous cursing that they heaped upon me week after week as I
surveyed the results of my impotent efforts to grow even one
single plume on their old men’s bodies. What irritated me about
the nudists was their sheer cheek; having extracted almost all its
plumage, one of these infuriating creatures would sit on its
perch, tilt a choleric, red-rimmed eye in my direction—and
then shiver. Of course you’ll shiver, you dum-dum! I wanted to
shout in my frustration. If I had had the temerity to write a
considered dissertation on the Diseases of the Parrot, it would
have consisted of but two sentences, written in blood on the
finest parchment: “Parrots are incontinent, wheezing asth-
matics in need of chiropody and tungsten-wire whole-body
toupees. They get well if they feel like it, or they don’t.’’

Nevertheless, I had to carry on. Dump the parrots and there

might never be any condors or cassowaries or King penguins.
And I had to do something to reassure the doting owners that
Rochdale was the Mecca for infirm and irascible parrots.
Although my treatment of their pets’ ailments seemed to be
meeting with a singular lack of obvious success, I decided that
at the very least I could thwart the parrot nudist brigade in its
efforts to commit suicide by self-refrigeration. I was damned if
I would let these birds have the last laugh by developing
hypothermia or pneumonia or frostbite.

First I gave instructions for all such patients to be confined day

and night for one or two weeks at least to rooms where the
temperature never dropped below 80 degrees out all their
feathers (except the ones on the top of their heads, of course)
until they became pink-nude, pot-bellied and scrawny-necked.
They reminded me of bellicose miniature Colonel Blimps
emerging from the Turkish baths. I could find no itchy skin
parasites or nutritional deficiency to cause this craze for full
frontal exhibitionism.

My failure to counter what seemed sheer cussedness on the

part of my malevolent parrot patients was underlined by the
raucous cursing that they heaped upon me week after week as I
surveyed the results of my impotent efforts to grow even one
single plume on their old men’s bodies. What irritated me about
the nudists was their sheer cheek; having extracted almost all its
plumage, one of these infuriating creatures would sit on its
perch, tilt a choleric, red-rimmed eye in my direction—and
then shiver. Of course you’ll shiver, you dum-dum! I wanted to
shout in my frustration. If I had had the temerity to write a
considered dissertation on the Diseases of the Parrot, it would
have consisted of but two sentences, written in blood on the
finest parchment: “Parrots are incontinent, wheezing asth-
matics in need of chiropody and tungsten-wire whole-body
toupees. They get well if they feel like it, or they don’t.’’

Nevertheless, I had to carry on. Dump the parrots and there

might never be any condors or cassowaries or King penguins.
And I had to do something to reassure the doting owners that
Rochdale was the Mecca for infirm and irascible parrots.
Although my treatment of their pets’ ailments seemed to be
meeting with a singular lack of obvious success, I decided that
at the very least I could thwart the parrot nudist brigade in its
efforts to commit suicide by self-refrigeration. I was damned if
I would let these birds have the last laugh by developing
hypothermia or pneumonia or frostbite.

First I gave instructions for all such patients to be confined day

and night for one or two weeks at least to rooms where the
temperature never dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Then
it struck me that parrots really did appear to be old-fashioned
sort of fellows; the analogy to Colonel Blimp really did stick.
Where more genteel birds such as doves might get tipsy now
and then when feasting on fermenting berries in the fall,
parrots have the leery, rheumy eye of the hard-liquor drinker
who prefers the grain to the grape all the year round. If the
incontinent wheezers spurned my antibiotics and sulpha drugs,
let’s see how they fared on a drop of the hard stuff. As soon as
I began to prescribe minute tots of rum or brandy for all my
sick parrots I began to have successes. My knowledge of
disease in exotic birds had not advanced very much, but a
combination of the Turkish bath and hard-liquor regime for
nearly all my cases resulted in more and more incontinent birds
passing normal stools, the wheezers beginning to breathe more
easily and some of the Kojak types even growing a soft
covering of grey down and later the colourful plumage that was
their rightful attire. As time went on the booze- ’em-and-bake-
’em therapy persuaded quite a few parrot owners that Dr.
Whittle’s partner had a knack with their favourite bird.
I also earned the rather more demonstrative gratitude of a lady
almost as exotic as her pet. It all began when the surgery
telephone rang as I was showing out yet another parrot owner
who was looking forward to giving his wife the perfect excuse
for taking out the brandy bottle as soon as he got home.

“Hello,” said a sultry voice as I picked up the receiver. “Is that

Dr. Taylor?”

“It is,” I replied. “Who’s this speaking?”

“It’s Miss Seksi. I expect you’ve heard of me. I’m the speciality
danseuse at the Garden of Eden.”

This surprising statement did not perplex me as it might have

done, for I knew of the Garden of Eden, a sleazy Manchester
night-club from whose doors there wafted a permanent smell
of stale beer, yesterday’s cigars and cheap perfume.

“What can I do for you, Miss, er, Seksi?” I asked. Edith looked
up sharply from her book-keeping.

“Well, it's very confidential. Private, if you know what I mean.”

“I see, but how can I help? Do you wish me to visit or will you
come to the surgery?”

“Well, if you can be sure it’s all confidential I’ll come with him
to the surgery if you’ll give me an appointment.”
“Er . . . come with who, Miss, er, Miss Seksi?”

“My Oscar, of course.”

Who or what was her Oscar? I doubted if she had won a

Hollywood Academy Award and decided Oscar must be a
friend or husband. Well, I thought, she must realize I’m not a
people doctor. We had had cases of Pakistanis and displaced
persons from Eastern Europe queuing patiently for hours
among the dogs, cats and budgerigars in the waiting room, only
to find when it was their turn that we did not extract human
teeth or issue National Health Service sick notes. This lady
sounded one hundred per cent English, but she still wanted me
to treat this chap Oscar. Then again, I thought, I had had a few
human patients. There was the window cleaner who regularly
had our fiery horse linament for his arthritic knee, many a
farmer swore our medicaments were the most likely to cure the
ringworm he had contracted from his calves, and I had dealt
with all sorts of problems from impetigo to impotence among
the hill-farming folk of the Pen nines, who found it easier to
talk to the vet, sitting over a cup of tea in the farmhouse after
calving a cow, than to the doctor in his surgery in town.

“But, er, are you and Oscar bringing the animal?” I asked Miss
Seksi.

“I work with Oscar. Oscar is my python.”

“Oh,” I said, grateful that at any rate part of the mystery had
been solved.

A confidential consultation, with no nurse and no assistant

present, was arranged for the ailing Oscar for three o’clock, and
I waited in intrigued anticipation. Punctually at three, a taxi
pulled up outside the waiting-room door and Edith ushered in
a startlingly painted lady of Junoesque proportions dressed in
an imitation tiger-skin coat that seemed to be afflicted here and
there with remarkably accurate imitations of sarcoptic mange.
She teetered on six-inch stiletto heels, lugging awkwardly in one
hand a large canvas bag. As she sat down she dabbed the
perspiration from her face and touched up the paintwork
expertly. Then she switched on the multi-volt smile that had
been designed to cut its way through cigar smoke, wolf
whistles, rude remarks and embarrassing silence with the ease
of a disposable scalpel. Her first words to me were “Bloody
heavy, he is, poor little darlin’.”

Undoing some cord tied tightly around the neck of the canvas
bag, Miss Seksi switched off the head-splitting smile and
plunged an arm inside. Slowly she withdrew a glistening, plump
snake, an anaconda that must have been every bit of twelve feet
long.

“There he is,” said my client. “Poor, poor Oscar; I’m really

worried about him.”

“What seems to be the problem?” I faltered, looking down the

undulating length of Miss Seksi’s partner as he gently wound
himself round her shoulders and waist. His weight seemed
normal and there was a healthy fluorescent glint as the light
caught his rippling scales. Oscar was trying to disappear inside
Miss Seksi’s fur coat. Already the first six feet of him were
making her torso bulge and warp beneath her coat as if she
were made of rubber; in a moment my patient would have gone
completely to ground. Remembering Charlie the parrot and the
fate of my toenail clippers, I firmly resolved that I was not
going in there after him. Instead I grasped twelve inches of
Oscar’s tail end, flexed my biceps and stood firmly with my legs
apart. Oscar, like all such non-venomous constrictor snakes,
was ninety per cent muscle. He continued to contract his
powerful twelve foot body as I held staunchly onto his tail and
refused to be pulled inside the perfumed recesses of Miss
Seksi’s tiger-skin coat. The result was predictable. If I was not
going to release the tail and if Oscar continued doggedly to go
places, there was only one thing left that had to give way: Miss
Seksi. The contracting snake pulled her right into me. “Dear
God, keep Edith out of here at this moment!” I prayed, as I
stood nose to nose and thigh to thigh with the lady from the
Garden of Eden. Oscar wedded us like Scotch tape; as he threw
a loop or two around my wrist, I wondered who was holding
whom.

“The, er, the problem,” said Miss Seksi from two inches away,
“the problem is personal. It’s his eyes.” She breathed a cloud of
Chanel No. 5 and onions into my face. “If you can reach my
handbag, Doctor, you’ll find the card; you’ll see what.I mean.”
Still clutching my bit of Oscar with one hand, I clicked open
her handbag with the other, fished vaguely about inside it and
pulled out an oblong card.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s the card from the clinic.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “What clinic?’* I

asked.

“The venereal disease clinic.” She lowered her voice con-

fidentially and looked at the door to make sure it was firmly
closed. “I think Oscar’s got it.”

“Got what, venereal disease?”

“Yes, You see, Oscar and I are in the burlesque business.

We’ve appeared in Paris and Beirut, haven’t we, Oscar?”
Oscar’s head had emerged from below Miss Seksi’s coat and,
with flicking tongue, he had begun to investigate my shoes.
“Yes, we’ve been very well received, Oscar and I. Very
exotique, very good money.”

“But how do you and Oscar work together?”

“I’m a speciality danseuse .., exotique ... you know?*

“A stripper?” I hazarded.
Miss Seksi gave me a five-second, full-power burst of the smile.
“Yes, but not low-class, my dear,” she said. “Seksi’s my stage
name; actually it’s Schofield.”

“Please go on, Miss Schofield.”

“Well, during our act I do a very exotique speciality dance as

Cleopatra. See what I mean? That’s where Oscar fits in.”

An embryonic glimmer of light began to spark in my brain. We

bumped foreheads.

“During the act—it went down awfully well in Beirut— I

disrobe to exotique music” (Miss Schofield emphasized the -
tique each time she uttered her favourite word) “and the climax,
when I’m in the buff—you know what 1 mean, Doctor—is
when I commit suicide.”

“So Oscar is Cleopatra’s asp?”

“Exactly. Oscar is the asp. Rather exotique, don’t you think?”

If Cleopatra really did shuffle off this mortal coil with the aid of
a reptile it must have been one of the small venomous Egyptian
snakes, possibly a cobra, but certainly not a 65-pound South
American constrictor.

“Yes, Doctor,” went on Miss Seksi. “My agent thinks it’s a

really dramatic finale, with Oscar twining all round my body.”
“I see, I see,” I interposed quickly.

“Now. The thing is, Doctor, I’ve had a touch of, er, VD. The
clinic gave me cards to hand out to anybody I might have had
what they call contact with. I’ve dished out the cards, of course,
though I couldn’t care a fig for my boy friends—they’re all
pigs. But Oscar, he’s my partner, my little darling. He’s
everything to me.”

“Why do you think Oscar might have picked up an infection

from you?”

“His eyes, Doctor, look at his eyes. I’m worried sick by them.
It’s his work, Doctor. He’s got it from me, I’m sure.”

Miss Seksi was becoming tearful. We were still so closely

entangled that any sobbing on her part was likely to soak my
tie.

“Trouble is,” she continued, “the clinic wouldn’t see him, even
though I told them all about him, how he worked with me.
That’s the National Health Service for you! So that’s why I
came to you.”

“Let’s get ourselves sorted out and have a look at his head,” I
said. My own head was spinning. Whatever it was that did not
look right with his eyes, it certainly could not be VD. That
disease of humans does not affect other mammals, and in
reptiles like Oscar it is out of the question. Although, I
reflected, I could not be positive that no scientific paper had
ever been published stating categorically that anacondas and
their like were immune to the gonorrhoea microbe.

Eventually Miss Seksi/Schofield unravelled the snake and I

took a relieved step backwards. For the first time I had a good
view of his head. “Look at his eyes, Doctor!” his owner wailed.
“They’ve gone like that in less than a week!”

Both the anaconda’s eyes were indeed abnormal. Instead of

being limpid dark jewels they were blind, milk-white blobs.
Looking at them carefully through the magnifying lens of an
ophthalmoscope with its intense beam of light, I was able to
make out the eye lying beneath the milky film.

“When did Oscar last shed his skin?” I asked. I had not seen
this eye condition in snakes before, but an idea was forming in
my mind.

“About a week or ten days ago. Came off as clean as a whistle.”

“And round about then you first noticed his eyes?”

“Yes.”

Snakes’ eyes are completely covered by a non-moving

transparent third eyelid. As the rest of the skin is shed from
time to time as the animal grows, the old outer layers of the
third eyelid are sloughed too. Or rather they should be. I was
convinced that the “VD” infection of Oscar’s eyes was the old
third eyelid which had not fallen off with the rest of the skin. It
was a sheet of tough, dead tissue covering an otherwise healthy
eye.

While I prepared to try and restore the sight of the un-

complaining trouper there and then, his owner became tearful
again. “If he’s blind, I won’t be able to work with him
anymore,” she moaned. I did not quite see how vision was
essential for Oscar’s act. “How can I replace him? I just
couldn’t get another like him. It would mean back to my
Florence Nightingale routine—and at half the salary.” The
wailing increased as I dropped a little paraffin oil into each of
the white eyes.

“Hold tightly onto his head, please,” I instructed. Oscar began

once again to intertwine us both, and I felt his rear end drag me
into another bout of intimate contact with his mistress. The
latter was now red-faced and sweating as well as weepy. Even
her mask of make-up was beginning to erode.

With a pair of fine-toothed forceps I gently began to tease up

the edge of the white film covering one of the snake’s eyes. Bit
by bit, and using more drops of oil as I progressed, I slowly
freed the crust. A dark gold glint showed that Oscar’s eye lay
uninjured underneath. At last the entire piece of dead tissue
came away. Oscar eyed me, unblinking and inscrutable. I set to
work on the other side of the head and soon the second eye
was clear as well. The “VD” had gone. Putting down my
instruments, I struggled out of Oscar’s coils and stood back to
survey my handiwork.

Miss Seksi was open-mouthed in astonishment and delight,

gurgling and smiling real, unprofessional smiles. Releasing
Oscar’s head and letting him roam where he would, she came
over and hugged me. “Doctor, how can I ever thank you?” she
purred. Then she imprisoned me in a python-like embrace and
planted a big, soggy, bright red kiss on my forehead, just as
Edith came back into the surgery.

“Ah, you’re just in time, Edith ...” I said.

“So I see,” she interrupted drily.

”... to help get Oscar back into his bag.1*

Between us we untangled the now clear-eyed anaconda, and

Edith saw Miss Seksi out.

“We can do without that sort,” she said, coming back into the
room where I was sterilizing the forceps.

For all her stagey manner, Miss Seksi had enlivened my

afternoon, and there was nothing artificial or overblown about
Oscar: he had provided my first experience of what I later
found to be a common problem in snakes.

“Oh no, we can’t, Edith,” I replied.

5
Belle Vue
Although it was now almost two years since I had joined
Norman Whittle in his practice, I seemed to be no nearer the
solid diet of zoo cases that I craved. Without a background of
zoo-animal experience I was frequently forced into tight
corners where my ignorance was nakedly exposed. It was not
just the difficulty of diagnosing a whole new range of diseases
in animals that figured nowhere in orthodox veterinary
education—there were times when I could not even put a name
to the species of creature that was borne, dragged or prodded
into the consulting room. Animal owners often do not take
kindly to the veterinarian working with pet cats and dogs who
has forgotten the name of “Fluffy”, “Poochie”, “Garibaldi” or
whatever in the time between visits, even though these may be
years apart. The position was considerably trickier when a furry
brown creature about as big as a ferret and with large orange
eyes with pinpoint pupils was proudly plonked down on the
table and the owner said, “Horace, this is Dr. Taylor. Be a good
boy now,” and then continued, “I’ve brought Horace down
from Carlisle, Doctor, because the zoo told me your practice
could get rid of this skin disease that’s been bothering him for
months.”

Having travelled no miles with this whatever-it-was, the smiling

owner of Horace would not be impressed if I started off by
asking what sort of beast I was dealing with. He was absolutely
certain I knew. I looked at the Horace and the Horace gazed
gently back to me. He seemed docile enough as he moved
slowly around the table top. Anyway, he had to be a mammal
because he was hairy.

“He’s got these small bald patches on his head, Doctor,” the
proud owner announced.

I looked at the Horace’s head; it was mongoose-like, with small

ears and a pretty damp nose about the size of a chihuahua’s.

“Well, well,” I began hopefully, “it’s not often we see one of

these.” The idea of this artful gambit was to lead the owner into
giving me the clue I needed by agreeing that crunchlappets or
flummerjacks or whatever the thing was were indeed getting
rarer.

The owner of Horace did not fall into my rhetorical snare.

“No, Doctor,” he replied, “but Mr. So-and-so says that Dr.
Whittle’s practice did wonders with his when it was sick.”
Impasse.

I looked at Horace’s feet; they were finger-like and reminded

me of a monkey’s. Although there was not much sign of
anything to grab hold of I decided to stall for time by first
stroking Horace and then picking him up so that I could get a
better look at the diseased areas. He diffidently sniffed my
fingers as I approached him. To my horror, as I stroked him I
felt his backbone. Horace had a backbone like all mammals, but
what chilled me as I ruffled through his fur was that the spines
of his vertebrae appeared actually to be jutting out through his
skin; my fingers were pressing directly on his spinal column! He
seemed plump enough and there had been no talk of an
accident—why on earth should Horace’s owner be worrying
about bald patches when there was something much more
dramatically significant happening to his beloved pet’s back?
Perhaps I could get through the examination, diagnosis and
treatment without actually knowing what Horace was. No, that
was a hopeless idea. I was a fool—I should have admitted my
ignorance as soon as Horace arrived.

At this juncture Horace decided to bite me. He did it once,

precisely and powerfully, on the index finger which I was using
to feel his spine. He then gazed gently at me once more as I
jerked back my hand with a yelp and stuck the bleeding digit in
my mouth.

“Oh my, Horace,” exclaimed his owner, “that’s a naughty boy.

Still, I suppose you get lots of those in your job, Doctor,
dealing with the likes of him.”

My finger was bleeding copiously and hurt like hell, but at least
Horace had given me the chance I needed to save my
ridiculous dignity. “I’ll just nip and get a Band-aid,” I said and
slipped smartly out of the consulting room.
In thirty seconds I had plastered up the punctured finger and
shot upstairs to my collection of zoo books. Somewhere in
there, God willing, I would track down the Horace animal.
Feverishly I flicked through the pages of an encyclopaedia of
the animal kingdom. Horace’s fingers seemed to be the crucial
feature, but then I remembered his strange protruding spine.
Not a monkey and yet not really like one of the small
carnivores such as a stoat. There was nothing like him in the
mongoose line. I turned to the raccoon family—maybe Horace
was a cacomistle, whatever that looked like. I found the
photograph of the cacomistle. Yes, the face was similar but the
ears were too big and the clawed feet were most un-finger-like.

Hoping I would remember the appearance of a cacomistle

should one ever be brought to me, I hurried hopefully on to
the chapter dealing with the pro-simians, that strange bunch of
individuals who lie halfway between insect-eating carnivores
and monkeys. Horace certainly had some of the typical
appearance of an insectivore, as well as those monkey-like
fingers. Bingo! As I looked at the appealing faces of these most
distant cousins of Man, the aye-aye, the treeshrew and the rest,
I suddenly found myself faced by an illustration of Horace in
glorious colour. “Long time since I was bitten by a potto,” I
said gaily as I opened the door of the consulting room.

Pottos, the caption to Horace’s picture stated, have horny

processes on their spinal columns that project through their
skin, so at least my fears about what had appeared to be
Horace’s exposed backbone were set at rest. He was my first
pro-simian patient, though, and of pro-simian ailments I knew
not a thing, but by taking scrapings and swabs of his bald
patches for analysis I would try to find out what was causing
the hair loss.
About a week later, Edith handed me the laboratory report on
the scrapings I had taken. It started, “Your sample from a?
dotto??? (what breed of cat is that—or is it a joke?) . .

I would have to become accustomed to folk thinking that I was

some sort of nut addicted to practical jokes. I would learn to
wait patiently while the person answering the phone at a
pharmaceutical company scoffed disbelievingly when a vet
from Rochdale ordered some special tropical drug for bilharzia
in baboons, or when the international cable operators stopped
me in mid-dictation of some urgent message containing phrases
like “Suggest your penguins have got bumblefoot” with a
“Come off it, mate, is this an April-fool thing or something?”
Years later I had to threaten an operator with legal action if he
did not type out my cable about a deadly serious matter which
concerned not a potto, nor indeed any kind of wild animal, but
a footballer. The star player of the famous Real Madrid soccer
team in Spain had contracted a unique fungus infection of his
knee bone; he might well never play again. The fungus
infection had never previously been recorded in humans, but
the Spanish doctors knew that I had been involved in treating
various kinds of fungus infection in zoo animals. They
contacted me via my friends, the directors of Madrid Zoo, and
I cabled what information I had concerning the fungus. I
suppose one can excuse the disbelief of the cable operator as I
began to dictate: “Concerning the footballer’s kneecap, I know
of one case of an otter in Africa and one possible hedgehog....”
Eventually the cable was accepted, and I like to think that the
otter and the hedgehog helped that soccer star to play again.
The rest of the lab report on Horace the potto read: “ ... is
positive for Trichophyton sp.—Ringworm.” I handed the
report back to Edith and sighed as I wrote a prescription for
Horace’s owner to pick up that would in time completely clear
his pet’s ringworm. Even if a potto was unusual, his skin
disease was anything but. Would I never be let into the zoo?

After two and a half years of treating cats and dogs, pigs and
cows, with the occasional potto or python to bring me
tantalizingly close to zoo work, I was all ears when Norman
Whittle casually broke some news one winter’s day as we both
stood warming the seats of our pants in front of the gas fire in
our little office. “There’s a new director been appointed at Belle
Vue. Name of Legge. Got a first-class reputation as a naturalist
and particularly with fish.”

Could this at last be the opportunity for me to begin doing

some of the real zoo veterinary work? A new director could
well mean a brand new approach to the management of the
animals. The zoo had recently been taken over by an inter-
national hotel and leisure group, there were rumours of new
animal houses to be built and new species to be exhibited. It
sounded like the perfect chance for a young, green veterinarian
to get in at the beginning of a fresh chapter. I tackled Norman
about it at once.

“You know how I feel about exotic animals,” I said, “but I

don’t seem to be getting anywhere with the odds and ends, the
parrots, bush babies and monkeys, that come here from time to
time. I learned more when I went with you as a student to Belle
Vue.”

Norman knew what I was going to ask him. “Zoo work,” he

said, screwing up his face pensively and rocking back and forth
on his heels. “Do you think there’s a future in it?”

“I’m absolutely certain there is.”

“As I’ve told you before, we don’t know much about what
we’re doing down there, David. Can’t handle most of the
animals. Guesswork, inspired guesswork, most of it. It’s the
know-how of keepers like Matt Kelly that counts. They call us
in as a formality.”

“But it’s one of the biggest zoos in Britain; there must be a vast
amount of work for us. What about nutrition, preventive
medicine, fertility improvement? There must be limitless scope
for things that only a vet can do. And with a keen new
director,..

“You may be right, but I don’t go very often, you know. In the
past they’ve called me only when they’ve got themselves into a
sticky hole. We’re the last resort.”

“But if they don’t appreciate veterinary work in the zoo, we

should get involved deeper, show them, force them to see the
value. The new company and new director mean a chance for
new attitudes.”
Norman sighed and slowly shook h is head. “We don’t know
enough about these creatures. We haven’t the tools. You know
how it is; if a gorilla gets a bad eye they ask some specialist in
humans from the eye infirmary to look at it. He comes along if
and when he can spare the time, but he’s used to humans who
don’t break both your arms and chew the top off of your
ophthalmoscope if you try shining bright lights in their sore
eyes. So the specialist loses interest and the case isn’t followed
through. A bunch of human surgeons from the university come
to take blood from the lions, and three lions die because the
anaesthetist doesn’t have a clue what frightening things
morphine does to cats. So they try again, this time using a
barbiturate, and another one never wakes up. It’s rather
depressing. You’d find it very hard to break into that sort of
set-up.”

The story of the dead lions I had heard before. It made me

angry then and the thought of it still does.

“Doctors be damned,” I said. “It’s the veterinary surgeon who

should be in charge of the health of every one of those animals
in Belle Vue.”

My partner laughed but there was sadness in his eyes. “You’re

right, but you’ll have a rugged time trying to convince some
folk. Most of the time, with things like rhino and giraffe, I’m
completely in the dark. The best I can do is to treat zebras like
horses, giraffes and camels like cattle, lions and tigers like
domestic cats.”
“But that leaves out most of the animal kingdom. What about
reptiles, primates, things like tapirs and elephants and
porcupines?”

Norman shrugged. “Hobson’s choice. Follow first principles.-’’

“And animals die.”

“Yes. And I have to admit that even at post-mortem I can’t

usually be sure why a creature gave up the ghost. Now and
again I can do something positive, but mostly it’s terribly
frustrating. Anyway, remember we are a mixed farm and small-
animal practice—don’t you think the zoo could well be more
trouble than it’s worth?”

Norman’s last sentence chilled me. I did not care to hear him
even hinting that we might consider pulling out of zoo work. It
was my only chance of penetrating the world of wildlife
medicine. He—we—must not lose heart. Fearfully I asked,
“Would you seriously think of dropping the zoo?”

“Well, it’s twelve miles away, the city traffic’s getting worse, all
the rest of our work is round Rochdale, there are practices
nearer to the zoo than us.”

I felt my pulse quicken. If Norman went on in this vein his

next words would surely be the renunciation of the one thing
that I felt made our partnership special: the collection of
strange and wonderful beasts in Belle Vue that fascinated me so
powerfully. The very possibility made me shiver. I made up my
mind immediately: nailing my colours to the mast with brass
studs that hold firm to this day, I said, “Let me take over the
work at Belle Vue. I want to make something of exotic
medicine.”

Norman smiled again and slipped on his white coat. It was time
for surgery. “OK,” he said, “that’s fine by me.”

At last I was going to do the zoo work; now all I needed was
for the zoo to ring and report a sick animal. I made sure the
other members of the staff understood that it would not matter
whether I was on or off duty, I must be informed immediately
the new' zoo director called. God forbid that it should happen
when I was in the middle of a difficult calving out on the
moors!

A week went by. My visiting list consisted solely of dogs, cats,

cows and pigs. Another week came, and another, and still
whenever the telephone jangled it was the same sort of request:
“Got a heifer here with a bloated stomach that’s tight as a
drum,*’ or “Our old bitch is drinking day and night and gone
off her legs.’’ Just when I was beginning to wonder whether the
Belle Vue stock had been given a bunch of remarkably effective
amulets as well as a new director, the message I had been
waiting for came in. A young camel that was being raised on
the bottle was having problems with its mouth. Could the vet
please attend?
I was delighted as I set off for Manchester. Here was an animal
made for my opening performance: easy to handle and with
few anaesthetic problems. I reckoned I knew a thing or two
about mouths. Camels’ teeth resemble cattle’s, and I had pulled
out dozens of those. Tongue infections, ulcers, oral forms of
cancer, foreign bodies: I had no qualms about dental work and
I had covered, so I thought, the whole field in pet and farm
animals as well as the odd new-world monkey with so-called
South American primate disease, which deforms the facial
bones and scatters the growing tooth buds in bizarre disarray. I
hoped camels were not prone to some esoteric mouth
complaint afflicting them and them alone, murrain of the
Pyramids or Gobi Desert tooth rot or some such pestilence,
about which I had not read but which was common knowledge
among Egyptian camel drivers and head keepers like Matt
Kelly.

The road from Rochdale to the zoo in Manchester ran past an

unbroken succession of terraced houses with sooty brick
facades, cluttered corner shops that sold everything from a yard
of elastic to sweet Cyprus sherry from the barrel, and towering
mills with massive iron and brass mill gates and names like Bee
and King emblazoned in white on the sweating red brick of
their chimneys. It was an easy, familiar journey for me. As a
small boy and later as a student I had often taken the yellow
and orange double-decker bus that ran to the city and then
rattled out by tram to the zoo, which stood behind high walls in
a wilderness of mean streets, coal mines and railway sidings.
This was the unloveliest part of the city, where sparrows
sported uniformly sooty black plumage, where the vagrant and
ubiquitous pigeons limped along dripping gutters with swollen,
arthritic joints and gouty feet, and where the sulphurous fogs of
autumn condensed on the clouded-glass windows of the tap
rooms of the Engineers Arms and the Lancashire Fusiliers.
Today the mills, the dreary dwellings and the churches standing
shuttered and forgotten in yards of weeds and broken glass
went by unnoticed. I was going to the zoo as its official vet.

Within the high walls of Belle Vue the jungle began. In the grey
desert of Manchester there existed this oasis where wild
creatures from every part of the globe were to be found. Just
beyond the box office on the busy main road, a stone’s throw
from the mighty pit-shaft wheel of the Bradford colliery and
within spitting distance of the London Midland and Scottish
railway yard, were Africa and Asia, the impenetrable green of
the Mato Grosso and the endless horizon of the steppes. There
was no more than an acre of meagre, consumptive-looking
grass in the whole park, and that was planted on a bare one-
inch layer of soil overlying ashes. In spring the air reeked of
engine smoke and in November it stung the eyes. Yet here
lurked leopard and lion, eland and elephant. Here as a boy I
had scaled the walls, despite the broken glass on top, to gaze
down gratis on the tigon, that curious and long-lived hybrid
donated a quarter of a century ago by some maharajah, and to
make faces at the bears until pursued by irate keepers. It was a
magic place for me, and it seemed unbelievable that at long last
I was going “on safari” professionally (at the princely fee of
eight shillings and sixpence per visit) among the enchanted
beasts behind the high walls.

The zoo was built when the reign of Queen Victoria was at its
zenith, when Britain ruled the waves and the flower of the
Indian Empire was still in full bloom. It was thought
appropriate to design the buildings in the style of Mogul India
which the England of the Raj had found so much to its taste,
so the animal houses were built with windows, roofs and
doorways in which the sensuous curves of Islamic art were
wedded firmly to the heavy, worthy Victorian ways of working
wood and iron. To the crowds who came from the cotton
towns by train on a line that ran right into the zoo grounds, the
sea-lion house in its heyday must have seemed like a delicate
pavilion transported from the palace lawns of Mysore, the sort
of place where, but for the drizzle and the smog and the clank
of trams from the road, one might take tiffin among the
jacaranda blossom with the Colonel’s lady. Gardens and long
rose walks were laid out between the animal houses, artificial
lakes w'ere dug, trees and bushes were planted, and among the
bushes nestled the onion domes and minarets of ornamental
mosques and palaces done in stucco.

In these pleasant surroundings the Victorians could promenade

and admire the wild animals held behind massive bars or
beyond deep pits. When they tired of the animals they could
listen to brass bands in one of the several concert halls, eat in
cafes, drink in pubs or amuse themselves on carousels and
coconut shies in a fairground—all within the same high-walled
park. The park had its own brewery and bakery inside the
grounds and the facilities for great banquets, balls and
fireworks displays. As I drove through the grounds on my way
to see the sick baby camel, the light growing dim with the
approach of evening, I could imagine what Belle Vue had been
like a century before. Even today the crumbling remains of the
ornamental mosques peep out of rhododendron bushes,
defying the damp and the attrition of small boys’ feet who
clamber over the “Keep Off” notices to reach the muezzin’s
turret. Despite dry rot, peeling pale blue paint, a hundred years
of sea lions’ splashing and the dank smell of herring
impregnating the wooden Mogul arches, the pavilion still stands
and there is a tiny bit of one of the rose walks, too. The thick
bars are gone, new animal houses have been built of concrete
and fine steel, the railway stops far short of the park now and
the brewery is derelict, but here and there among the modern
things like the speedway and the children’s playground, an arch,
a dome, a pierced screen or a fragment of curled iron winks
out, conjuring up a lost age of stylish self-assurance.

The young camel to which I had been called turned out to be a

friendly two-humped (Bactrian) female. As I arrived Mr. Legge
and Matt Kelly were feeding her from a bottle. I introduced
myself to the new director while Kelly stood silently by,
frowning in surprise at my appearance. Ray Legge was a slim,
pale, military-looking man in his mid-forties, with dark hair and
moustache, an aquiline nose and a warm and generous smile.
He was neatly dressed and moved easily, with the precision of
the rock climber that he was. When he spoke, it was in the
crisp, public-school accents of the army officer that he had
been. Quite a dramatic change from his predecessors in the
post.

He pumped my hand energetically, threatening to pulverize my

knuckles. “Jolly pleased to meet you. As you know, I was at
Chester Zoo but I’ve concentrated on aquaria over the past few
years, especially Blackpool Tower aquarium. I’m a fish man
really, but my mammals and birds will be brought up to scratch
in the next few months. Now, let’s show you this camel.”

Kelly the head keeper held the animal with an expression of

weary scepticism at this young vet who was all book learning
and had no idea of zoo animal management. As I inquired what
seemed to be the trouble, he quietly gritted his teeth and did an
impersonation of St. Ignatius Loyola staring heavenwards in a
baroque painting. He had a ruddy, puckish yet handsome face
and a close-cropped head that appeared dice-shaped, cubic with
slightly rounded corners, the whole set on a short, stocky body.
Matt had put the fear of God into me when I was a student
with his apparent omniscience, a sleeveful of zoological tricks
and the autocratic bearing of a sergeant-major. Now his
powerful hands held open the camel’s jaws.

“She isn’t suckling strongly,” said Legge, “and there’s this white
coating developed in the mouth.”

I looked inside. Sure enough, the entire internal surface of the

mouth was covered with a milky white membrane. “That’s
thrush infection,” I pronounced immediately, “the fungus you
see so often in human babies. You have been sterilizing your
feeding bottles properly, haven’t you?”

Matt Kelly cleared his throat, went redder, but said nothing.

“Yes, Matt boils the bottles before each feed,” replied the
director. “Can it be serious?”

“No, not usually. We’ll soon have that right. Hold on a

minute.”

I went to my car and brought back a bottle of gentian violet

solution. While Matt held the camel’s mouth open again, I used
a small brush to paint the bitter purple liquid over her gums,
teeth and lips. The animal screwed up her face at the taste and
bubbled out a foam of purple saliva, staining Matt’s hands.
Gentian violet does not wash off easily. Matt’s face was now
plum-coloured and I feared his teeth- gritting might shatter
every tooth in his head.

“Right,” I said, “that’ll do the trick.” Confidently I said my

farewells and set off home with the conviction that I had made
the best possible start.

Two days later the zoo telephoned again. It was Matt Kelly.
“This here camel, Dr. Taylor,” he said in his light Dublin
brogue, “oi don’t think your purple paint’s done one bit of
good. She’s worse.” And then, as if he had already decided the
patient was in such a critical state that anything more I might
do could not make things any worse, he added, “Ye can come
down if ye like.” Damn, I thought, he talks as if I’m invited to
pay my last respects.

The camel was indeed worse. The white membrane was still
coating much of her mouth and the animal’s general condition
and vitality were deteriorating alarmingly. More of the white
fungus was coating the bowels and the vagina. I had never seen
thrush, a usually mild, yeasty fungus, on the rampage like this,
but my training at university had paid scant attention to the
germ. It was regarded as an opportunist, secondary bug of little
menace under normal circumstances. Yet this camel was very
definitely ill. Could the thrush alone be doing that? Much later I
would learn that thrush can be rather a tough and sometimes
fatal infection for birds and dolphins, but at the time I felt sure
the camel case was more complicated than I had first
suspected.

Matt raised his eyebrows when I began to mutter my doubts

about the case. “Sure, oi thought all along she wouldn’t make
it,” he said. “Bottle-reared animals haven’t the resistance.” He
adopted an expression of tired patience.

Suddenly something came back to me. Fungi. Yeast fungi.

Yeasts, the kind of things that are used in making bread and
beer. The yeasts thrive in the bread dough and, during the
brewing, on sugar. Sugar, that was it. Somewhere I had read
that people with excess sugar in their urine, in other words
diabetics, are more susceptible to yeast fungus infections.

“I’m going to take a urine sample, Mr. Kelly,” I announced.

Matt stared. He had never heard of such a thing being done to
a camel. Still, I could imagine him ruminating, young vets do
strange things like that when they don’t know where the devil
they are.

With much difficulty I passed a catheter into the camel’s

bladder, drew off a few teaspoons of urine and dipped one of
my glucose test strips into the sample. It turned deep blue—
the camel was diabetic. “Sugar diabetes, Mr. Kelly,” I
proclaimed excitedly. Matt scowled. “Now I want some blood.”

The blood test’s abnormally high sugar level confirmed beyond

doubt the cause of the camel’s disease. The thrush was
secondary and could probably be eradicated by antifungal
drugs, but the question of how to handle the diabetes was a
tricky one. I talked it over with Ray Legge.

“It looks as if she’ll need a daily injection of insulin,” I warned.

“We’ll start off with the fairly long-acting protamine zinc kind
and fiddle about with the dose until she’s just free of sugar.”

It was not a very encouraging prospect, possibly having to give

shots to a camel for life. I knew a number of dog owners who
were used to jabbing their diabetic pets each day with insulin;
the animals tended to develop small knobbles all over them and
felt like pineapples.

“Couldn’t we give anti-diabetic drugs in her food?” asked Ray.

There were at least two kinds of oral drug which were proving
effective in some human cases at that time, but they had failed
to reduce the sugar level and control the progress of the disease
in almost all animal cases. I explained this to the zoo director
and we decided to embark on the course of insulin shots. Matt
Kelly was armed with a bunch of syringes and needles, and I
showed him how to adjust the dose according to the colour of
the test strip after it had been in contact with the urine.

“And where do oi get the urine from?” Matt inquired. “Oi can’t
stand waitin’ behind the craytchure all day long hopin’ it’ll pee!”

“Of course not,” I replied. “All you need do is spot a damp

patch on the concrete where she’s passed water and dab your
test strip in that.”

Matt looked at his collection of medical paraphernalia with the

enthusiasm of a bilious leprechaun. Crawling about over the
floor blotting up camel-juice indeed! Just what he had known
would happen if novices like young Taylor started interfering.

The young camel began to put on weight and condition over

the next few days as Matt gave the insulin and the anti-fungal
treatment annihilated the layers of yeast fungus. Things were
progressing admirably. Then, on the ninth day, the youngster
refused to feed and took on a drawn and depressed look. The
sugar content in the urine rocketed upwards. When Ray Legge
went into the hospital on the morning of the tenth day he
found the little camel lying dead. Miserable, I drove over to
perform the necropsy. The pancreas, the organ which produces
natural insulin normally and also serves a number of other vital
functions concerning digestion of food, I found to be a
shrivelled, almost non-existent piece of tissue. What there was
of it was inflamed, red and yellow. Matt Kelly silently returned
to me the unused syringes, test strips and injections. So much
for veterinary science.

Despite this early setback, Ray Legge set off to a cracking start
at Belle Vue. He supervised the building of one of the finest
aquaria and reptile houses in the country and then designed a
modern great ape complex complete with isolation rooms, a
self-contained kitchen and food store for Len, the senior ape
keeper, and underground tunnels leading from centrally heated,
glass-fronted indoor quarters to circular open-air play pits again
protected from the germ-bearing visitors by armour-plated
glass. In these new buildings I was going to spend much of my
time in the next few years, for it became a mutual, unspoken
arrangement that I would visit the zoo regularly at least once a
week and not just when I was called. Exciting new inhabitants
for both completed residences had been purchased by the zoo,
giant tortoises and alligators for the one and a pair of young
gorillas for the other. These would join the existing reptiles and
apes from the old reptile and great ape houses.
Ray was a stimulating and sympathetic person to work with: a
talented artist and sculptor in wood and stone, he had a
sensitive and humane approach to zoo animals wonderfully
combined with the never-ending curiosity of the born
naturalist. To hear him talk, his time with the British Army in
India during the war had been one glorious natural history
ramble, finding new fish, rare insects or strange plants wherever
he was posted. During the Cyprus crisis, when he instructed
troops hunting Eoka terrorists in the arts of mountain
climbing, he found the greatest excitement in pursuing the
nimble lizards of the Troodos Mountains under the concealed
rifles of General Grivas’s guerrilla snipers.

But it was with Matt Kelly that I had to build some sort of
bridge if I was to carry out my resolve to learn something of his
zoocraft. This most renowned of British head keepers had
worked for many years at Belle Vue and before that at Dublin,
which at the time had an unrivalled reputation for the quality of
its lions. Matt was no naturalist, no lizard chaser, no smooth
utterer of Latin names, no scientist; he was simply the perfect
head keeper of his time. An out-and-out practical zooman, he
was born with that “feel” for his animals which is to be found
in good shepherds and in farmers who rear plump beef cattle
efficiently and with apparent ease, not by any high-falutin
knowledge of food analyses, digestibility factors or other
scientist’s jargon, but by observation, experience, personal
attention to individual feeding and plain, inborn talent. Also, in
the same indefinable way that natural seamen sense impending
changes in the weather, Matt had a nose for trouble. Long
before it was obvious to others, he would start to fret about the
rhinoceros or the ostrich or any other of the numerous
creatures that he knew so intimately.

“Matt,” I said one day, shortly after the death of the baby
camel, “you know I learned a lot at Belle Vue as a student.
Now, doing the veterinary work myself, I’m going to need your
help in showing me a whole lot more of the things a vet doesn’t
know.”

Matt seemed pleased with my approach. A wide grin, showing

broad white teeth like a chimp’s, split his face. “Sure and we’ll
see what we can make of ye, Dr. Taylor,” he replied.

Things, little things, immediately began to go wrong. If there

was a wrong way to do something, some particularly obtuse,
disastrous or all-fingers-and-thumbs way todoit, I did it. There
was the cardinal sin of zoo keeping which 1 quickly
committed—leaving a gate unlocked. Matt and I had been
looking at the Barbary sheep as they sprang from rock to rock
round the artificial mountain in their pen. Bald, scurfy areas on
their coat suggested mange. I would arrange to have them
trapped, take skin scrapings for examination and dip them like
farm flocks. Ping, ping, ping. Surefootedly on their tiny hooves
they leaped from one minute ledge to another with infinite
grace. Then, just as surefootedly, one of them went ping, ping,
ping out through the gate into the zoo grounds. The last in, I
had not bolted the gate behind me. Red-faced, I chased after a
fuming Matt Kelly as we pursued the agile creature like two
decrepit satyrs on the trail of a wood nymph. Out of the zoo
grounds we went and onto the main road that leads to the city
centre. The Barbary sheep was gaining ground; the way it was
galloping along one might have thought it was making for the
docks and hoping to dash aboard a freighter due any moment
to sail for its native North Africa. Eventually, with the aid of
Ray Legge, keepers and sundry other citizens who had been
informed of or had actually witnessed our puffing, cursing dash
towards the town, the creature was cornered in a coal
merchant’s yard. Master of rocky pinnacles and sandstone cliff
faces, the Barbary sheep found that the scree-sloped black
pyramids of coal did not provide firm footing. Scrabbling
vainly to reach the sooty peak of one mound it slipped
relentlessly backwards and was caught.

Covered in coal dust that stuck firmly to our clothes and

sweating skin, Matt and I returned to the zoo. “Jeez, ye made
me purple a few weeks ago, Doctor,” he lamented, .clicking his
teeth, “and now ye’ve made me black!”

Our next joint foray concerned a monkey that had been fed the
most potentially deadly titbits. Every zoo attracts a tiny
proportion of nuts, dangerous eccentrics and vandals among
the crowds of paying public. I can understand the impulses that
make folk ignore the “No Feeding” signs and pass potato chips
or boiled sweets to elephants or monkeys; I detest it, but see
the motivation involved, when drunken louts climb over the
walls on a Saturday night after the pubs close and, in the
fuddled spirit of bravado which this most primitive of
mammalian species exhibits at such times, knock hell out of
defenceless creatures like penguins or wallabies or peacocks.
But I do not understand, cannot in my wildest dreams explain,
the workings of the mind of the human who passed a bunch of
thin, new, stainless-steel razor blades through the bars to a
monkey. The monkey liked the look of the shining metal wafers
and, so that his fellows could not purloin them, put them safely
away—in his mouth. Like anyone who has received a present
of which he is rather proud, the monkey just had to keep taking
them out from time to time to admire and shuffle through
them, and it was while he was inspecting his treasure in this way
that his keeper spotted the blades and raised the alarm. Quick
as a flash, the monkey put his fascinating little collection back
into his cheek pouch.

When Matt and I arrived the monkey stared innocently at us.

No blood ran from his mouth. His fingers appeared uninjured.
Razor blades? What razor blades? his eyes seemed to say. Like
some Indian fakir, he had so far avoided doing himself harm by
manipulating the blades delicately with his soft tongue and
velvety cheek lining. But how were we to retrieve them? I still
had no speedy, safe monkey anaesthetics. If we netted him,
might he not slice up the inside of his mouth in the fracas?

“What do you think, Matt?” I asked my mentor. “How do we

get the bloody things out without carving him up?”

Matt thought for a moment; then, with an air of relaxed

confidence, he said, “Get me a sweepin’ brush.”
I found a brush for Matt, who slipped into the cage through
the trapdoor at the back. The monkey darted to a far corner
well away from him and prepared to do battle. It was obvious
the head keeper was going to try to pin him in the corner with
the brush. OK, the monkey was clearly thinking, we would see
about that, and he tensed his powerful leg muscles, ready to
leap out of the way of the imminent onslaught. With all the
space available, the monkey must have reckoned that by
jumping rapidly round from bars to branch to ledge to bars
again he could wear out this lumbering human with his
unwieldy brush in a war of attrition that might, as far as he was
concerned, last all day. My forecast of the outcome,
inexperienced as I was, agreed with that of my little simian
friend; if I had been a betting man, I would have laid my money
on the monkey.

Both of us were barking up the wrong tree. Matt’s battle plan

was quite, quite different. Without warning the stocky Irishman
began to shout and swear at the top of his voice. Every oath
invented in the isle of saints and sinners came blasting out. His
face contorted with rage and he waved the brush vigorously
about, clouting it with resounding bangs on the walls of the
cage. It was an unholy din, but he did not make one move
towards the monkey, nor did he bring his weapon within feet
of the startled animal’s crouching body. To the monkey it must
have seemed as though the head keeper had gone mad. Any
second this Fury- would bring the flailing brush smashing
down on his puny frame. With wrath like this he would not be
just pinned and caught, he would be smashed to smithereens!
This was going to be no game, but a matter of life or death
somehow to keep out of range of the murderous maniac. He
was going to have to run and run and run.

When running for your life you discard all inessential baggage
so, watching for the first thunderbolt, the monkey picked the
razor blades out of his mouth and dropped them on the floor,
Matt stopped shouting, put down his brush, replaced the
expression of mock rage with one of winkling satisfaction and
gathered up the slivers of steel.

“That’s the way ye do it, Dr.Taylor,” he said. “Now we can bag

him and ye can check him over if ye like.”

I was very impressed. Catching the monkey in a sort of

butterfly net did not take long, then the captive was transferred
without ceremony to a sack for carrying across to the hospital.
When we arrived there the bagful of monkey was put on the
table and I prepared to do my bit. I would sedate the monkey
with a small shot of Barbiturate so that I could examine him. I
had the choice of injecting through the sack—an unhygienic
procedure—or fishing the animal out, putting a full nelson on
him and doing it elegantly in arm or thigh. I decided to extract
him, but which end of him was where? There were three or
four moving lumps in the wriggling sack, but were they arms,
head or buttocks? I reckoned that one spherical lump must be
the head and seized it firmly through the sacking. It was not the
head— it was the other end. A second later the dagger-like fang
teeth of the genuine head end lanced through the sack and
sliced my left index finger almost in half. As I tried to stem the
bleeding and prepared to go down to the city hospital for
suturing and tetanus injections, Matt gave me the word. “Never
try grabbin’ a monkey in a bag like that again, Doctor.
Remember his eyes are pressed close to the coarse sackin’ stuff.
Ye can’t see where he is, but sure as hell he can see ye.”
Painfully I acknowledged my dumb stupidity and went off to
the Manchester hospital, where the house surgeon declined to
use one drop of local anaesthetic as he cobbled together my
sliced extremity. (My colleagues in human surgery do not
realize how easy their primate species are to handle; try doing
the same on a young chimp, for example.) He also cauterized
the wound deeply and painfully with silver nitrate, neglected to
give me any antibiotics and consequently produced a throbbing
infection.

It was when the finger was at last settling down and my hand
was once more available to do surgery on my own behalf that
Ray Legge informed me that one of the zoo’s golden pheasants
had a lump on its eyelid. When I examined the bird there was
no doubt that the hard, yellowish swelling was a tumour, but
not very difficult to cut out. I decided to take the bird back to
my surgery in Rochdale and do the small operation under gas
anaesthesia. Matt Kelly came along with me.

With its striking art-nouveau plumage of scarlet, green, gold

and black, the golden pheasant Is one of the handsomest birds
in the world and definitely among my favourites. Like many
other species of pheasant, the male sports a particularly
gorgeous flourish of tail feathers, and it was on one such
exquisite avian dandy that I was operating. All went well as I
cut out the growth with scalpel and forceps and Edith puffed
air and a minute quantity of halothane gas into the syrup tin
containing the head of the slumbering bird. Matt watched and
seemed moderately impressed. After stitching the wound with
fine nylon thread, I told Edith to stop the anaesthetic and stood
back to admire my work. The bird drowsed peacefully on the
operating table. Then, as is the way with birds coming out of
anaesthesia, it suddenly blinked its eyes open, flipped itself up
onto its feet and fluttered off the table before any of us could
move. Rapidly gaining strength, and finding itself in sur-
roundings quite different from its native Tibetan forests or its
range at Belle Vue, it dashed merrily round the room, knocking
over light pieces of equipment and provoking the cats who sat
in wire-mesh boxes waiting their turn for surgical attention.
Edith and I gathered our wits and set about retrieving the
energetic post-op patient.

“Careful!” shouted Kelly, crouching down in the posture of a

rugby full-back about to tackle his man. “Leave him to me! I’ll
get him as he comes round!”

But we took no notice and scuttled in hot pursuit, while Matt

waited to bag the pheasant as it dashed towards him on its next
lap of the room. Anxious to impress the head keeper with my
animal handling expertise, I ungallantly elbowed Edith out of
the way, put on a spurt and made a determined grab.

Leave him to me!” Matt yelled again, but I had caught the
bird—or so I thought. With a firm grasp of the careering
pheasant’s proud tail feathers, I applied the brakes and the long
plumes came to a halt. The pheasant, to my horror, dashed on,
straight into Matt’s arms. Now bereft of its full complement of
the tiger-barred plumes which in the complete bird make up an
arching tail of just the right artistic length, the pheasant was
exposing a stubby, yellow-pink butt end reminiscent of a
Christmas turkey on Boxing Day.

“Dammit, look 1” groaned Matt, his teeth grinding as he

struggled to contain more picturesque Irish turns of phrase
while Edith was present. “Look at the bird’s ar . . . posterior!”

Although unhurt, the bird looked most undignified as it

squatted in Matt’s folded arms. Both of them, I thought, looked
at me with a red and reproachful eye. There was no way of
making up for my mistake, no glue nor subterfuge could save
my face. It would be many months before nature restored the
pheasant’s fine cockade and covered the evidence of my
ineptitude.

Matt’s sour expression confirmed that I had done it again.

“Never catch hold of a bird loike that again,” he instructed as
he made for the door and I stood glumly, still clutching my
wretched bunch of feathers like a schoolboy caught in the act
of picking the neighbour’s strawberries. “And give me those
feathers,” he added, holding out a hand. “Dozens of
schoolchildren ask me for such things.” I could imagine him
handing this lot out and saying in his fruity brogue, “And these
were pulled out of a golden pheasant by a clumsy young vet.
Can ye imagine that?” I was not building much yet .in the way
of bridges with Mr. Matt Kelly, that was certain.

At least Ray Legge was encouraging and tolerant as I stumbled

my way painfully through the minefield of practice among
creatures too dangerous or too difficult to handle safely, who
presented symptoms that bore no resemblance to anything I
had seen in cat or pig or carthorse. I also had to contend with
techniques of animal self-defence which I had not met before,
from the torpid sloth who is anything but slothful when
slashing rapidly and accurately with its front claws, to the coati
mundi who, if you pick it up by its tail and hold it safely at
arm’s length, will athletically climb up its own tail and
summarily deal with you. It shares this contortionist ability with
the opossum, Matt instructed me. It came as a relief sometimes,
though one which I would have vehemently denied at the time,
to return at the end of a day of “guess-agnosis” at the zoo and
get stuck into a surgery full of common or garden domestic
pets with complaints that seemed like old and trusted friends,
where drugs acted predictably and surgery was a romp round
anatomy as familiar as one’s own back yard.

Matt Kelly continued to supervise my enthusiastic meddling

with a melancholy reserve. My wrong diagnoses were shown up
when I performed post-mortems. The squarefaced Irishman
would click his teeth as I prodded around inside the cadaver of
an antelope that I had considered to be afflicted with liver
infection but whose diseased lungs were manifestly the cause of
its death. “Knew it hadn’t much chance,” he would opine as I
began to mutter the Latin name of the condition and hopelessly
try to baffle him with science. “Seen it before, oi have, Dr.
Whittle and ot both. Knew the powders ye gave him would do
no good.” Matt would shake his head and reflect aloud on the
good old days when yoghurt, cider vinegar, honey and molasses
had been the elixirs of life in the zoo and everything from
axolotl to zebra had apparently expired only from advanced old
age.

It seemed that the only common fact about exotic species was
their unwillingness to exhibit symptoms that had much logical
connection with the diseased portion of their bodies. In the
evenings I would complain to Shelagh as I ate my supper about
how a hippopotamus with chronic pneumonia of both lungs
had breathed apparently evenly and without difficulty right up
to the point of death and had not been heard to cough one
single, soft cough. And about how monkeys that I found to be
riddled with tuberculosis had played, fought, eaten, mated and
harassed their keeper until struck down within the space of five
minutes as if smitten by thunderbolts. “It’s as if the zoo animals
have some tacit conspiracy to give me a hard time,” I would
ruminate as I tackled my steak pudding and peas. “Maybe
Norman Whittle was right. It doesn’t make much difference
whether I do anything or nothing, the outcome is inevitable,”

“Nonsense!” Shelagh would reply’. “You’ve got to learn to walk

before you can run. And after all, it was your idea to go in for
zoo animals.” '

With more homilies on the general theme of having to break

eggs to make omelettes, she would brew me a mug of coffee
and I would go into the lounge to spend an hour or two
reading books or journals on exotica. Although there were as
yet no books available on zoo medicine, occasional papers were
being published here and there by scientists working in Africa,
in laboratories and in places such as the mighty San Diego Zoo.
For a few minutes in the evenings I could escape from my
problems with Belle Vue and Matt Kelly and learn what
veterinarians were doing in sunnier climates. Even San Diego, it
appeared, did not have it too easy, and the Prosector’s Annual
Report from London Zoo, a detailed record of the toll of
creatures dying from disease and accidental injury, grimly
reflected my experience in Manchester. The crying need was
still for a range of powerful but safe sedatives and anaesthetics
which would enable all of us to examine and treat living exotic
creatures more thoroughly. On top of that, we needed a sure
way of delivering the drugs to wild and dangerous critters over
distances ranging from a few feet to tens of yards. Until we had
such weapons in our armoury I would have to go on collecting
hair, droppings, urine and other possibly useful stray material
from sick animals in the hope of getting enlightenment from
the Test (rather like a soothsayer pondering the entrails of a
sacrificial chicken), while Matt Kelly stood stolidly by with an
expression on his face which said quite clearly that scientific
mumbo-jumbo could never take the place of good old-
fashioned zooman’s know-how.
6
“Not Bad, Young Feller”
One way Matt Kelly demonstrated his inborn zooman’s skill
brilliantly was in knowing exactly when it was safe to go into a
cage or den with a seriously ill animal, even a dangerous one.
He had an eye for picking the earliest moment when, providing
I did what I was told, I might get away with injecting an ailing
lion, lancing an abscess on the butt ofa blood-poisoned and
uncaring bear or snatching a quick feel of a tigress’s swollen
belly without losing a limb or my life in the process.

My first such venture was a David-in-the-leopard’s-den episode

involving a cat that had picked up the miserable running cold
symptoms of feline influenza, no doubt from some mundane
domestic puss who had wandered through the big cat house at
night in search of stray morsels of meat. Feeling and looking
just like a human on the first day of an acute attack of flu, the
leopard lay in his cage, sneezing miserably, drooling ropes of
saliva and blinking blearily through inflamed and watery eyes. I
was most impressed when Matt produced his keys and
unlocked the cage door,

“Oi think we can go in,” he said. “Stick close behind me all the
time.” I nodded. “All the time,” Matt repeated as we crept
warily through the door and closed it behind us.
The leopard sneezed, snuffled and snorted where he lay in the
straw, but appeared not to notice us. “Oi’m goin’ to grab his
tail,” Matt whispered. “Keep behoind me and jab your injection
into it.” Tail injections in domestic animals are considered to be
utterly beyond the pale, but in zoo animals one sometimes has
to give thanks for whatever bit of the patient’s anatomy the
Good Lord provides. I had my syringe and needle full and
ready.

Mat t walked quietly over to the leopard, with me shadowing

him a full six inches behind. Bending slowly down, he picked
up the leopard’s tail and pulled. The leopard, miserable as he
was, just had to react to such provocation. Growling, he dug
his claws through the straw into the wooden floor and glared
back over his shoulder at his tormentors. Matt continued
pulling. “While he’s like this, if oi keep pullin’, he can’t get his
head round and into me,” he grunted.

Suddenly the grip of the leopard’s claws on the floor gave way
and the animal skidded back towards us. Angered now, he
slewed his front half round and lashed out with his front claws.
Matt continued to pull the tail and started to skip backwards.
“Oi’ve got to keep the tail at full stretch,” he said more loudly
as I skipped backwards too, trying to match my footsteps with
his to avoid our legs tangling and both of us tumbling over
with an increasingly irate, probably headachy leopard on top.

Back we went and back came the cat. The more he struggled,
the faster we went. As we came near a corner, we backed off at
an angle. Our strange paso doble, or rather paso triple,
continued round the cage. We just could not afford to let the
leopard catch up with the end of his tail.

“Roight, now,” said Matt eventually, puffing with the exertion

of the dance, “reach round me and stick it in!”

It was not easy, tripping energetically backwards, with Matt’s

bulk blocking my view of the rear half of the spitting

'flu victim, to reach round and stick the hypodermic needle

under the skin of the tail. I looked round Matt as we danced,
chose my point and thrust forward my syringe. Man's shoulder
obstructed my line of sight again. I prodded blindly towards the
position I had chosen. "Bejasus," yelled Matt,"ye've jabbed me
hand!"

Startled, I pulled back my needle. Luckily I had not begun

depressing the plunger, but the back of Matt's neck had gone
the colour of smoked salmon, “Again, again, try again,” he
shouted testily, “but for Gawd’s sake look where ye’re goin’.”
Still trotting backwards behind the now-sweating head keeper, I
steadied myself with one arm round his waist, craned my neck
awkwardly to the right, spotted the tail once more and launched
a second attempt. This time I struck home and was greeted by
the manhandled leopard with a throaty roar of outrage.
“Done,” I declared. “What do we do now?”
“Keep goin’ till we’re next by the door,” replied Matt, “then ye
back out. Oi’ll throw him forwards and follow ye.” It was our
last circumnavigation of the cage. When I was in position I
retreated from the dance floor and crashed with relief through
the doorway. With a skilful flick of his strong wrists Matt threw
the leopard forward and away from him. Before the animal had
time to gather himself for a riposte, Matt had joined me outside
the cage and banged the door to.

Puffing, the head keeper wiped his forehead and sucked the red
spot on his hand where I had punctured him. “Not bad, young
feller,” he said, “not bad.” I was delighted. That “not bad”
from Matt was worth a thousand guineas to me. “But ye’ll have
to practise your Oswaldtwistle Bam Dance.” He reminded me
about it the following Christmas when, at the annual Belle Vue
party, he took the floor for this English north country dance
where partners go three by three. Not a bad dancer, Matt.

My successful injection of the fully conscious savage beast

produced a euphoria which was to last all of twenty minutes.
Walking back from the big cat house, Matt and I passed the ape
house. In the sunlit open-air cage was a fit-looking three-year-
old chimp with eyes as bright as buttons,

“Who’s that?” I asked the head keeper.

“That’s Lee, son of Katja and Robert, a grand little feller.”

I stood for a moment to admire the chimpanzees. Lee seemed

positively entranced by me; his eyes never left me. Gould it be,
I thought in the afterglow of my feat of derring-do with the
leopard, that he senses in me something of Dr. Dolittle? Maybe
I have got that special way with animals. Lee stared on. True,
he did not seem to be quite catching my eye, but there was no
doubt that something about me was riveting his attention.

I vaulted the metal barrier designed to stop the public from

doing what I was about to do and went closer to the cage. My
confidence knew no bounds. Lee continued to gaze adoringly
at me but seemed to be fascinated by my chest rather than my
face. The reason rapidly became clear as he pushed an arm
through the bars of the cage and with a lightning-fast
movement snatched at my shirt, an expensive pink one lightly
embroidered with glossy whorls in light brown, of which I was
rather fond. With one single, precise yank, he pulled the
garment clean away from my body. I stood unhurt but
dumbfounded, naked from the waist up. In the background the
Irishman began to scoff loudly as Lee shuffled off to the back
of the cage with his prize and tried it on for size. It was not a
very good fit, but that did not seem to bother him at all.

“My shirt,” I exclaimed pointlessly. “My shirt.”

“Ye’ve seen the last of that,” chuckled Kelly. “All the tea in
China couldn’t get it away from him; oi’ve told ye before about
goin’ close to primate cages.” He had. One of’ the first lessons
I had learned when walking along the narrow central corridor
that divides the sleeping quarters of Belle Vue’s monkey house
was to keep dead on the middle line, or grey, brown, black or
greenish little arms would snake out and pull my hair, give me a
thick ear or steal any detachable object such as fountain pen or
stethoscope. Now my shirt was very definitely Lee’s. For long
after you could still see the remains of it lovingly hoarded in his
bed, fragmented and less recognizable, but Lee appeared to
treasure it even more than I ever had.
I felt rather exposed setting off home half naked, as Matt
grinned and said something to Len, the head ape keeper, about
“young boyos with more lamin’ than sense”.

“Hello, Tarzan,” said Shelagh with a giggle as I walked into the

kitchen, “tea’s ready.”

It would be wrong to give the impression that everything I

attempted in the zoo fulfilled Matt’s gloomy predictions

by ending in disaster. Cracked toenails on elephants did well on

the hoof oil I prescribed, and I had cleared a llama or two of
lice—but Matt Kelly had .been getting similar results on zoo
animals before I was born. Maybe he had used automobile
engine oil on the elephants’ feet and simple flowers of sulphur
to destroy the llamas’ parasites, but they had worked almost as
well and nearly as quickly as my up- to-date drugs. To break
into the business properly and become a zoo vet in Matt’s eyes
I would have to do better than that. I consoled myself with the
thought that the director, Ray Legge, seemed to appreciate my
efforts. Perhaps it was because, as an aquarist, he too was
learning in this hotchpotch of a captive jungle.

We learnt together on one emergency which happened on Matt

Kelly’s day off. Some mindless member of the public had
thrown a ball of string over the wire into the big cat enclosure,
and a puma had decided to play with it. It was fun! When he
tapped it, it rolled along the grass. A thwack from a paw and it
spun through the air. The puma pounced on it and gnawed it,
pretending it was a rabbit that he had cleverly stalked and
finally seized in one irresistible attack. The ball of string began
to unravel. The big cat licked idly at the imaginary body of his
prey and a loose end of string stuck to his tongue. All cats’
tongues have harsh, abrasive upper surfaces on which prickly
cells point backwards to help the animal lap up liquids
efficiently. The puma continued licking when he felt the string
in his mouth, and the movement of his tongue inevitably
pushed it farther and farther backwards. Like the incurving
fangs of a snake, the scales on the tongue provided a one-way
ratchet, making it difficult if not impossible for the creature to
spit out what had been taken in. The puma felt the string at the
back of his throat and pawed vainly in an effort to dislodge the
tickly thread. The string stayed put, so the puma started to lick
and swallow to try to put an end to the irritation. The end of
the string disappeared. The puma licked and swallowed. The
unravelling ball of string became smaller as inch by inch it crept
down the animal’s gullet.
Ray Legge telephoned me early in the morning. “Will you come
over and look at one of the young pumas? It’s an odd case.
There’s one piece of string hanging out of his mouth and
another from the anus.”

When I arrived at Belle Vue the position had not changed. Sure
enough, the animal had about three inches of string dangling
from one end and a slightly smaller length trailing from the
other. Ray and I agreed that both bits of string looked very
much alike and might well be one and the same piece. The
puma was not bothering to lick at the fragment hanging from
his lips and appeared perfectly healthy. The possibility that we
were looking at two ends of a single piece had ominous
undertones. Endless opportunities for trouble in the bowel
were offered by such a foreign body. I would have to
anaesthetize the animal,

Ray' had designed a new cat house with special squeeze

compartments where I could get to grips safely with my
patients, but it was not easy to entice the animal into the
restraining device to give it a shot of anaesthetic. I made a
mental note to order one of the new darting pistols that I had
just heard were being produced in the United States. At last the
puma was immobilized and I gave my anaesthetic. In ten
minutes he was sleeping peacefully and we pulled him out into
the passageway of the cat house so that I could examine him.

Kneeling down and concentrating on the puma, I made the

cardinal error of forgetting about my rear when in a confined
space flanked by caged animals. As I bent to give a gentle pull
to the string hanging from the puma’s jaws, a nearby leopard
whipped its forepaw through the bars, dug a hooked claw
deeply into my right ankle, anchoring itself behind my Achilles
tendon, and tried to haul me into its cage. In agony I tumbled
round and literally unpicked the tough hook of nail from my
bleeding leg. Thank goodness Matt isn’t here, was all I could
think, I’ve fumbled it again.
Pausing to stick some of the penicillin cream normally used up
cows’ udders into my wound and bind it with gauze, I returned
my attentions to the puma. Tugging the string at either end did
not budge it a millimetre. I decided that it might not be wise to
pull really hard; I was not sure why, but I felt that if the string
did not slip conveniently out the force might do untold damage
to the animal’s insides. Besides, I still could not be certain that
the two portions were not separate. “I’ll have to open him up,”
I told Ray. “I’ll go into the abdomen first to find out how far
the string extends and then maybe open the intestines.”

We carried the unconscious big cat on a wheelbarrow over to

the dispensary and the operation was soon under way. I
inspected the loops of bowel. Sure enough, I could feel the
firm thread of string running right through the animal’s
alimentary canal.

“My hands are sterile—will you try pulling the string at the
back end, Ray?” I asked. The zoo director pulled lightly at the
puma’s rear beyond the draped operation sheets, while I
watched the effect on the exposed bowel loops. When Ray
pulled, the intestines began to concertina together as if he were
drawing the cord on a pair of unoccupied pyjamas. I told him
to stop pulling at once. Any more of that and the string would
begin to cut into the delicate folded lining of the bowel tube.
Thank God I had not tried brute force in extracting the
string—it would have sliced open the intestines at a couple of
dozen points. There was only one way. At six places between
the duodenum and rectum I had to pierce the intestine wall,
fish in for the string, cut it and then sew up the wall with
waterproof stitching. At every second incision I pulled out the
freed section of string after cutting it.

An hour later it was completed. The puma had six patches in

his food canal and I had all the string. With his abdomen sewn
up and pumped full of antibiotics to prevent peritonitis, the
still-sleeping puma was wheeled back to his night house.

“Marvellous job,” said Ray, patting me on the back, “really

worthwhile.” Pity old Kelly wasn’t there, I thought. Telling him
tomorrow won’t have the impact of the real thing.

Ten days later I took the stitches out of the recovered puma
with Matt helping me to give the anaesthetic. “You ought to
have seen it, Matt,” I said proudly. “String from end to end like
a bunch of black puddings. Good thing I operated.”

Matt nodded and spat accurately at a drain. “Pumas,” he said,

“pumas. Sure, they’re a drug on the market. Dime a dozen
these days. Makes me wonder if they’re worth spendin’ money
on,”

Despite Matt’s scepticism, my experience was beginning to

extend beyond split toenails and lousy llamas. If there was the
slightest chance of saving an animal’s life Ray and I took it, and
Matt was roped in to help as I fitted a custom- built wooden
leg, complete with ingenious articulated foot, to a flamingo
whose limb I had amputated because of gangrene; he held the
bowl of water while I took casts of a newborn zebra foal’s neck
which had been bitten and broken by its father shortly after
birth, and for which I designed a glass fibre support to keep the
foal’s head up while the bones healed. Times were gradually
changing, and a major turning-point came the day I received
through the post from America my gas-powered dart-gun.
What was more the drug company, Parke, Davis, had sent me a
supply of a promising new drug, phencyclidine, to try out on
zoo animals. Concentrated enough to be used in the dart-gun
syringes, and said to be fast-acting, it gave me a new optimism
about my future as a zoo vet.

I took my new toys over to Belle Vue to show Ray, but he was
not in his office so I drove through the grounds to the animal
kitchen. Walking into the room where the diets are made up, I
found Matt standing at the sink shaving. The foamy lather from
his face was dropping onto a tray of frozen sprats that were
being thawed out for the penguins.

“Dear me, Mr. Kelly,” I said sternly, “what are you doing? It’s
hardly the right thing to do one’s ablutions all over the animal
food. The practice will have to stop at once.”

The stocky Irishman glared at me like an apoplectic Father

Christmas, blew a few soapy bubbles but said nothing. He
began rinsing the sprats. I went out, leaving the crestfallen Matt
with half his beard still on. I grinned to myself when I was out
of sight. A belated comeback, I thought; one point to me.
Now that I had a dart-gun and the new drug, I was all set to
break forever with the old days of impotent guesswork from
the other side of the bars or the opposite bank of the moat.
The use of tranquillizers in the food of zoo animals had not
proved to be very reliable—most of the drugs then available
were designed for humans and did not necessarily work on wild
beasts. Anyway, the animals could not be guaranteed to take
the pills ground up and mixed with their food, and if they did
the stuff" often got lost among the vast quantities of digesting
material churning around in their stomachs and either
produced no signs of sleepiness or did so hours later when we
were long gone and in bed. The doses of human tranquillizers
also had to be multiplied many times when administered to
exotic animals, even small ones, and the thousands of pills that
would be required for a biggy like an elephant made the whole
business farcical. Ray Legge and I had also tried jabbing
injections of dope into awkward animals like giraffe with
syringes attached to the end of long poles, but it never really
worked. We just broke a lot of needles and even more poles.

The first animals on which I tried my gun and phencyclidine

were some wolves that Ray wanted to move from one lot of
quarters to another within the zoo. Nervously I loaded a dozen
darts and then, one after the other, fired them at the prowling
animals. Plop, plop, plop. I learned how easy it was to hit
shoulder, thigh or neck muscle. Within ten minutes all the
wolves were asleep—we had never seen anything like it. The
whole transfer was completed within half an hour. I went on to
lions and then bears. Never a hitch, never a fatality. The drug
was ideal on monkeys, chimps, gorillas. It kept the animals
unconscious for about an hour and then wore off gradually
over the next day or so.

Phencyclidinc appeared to be the universal bringer of dreams I

had been seeking.

Then I hit the first snags. I lost my first elephant, Mary, after a
long operation to remove a Tooth with a root abscess; the
prolonged period of recovery from phencyclidine in such a
large creature resulted in fatal congestion of the lungs. I
experimented on zebras needing emergency suturing of
wounds. The phencyclidine put the animals down but the
nightmares they seemed to experience, and the hours of frantic
crashing about as the chemical faded slowly from their systems,
were painful to witness. After one awful night spent with Matt
Kelly in a straw-smothered loose box, soothing and struggling
to hold down a lathered, wild-eyed zebra stallion that was
coming round from phencyclidine anaesthesia, I vowed never
to use the drug again on equines. Fortunately, two newer drugs,
xylazine and etorphine, would soon appear and prove the
answer to doping zebra.

Although phencyclidine was first-class in bears, the polar bear

was more sensitive to it than its cousins were and needed a
much smaller dose to knock it out. It was my success in
anaesthetizing polar bears at Belle Vue which led to my first
piece of circus work. Billy Smart’s Circus was at Prestwick in
Scotland and had a male polar bear with the irritating condition
common in these deceptive and highly dangerous creatures,
ulceration between the toes. Polar bears have lots of fur on
their feet to insulate them against the cold of ice and snow, but
in captivity it often becomes matted between their toes into
hard little balls. The balls act as foreign bodies and rub
uncomfortably at the soft flesh on either side of them.
Gradually ulcers are formed which attract fungus and other
types of infection, and the accumulated hair balls must be cut
out. The Smarts and I had met at the circus held every
Christmas at Belle Vue, and they asked me to go up to
Prestwick to dope the bear and clean up his feet.

I felt wildly elated as I drove back down from Scotland after

darting in the phencyclidine and then taking my scissors and
soothing ointments to the' massive paws of the slumbering
white giant. Zoo work is one thing; impressing the hard bitten
animal men of the circus world, who tend to have firm
prejudices about veterinary matters, is another thing altogether.
The Smarts had seemed very impressed with my fast, no-
nonsense anaesthesia.

The gun and the new drugs could be the key to bringing
veterinary help to circus animals as well, then, but the next
patient on which I used it was back at Belle Vue. One morning
Matt Kelly telephoned in a terrible flap; Ray Legge was away on
holiday and he was acting zoo director. He sounded desperate
yet resigned. “Get down as soon as ye can, Doctor. It’s an oryx
cow. She’s just calved and all her insoides are hangin’ out. It
looks very bad.”
Listening to Matt’s brief description I could guess what had
happened, but I did not waste time telling him about it over the
telephone. I told him to keep the animal quiet, to cover the
“insoides” with a clean, moist sheet to keep them from
becoming damaged or dirty, and to wait for me. Then I jumped
into my car and set off for Manchester.

Matt’s face was long and sombre as I walked into the oryx
shed. I had never seen him looking so downcast. He did not
bother to greet me but just announced bleakly, “She’s had it.
No question. Oi’ve never seen such a mess in all me years as a
zoo keeper.”

The Beisa oryx was lying on her side on a pile of straw, her
hind quarters draped in white sheeting stained with large fuzzy
shadows of red. Under the sheet a bloody pink balloon of flesh,
studded with purple cherry-like objects and as big as the
animal’s head and neck, lay on the straw. It was attached by a
narrow neck to the vulva. As I had guessed, the oryx had calved
and discharged the afterbirth; then the whole of the womb,
with the ovaries attached, had turned inside out and fallen
through the pelvis into the fresh air. The oryx’s entire womb
and associated structures had prolapsed and were lying on the
ground for all to see.

“Just look at her,” continued Matt. “She’s had it, oi can tell ye
that. No animal can survoive havin’ all its insoides turned out.
Fancy drugs and such can’t help her!” He clicked his teeth
agitatedly.
Uterine prolapse is fairly common in sheep and cattle and
occasionally occurs spectacularly in sows. It is rarely seen in
wild animals. This was the first time Matt or I had come across
it in the zoo, but unlike him I knew what it was and had
wrestled with many similar cases in farm animals. I decided to
keep that to myself for the moment, “Get some warm water
and plenty of towels,” I instructed. Matt went out sighing.

As I went towards the oryx’s head to examine her, she

threatened me with her wicked straight horns which I had seen
driven with accuracy through two-inch wood planking. I would
have to dope her before tackling her hind end, although I could
not be sure what the effect of phencyclidine would be on her
four-stomach digestion. Matt watched while I also injected io
cc of local anaesthetic to paralyse her spinal cord and stop her
straining by reflex action when I began to work. Next I
thoroughly washed the exposed lining of the womb and its
“cherries”, which were the attachment points of the calf s
placenta, and picked off bits of straw and grime. “Now then,
Matt,” I said when it was clean, “I want you to put a towelling
sling under the womb and hold it clear of the ground to stop it
getting dirty again.”

He took a towel, looped it under the flabby mess of raw flesh

and lifted it off the straw. I coated the womb liberally with a
sulphonamide antiseptic cream. Now for the tough bit. As the
womb had fallen inside out, I had to replace it gently but firmly
by rolling it inwards from the centre as if it were a plastic bag
or woollen sock that was inside out. Womb walls are thick and
spongy but easily punctured by too rough fingers, so I had to
be extremely careful to use only the balls of my fingertips. Bit
by bit the womb began to fold inwards, I kept lubricating it
with obstetric cream. The size of the exposed womb began to
decrease as I worked away with both arms groping in the oryx's
pelvic canal.

Matt said nothing as he strained to hold the towelling up, and I

knelt below him, concentrating, with my tongue stuck between
my lips. At last, with a satisfying sucking noise, the last bit of
the womb disappeared inside the vulva. I pushed it well
forward inside the animal. Luckily I have a long arm with a
smallish hand, ideal for this sort of obstetrical problem.

"Get me a milk bottle, Matt," I said finally.

The head keeper broke his silence*. "A milk bottle? What for?"

"Get it please, and quick!" I replied sternly.

Matt dropped the towel and disappeared again. He came back

with a milk bottle which, while he watched curiously, I
disinfected with iodine soap. Then to his amazement I plunged
my arm back inside the oryx's womb with the bottle held firmly
by the neck. Using its blunt bottom as an extension to my arm,
I made sure that the part of the womb beyond the reach of my
fingers was folded back into its proper position.

If I did not do that, the thing would be out again in no time.

Withdrawing the milk bottle and still not explaining its
function, or what indeed the whole business had been about, I
finished off by putting a few clips into the vulva as a
precaution. I would remove them after thirty-six hours. Done,
The animal's colour, pulse and respiration were good.

I scrubbed my hands and arms and then turned to Matt.

"She'll be right, as a clock by tonight," I said. "It was just a

prolapsed uterus."

Matt stared at the clean and tidy hind end of the oryx and
cleared his throat. "Incredible," he said at last. "Incredible. The
foinest bit of work oi've ever seen in all me years. Oi take me
hat off, Dr. Taylor."

That was some reward, coming from Matt. Better still, just as I
had predicted, by evening the oryx was indeed as good as new,
and I tried hard not to gloat as Matt and I stood watching her
suckle her lusty calf.

The disease problems of primates, apes and monkeys, had

always fascinated me, so I was stung by a remark by Ray Legge
that medical doctors were by tradition more equipped to deal
with such animals than veterinarians. I decided to embark on a
study course in an attempt to prove him wrong and in the
process to gain a Fellowship of the Royal College of Veterinar'y
Surgeons. After a year and a half’s hard work, sandwiching the
studies in where I could between my day- to-day clinical work
and attending postgraduate courses at the medical school in
Manchester, I got my Fellowship, the first ever given where
zoo animals were named as the speciality. Not only did my
practice with great apes in particular now have a firm base, but
through the study I had had to do at home for the Fellowship
Shelagh was becoming increasingly involved with some of my
simian patients.

Soon after I gained my Fellowship, Jane, a charming female

orangutan at Belle Vue, was pregnant for the first time. Then,
with about two months still to go before her time was due, she
suddenly had a miscarriage. A premature scrap of an orang
infant was born dead one night.

The effect on Jane was remarkable and profound. All the other
female orangs had live, healthy babies. She sat alone in a corner
hugging the shrivelled corpse of her baby, trying in vain to
make it suckle and whimpering in distress. I am not a
sentimentalist prone to seeing the whole range of human
emotions in animals, but when I first saw Jane after the mis-
carriage, I felt tears in my eyes. She was heartbroken. Try as we
might we could not get her to give up the baby’s body. I began
to consider darting her with a sedative in order to remove it
before it putrefied further. The distraught female would not
touch food and she began to lose weight alarmingly.
I took Shelagh with me to the zoo when I finally decided to
knock Jane out and take the infant cadaver. We went into the
isolation room where Jane sat pitifully in a large cage. Shelagh
looked at the orang and the orang looked at her. I saw her eyes
fill. Matt and I stood silently.
“Before you try darting,” said Shelagh suddenly, “I want to go
in with her,”

My wife was asking to go In with a full-grown orang that was

undoubtedly in a disturbed and unpredictable mood.

“I mean it,” she said. “Open the door please, Mr. Kelly.”

Matt started to speak but I interrupted him. “OK,” I said.

“Open it, Matt.”

Matt undid the lock and cautiously swung open the barred
door. Shelagh climbed into the cage and on hands and knees
crawled straight over to Jane. When she reached the orang, she
at once began talking to the animal in soothing low tones.
“What’s the matter, love?” she murmured. “I know all about it.
Come on, put an arm round me.” On and on she talked, with
the orang looking straight into her face. Shelagh sat down
beside Jane and gave her a cuddle that was full of love and
understanding. To our delight and astonishment, Jane snuggled
into her and put her broad lips to Shelagh’s mouth. Shelagh
stroked Jane’s hair and kept up the flow of sympathetic talk.
Then, just like that, Jane gave Shelagh the dead orang. Shelagh
took it, cradled it, talked admiringly about it, then slowly
slipped it into one of her pockets. Jane did not make one
gesture of protest.

“Pass me some food,” Shelagh said to us. We handed in some

bananas and grapes. Shelagh took them, broke them into
portions and presented them to the orang’s mouth. Jane took
them one by one.

“I’d like to give her a stimulant, Shelagh,” I said quietly. “I’ll

come in too.”

“No, you won’t,” she replied. “Fill your syringe, tell me where
to put it and I’ll do it—w’on’t I, Jane dear?”

“But Mrs. Taylor,” Matt remonstrated, “she’ll boite. Oi think

we’d ..

Shelagh was having none of it. Reluctantly I made up a syringe

and passed it in to my wife. “In the thigh muscle,” I instructed.
Cooing to her friend, w’ith one arm still hugging her, Shelagh
slipped the needle into Jane’s leg. She did not budge a
millimetre.

After a while, Shelagh left the cage and gave us the little corpse.
Jane was no longer whimpering. She looked more tranquil as
she watched my wife close the door, “I’ll be in again
tomorrow," said Shelagh briskly to Matt and me. She had taken
over.

And that is how it was. Every day Shelagh went in with Jane,
feeding her by hand, talking to her just like women do to their
girl friends, particularly when they have suffered some
misfortune, and giving her lots of loving cuddles. Jane
responded. She began to cuddle Shelagh in return and stopped
losing weight. Gradually she started to feed herself again. In
three weeks she appeared completely normal.

I am certain that the injections that Shelagh gave sitting cheek

by jowl with a great ape that could have broken every bone in
her body did not play much part in Jane’s recovery. As Shelagh
said, “There are some things in zoo work that just can’t be left
to men."
7

Widening Horizons
I had landed the practice with a thumping big bad debt, and
Norman Whittle was not amused. After chasing about for
’several weeks treating a touring circus’s arthritic elephant with
injections of gold salts, I found the circus had done the dirty on
me. Its owner claimed that the animal rightfully belonged to
such and such a clown, who in turn maintained that I had
originally been called in by one of a family of acrobats while the
circus was in Rochdale. The company was a small one,
everyone seemed to be interrelated and the clowns doubled or
even trebled as ice-cream sellers, bareback riders or jugglers.
Trying to get my fee out of anyone was futile and embarrassing.
If I called during a performance everyone was dashing round
concealed under greasepaint and tomato-sized rubber noses,
and at other times the trailers were silent as the grave when I
knocked miserably on the doors for my cash. Strange, when the
elephant had been creaking painfully about on puffy, tense
joints, I had been able to find the staff in a trice in order to
make my examinations. But gradually the circus moved farther
and farther away from Rochdale and debt-collecting forays
became impossible.

The bad debt led to a bitter exchange with Norman of the sort
that made me long to make the great leap and to throw in my
lot with wild-animal medicine lock, stock and barrel.
“Apart from the time you’ve spent gallivanting all over England
away from the practice,” Norman said in his undemonstrative,
clipped manner as we stood over the unconscious body of a
tortoiseshell cat on which we were doing a hysterectomy,
“we’re over a hundred quid out of pocket. This circus farce
can’t go on. Anyway you can’t trust travelling folk, fly-by-
nights, gipsies. I warned you time and again. And even if they
had paid, look at all the time and effort and driving. Compare
that to work like this.” He waved a needle holder at the supine
she-cat. “Thirty shillings, nearly all profit and done in five
minutes!”

Looked at from a purely financial point of view, it was true; one

vet we both knew frequently said that his ideal practice would
consist of doing nothing but sterilizing she- cats, six in the
morning and six in the afternoon. But that was not my view of
veterinary work. Could they not see that taking the pulse of an
elephant, feeling the thick artery deep under the dry, crinkly
skin, was a reward in itself? Cash cannot be equated with seeing
a cub in its foetal membranes emerge like a vacuum-packed
pigeon, especially if you have helped it out. Even more
especially if, as you peel the membranes from it, it writhes and
natters the first feeble protest of its independent life. No, I felt
as strongly then as I do now that it was a rare privilege to be
allowed to try to heal wild living organisms. Can a stockbroker
or banker know anything of the happiness which I have had
when seeing a leg walk that I, somehow, have helped tack
together?
I had talked before in this vein to Norman, but decided it
would be pointless to start again this time. I think he thought I
would grow out of it, so he was exasperated by my enthusiastic
acceptance of our next circus call. It was from an outfit
completely unknown to us at Great Yarmouth, two hundred
miles or more away across country on the coast of the wind-
washed fens of Norfolk. Again the problem was an elephant,
an elephant suspected of foot-and-mouth disease.

“You can’t go off down there,” said my partner angrily. “This

zoo and circus work is getting too much. No, we just can’t have
it.”

An elephant with suspected foot-and-mouth? Nothing could

stop me. “I’m off,” I said, and slipped out of the door before
he could say another word.

It was a long drive that took nearly six hours. By now I was
receiving calls to exotic animals from all over Britain as the
knowledge that I had a special interest in such creatures spread
by word of mouth from one owner to another. My mileage was
increasing rapidly, and on long journeys I was troubled by
being out of contact with my surgery and the rest of the world
for most of the day. Anything could be happening while I was
doing nothing but acting as taxi driver to myself. To remedy
this I had recently done something which was to prove the key
to roving zoo practice: I had installed in the car a radio
telephone operating on a private network that extended
virtually all over the country. My call sign was the zippy “Jet
eight-seven” and I got a great kick from receiving messages on
the road like the first one that came over the air from Belle
Vue: “Calling Jet eight-seven, Jet eight-seven. Mr. Kelly reports
pigmy hippo born. All well. Repeat, all well. Over.”

I had plenty to ponder as I crossed the flat marshes of East

Anglia. There were the problems with Norman and my role in
the practice: I owed Norman a lot for introducing me to zoo
work, and I could understand his frustration at being left to
cope on his own so much, but I knew that my first duty was to
the animals I was trying to help. Then foot-and- mouth disease.
I had never seen a real live case. As for such a thing in
elephants, I had heard of a few suspect cases where large ulcers
had formed at the back of the mouth, but that was all I knew
apart from the fact that no foot-and-mouth disease was being
reported in Britain at that time. There must be some likelier
explanation.

At last I rolled into Great Yarmouth, a place exactly like dozens

ofother holiday towns dotted round the English coast, redolent
with the faded fashion of Victorian and Regency days when
Majorca and the Costa Brava were as far away as the moon.
The circus was inside the Hippodrome Theatre, and I soon
found the elephant lines. Near three adult female Indian
elephants an old lugubrious-faced German, who turned out to
be the elephant trainer, a midget in a Charlie Chaplin outfit, a
policeman and another man in a black rubber coat and
gumboots were arguing. The midget seemed particularly
agitated.
I went over. “I’m Dr. Taylor to see the elephant.’

The man in the rubber coat put out a hand, “Tompkins,” he

said, “Ministry of Agriculture vet. Came out to see what this
report of F-and-M was all about.”

“And they won’t pay me my half-crown,” squeaked the midget,

tapping me on the knee. “I want my half-crown.” “I am Herr
Hopfer,” said the German. “Please, Doktor, come zis way.
Gerda iss very ill.” He looked as if he was about to burst into
tears.

“My half-crown! It’s the rule! My half-crown!” The midget was

fairly hopping about by this time and was waving his miniature
bent walking-stick at the policeman.

The latter cleared his throat and sighed. He had obviously been
saying something similar for the past half-hour. “I ’ave told you
once, Mr. Lemon, and I *ave told you twice. I know nothin’
about no ’alf-crown. You’ll ’ave to go down to the station and
see my sergeant about that.”

“What’s this all about?” I asked Tompkins.

“Oh, it’s all because he, Mr. Lemon, reported the suspect case
of F-and-M. Apparently there’s something in the law that says
if any private citizen suspects a notifiable disease in anybody’s
animal, whether he knows what he’s looking at or not, he can
claim two-and-sixpence from the police.”
“Is that right?” I queried.

“Can’t say I know anything about it, but the little fellow’s mad
as hell on getting his cash. Claims to know all about it.”

“Done my duty, done my duty! Where’s my half-crown?” The

midget started buzzing again.

“Now look ’ere, Mr. Lemon,” said the policeman.

“Just give me the money,” yelled Mr. Lemon.

Tompkins and I looked silently at one another and

simultaneously put our hands in our pockets. We produced
one-and-three pence each and pushed the coins at the midget.
“Now can we please have some hush while we look at the
bloody elephant!” I said tetchily.

Mr. Lemon waddled off, and later I learned that he was quite
right; he was indeed entitled to the reward whatever the
diagnosis turned out to be.

Gerda the elephant was standing miserably in a pool of water

which streamed slowly from her lower lip to the. cobbled floor.
The water was her own saliva. I must look inside her mouth at
once, but Matt Kelly had warned me of the danger of sticking
one’s hand blindly into an elephant’s mouth: “If the craytchure
moves her lower jaw, ye’ve a pulverized hand.”
“Get her to open up, Herr Hopfer,” I said. It is one thing all
elephant trainers can do with their animals.

“Gerda, auf, auf!” he shouted.

Gerda slowly raised her trunk and opened her soft pink mouth.
Tompkins shone his torch in and we both peered into the
narrow space between the teeth. Not a blister or an nicer in
sight. .

“I don’t think elephants can get F-and-M,” said Tompkins,

“Better check her feet, though, just in case.”

He walked cautiously round the elephant, looking at her neatly

filed and oiled toenails. Nothing that looked like ulcers there.
Tompkins was shining his light on the left rear foot when
Gerda felt the urge to pass water. Unwisely, the ministry vet
was not wearing the Government-issue black sou’wester that is
supposed to be part of the uniform for investigations into
notifiable disease. He took the cataract square on top of his
head It went down the inside of his coat and ran out below.

“I ’ave ’eard that yoorine is very good for the complexion,**

observed the policeman, as deadpan as if he were making an
arrest.

“I’m off,” spluttered Tompkins. “Negative F-and-M here. End

of the affair as far as the Ministry’s concerned. Get on with it,
Taylor.” Spitting, he squelched away,
“Now, Herr Hopfer,” I said, “tell me the full story.’*

“Zis morning I find her streaming from ze mouss like zis. She
vill not eat, not even drink. Maybe she hass a bad tooss.”

Toothache was indeed a possibility. One of the commonest

ailments in elephants is an infected or badly positioned molar. I
got Hopfer to make Gerda open her mouth again and shone
my torch carefully on each tooth with one hand while pressing
down the slippery ball of her tongue with the other. One slip
and I could lose a finger or three. All the teeth, seemed normal.
I felt Gerda’s glands, ran my hands down over the outside of
her throat, took her temperature and drew a blood sample.
Everything was OK. But Gerda was miserable and would not
eat or drink, and her saliva ran and ran. There was no evidence
that her throat was inflamed, her swallowing muscles were not
paralysed, there was no logical reason why she should be
producing excessive quantities of saliva. I was left with one
ominous probability.

“Bring me some bananas and a bucket of water,” I said to

Hopfer. I wanted to watch her reaction to food very carefully
for myself. Treating elephants was not much different from
treating cattle, I was finding, as long as you knew how to
handle them and how to love them.

When the elephant trainer returned, I presented Gerda with a

peeled banana. She took it with her trunk tip, popped it in her
mouth and swallowed readily. Then slowly, slowly, the pulped
banana came back and dripped in sticky blobs from the corners
of her lips. I put the bucket of water in front of her.
Immediately she sucked up a trunkful and squirted it into her
mouth. She swallowed. For a moment nothing happened and
then the water gushed back out onto the floor.

“What did you feed the elephants last thing yesterday, Herr
Hopfer?”

“Chopped carrots and apples.”

“Chopped?”

“Ja, chopped.”

I was certain now that one of the apples had evaded the
chopper’s cleaver and was jammed somewhere in the gullet.
And I could predict that it would be in one of three places:
where the gullet enters the chest, where it passes over the heart
or where it pierces the diaphragm. Wherever it was, Gerda was
in big trouble.

In cattle, similar jammed objects often pass naturally if the

animal is left alone for twenty-four hours. That was my first
feeble, line of attack. I booked in at a nearby hotel and made
sure that the hungry and thirsty elephant at least had plenty of
water to suck up. Maybe a trickle would get past the apple, I
thought optimistically as I added nourishing glucose to the
water. The next day, Gerda was much worse. She was sunken-
eyed, weak and obviously dehydrated. How to move the apple?
If I pushed it somehow, I could rupture the oesophagus.
Operating was out of the question; no machine could keep the
six-ton monster’s lungs inflated with oxygen when the chest
cavity was opened. Drugs designed to relax the muscles of the
gullet had no effect.

By the third day the poor elephant was so weak that she could
almost be pushed off balance by one man. Her eyes were red
and her breath was foul. The apple was still firmly lodged and
the river of saliva flowed on Gerda was now desperately thirsty.
Stripped down to my underpants, I started a series of hourly
enemas, trying to pump water and glucose as far as possible
into her lower bowel with a plastic tube and an old stirrup
pump borrowed from the Hippodrome’s fire-fighting
equipment. It was slow, dirty work.

“Ooh!” said the waitress in my hotel when she learnt that I was
working at the circus.

“What a super job. Lovely animals and able to have a holiday

by the seaside at the same time!”

She should have been there all night, pumping ten gallons of
sugary water up an elephant’s backside and getting nine gallons
sprayed back over her, I thought, as the waitress flounced off
for my pot of tea and kippered herrings. Still, it had been worth
it. A gallon had stayed up, a gallon that might just keep Gerda
going till something turned up.
On the fifth day I had to make a crucial decision. The elephant
was deteriorating rapidly. The only thing left was to push a
probe down her throat. This meant anaesthesia. By now Gerda
was unwilling to lie down for fear of being unable to rise. Left
much longer, she would not tolerate doping, for lack of sleep
had now been added to starvation and thirst and debility.

I walked along the shingly beach and thought long and hard. I
considered phoning Norman but, remembering the coolness
between us, decided against it. The seagulls chivvied me in the
cold, grey sky with incomprehensible advice. For a moment I
envied the fishermen sitting muffled on the end of the pier,
sucking contented pipes and off home soon to baked beans
and TV. Then I decided. I would dope Gerda lightly, pass a
probang, a long leather tube with a bulbous brass end, down
her gullet and take her life in my inexperienced hands.

Later that day I gave the elephant a massive dose of acetyl

promazine, a strong sedative rather than a true anaesthetic.
After half an hour she slowly sank to the ground and lay, still
drooling, on her side. Herr Hopfer pulled the upper jaw and
the diminutive Mr. Lemon, who like most midgets was
immensely strong for his size, tugged on the lower. Greasing
the probang with cod-liver oil, I pushed it carefully to the back
of Gerda’s throat. When a couple of feet of tube had
disappeared, I stopped and went to the end of the probang
outside the elephant and put it to my ear. I could feel no puff
of air as Gerda breathed, so at least I was not going the wrong
way, down the windpipe. I pushed the probang on slowly.
Suddenly it stopped; it would go no farther. I marked the tube
and withdrew it so that by measuring it over the outside of the
elephant’s body I could tell exactly how far down the
obstruction lay. The mark on the tube told me that the apple
was jammed at the point where the oesophagus passes the great
heart. I must push it on. I re-introduced the probang and
arrived once more at the obstruction. The moment had arrived.
The next strong shove could stop the heart. It could burst the
gullet and send the apple into the chest cavity. Or it could
succeed. I gritted my teeth and steadily increased pressure on
the probang. All at once it began to move freely once more.
Something had given. I was sweating and my lip was bleeding
where I had bitten it. Had the apple moved on or was it now
bobbing around on the lungs with a ragged, gaping hole in the
gullet beside it? Through my stethoscope I could hear no ugly
noises from the lungs. Hardly daring to breathe, I slowly
withdrew the probang. After what seemed an hour, its gleaming
brass end flopped out of Gerda’s mouth. It was coated in clear
slime and shreds of banana pulp but not one drop of blood. I
had done it!

Gerda was drowsy for many hours as the sedative wore off.
The waiting was intolerable. I went to the cinema but came out
after five minutes. I did not feel like eating or drinking. I ran
along the beach. I played the one-armed bandits on the pier.
Every half-hour I was back at the Hippodrome. At last, at nine
o’clock that night, Gerda regained enough energy to rise
groggily to her feet.
“Don’t do a thing, Herr Hopfer!” I shouted. “I’ll do this.” I
took a bucket of hay tea, an infusion of hot water and new
meadow hay, and placed it in front of Gerda. Her trunk flapped
weakly. I grabbed it and stuck it into the golden liquid. The
bucket half emptied. Gerda’s slow and unsteady trunk curled
towards her mouth and injected its contents.

I saw the gullet muscles contract. A wave passed down her

throat. She had swallowed. We waited, frozen like statues. The
hay tea did not come back. Gerda’s trunk was already back in
the bucket, draining it dry.

“A banana, a banana!” I shouted excitedly.

The German ran for a bunch of fruit and handed it to me. I

stuffed one straight into the elephant’s jaws without peeling it.
Squelch! It was gone. Nothing drooled back. The ropes of
saliva no longer hung from Gerda’s bottom lip. Her sunken red
eye was on the remainder of the bunch of bananas. A perfect
lady, and anyway still appallingly weak, she reached delicately
for them. We were on our way.

That night I stayed up with Gerda again, making sure that she
was not overloaded too suddenly with food or water, but
gradually building up her much-needed intake. By daybreak she
was visibly much stronger and the signs of dehydration were
disappearing fast. I went back to my hotel when Herr Hopfer
woke and relieved me.
“Ooh!” said the waitress as I slumped into my chair at the
breakfast table. “Been out on the town, eh? Naughty boy! Told
you you’d have a smashin’ time at Great Yarmouth. Must be all
play, your job.”

“Yes,” I said wearily. “Bring me an extra pair of kippers, will

you? I’m celebrating.”

On my return from Great Yarmouth Norman tackled me again

about my travels round the country in pursuit of exotic
patients. “Anyway,” he said, “can you really square your
conscience with being involved in zoo and circus animal work?
Aren’t you just part of the shady business of exploiting wild
creatures?”

It is a question people often ask me and from time to time, as I

lie in bed, I ask it myself, just to make sure that the answer I
give is still the same one, the one I believe in.

I believe in zoos, marinelands, safari parks. To come into close

contact with the creatures of the earth—to see, to smell and, if
you are lucky enough, to touch the beasts—is a vital part of
human experience. Just as cinema cannot catch the atmosphere
of the live stage, films of elephants or lions or buffaloes cannot
give that spark of magic which flesh-and- blood presence
provides. To be snuffled over by the damp tip of an elephant’s
trunk, to have one’s hair lifted by the curling rasp of a giraffe’s
tongue—out of such experiences spring real feeling and love
for fellow animals. There is nothing more rewarding than
escorting a group of blind people round a zoo. They truly
appreciate, in every sense of the word, camels, puma cubs,
snakes, ostriches and the rest of the species to which I feel it is
safe to introduce them.

It is pie in the sky to talk of us all going to see the wild animals
in their natural habitats. The habitats are shrinking fast, not
least because of tourism. The cruel impact of man on animals’
natural homes will inevitably lead to more and more birds,
mammals, fish and insects becoming extinct in the wild. Wilful
greed and careless pollution are taking a terrible toll, and zoos
and marinelands have a real part to play in helping at least some
creatures to avoid the fate of the dodo, the Steller’s sea cow
and the quagga. No, zoos are essential for all the kids in New
York, London, Rome and a thousand other cities who will
never in a million years get the chance to go on a jet-set safari
to the Serengeti.

As for me, my job is to represent the animals’ interests, to see

their point of view. There are disgraceful black spots, disgusting
examples of cruelty, neglect and naked exploitation, in animal
trapping, zoos, circuses and laboratories in all parts of the
world. But by working from the inside, by .encouraging
breeding here and improving diets there, by trying to heal the
sick animals, educating their ignorant owners and proving to
them that cruelty and neglect are counter-productive purely in
terms of cash, I know things are slowly but steadily getting
better. I am proud to be part of it.
When I explained how I felt to Norman, he grunted and said
that was all very well, but how was he expected to run a two-
man practice when one of the partners was never there ? I
wondered what he would say if he knew that I had just received
my first call abroad, to go over to Holland the following
weekend to inspect and then accompany six young African
elephants to England. Since it was Norman’s duty weekend
anyway, I thought it would be more prudent just to go, and to
tell him about it when I got back.

I made the tedious journey by truck and ferry. After the truck
had burnt its brakes out and hours had been wasted finding a
replacement, I eventually got my charges onto the Rotterdam-
Hull overnight boat. I sat alone during the crossing, guarding
the elephants and feeding them from time to time with hay,
bananas and apples. It was further invaluable experience in
animal handling and transportation.

One of my jobs was to keep curious passengers and crew from

interfering with the elephants. All went well until the middle of
the night when, tired out by the day’s exertions, I was unable to
keep my eyelids open any longer. Fighting against it, I finally
fell asleep propped up in a sitting position against one of the
elephant crates.

Three hours later I woke to find that some misguided animal

lover had fed my entire stock of apples and bananas to the
ever-willing beasts. So much fruit in so short a time could cause
six elephantine cases of colic before we docked, and I prepared
for the worst. Luckily colic did not develop, but the surfeit of
fruit certainly made, its presence felt. After half a day spent
ministering to a handful of elephants with acute diarrhoea, I
knew a little of what it must have been like to be a bell-carrying
leper in the Middle Ages, and when I got home Shelagh made
me strip down to my underclothes outside the back door.

A few weeks later I was back in Holland, to capture Mr. van

den Baars’s onagers, and soon after that I took a much longer
trip. Its purpose was not to treat any one case but to learn more
about one great group of wild mammals of which I still had no
experience. These creatures, taking their name from the Greek
word for sea monster, second in intelligence only to man
himself and descended from insignificant piglike foragers that
rooted around marshy land millions of years ago, were the
cetaceans: whales, dolphins and porpoises. In the mid-sixties
dolphins became the most fashionable and popular of zoo
animals in America. Then Flipper and his relatives came to
Europe, and I decided that it was time for me to start learning
something about the care and medicine of these beautiful but
mysterious beasts. I suspected that marinelands and dolphinaria
were going to mushroom in Britain andon the Continent, and
that dolphin doctoring was going to become an established
branch of the veterinary art.

Today we know more about the dolphin than about any other
animal except man and the dog, yet little more than a dozen
years ago virtually nothing was known and still less published
about cetacean disease. It was uniquely challenging, for this was
not a case of trying out horse techniques in zebras or cattle
medicine in buffaloes. Cetaceans do not abide by the rules.
They have reconquered the watery places of the earth by
adapting to a marine existence all the benefits of being a
mammal, and combining that with ingenuity in doing things
that mammals out at sea would not be expected to do. For that
they have to be different; different in body structure, function
and behaviour. The Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin is an air-
breathing, warm-blooded animal with three stomachs like a
cow’s, kidneys like a camel’s, a brain as big as a man’s, the
swimming skills of a shark and the sonar equipment of a bat. It
can dive deep and ascend fast without fear of decompression
illnesses, endure long periods without oxygen but ignore levels
of carbon dioxide that would black out other beasts, and drink
nothing but sea water, the brine which drives thirsty castaways
mad, and it has a bundle of other feats of mystery and
imagination at its command.

Only the handful of veterinarians working full time with marine

mammals in the United States had the knowledge I would need
if I was to treat cetaceans effectively. Leaving the long-suffering
Norman in sole charge of the practice once again, and digging
deep into my personal savings, I went first to Point Mugu in
California, where the U.S. Navy Undersea Warfare Division
had a small but high-powered veterinary team led by Dr. Sam
Ridgway. Among their research pools and complex of
laboratories set on the shore of the Pacific, I embarked on a
crash course of sea-going veterinary medicine. Apart from the
very different surroundings, it was rather like my first months
at Belle Vue under the thumb of Matt Kelly. I learned that
dolphins can contract influenza, mumps, polio and gastric
ulcers, that their anatomical and physiological adaptations make
them the safest creatures in the world to pass a stomach tube
on but the most tricky to anaesthetize, and that they require
each day three hundred times more Vitamin B, than a human
of the same weight. An apparently simple thing but most vital
of all, I was given my first opportunity to take blood samples
from the animals. The smooth, shining skin of a dolphin
betrays almost no evidence of where blood vessels might run.
You can fish the beast out of the water and apply tourniquets
to the flippers or the tail, but still the uncooperative veins and
arteries refuse to reveal themselves. They lie beneath a tight,
inflexible layer of blubber, each artery completely surrounded
by a cluster of veins. Find the areas where the blubber is
thinned and you find a cluster of blood vessels, the vets at
Point Mugu told me. Easier said than done. Slight skin
discoloration, a depression here and there, the glint of a shallow
groove if the moistened tail is held to reflect the light; by such
things I would be guided. Then a short needle could be placed
in a vessel and a sample of venous, arterial or frequently a
mixture of the two bloods taken.

My first essay in blood sampling was right on target. I struck

oil. “It doesn't matter much,” said Dr. Sam in his relaxed Texan
drawl, “if your needle takes blood from vein or artery or a bit
of both if you’re doin’ routine analysis and such, except of
course oxygen levels, but don’t forget the layout in these
critters if you ever want to do an intravenous injection. It’s easy
as hell to get some of the drug into an artery, it lyin’ so close to
the veins an’ all. So watch out, buddy.”

I saw the point. A drug inadvertently injected into an artery

instead of a vein will damage the delicate arterial lining,
stopping the circulation to tissues supplied by the artery beyond
the injection site and causing them to die. At least in land
mammals the tough-walled, pulsating arteries are usually easily
located and are rarely close to the veins in places where the
veterinarian roams in search of injection sites. Already these
mermen were leading me, as they were said to lead ancient
Greek seafarers, into a new life.
8

Dolphin Handling
From Point Mugu I visited other marine-mammal vets and all
the major marinelands in the United States before turning my
attention to the dolphin-catching side of the business. Just as a
zoo vet must understand the housing, handling and transport
of his charges if he is to deal competently with their health
problems, so it seemed to me best in this aquatic arena to try to
find a water-borne equivalent to head keeper Matt Kelly from
whom I could learn the nitty-gritty of the non-veterinary side of
dolphins. I found him one March day in Fort Myers, Florida.
He made his living catching dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, his
name was Gene Hamilton and with him I had some of the
most exciting days of my life.

Like Alice I decided to begin at the beginning and asked Gene

if he would take me out with him. A tall, lantern- jawed
individual with a taciturn but kindly nature, he agreed, provided
that I did exactly what I was told. His catching boat, with low
sides and a cutaway stern for pulling animals on deck, could
touch sixty miles an hour skimming over the shallow Florida
waters, and it could turn on a sixpence at almost full speed. It
was no place for novices who got in the way when the hunt
was on.

The first thing I learned about catching is that wind is one’s

prime enemy and patience the greatest virtue. Even a slight
breeze, which was welcomed by the yachtsmen and sweating
sunbathers of Fort Myers, was enough to put a chop on the
water that extended to the horizon. Under such conditions
every triangular wavelet could be a dolphin’s dorsal fin. The
ocean seemed filled with dolphins or, looking at it another way,
totally devoid of them, After an overnight storm, the water
would be opaque, full of stirred-up sand, and the spotter plane
which worked with us as our airborne pointer could not see the
groups of dolphins hunting fish shoals under water. So if there
was wind or had been wind, and that was most of the time, we
sat cutting fish on the rickety old jetty where Gene moored up
and put a fortune into the pockets of Mr. Schlitz, brewing beer
far away in Milwaukee,

When we did have a calm and glassy sea wTe would be off early,
sometimes before sun-up, to the shallows where the waking
dolphins might be collecting a breakfast of mullet, blue runner
or butterfish. As the sun climbs out of the grey water we hear
the crackle of our spotter plane’s radio. In the first good light
of the day he has located a group of twelve dolphins feeding
quietly ten miles to our north. The pilot, experienced at
estimating size and age from a height of several hundred feet,
tells us how many animals of the right length, not too young
and not too old, not pregnant and not suckling babies, are there
for the taking—if we have luck.

We make for the area while Gene’s two assistants, bronzed

teenagers in frayed jeans shorts, check the catching gear. This is
a mile of lightweight, fourteen-foot-deep net which has been
carefully folded into zigzag layers and sleeved onto a long
bamboo pole which projects over the stern. The top edge of
the net is attached to a series of floats and the end nearest the
water carries a small sea anchor. The sea anchor is watched
carefully. If it were to fall into the ocean before the appointed
moment, one mile of net would be unfolded in seconds and it
would take an hour or more to retrieve it, sort it out and
reposition it along the bamboo pole. While we sail for the
catching zone I stand at the wheel talking to Gene, taking
lungfuls of cold, morning sea air and munching my share of a
bizarre but delicious breakfast of fresh clams, fried frogs’ legs
and doughnuts, washed down even at that hour with cans of
foaming Schlitz.

Before long we hear the buzz of the spotter aircraft somewhere

overhead, and the pilot tells us the latest position of our quarry.
Cutting the engine speed down to avoid alarming the feeding
dolphins, Gene takes the boat towards the school of animals
while the spotter keeps up a continual commentary. Suddenly I
catch the first thrilling glimpse of a low, dark-grey dorsal fin
breaking the water surface for a second as its owner takes in a
gulp of air. Then we see another and another. Gene at this
point relies almost completely on the aircraft. The pilot, seeing
the dolphins’ reaction to our approach, for their sensitive ears
would have picked up our engine noise miles away, gives
instructions that put us in a favourable position for our sweep.
To us at almost water level the directions do not seem to make
sense, but the pilot is looking down on the chessboard from on
high and has a perfect view of all the players in the game. With
luck, the dolphins will assume we are just another of the many
pleasure boats in Florida’s teeming waters. Nevertheless, some
of the cowboys who sail such craft are known to indulge in the
“sport” of using dolphins for rifle practice. It has made many
old bulls wary of any sort of vessel, and the bullet scars that
some of them bear are the reason why.

Today all goes according to plan for once, and the spotter plane
tells us we are in an ideal position, with the dolphins quietly
browsing a hundred yards to our right at two o’clock. He then
leaves the scene, and the hunt from now on is conducted solely
by Gene. His first action is to tell me, “Sit squarely down on
the deck, grab hold of something firm and hold on!” Then he
opens the throttle to the full, and the boat leaps forward with a
deafening roar and with a punch that leaves the thrill of a ride
on Belle Vue’s roller coaster in the novice class.

Over the sparkling skin of the water we charge, the boat

heeling over as Gene cuts a trench of frenzied foam that arcs
across the path of the leading dolphin. The g-forces play
musical chairs with my innards and I cling on for dear life,
certain that at any moment I will be catapulted through the air
like a human cannonball to join the dolphins. The boat stays
flat out and the arc continues into a full circle. Gene takes us
completely round the school of dolphins and keeps the wheel
locked over for a second circuit. Peeping tensely over the
gunwales, I can see the animals bobbing and blowing puffs of
rainbow-shot vapour in the centre of a broad ring of white
water. Gene’s aim is to confuse the dolphins by encircling them
with a continuous wall of sound from the powerful engines.
We have encountered one or two wiser, pluckier leaders of
schools (not always bulls, sometimes redoubtable matriarchs)
who have made a high-speed beeline run for it, leading their
weaker brethren straight through the noise wall and away safely
into quiet water, but today the animals are hesitating and
milling in the water, uncertain of the best plan of action. Gene
observes their indecisive movements, tightens his circular run
still further and then roars to his boys, “Shoot!”

At his command one of the boys throws the sea anchor

overboard. Gene continues to carve out yet another circle, and
all the while the mile of net is being dragged off the bamboo
pole like an express train. Round we go, leaving the net floats
bobbing in a great curve in our wake until, having completed
the full 360 degrees, we come back again to the sea anchor and
first float. Gene kills the engines and peers anxiously towards
the now fully cast ring of netting, one mile in circumference.
There has been no last-minute dash by his quarry, he has not
misjudged the water depth, and the nets are deep enough to
stop escapers diving underneath; in the centre of the circle a
cluster of dark-grey dorsal fins swirl about.

At this stage in the proceedings I was able to stand up again

and start to be useful. The first thing was to scan the line of net
floats. Evenly spaced, they should all be visible on the water
surface. If one or two were submerged it might well mean that
the net at that point was being dragged down by some heavy
object—like a dolphin enmeshed several feet below and in
imminent danger of drowning. “In y’go, Dr. Taylor,” Gene
would say if we saw such warning signs, and with goggles and a
short snorkel tube I would drop over the side into the cool,
dark water and make for the spot where the floats had
disappeared. Once there I would make an awkward duck dive
and pull myself down to where a grey shape might be struggling
to free itself from the net. As I glided down I would sometimes
hear through the water the alarmed, high-pitched
communication squeak of the trapped dolphin. If the animal
was not too severely entangled I might free it by hand;
otherwise Gene’s treasured net had to be cut with a diver’s
knife.

Trapped dolphins were not the only cause of the net floats
sinking. My first experience of other accidental catches came
one sunny afternoon off Key Largo when Gene dropped his
nets in a perfect “set” round six or seven immature adult
dolphins. The line of floats dipped at two points and, while one
of Gene’s boys dived to investigate one, I went down to look at
the other. Kicking myself under, I followed the net down to
where the expected grey form thrashed furiously twelve feet
under the surface. Through the fuzzy shadows I could tell that
the beast was caught by its head in a hole in the net. It should
not be too difficult to pull it back by hand and release it so that
it could surface for a welcome gulp of air. Coming closer, I saw
to my horror that I was within inches of a seven-foot shark that
was lashing its tail to and fro and gnashing its rows of razor-like
teeth. I identified it as a black-tipped shark, a species strongly
suspected of a Hacking humans. Should I release it? What
would Gene do? Would it attack me if I freed it? Looking at it
held in the net by its pectoral fins, I decided to risk a few cuts
with my knife before going up again for air. Surely it would be
too relieved at its near squeak to try tangling with me. I reached
for the knife in my belt and then I saw the second black-tipped
shark. Bigger than its companion, it was weaving figures of
eight two yards to my left and below me. That made my mind
up. In a flurry of bubbles I kicked for the surface and pulled
myself thankfully up onto the boat.

“Don’t ever fool around with those guys,” Gene said when I
had told him my story. “If he ain’t dead when we pull the nets
in, I’ll kill him. Hate those guys. Sometimes get a hammerhead
or two in with the dolphins messin1 up the nets. Ain’t no good
for anythin’ ’cept bait.”

“What are blacktips like around here?" I asked.

“Cain’t trust ’em,” he replied. “Know a dolphin catcher up near

Steinhatchee lost a couple o’ pounds o’ thigh muscle from a
blacktip. The doctors who stitched him up knew it was a
blacktip by the pattern o’ the tooth marks.”

That was not the last time I went down to entangled sharks, but
whenever I found one I came up fast and left it for Gene to
deal with later. I often watched one or another of Gene’s boys
make similar hurried exits from the water while he laughed and
shouted, “Sharks down there? Well, get on your Jesus shoes
and walk on the water, fella!”

After clearing the nets of trapped animals, Gene would

supervise the slow and meticulous pulling in. The area of the
circle was decreased gradually to stop the dolphins panicking
and entangling themselves en masse. Little by little the group of
captured animals was brought closer to the boat until finally,
with one or two men in the water to help, they could be hauled
up onto the stern decking. Unsuitable animals were released
while those that were to be kept were placed on foam
mattresses amidships. There, while the other men pulled in all
the net, I had my first experience in handling one hundred per
cent wild, dripping wet, fresh dolphins. The older animals
usually lay resignedly, chirping plaintively to one another but
not objecting to my touching their bodies. I got, and still get, a
sheer physical thrill from contact with the flesh of animals that
a few minutes before had been masters of a virtually limitless
three dimensional world where man is a feeble, groping
amateur.
When the net was finally aboard and Gene started the engines
ready for a fast cruise back to the holding pens at Fort Myers,
another unwanted kind of captive often caused us problems
and pain as we tended the dolphins. These were stingrays. This
flat relative of the shark, which flies through the water like
some marine bat and carries a poisonous flick knife at the base
of its whip-like tail, abounds in Florida waters. Very often a
number of these fish, even a hundred or more and some
weighing up to twelve pounds, would be pulled in along with
the dolphin haul. We would throw them back into the sea after
picking them out of the net, but some of the slippery, plate-like
creatures would fall onto the deck and flip about, unsheathing
their poisonous spines and making it perilous underfoot.
Occasionally we were inundated with the stingrays, and dead
ones would lie all over the boat as we made for home, but even
up to many days after its death the poison spines of the fish
remain highly active. Once we had the net in, I put on rubber
boots to cut the risk of being stung, but the spine of a big ray
could easily go through the rubber covering my leg and would
go through jeans with no trouble. Gene did not make it any
easier for himself by working at all times barefooted, relying on
his nimbleness and quick reactions to keep out of the way of
the spines that would click up into the armed, offensive
position in the twinkling of an eye if a ray was touched or even
if it just felt ornery.

It was Gene who gave me one of my most important lessons

about the extraordinary ways of the dolphin. It was a bitter but
salutary experience; at the end of it a dolphin was dead and I
had killed it.

We had caught a young dolphin which was on the point of

weaning. It had been captured along with its mother,. and both
were destined for a famous marineland in California. The
youngster struggled and fought when brought aboard and,
most significantly, stopped breathing.
“Right now,” commanded Gene, “listen good. Young critters
like this one will commit suicide by holdin’ their breath if you
don’t watch carefully. Once they’re out of the water you gotta
time their breathin’. If they go for a maximum, a maximum of
two minutes without breathin’, we put ’em over the side in a
turn or two of net as a sling and Jet ’em be in the water again.
Then they breathe.”

“And what then?” I asked.

“Then we pull ’em on board again after a short while and try
’em some more. If they do it again, we dunk ’em again and so
on. Usually by the time we get back to Fort Myers and put ’em
in the holdin’ pens they’re OK.” Gene wagged a leathery, sun-
blackened finger at me. “Now your job, Dr. Taylor, while I get
us home lickety-split, is to do nuthin’ but watch that little feller
and your wrist watch. If he goes more’n two minutes, give a
holler and we’ll stop and dunk him.”

We set off and I sat close to the agitated baby, timing its
respiration and pouring sea water over it from time to time to
keep the skin from cracking and the body temperature from
rising too high. Two minutes went by without the little
blowhole opening to suck and blow.

“Whoa!” I yelled, and Gene slowed the engines and came back
to help me sling the dolphin and immerse it in the sea. Hanging
over the side I watched the youngster breathe normally once it
felt the ocean around it. Gene told me that he never had this
trouble with bigger specimens.

After two or three minutes we pulled junior back aboard and

continued on our way. He took one good breath when he was
settled on his pad again, and I noted the time. Two minutes
passed with no further breathing. I stopped the boat a second
time and we repeated the ducking. Once more the young
animal went back to a normal respiration rate of four per
minute. Back in the boat again he took a breath and Gene
returned to the wheel.

I stared at my watch, following the movement of the second

hand, and reflected silently as I squatted by my charge. The
breeze streamed through my hair and the sun scorched my
naked back. Suicide, Gene had said. Could any animal commit
suicide? The mystery of the mass self-drowning of lemmings
was a different matter. Could an individual animal just stop
breathing and die? Some canonized Catholic virgin was
supposed to have taken her life in this way, but normally in
mammals the brain simply forces its owner to breathe when the
body senses a deficiency of oxygen and an increase of carbon
dioxide in the blood. Will power, design, psychological state do
not come into it, and shock is a separate thing that produces
collapse of the circulation and unconsciousness before death.
This little dolphin, though obviously agitated, was conscious
and alert and, as far as I could tell from its colour and pulse, its
circulation was good.
The seconds ticked by. One minute fifty. I sat on. I knew
dolphins’ brains ignored high levels of carbon dioxide in the
blood when they were diving, but they needed oxygen,
demanded it, in the end. That is why eventually they have to
surface for air. That is why they drown if trapped in nets. So
some involuntary mechanism must make this dolphin breathe
and soon.

One minute fifty-nine. I wondered why Gene had said “Two

minutes.’* Surely this was just a good estimate—no, more likely
it was a dolphin catcher’s unscientific bit of mythology. I
watched the second hand pass the two-minute mark and
decided to let it carry on without calling Gene yet again. As the
watch ticked out the third minute, I knew that orthodox,
reliable physiology would prove Gene wrong. It was the
unbreakable rules of oxygen deficiency versus the crude rule of
thumb of the dolphin catcher.

Four minutes. Still no breath taken by the dolphin. I began to

sweat slightly and bite the tip of my tongue. Gene was busy
navigating through the shoals. He probably did not know
whether two minutes or twelve had gone by. Four and a half
minutes. I felt my heart pounding but still trusted the laws of
physiology which are common to all mammals from tiny vole
to giant elephant. An arrogant voice still whispered. “Oxygen
demand must prevail.” Four minutes forty-five. The baby
dolphin became as still as a plastic model and the pulse faded.
My idiot resolve broke and I yelled to Gene, “He’s stopped
breathing!” The boat came to a stop agairi and Gene came back
to help me lower the dolphin into the water, but it was obvious
that this poor creature would never breathe again. It was limp.
The eyes were glazing. I had murdered it.

In deep misery I told Gene what I had done. He grimaced but

said nothing. Then, as he knelt by the gunwale to release the
corpse from the net and let it fall away into the gloomy depths
where the sharks patrolled, his knee touched a stingray that had
been dead for some time. The erect spine pierced his leg and
the barbed point delivered its poison into the vein. White and
sweating with pain, he had to endure the worse agony of me
withdrawing the spine against the direction of the barbs. Using
one of the rubber tubes of my stethoscope as a tourniquet, I
bandaged the wound, but within minutes the pain worsened
and Gene became very ill. The tough dolphin man stood the
wracking agony without uttering one sound, and I made him
comfortable on a foam pad while one of his boys took us the
rest of the way in. Gene was in bed for nearly a week after that.
Dolphin catching was off and all I had to do was to sit on the
old jetty, throwing bits of stick into the water and staring
miserably out over the dark green expanses of the holding
pools, where a big female dolphin dipped and rose without her
young son by her sleek side.

When the newly caught dolphins destined for Europe were

fully acclimatized and feeding well in the holding pools, they
were judged fit to make the long journey over the Atlantic. I
had much to learn about this important aspect of dolphin
management, too, and the best way to learn was to go with the
animals from start to finish, from the sunny coast of Florida to
New York and then on to London, Scarborough, Cleethorpes,
Nice, Hamburg, Antwerp or Stockholm. Everyone thinks that
accompanying dolphins by air from Florida to Europe must be
an ideal way of earning one’s living. It is not. It is hard, boring,
wet, smelly work and it can last for two or three days, particu-
larly if, as happened this time, the first leg of the journey from
Miami International to JFK New York is delayed and a missed
connection means a twenty-four-hour lie-over in the Big Apple.
You cannot take a pair of dolphins along to the nearest Holiday
Inn and stick them in your bathroom. If they stay in a cold and
windy warehouse in mid-January, you stay too—night and day.

First comes the road journey to Miami with the animals

smothered in vaseline or lanolin which gets on your clothes and
makes everything tacky. At the airport are the loading and
paperwork formalities. I was to find that experienced dolphin
handlers avoid excess weight charges by emptying all the water
from the crates and removing the re-circulating spray pumps
and their twelve-volt batteries just before checking in at the
freight warehouse. The animal and crate are then weighed and
the weight entered on the papers. Now everything can be
loaded. On the way to the aircraft, the handler nips quickly
round the corner, turns on a tap, runs tens of gallons of water
into the crate and replaces the spray equipment and batteries.
The dolphins then go onto the plane with the whole load
weighing several hundred pounds more than the amount
accounted for on the waybill. The alternative, I was told, is to
carry water at a cost of five dollars a gallon for the trip.
Another source of free water is the washroom on board the
cargo planes. The trouble is that if this is overdone the crew of
the aircraft complain later that they found no water on board
for their needs during the flight and there might be inquiries
made.

Batteries for the pumps have a nasty habit of failing at some

crucial point along the way. If you are prepared to go
completely without sleep in the uncomfortable cargo hold, the
constant squirting of water through a large rose spray helps to
solve this difficulty. The equally tiresome alternative is to try to
buy eight twelve-volt car batteries in the middle of the night
somewhere near Kennedy Airport. At that time of day, if you
can find a handy garage that is open, the disbelieving guy on
duty is likely to demand a fistful of dollars and to regard an
American Express card with the enthusiasm he reserves for
four-dollar bills.

The endless flight to Europe in what resembles the inside of a

giant cigar tube has none of the amusements enjoyed by
travellers on passenger flights. Damp and grease go through to
your skin. There is the perpetual chore of un-. clogging the
holes in the spray system which become choked with circulated
dolphin droppings, and on bumpy flights the shifting positions
of the dolphins in their crates means constant vigilance and a
handy supply of cotton-wool pads in case of wounds, eye
damage or bedsores. Meanwhile the crew sit forward in their
snug cockpit and once in a while pass back a liverwurst
sandwich or a beaker of Seven Up as you shiver in your duffle
coat and try to find a comfortable squatting position for a
minute or two on the treacherous ball-bearings which stud the
floor of the cargo hold.

Probably the worst part of the whole journey will be the arrival
at London Heathrow. It is not uncommon for a dolphin to wait
in the bonded warehouse there for a couple of hours while the
customs men take their time about sorting through the mass of
paperwork. Rarely will they agree to let the long-suffering beast
get on its way while you stay behind to sign all the necessary
documents and answer any questions. It is not as if they ever
inspect the animals thoroughly for diamonds or contraband
hooch, even though it would be quite possible to slip small
packages into a dolphin’s stomach and the animal would
tolerate them for months. No, however much suffering it
causes the animals, the customs men work by the book and the
dolphins must do likewise.

My first experience of the Heathrow customs was when I went

there to receive a giant Pacific octopus from Seattle that
arrived, all fifty angry red pounds of him, neatly packed in
water, ice and oxygen. This finest of all octopuses is extremely
difficult to transport because it tends to pollute the water in
which it travels and eventually poisons itself with nitrates
produced by its own excrement. Anxious to resuscitate my
giant octopus and to give it the chauffeur- driven limousine
treatment at express speed all the way to the Yorkshire zoo that
had bought it, I had gone out of my way to co-operate with
customs.
“There’s nothing in my book of duty rates concerning giant
octopus,” said the official sternly as the minutes ticked by, “but
I can’t let it go without classifying it. I’ve got to fill in the right
tariff.”

“It’s a mollusc,” I insisted, “like oysters, snails and so on.”

The official glowered at the massive, scarlet, tentacled creature

in its plastic bag and insulated box. “You mean it’s edible?” he
queried.

“Well, no, but to make it easier you can classify it as an oyster if

you like.”

“Oysters are on my list, but he doesn’t look anything like an

oyster, or a snail.”

“Don’t you eat little squid, calamares, in Spain or Italy ever?” I

asked. The octopus was getting madder and redder and passing
more droppings. I had to get it out of there and away with new
water and oxygen.

“Nope,” said the customs man, “don’t like nasty foreign food.
Squid? Yuk!”

“Please, please,” I said, “take my word for it. It’s the same
family as oysters. Look that lot up in your tariff book and
charge me at the same rate.”
At last commonsense prevailed. My octopus was entered on the
import documents as “One unusually large shell-less whelk”.
The customs man had had the last word, and what did it matter
to me if he considered this scarlet kraken a variety of the
humble whelk which is so good with vinegar, salt and pepper?
At least I had got away.

As a direct result of this experience, when I returned with the

Florida dolphins I did my first and only bit of animal
smuggling. I was bringing back an unusual present for. Belle
Vue’s aquarium in the shape of a bunch of horseshoe crabs,
primitive, helmet-shaped creatures that abound in the canals
and round the shores of Florida. I put a dozen adults, each ten
inches across, in the water beneath a dolphin slung in its crate.
Coming to count the single "fish”, the customs officer noticed
the spiky, rod-like tails of the large crabs projecting above the
water surface as the creatures shuffled about below.

“Whassat?" asked the official.

“Horseshoe crabs,” I replied.

“Crabs? What for?”

Oh dear, I thought, not again. I bet my bottom dollar that this

unique descendant of the trilobites, a group whose other
representatives became extinct two hundred million years ago,
would not be in the tariff book.
“Er, the crabs are for the dolphins. Animal food for en route,”
I lied.

“Oh, fine. Of course,” said the customs man. “I suppose

they’ve got to have a nibble on the way like us.” The crabs and
I had won through.

Arrived at their destination, the dolphins were lowered into a

shallow pool, their first feel of salt water in days. Even then, my
work was not done. Stiff and sore from the journey, the
animals had difficulty balancing themselves in the water. This
went on for a further eight hours, but until they were able to
swim freely and safely, I had to go in with them. Though dog
tired, I would walk them round and round their pool, guiding
them by holding onto their dorsal fins. No, dolphin
transporting is not much fun.

One of the dolphins I brought back from the Gulf of Mexico

was destined for the London Dolphinarium on Oxford Street, a
place where dolphins, sea lions, penguins and beautiful girls put
on non-stop shows in a converted theatre. There were
marvellous sound and lighting effects, and professional actors
presented the shows. Behind the scenes, beneath Soho Square,
there were holding pools and facilities where I crammed in
among leggy chorus girls and kept the dolphin stars up to
scratch under intensely artificial conditions. It was a good
training ground for me in working against the odds in show
business, preparing for the days when I would go to Paris to
examine dolphins in the glass pool at the famous Moulin
Rouge, the only dolphinarium where the management has ever
informed me that “When ‘e ’as finished, ze veterinarian can
take a shower weez ze girls eef ’e wishes, like ze French vet
used to do.”

Unfortunately, although brilliantly conceived, the London

Dolphinarium was built in the shopping area of the West End
where passers-by were more likely to seek coffee shops than
wander into Flipper shows in their breaks between bouts of
buying and window gazing. The Dolphinarium was eventually
forced to close, but before it did I had driven down from the
north at least once a week to sort out one problem or another
with the animal and occasionally with the human performers.
When the dolphins started roughing up some of the girl
“aquamaids” swimming with them in the water, I was called in
to help. The girls were getting bruised and alarmed by the
dolphins’ boisterous attentions, the shows suffered and some
of the ladies talked of resigning. I found that the animals were
detecting minute quantities of pheromones, sex chemicals, in
the water during the days that the girls had their monthly
periods. The attacks turned out in fact to be vigorous amorous
advances, triggered off by the chemicals. Once the dolphin
rouѐs had been given shots of a drug normally used to turn the
minds of human sex criminals to higher things, peace and good
shows returned to the Dolphinarium.

One day, Clyde, the dolphin at the London Dolphinarium

whom I had accompanied across the Atlantic, fell severely ill
with liver inflammation. I struggled with the case, sleeping for a
couple of nights beside the pool on a makeshift bed of an
upturned rubber dinghy, and gradually Clyde began to pull
round. He would need a massive dose of vitamin B complex by
intravenous injection, so he was taken from the water and laid
carefully on a thick mat of plastic foam. With two men holding
the dolphin firmly, I slowly pressed a new, fine needle into the
tail. A dark gout of blood welled up. Vein. I improved the flow
by edging down a fraction more and stared intently at the
blood. It was blackish, surely all of it de-oxygenated blood from
a vein. Then I noticed the finest hair-thin wisp of pillar-box
red. I recalled Dr. Sam’s “Watch out, buddy” at Point Mugu.
Probably the needle was drawing from veins and from the
central artery. I pulled the needle back a whisker. Now all
seemed blackish blood again. I must be in a vein and a vein
alone. Trying not to alter the needle’s position, I carefully
connected the loaded syringe, sucked back to check all was well
and then gently depressed the plunger. The vitamin B went into
Clyde’s circulation, he was returned to the pool apparently
unperturbed and continued to make a fine recovery over the
next forty-eight hours. We were all delighted.

Then, three days after the intravenous shot, I received a

worrying phone call. A strange mark had appeared on Clyde’s
tail, a pale streak that was long and showed smaller branches,
rather like a fern. Clyde was showing signs of pain and irritation
in the area, an area as important to the motive power of the
dolphin as a propeller is to an ocean liner. I went to look. Sure
enough, the fern-like mark was distinct but only on one half of
the tail, the half where I had given my shot, and it began at
exactly the point where I had introduced my needle. For the
first time in my life I had given at least part of an injection by
mistake into an artery. Glumly I knew that the vitamin B3, an
irritant chemical, had gone whipping along the artery and into
its tributaries. Thrombosis had occurred, the tissues supplied by
the artery beyond my injection had died and I could expect
them to drop off. It was a classic case of iatrogenic gangrene
or, in honest layman’s terminology, a real screw-up by the vet.
There was little I could do. Dead tissue is dead tissue. I could
encourage it to slough off, prevent secondary infection and
wait. The nub of the question was how much tissue did that
artery supply and so how much had died? If half the tail
dropped off eventually, how would Clyde swim? I lay awake
during those nightmare hours between two o’clock and five
o’clock in the morning when only ill humours are abroad and
sweated as I imagined the prospects.

As the days passed the pale, fern-like area became an ugly

yellow colour, expanded and began to soften. At last after a
week it was clear that I could see all the dead area; it had
stopped expanding and the rotting tissue was beginning to peel
away. A broad band ran down the centre of one tail fluke, but
to my relief it seemed very unlikely that half the tail was going
to fall off since the rest of the fluke looked healthy and was
apparently well furnished with blood. What had seemed to be
the main vessel supplying the tail fluke must have been backed
up by other, smaller arteries which were not its tributaries and
had been undamaged. Dolphins were obviously designed
marvellously in yet another respect, to keep erring veterinarians
from screwing up their engines.

After many anxious days, Clyde’s tail eventually cast off all the
dead tissue, leaving a deep wide trench which had gone right
down to the fibrous core of the fluke. Still, the tail worked.
Clyde jumped, somersaulted and spun. My job was to get this
gaping hole filled as quickly as possible. Twice a day I arranged
for it to be coated with a healing cream and then thickly
plastered with Grandmother’s water-resistant denture fixative.
After a month Clyde had completely healed and I could sleep
dreamlessly again, but a long, fronded snow-white scar remains
to this day to remind me whenever I see him that “mainlining”
a dolphin is one of the most hazardous of procedures.
9

The Burning Bear and Other Crises

After the exciting days at Point Mugu and on Gene’s boat off
the coast of Florida, I began to consider seriously what had
always been just a dream: setting up a practice to treat nothing
but exotic species. It would be some time yet, though, before
my zoo experience and contacts would be wide enough to take
such a big step into the unknown, and until then it was back to
cows and sheep on moorland farms and cats and dogs in the
Rochdale surgery. For exotic animal work I would continue to
rely mainly on surgery cases and on Belle Vue Zoo.

It was from there that Ray Legge telephoned me one autumn

evening. “I’ve got a bear on fire! Get here sharp as you can!” I
hardly had time to pick up the phone and put the receiver to
my ear before Ray’s unusually strident voice rapped out the
message. Before I could ask any details, there was a click. He
had rung off.

When Ray’s abrupt call came in I was just putting the final
touches to my favourite dish of hare, Lievre a la Royale, an
exquisite casserole containing cream, cognac and pine kernels.
From the dressing of the shot wild hare after it had hung a
week, something Shelagh insisted I do alone in the farthest
corner of the garden, through the marinading in wine and herbs
and the blending of the chopped liver and heart with the
brandy, a relaxing and enjoyable culinary exercise with which I
insisted Shelagh should not interfere, the whole process took
twenty-four hours. Now at last, with its accompanying wafers
of glazed carrots and rosemary- sprinkled potatoes, it was
almost ready for the table. But the burning bear banished all
thoughts of dinner.

“Don’t worry, love,” said Shelagh, as I whipped off my blue-

and-white-striped cooking apron and picked up my emergency
bag, “it’ll warm up tomorrow.” She pushed a couple of apples
into my duffle coat pocket.

As I wound my way laboriously through the evening traffic

towards the zoo I puzzled over Ray’s call. He had sounded
worried all right, but more than that I had the impression that
he was mightily angry. I had never seen Ray, the epitome of the
well-mannered English gentleman, blazing with rage the way he
had sounded on the phone. A burning bear? It sounded like
vandals. We have more than our fair share of those in a city
zoo. Yes, vandals must have done something particularly
obnoxious to raise his wrath. A burning bear sounded just that.

When I arrived in the zoo grounds my headlights illuminated a

cluster of men standing near the bear pit. One of the group was
in a state of great agitation, almost literally jumping up and
down and stamping round in small circles. It was Ray Legge.
The other figures I recognized as members of the Board of
Directors. I stopped the car and walked over to join them.
“And if it happens once more, just once more, I’ll walk out of
this place and, by God, I’ll . . Ray was white with anger. The
Board members were listening silently; some looked crestfallen,
others embarrassed. “Just look at that animal, will you?” Ray
was in full spate. “You can’t have it both ways, you won’t have
it both ways! It’s my animals or your Battle of Waterloo. Your
damned Battle of Waterloo will have to go!”

In the bear pit a brown bear sat on a rock licking at a frizzled

black patch as big as a saucer on its side. On the ground nearby
lay a large burnt-out rocket, a firework with a stick at least four
feet long. From its charred casing a plume of grey smoke curled
lazily upwards. I understood. Damned Battle of Waterloo!
Every autumn Belle Vue presented for two or three weeks a
lavish evening firework display. Combined with son et lumiere
and several dozen men in period costume, historic battles
would be re-enacted in a deafening, dazzling pyrotechnic
spectacular. Last year it had been General Wolfe storming the
heights of Quebec. This year it was Waterloo. The problem was
that the hour-long barrage of star shells, firecrackers and smoke
bombs was all staged in an arena backing directly onto the bear
pits where the collection of Himalayan, brown, sun, polar and
sloth bears ate, slept, went about their quiet daily business and,
most importantly, mated. They were literally only inches away
from the crackling rockets and roaring Catherine wheels.

Both Ray and I had been complaining bitterly about the effects
on the animals of being compulsorily in the orchestra pit during
every performance of the ear-splitting extravaganza. We were
particularly concerned for the polar bears and their efforts to
produce young: we were certain that each year our lovely adult
female conceived and, if things had progressed as nature
intended, she would have delivered one or maybe two little
cubs in November or December. It never happened. On came
the fireworks at the end of September, and within a few days
the keeper cleaning out the dens would find a smear of blood
or perhaps remains which proved conclusively that the bear
had once again miscarried and devoured the half-grown
embryo. It was heartbreaking, but now this!

Ray broke off his tirade and came over to me. “That bear felt
like sleeping outside on the rocks tonight. The keeper couldn’t
get him into the sleeping quarters,” If a bear feels like napping
al fresco on a mild night, there is no easy way of changing his
mind. “Then that bloody pantomime started up, a rocket went
off course and landed in the pits.” He was quivering with fury.
“Do you know, when the keeper called me the bear was
actually alight! Fur in flames!” He spat out the words with slow,
precise venom. “I’ve told them. That’s the last straw. The
fireworks must go because we can’t move the bears.”

I darted the bear with a tranquillizing syringe and climbed

down a ladder into the pit. The burnt area of the skin had been
largely insulated by the dense, sizzling hair but it was still a
serious and painful injury. I plastered it liberally with a paste
containing local anaesthetic, antibiotic and cortisone. It would
heal all right. Climbing back out of the pit, I found Ray still
expostulating and gesticulating with the directors.
To our amazement, his war dance did produce all that we could
have hoped for. The stray rocket turned out in the end to be a
twenty-four-carat blessing in disguise, for it was decided that
the annual fireworks displays at Belle Vue should end. Ray and
I were delighted.. Now maybe we would get our first baby
polar bear.

The key to successful breeding of this species in captivity

appears to be ultra-quiet privacy for the female. We decided
that from October onwards next year, Crystal, Belle Vue’s
female polar bear, would be placed in strict isolation in a
secluded, dark den, with food placed silently from time to time
in an adjoining compartment which she could reach through a
small door. No mucking out, no regular inspections by
flashlight—just leave her alone. Then, if all went well, we might
hear the soft squeaks of the hidden cubs some time before
Christmas and get our first glimpse of them in the following
January when she decided to show them to us.

The next breeding season came round, and true to form the
female polar bear conceived. We went ahead with our plan and
treated her like a hermit. Just after Christmas the keeper heard
faint mewing noises in her den. They continued for a day and
then ceased. Some days later the bear moved into the feeding
compartment and insisted on staying there, clawing at the door
that led to the outside pits. We let her out and searched her
den. Inside was the shrivelled body of a full-term cub, but
without a drop of mother’s milk in its tummy.
The following year the same thing happened, but this time she
half ate the baby. Ray and I were despondent. “Well,” I said,
“next season we’ll hand-rear the cub right from birth.”

“How do you reckon to get the cub away before she eats it or
at least does it some harm?”

“As soon as the keeper hears any squeaking or gets any hint at
all that she’s given birth, you (I’m bound to be at least half an
hour away, maybe more, and that could be too long) you will
knock her out with phencyclidine and grab the cub. Beginning
in mid-October we’ll have a dart already loaded with the right
dose of phencyclidine standing permanently in ajar outside her
den. And we’ll start the little ’uns off on Carnation milk.”

Ray nodded. Ail we had to do now was to wait an interminable

ten or eleven months to see if our plan would work.

Ironically, in view of my hard-won connection with the zoo

and the amount of time I spent there, Belle Vue could not help
very much with my increasing interest in learning about marine
mammals. The only ones in the zoo were three big old
Californian sea lions that lived in the wooden Victorian
pavilion, jealously guarded by their trainer, an elderly German
lady called Mrs. Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt had a lifetime’s
experience in working with sea lions. She worried and doted
and fussed over the honking, snorting, four-hundred-pound
monsters, rarely taking a day off and meticulously selecting and
preparing all their food herself.
No one, but no one, be he head keeper or zoo director, and
certainly not that meddlesome harbinger of death, the
veterinarian, got within spitting distance of her beloved Adolf,
Heinz and Dieter. Mrs. Schmidt took no chances; she even
took her baths in the sea-lion house, sitting in an old tub and
bellowing shrill Teutonic oaths if anyone made to approach the
door. It was tacitly accepted by everyone that the sea-lion
house was Mrs. Schmidt’s private preserve. Left alone in her
sanctum sanctorum she caused nobody any trouble and asked
for nothing but the regular delivery of fish. Even Matt Kelly
was a little in awe of her.

There was no salt water in the sea-lion pool, no filtration or

chlorination equipment. The sweet water was changed when it
became foul. The fish for the animals was fresh from the
Lancashire docks and thus did not undergo the deep freezing
that would kill any parasites it contained. As a result of all this,
Adolf, Heinz and Dieter were constantly taking in worm eggs
by mouth and from time to time would excrete the long,
wriggly, clay-coloured adult parasites. This would send Mrs.
Schmidt hurrying to the nearby chemist’s for extract of
santonin, the stuff that she had always used on sea lions, as had
her father before her. Santonin extract generally resulted in a
pleasing expulsion of a biggish bundle of worms, but in the
process the animals would suffer a few hours of griping pain in
the guts and would grind their teeth with a most despondent
air.
Mrs. Schmidt was used to that. “Those verdammte worms!”
she would explain. “They fight to their last gasp to keep a hold.
See how they make my three heblings unhappy while they
thrash about and struggle to resist my santonin. Still, all will be
well shortly. I always get those verdammte Würmer!” And she
would nod contentedly.

Sure enough, the three sea lions would soon recover from the
worming and would be rewarded with choice whole whiting—
whiting which contained invisible worm eggs and sometimes
even invisible baby worm larvae.

If Adolf had a cold, Mrs. Schmidt gave him Fenning’s fever

powders, cloves of garlic and spoonfuls of honey secreted
inside the fish. When Dieter got a boil and would not eat, she
smeared the throbbing lump with Germolene and kept him
locked in his pen away from the pool in the hope that he would
drink from a bowl of water into which she had mixed some
mysterious “blood-purifying” salts. In all the years and years
that she had been at Belle Vue she had never once taken
veterinary advice. I rarely ventured inside her domain and then
only to catch the sea lions’ show with the paying public. It
struck me that the big animals were slow and lethargic
considering their high degree of training, but my knowledge of
marine mammals was still limited and perhaps it was just their
great weight.

There were times when Ray Legge knew that one or another of
the sea lions was not up to the mark and he would
diplomatically suggest that perhaps Dr. Taylor might be able to
help—after all, he was being paid for his veterinary advice—
but Mrs. Schmidt would simply retreat within her pavilion, bolt
the door and prepare to withstand a siege. If Ray took a firmer
line she would just as adamantly but politely refuse the offer,
send her assistant to the chemist so that her lines could not be
infiltrated while she herself was away, and even sleep at nights
by the side of her charges just in case we tried a secret
nocturnal examination of the beasts. “You can’t be too careful”
seemed to be her motto.

The worms in the sea lions came and went and new ones took
their place. One day Mrs. Schmidt noticed an unusually large
number of live worms lying on the pool bottom. Mein Gott!
The three boys had picked up a bigger load of parasites than
ever. She decided to take stern measures with the disgusting
invaders. It looked as if a particularly numerous band of the
pests was involved; ach so 1 A double dose of the santonin
extract would deal with them. Adolf, Heinz and Dieter duly
swallowed their medicine hidden inside a whole fish. Half an
hour later it appeared to Mrs. Schmidt that the worms were
fighting far more ferociously than normal. The sea lions were
getting the expected gripes and collywobbles, but something
she had never seen before was also happening. The animals
were beginning to vomit violently, tremble uncontrollably and
shake their heads in a bizarre, glassy-eyed fashion. Sudden
powerful spasms shook their sleek, chubby bodies. They were
in trouble. The worms were winning!
As the minutes passed and the sea lions showed no signs of
recovering, Mrs. Schmidt made a momentous decision; she
would ask Mr. Legge’s advice. Ray went down to the sea-lion
house as soon as she appeared white-faced in his office to tell
him with much agitation what had happened. It was plain when
he saw the distressed trio that something had gone horribly
wrong with the worming, and he called me right away.

Adolf and Co. were in fact showing all the symptoms one could
expect from an overdose of santonin. Santonin is a poison
derived from the dried buds of a plant named wormwood by
ancient apothecaries after they had observed its properties. The
use of it in the old days relied on the poison bumping off the
parasitic worms at a dose which was low enough not to do the
same to the worms’ host. It is a chemical that attacks the
central nervous system, and the signs that the worms were
putting up a heroic resistance, as Mrs. Schmidt interpreted
them, were in fact the effects of the toxic substance on the sea
lions themselves.

Now at last I was presented with my first marine mammal case

at Belle Vue. It was a breakthrough, but I could hardly have
chosen a more inauspicious debut than three un-restrainable
sea-lion bulls with the signs of nerve poisoning produced by a
chemical to which there was no antidote.

Although the vomiting and diarrhoea should evacuate any of

the santonin that remained unabsorbed by the intestine, the
dramatic convulsions continued. I decided to try a tranquillizer,
but it would have to be injected, and sea lions are one of the
species on which it is risky to use the dart-gun because of the
danger of dirt from the skin being carried into the animal’s
system by the dart.

Kelly had arrived on the scene and was shaking his broad head
pessimistically as he looked at the agonized animals. “Can you
and Matt hold them somehow while I give them a shot?” I
asked Ray. The sea lions were in a small pen containing a pool
from which the water had been drained. They were conscious
and obviously aware of our presence. It would be impossible to
pin down such heavy creatures and, like most sea mammals, the
sea lion is designed without any convenient grab handles.

“I’ll get a chair,” said Ray. “If you can get a needle into the
back flipper muscle somehow, I’ll try to distract the head end.”

Mrs. Schmidt produced a chair, and the zoo director took up

the classical lion tamer’s pose with the four wooden legs
pointing towards the jerking head of the agonized Heinz. We
both knew how dirty sea-lion teeth are and what severe bites
they can inflict on one another and on man; Mrs. Schmidt bore
gnarled scars on her hands and arms. Protected, I hoped, by
Ray and his chair, I splashed some disinfectant onto Heinz’s
skin and jabbed a new needle into his rump. He was too
wracked with the convulsions to do anything more than turn
his head slightly in my direction. The tranquillizer slipped into
the muscle. Adolf and Dieter were treated in the same way,
then we stood and waited while Mrs. Schmidt continued to
marvel at the powerful rearguard action by the worms. Slowly
the sea Hons relaxed, the convulsions diminished and the
vomiting ceased. After three quarters of an hour it looked as if
the three sea lions were going to be all right. They were drowsy
but undoubtedly out of danger.

“Now, Mrs. Schmidt,” I said, feeling able to take advantage of

the situation, “that’s the last time that you will use santonin on
our sea lions.” She blinked and did not say a word. Matt stood
by, looking like a sergeant-major quietly enjoying the dressing-
down of one of his privates by the CO. “From now on,” I
continued, “we will use something new. It’s very effective and
not at all poisonous. I’ll send you a bottle of piperazine tablets
tomorrow.”

Adolf, Heinz and Dieter did fully recover but in a few weeks
began to show evidence of worm infestation again. Obediently,
Mrs. Schmidt gave them the piperazine tablets. Delightedly she
watched the worms expelled a few hours later, and much to her
amazement not one single worm put up a struggle. The sea
lions had no gripes, no diarrhoea, no grinding of teeth.

Mrs. Schmidt continued to feel, I think, that although I might

be Lord of the Worms, the rest of my medical art was still
suspect. At least I had penetrated the sea-lion house and was
allowed to look at the animals whenever I wanted— unless
their keeper was bathing. It was a major advance, but I still had
the impression that the sea lions were slow and sluggish in their
movements. They seemed to tire easily and they lay around idly;
there was none of the zest I had seen in sea lions at other zoos.
At the time little of importance had been published about sea-
lion medicine, so the special nutritional problems that
pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses) and other marine
mammals can develop in captivity had not yet been realized.

One day, as I watched Mrs. Schmidt prepare fish pieces for

Adolf and his partners, it struck me that for every bucket offish
she filled with choice cuts for her “boys”, she was filling
another bucket with waste pieces to throw away. She was neatly
filleting the fish, removing bones, heads, tails and all the
internal organs. The sea lions got only one hundred per cent
meat, first-quality steaks. In the wild, sea lions naturally eat the
whole fish, bones, guts and all, as well as huge quantities of
squid and cuttlefish. I discovered that for years the Belle Vue
sea lions had received only the boneless middle cuts of herring,
whiting and mackerel.

“What about supplements?” I asked. “Do you give minerals or

vitamins?”

“No. Nor have I in all the years I’ve been keeping sea lions,
Doctor,” came the reply.

“Right, I’m going to give you some multivitamin syrup,” I said.

“Put a tablespoonful in their fish each day.” She agreed. “And
what’s more,” I added, "I want you to stop filleting the fish.
You can remove the guts if you like, but I don’t see how' these
animals can get enough calcium without the bones in their
diet.” *

Mrs. Schmidt looked horrified but she promised to do what I

asked. I sent down to her the first multivitamin syrup I laid my
hands on in the dispensary, a lemon-flavoured concoction
made up for human geriatric patients. Apart from the
flavouring it contained nothing but a mixture of the vitamins A,
B, C and D.

A few days later I was driving through the zoo grounds when I
saw Mrs. Schmidt running towards my car waving her arms to
attract my attention. Oh-oh, here’s trouble, I said to myself as I
wound down the window.

“Dr. Taylor, Dr. Taylor, you must come and see my boys,” she
said, puffing with the exertion. Apart from her flushed face I
was surprised to see that she did not appear alarmed or angry.
If anything she was in rather a pleasant mood. Good Lord,
Mrs. Schmidt had actually smiled at me!

I went into the sea-lion house. There were Adolf, Heinz and
Dieter playing in the pool and gambolling around on the stage.
But how they were playing! The three ponderous fellows were
no longer torpid or slow-moving. They were sliding, rolling,
diving and leaping in the water like young otters.
“It’s the vitamins, Doctor,” crowed Mrs. Schmidt, “it’s the
vitamins. I’ve never seen them so alert and active. I thought
they were in peak condition but look how wrong I was.”
She was right: it was the vitamins, probably the vitamin B1, in
particular. It is a wonder that those animals survived at all when
they were deprived of minerals and the all important vitamin
B1, Years later we were to discover how essential these
substances are to marine mammals fed on dead fish like herring
and mackerel, which contain a potent enzyme that utterly
destroys vitamin B; and how dangerous the lack of salt could be
to specimens kept in fresh water.

The conquest of Mrs. Schmidt and her sea-lion house was

complete, but I became increasingly nervous about driving near
the pale blue wooden pavilion. She seemed to sense that I was
in the grounds and would come flying Out with a thousand
questions about every minute thing that might or she imagined
might be wrong with her boys. As for the lemon-flavoured
liquid, she refused ever to change from it. When more suitable,
more concentrated tablets with the same constituents were
given to her, she swore that they did not work as well as the
lemon syrup. And when the drug company making the product
changed the flavouring from lemon to orange for some reason,
she kicked up a mighty fuss in Ray Legge’s office. “Dr. Taylor
said I should use the lemon syrup and look what wonders it
performed,” she thundered. “I must have the lemon one!” When
it was made absolutely clear that no more lemon was ever going
to be produced and that Dr. Taylor had personally checked the
credentials of the orange substitute, she gave in. I do not think
Mrs. Schmidt ever treated another ailment in her sea lions
again, and she made it her business to see that no one, but no
one, except myself went anywhere near her precious boys.
Driving back to the surgery one day after I had been to the sea-
lion house at Mrs. Schmidt’s excited request to see the effect of
my vitamins on her threesome, I stopped at some traffic lights.
Casually looking at the other vehicles around me, I thought I
recognized an individual sitting next to the driver of the car on
my immediate right. Bigger and shaggier than when I had first
encountered him when he was a baby, he was dressed in
corduroy dungarees, purple chunky-knit woollen sweater and
Sinatra hat. He was holding one side of an unfolded road map
while his human chauffeur held the other and studied their
whereabouts. If I was not mistaken it was Billy, a chimpanzee I
had once treated for pinworms. He had been owned at the time
by a rather overwhelming woman named Mrs. Lomax. I tapped
on my window.

Billy glanced superciliously in my direction and then, apparently

unable to place my face as belonging to anyone important, and
bored stiff by yet another of those oddballs who would insist
on gesticulating, waving, winking and generally making asses of
themselves every time he did nothing more remarkable than go
out for a drive, he yawned histrionically and looked down at the
map. I could not quite see Billy’s companion at the wheel, and
wondered whether it was Mr. Lomax and he was trying to make
his way to see me.

I had not been in the surgery for five minutes before Billy and
his friend were ushered in. It was indeed Mr. Lomax, a portly,
pink-faced man with a high-pitched voice, an ever perspiring
brow that required frequent mopping with a large blue-spotted
handkerchief, and a tight grey suit the pockets of which bristled
with pencils and ballpoints and the seat of which was so
polished that I might have expected to see Billy’s impish
reflection glinting in it. Mr. Lomax wore socks that did not
match.

“Dr. Taylor,” he piped, “my wife sends her apologies. She

couldn’t come because she has a speaking engagement in
Bradford. I’ve been sent—I mean, I’ve brought Billy with his
problem.”

“Problem? The worms again, you mean?”

Mr. Lomax shook his head vigorously. “Oh no. We, well, he’s
absolutely OK in that respect these days. What’s worrying her,
us, is the way his tummy’s swelling.”

I looked at the now mature ape sitting placidly on the floor

holding the neatly folded road map in both hands. He was big,
hairy, muscular and very much the macho male chimpanzee.
True enough, he did look eight months pregnant. His purple
piece of home knit was stretched over a distinct pot belly.

“Can you handle Billy?” I asked, noting the chimp’s now well
developed fang teeth, which he displayed from time to time as
he gave me the apprehensive chimp grin.

“Not really, to be honest. Billy’s a mummy’s boy. But if you

wouldn’t mind looking at him on the floor, and if I keep giving
him these Smarties”—hesitantly he produced a large bag of
iced chocolate drops from a pocket—“you can probably
examine him down there.”

I certainly did not mind. Not for the first time I would sit on
the floor with a patient to avoid starting a potentially disastrous
rough-house by trying to get the beast onto the examination
table. I am one Mahomet who, for the sake of a peaceful and
productive examination, is prepared to go to any mountain
anywhere.

“Apart from the swelling has Billy shown any sign of illness?” I
inquired.

“He’s a bit more peeky than usual, we think. He threw a milk

bottle at the next-door neighbour’s dog last week— knocked a
tooth out and we had to pay the vet’s bill—and he’s not eating
quite as well as usual. Gone off his fried liver and onions and
his bedtime Ovaltine. He’s still fairly lively though, He got into
the bathroom when my sister-in-law was washing her hair,
pinched her electric drier and dropped it down the loo. Blew all
the fuses. Sister-in-law’ had to go to a Masonic dinner with a
wig on. He’s taking his fruit and vegetables fine, though.
Droppings? Well, she —my wife—changes his nappies, you
know. He did take his clothes off the other night when we were
asleep. Nappies and all. Did his business on the piano. No, no
sign of diarrhoea or anything. Very normal, I’d say—I know
because I cleaned the piano myself,”
I sat on the surgery floor near Billy, and Mr. Lomax bent down
and started to feed Smarties into the mobile black lips with the
frenzy of a slot-machine addict. Cautiously I stroked Billy’s
head and slyly let my hand caress downwards over one cheek.
Billy seemed to like it. He stuck one index finger into my ear, I
let it stay there; it was only marginally uncomfortable and
seemed a reasonable quid pro quo. As my fingers lay on Billy’s
cheek I gently pulled down the lower eyelid. He seemed paler
than normal. Pretending to flip idly at his lips, I pulled them
out a little so that I could inspect the gums; they were not as
freshly pink as I would have liked either. Billy kept his finger in
my ear and with the other hand tried to push the corner of the
road map into my mouth. I pursed my lips and quietly raised
my hand to ease away his arm and to indicate that white I
might tolerate an earful of finger, a mouthful of paper was out
of the question. I also used the opportunity to take his pulse as
I held his wrist. It was normal. So far so good. The examination
was proceeding well and Billy was still unperturbed. Next I
slipped my hand under his sweater. The chimp hooted a
warning at me and pulled the finger from my ear, making ready
to clout me if I showed any sign of trying to take his clothes
off. I cooed at him and tickled his navel as I explored his
abdomen beneath the sweater. Billy relaxed, but took a grip of
the hem of his sweater just in case.

The swelling of the stomach was undoubtedly more than just

obesity or slack abdominal muscles, conditions often seen in
young, imperfectly fed great apes, particularly gorillas. A tense,
round mass the size of a large grapefruit lay in the body cavity.
It did not seem to b.e painful, and it was possible to move it
slightly from place to place within the abdomen.

For ten minutes I carefully explored the contours of the mass

and went through the possibilities in my mind. Abscess, cyst,
tumour? Amoeba cavity, common in chimps? Tapeworm
hydatids? Which organ was involved; liver, spleen, intestines?
Or no organ—just an independent mass attached to the
peritoneum? I debated whether to take a biopsy sample, but
decided that it would only delay the major operation which I
felt sure would be necessary. Better perhaps to operate and
remove the mass and then confirm its true nature. That would
avoid both the need for anaesthetizing twice and the possibility
of the biopsy producing side effects like peritonitis; it would
also save time if the lump was in any way malignant. On
balance I thought that the mass was most likely a non-
malignant cyst, lying fairly free in the abdomen or possibly
embracing most of the spleen and containing pus produced by
the same amoeba parasite that causes dysentery in man.
Whatever it was, Billy was going to undergo major surgery.

Mr. Lomax had to have a chair to sit on when I stood up and

told him what I had found. “It’s not the thought of the
operation that upsets me, Dr. Taylor,’’ he squeaked, sponging
his pink jowls with his handkerchief. “It’s, well, it’s the thought
of telling her—my wife. She’ll have a fit! She’ll wan t to know
how he got this trouble—she’s sure there’s no healthier chimp
than Billy.”
“I understand,” I replied truthfully—I remembered her as a
formidable, excitable woman—“but it would be unwise to
pretend that there is anything else to be done in the
circumstances. No operation and there may well be no Billy
before long.”

I saw them to the door and watched as they crossed the outer
office, Billy carrying the road map in one hand and belabouring
Mr. Lomax’s backside with the Sinatra hat held in the other.

I had arranged for Billy to be brought to the surgery in four

days’ time, with an empty stomach and a spoonful of
tranquillizing syrup administered in a cup of fruit juice just
before setting out. Operation day arrived and promptly at ten
o’clock Billy, accompanied now by Mrs. Lomax herself, was
brought into my office. She was a stringy, pale, middle-aged
lady, with a querulous voice and fidgety manner. To my dismay
the chimp showed no signs of having taken any tranquillizer,
and I did not fancy jabbing needles into him while he was fully
conscious.

“He just would not drink the fruit juice with the drug in it,” his
owner confessed. “He seemed to know there was something
added.”

At my request, the normally modish chimp was undressed. He

looked mean and hungry. Spotting a small packet of Nescafe
powder and a sugar cube lying on my desk ready for my mid-
morning brew of coffee, he swept both items into his mouth
with one fast “lodger’s reach”, as Lancastrians call such swift
light-fingeredness. After swallowing the goodies, he spat out
the indigestible paper. Still mean and still hungry, he looked
round the room for something else to eat. Ominously he began
cracking his knuckles. Everything else was ready for the
operation, but first I somehow had to get some injectable
anaesthetic into Billy. He was obviously in no mood to be
trifled with and there is no way to restrain a full-grown chimp
who does not feel like letting folk prick him with needles. I
would have to use the dart-gun and, for the first and only time
in my career to date, I prepared to shoot a knock-out syringe at
a free-ranging chimpanzee on the prowl in my own surgery
waiting room. Loading the gas-pistol with a small syringe
charged with a dose of phencyclidine, I explained what I
planned to do. “Billy will have to be left on his own in the
waiting room.”

“No, never!” wailed Mrs. Lomax.

“Yes, definitely. There’s no other way and I can’t risk having

humans about when I start firing darts in a confined space. No
one can stay in with Billy. I’ll open the door a crack, shoot at
him, close the door and then, when he goes to sleep, we’ll carry
on in the normal way. By the way, Mrs. Lomax, I suggest that
you go shopping for a couple of hours after he’s knocked out.”
I did not want her hanging round the premises while I
operated.
Vulnerable items like photo frames, potted plants and an
electric fire were removed from the waiting room and Billy was
slipped in there. Behind the closed door we listened. I had to
be certain he was at the other side of the room before I did my
bit of sniping. There was a bumping as Billy moved among
some of the chairs; then I heard a shuffling noise.

He was rifling through the magazines on the table by the far

wall. This was my chance.

I opened the door a few inches, put my foot against the bottom
of it and held firmly onto the door handle, ready to close it
should Billy try joining us. With one eye at the crack I glimpsed
a crouching Billy looking at me from a distance of three yards. I
took aim with my gun hand and squeezed the trigger. Plop!
From the angry screeching I knew that the dart had struck
chimp flesh. Before I could close the door, Billy had snatched
the missile out of his buttocks, where it had lodged and
discharged its contents in a fraction of a second, and flung it
accurately back at me. Not for the first time I nearly took a
returned dart full in the face. Great apes often return my
ammunition in this way, which is helpful of them I suppose,
but I shudder to think what would happen if I was hit by one
which had not fired its drug load. There is no antidote to a big
dose of phencyclidine, and I can just see the headline in the
Rochdale Observer: “Veterinarian put to sleep by chimpanzee.” A
different way to go.
The dart whipped through the still partly opened door and
embedded itself firmly in the corridor wall. With a crash I shut
the door just before Billy hurled himself at the other side.
Hollering with annoyance, he pounded the door and threatened
to split the panelling. Then he wreaked his fury on our chairs.
There were tearing and shredding noises, too, as copies of The
Field, and Illustrated London News were turned into ticker tape.
Gradually the echoes of bedlam subsided and all was still. Six
minutes had passed since the darting. Billy should now be
chasing lady chimpanzees in a sunlit happy valley, for we know
that small doses of phencyclidine in humans tend to produce
fanciful erotic dreams. I opened the door. Sure enough, Billy
lay sprawled and sleeping on a heap of chairs and pieces of
chair.

With Mrs. Lomax sent fretfully packing, the chimpanzee was

carried into the operating room and I deepened his anaesthesia
with oxygen and halothane gas. Scrubbed and gowned, and
with the patient shaved and painted a startling antiseptic red
over his bulging belly, I took a scalpel and unzipped his
abdomen from top to bottom. Spreading the operation wound
open with a set of ratcheted retractors, I felt inside for the
round lump. Bit by bit, I pulled it close to the opening where I
could see it. It was not part of any organ, but an independent,
tense sphere containing some sort of thickish fluid and stuck at
dozens of points to the loops of intestine. It was going to take a
long time to free all those attachments. Beneath it might lie
large blood vessels that I could not see; there might be
weaknesses in the wall of the thing which would rupture as I
separated it. I began cautiously and laboriously to break the
adhesions with the handle of my scalpel, as using the sharp
blade might pierce the sphere and release the contents, with
appalling consequences. After half an hour I had still freed only
a small part of the mass. On I went, stopping from time to time
to check Billy’s pulse, colour and breathing. He slept deeply.
Two hours later I had freed all of the mass that I could see.
Now for the underneath bit.

As I tried swinging the sphere over so that I could approach

the lower adhesions less blindly, I noticed something that made
my stomach turn. A pink-brown creamy liquid was beginning
to seep up between my fingers. I swabbed it away hurriedly and
looked closely. More of the stuff welled up. I gently pressed the
spherical mass. It was less tense than before. Somehow,
somewhere below it had begun to leak. The unpleasant pink-
brown cream was running over Billy’s intestines.

Cursing silently, I pressed on rapidly with the complete removal

of the lump, now a collapsed and flabby bladder. With that
gone, I surveyed the terrible sight before me: an abdominal
cavity which was awash with pus full of amoebae and nasty
bacteria. No matter what, Billy was going to have quite a case
of peritonitis. How could I remove most of the foul stuff? If I
put a drain Into his tummy, as is done in humans, he would
only pluck out the rubber tube when he came to. But would the
wound hold if I stitched it with much of that rubbish inside?
Then I recalled watching as part of my surgery course at
university an operation on a human patient whose gastric ulcer
had burst just after being bombarded with a meal of steak pie,
chips and peas, covering his liver, spleen, stomach and all the
other bits and pieces of organs inside him with gravy, peas and
chewed-up bits of food. The surgeon had not made a big fuss
about this dinner that had gone so sadly astray but had dealt
with it in a thoroughly down-to-earth, commonsense sort of
way; he had- ordered up two or three sterilized stainless-steel
buckets full of warm saline solution and simply swilled out his
patient’s innards by pouring in a couple of gallons and letting it
washout. Then he had done it again, just as if he was washing
down his garden path after a spot of untidy gardening. The
peas and all the rest of the meal were washed away and what
small quantities of foreign matter and bacteria remained in the
abdominal cavity following this practical bit of laundry were
easily controlled by antibiotics. I decided to use the same
method. Sending Edith for some bottles of sterile saline
solution, I sucked out as much of the pus as I could with a
special tube and vacuum pump. When the saline was ready I
used it to wash the intestines and surrounding organs, rinsed
them again and again, popped everything back into place and
sprinkled antibiotic powder in nooks and crevices. The rest was
simple: stitching up the various layers of peritoneum, muscle,
fat and skin.

Billy gradually began to come round when he was taken off the
gas, but because of the phencyclidine still active in his body he
would not be fully back to normal until the following day. Mrs.
Lomax did not object when I insisted that Billy would have to
go naked and unadorned until his operation wound healed;
chimps’ tissues heal rapidly when left dry and open to the
oxygen in the air.

By the time Billy came to have his stitches out, he was his old
fighting self once more. I did the job only when they had finally
succeeded in slipping him some tranquillizer in a sweet plum,
seven days after the date originally planned for the
appointment. Billy had recovered excellently. There was no sign
of peritonitis and he looked the picture of health. My
examination of the pus from his lump had shown the presence
of both amoebae and bacteria, as I had suspected, but these
were dealt with by a course of fruit-flavoured drugs originally
designed for children.

“By the way, Dr. Taylor,” said Mrs. Lomax, when she brought
Billy for his final check-up with her perspiring, pinkfaced
husband standing by, “this amoeba. Is there any chance that
George here brought it home from the office?”

George mopped his forehead and looked appealingly at me,

saying nothing. ,

“No chance, Mrs. Lomax,” I replied firmly, “absolutely no

chance.”

George Lomax let out a sigh of happy relief. “Now, how much
do we owe you, Dr. Taylor?” he asked.
10

Julius
It was a dark, wet night. The roads were empty and sheeted
with rain as I drove home from a 3 a.m. call to an old cow
whose calf had a head three sizes too big for her mother’s
pelvis. I had removed the big-headed infant by Caesarean and
then, sticky, sweaty and covered with pieces of chaff, set off for
a bath and what remained of the night’s sleep. By nine o’clock
that morning I would be at Belle Vue to begin a day’s
chiropody, trimming the overgrown hooves of every one of
three dozen agile, unco-operative aoudads. Not my favourite
occupation wrestling with those fellows, was my last thought as
I fell asleep. Yes, today looked like being a hard one.

But I was learning that in zoo work it is impossible to plan

ahead. As I sat bleary-eyed at breakfast, the telephone rang and
the distant elfin voice of a frantic Tunisian animal importer
delivered a message in a mixture of French and English over a
line that crackled and howled like a banshee.

“Dr. Taylor, this is M. Taouche. Mr. Legge at Belle Vue told

me where to contact you. Please come quick, I have twelve
dying giraffes, ici en Tunisie!”

I stood looking through the persistent autumn drizzle at the

cotton-mill chimneys impaling the low, early morning clouds
hanging over the town, while M. Taouche told of the
happenings on the farm near the town of Sbeitla, below the
Atlas Mountains, where he had set up a quarantine station for
African animals bound eventually for Europe. When his Arab
keepers had risen that morning they had found that every one
of the twelve magnificent Rothschild’s giraffes on the farm was
lying prostrate on the ground with legs askew, necks arched
back and bellies bloated so grotesquely that the skin seemed
about to split.

My mind whirred as I listened. I had only a few seconds before

I must come up with advice that could give twelve helpless
patients, unseen and unexamined fifteen hundred miles away, a
fighting chance. This was ludicrous! How could I ever consider
seriously working a one-man practice that might extend over
half the globe? Some medical doctors will not take on patients
living at the other side of the same town, yet here was I
listening to a man paying ten dollars a minute in long-distance
charges to plead for help. Come on, lad, I said to myself, this is
what independent full-time zoo work would be all about. Every
day things like this would be happening; was this not what I
had always wanted? There had never really been any choice,
had there? Cats with coughs and ponies with pleurisy had been
the qualifying heats; the main race for me was supposed to be
just this sort of situation. My mind cleared. No time to mull
over a considered review of possibilities, diagnoses and
prognostications. I had to learn the art of making snap
decisions about critical situations in Cathay or Katmandu and
always be right—or at least never harmfully wrong.
M. Taouche had finished his account of all he knew about the
giraffes. Clearly the animals were bloated by gas produced by
something they had eaten fermenting in their warm, wet
stomachs. The gas pressure must be released before any
distended stomach ruptured or pressed on the heart and
stopped it.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll fly out at once. Meanwhile do this: get your
man to find the biggest, broadest hypodermic needles he can—
from a clinic or a doctor somewhere—and tell him to stick one
into the swollen belly of each animal at its highest point on the
left-hand—repeat, left-hand—side.”

“Mais ouì,” came the Tunisian’s faint voice, “but would it not
be better for Abu al Ma’arri, my man, to release the pressure
with a sharp knife?”

“No, repeat no! Do that and you will lose all the giraffes for
sure!” I had seen too many cattle that had over gorged
themselves on lush spring grass lanced in that way by farmers.
Gas came out all right, but when the knife was withdrawn, the
hole in the stomach moved away from the hole in the skin and
the remaining gas forced stomach contents into the abdominal
cavity. Peritonitis followed and none survived.

“One last thing,” I continued. “If possible, see if your man can
find some washing detergent.”

The line hissed and crackled. “Washing detergent?”

“Yes. Tell him to give a teaspoonful of detergent powder—
detergent, not soap—in water by mouth to each giraffe. He
should be able to handle them if they’re down and in such a
bad way.”

“But detergent powder in the stomach! It will froth, will it not?

Like in my bath? Have I understood you correctly, Doctor?
Detergent? Hein?”

“I repeat: detergent, d-e-t-e-r-g-e-n-t. Got it?”

The phone hissed more furiously than ever and the line went
dead. I hurried to pack a bag while Shelagh dialled Air France.
There was a plane to Paris from Manchester in ninety minutes,
and in Paris I could pick up Tunisair. Shelagh followed me into
the bedroom and stuck chunks of toast and grapefruit
marmalade into my mouth while I used both hands to cram
shirts, syringes, tins of emergency surgical equipment, drugs,
dart-gun, toothpaste, mosquito cream, money belt, alarm clock
and water-purifying tablets into a bulging grip. Also, never left
behind, the dog-eared collected poems of John Betjeman.

“Ring Belle Vue, love, will you?” I said as I went out to the car.
“The aoudads will have to wait for their chiropody.

Oh, and ring Norman Whittle. I know he’ll be a bit browned

off but would he do my surgery and the RSPCA clinic and
could he be on instead of off duty this weekend. Tell him I’m
off to Tunis to see a bunch of bloated giraffes.”
“Leaving me to do the dirty work,” she replied, making a face.
“Norman won’t be pleased. This means the end of his sailing
on Lake Windermere on Sunday, and you know how he feels
about the way you keep rushing off.”

“My profuse apologies to him,” I answered. “Oh, I almost

forgot—-just in case detergent powder is hard to get on the
Algerian border, be a good girl and nip and fetch me your
packet of Daz.”

At Tunis airport a rotund little man in a white suit and pink tie
stood by the arrival gate sweating profusely and holding aloft a
piece of cardboard with my name crayoned on it. Beside him a
tall black man wearing a crocheted skull cap and grimy grey
jibba was mopping the perspiration from his companion’s brow
with a large silk handkerchief.

M. Taouche threw his cardboard away as I walked up to him.

“Thank heavens you’ve arrived,” he squeaked, shaking me
vigorously by the hand. “No, I’ve no further news from the
south, except Abu al Ma’arri thinks that the giraffes’ trouble
might be because of some peaches he fed them last night. He
says the fruit was over-ripe when it arrived. Pour moi, I believe
he has been selling the good fruit to the villagers near the farm
and keeping only the worst for my animals. It’s important you
go down there tout de suite.”

“But aren’t you coming too?”

“Sadly, no. I want to, I need to, but I have important work here
in Tunis. Anyway, I am sure that I personally could be of little
assistance. Nasser here will drive you, and Abu and the other
men will do anything you ask.” He fidgeted with his tie with
fingers like cocktail sausages.

“Let’s go then,” I replied. “We may be too late already, you

realize. Giraffes don’t usually last long once they’re down.”

M. Taouche’s forehead oozed fresh sweat globules and Nasser

blotted them up as we walked out to the parking lot. Nasser
jumped into a pick-up truck and Taouche pumped my hand
again. “Au revoir, Doctor,” he said. “In’ch Allah, all will go well
down south.” Nasser and I set off on the long drive to the
village near Sbeitla.

The journey was interminable. We travelled south at first,

passing through lemon groves and tobacco fields glowing red-
gold in the afternoon sunshine, then turned west, away from
the Gulf of Hammamet, into a smoky twilight, rattling over
mile after long mile of scrub and steppe. Every few hundred
yards we would be brought to a juddering crawl by jay-walking
flocks of sheep or goats, by donkey carts slewed across the
road while their owners loaded bales of esparto grass, or by
smoke-belching trucks weaving dangerously down the wrong
side of the road. Darkness came suddenly, an indigo sky with a
half moon dodging between, tufts of cloud, and the truck
started to climb up into the hills. It was too cold and too
bumpy to sleep, and I could see little beyond the few square
feet of grey dust picked out by the headlights. Nasser, having
been disappointed to hear that no, I was not a relative of
Elizabeth Taylor, had long since lapsed into silence. The only
words to pass between us were an occasional “Imshi, imshi!”
from me, a tentative stab at the Arabic equivalent of “Faster,
faster!” It brought no perceptible increase in speed.

The low houses and narrow streets of Sbeitla showed no sign

of light or life. We climbed on through winding valleys Where
the wind blew coarse dust into the open-sided pick-up and my
eyes became sore with squinting. At last, ten hours after leaving
Tunis, Nasser hauled the wheel over and we lurched off the
road and ran down a rutted track. The headlights picked out a
group of white buildings set on three sides round a yard—the
quarantine farm. Nasser skidded to a halt and shouted
something in Arabic, and Abu al Ma’arri with his three
companions came out of a doorway carrying kerosene lanterns.
All wore jibbas and skull caps except for Abu, who sported a
tattered old French army greatcoat. He had two black teeth
remaining in an ever-smiling mouth, and a snow-white scar like
forked lightning zigzagged across the cornea of each eye. Like
one of my chimpanzee patients at Rhenen Zoo in Holland, he
had six fingers on each hand. He introduced the others,
Hussein, Abdul and another Abdul.

“Venons, where are the giraffes?” I said, anxious to get started.

Abu’s happy face glinted in the soft glow of the oil lamps. His
melon-slice smile broadened as he said in halting French, “Five
are dead, Doctor, But seven live. I pricked them as you
instructed.” He led the way through the darkness to a rough
wooden stockade behind one of the crumbling cement-block
buildings.

The feeble light of the lanterns showed me a horrific scene. All

on their sides, with limbs and necks in a higgledy- piggledy
heap of unnatural and agonized positions, the giraffes sprawled
like a collapsed log-pile. At first it was impossible to tell the
dead from the living. All had swollen bellies.

I climbed over the fence and picked my way warily between the
horizontal legs, but the flickering lantern made it difficult to
avoid contact with the limbs. Accidentally I brushed against a
hind leg. That animal was still alive. It gave a weak kick that had
none of the pile-driver force that can disembowel a predator
snapping incautiously at a giraffe’s heels on the African plains,
but it was enough to sweep both my legs from under me. On
my knees I crouched and hunched my shoulders. There were
five or six iron-hard hooves within inches of my head. Touch
one of those again and I could be brained. With the delicate
care of a man in a minefield I rose to my feet and continued my
rounds of this charnel house-cum-hospital ward. Yes, there
were seven animals still breathing. The mounts of small
hypodermic needles sprouted from the belly walls of some of
them. Despite my instructions to place them on the left side
only— the point at which the stomach lies closest to the skin in
giraffes—sortie needles gleamed in the lantern light on the
animals’ right sides. They were in the intestine and useless for
releasing gas in the stomach.

The surviving animals bore their, agonies with the mute

fortitude typical of the dignity of my sort of patient. People
often say giraffes have no voice. That is not strictly true; I have
sometimes heard them give a short chirping cry. These poor
creatures were utterly silent.

“Bring another lantern in and watch the feet,” I shouted to

Abu.

At last he understood and picked his way over to me. As he

held both lanterns high, I picked one giraffe and, with a quick
stab, stuck a special device for tapping off gas through the skin
into the stomach. There was a flatulent puff of foul-smelling
vapour from the instrument, the giraffe’s belly subsided a little
and then, to my dismay, a noisome khaki foam began to pour
out. As I had feared, the gas in the'stomachs was not in one
giant bubble; it had produced a vast, fine froth that the animal
could not burp. This was where the detergent came in. It would
break up the foam in the animals’ stomachs in the same way
that a drop of detergent bubble-bath liquid will instantly
destroy a soap foam.

“Did you give them detergent?” I asked the Arab,

“Detergent?” He looked puzzled.

“Poudre, poudre a laver—dans la bouche!” I struggled
wretchedly with the words. Abu smiled broadly and shook his
head.

I went round all the living animals and released what gas I
could. All contained foam. Thank God for Shelagh’s Daz, I
thought, and prayed that, shocked and far gone as the giraffes
were, I might be able to save at least some with my wife’s
washing powder.. I mixed a little with water in a wine bottle. To
Hussein and Abdul number one I said slowly, “Hold the head
of the giraffe. I give this drink.” I gesticulated and they
understood, “Manchester United,” said Hussein, for no
apparent reason. From Greenland to Indonesia, wherever 1
work, I always meet at least one person whose English extends
to soccer terms, usually “Manchester United”, the most famous
soccer team in the zoological world. The man who catches the
first yeti and brings it to me for a check-up will say, if nothing
else, “Manchester United”.

One by one I drenched the giraffes with the detergent mixture.

Now to tackle the intoxicating effects of the foodstuffs
fermenting in the giraffes’ stomachs. I shot high-potency
vitamin B directly into the bloodstream, the treatment applied
to humans who became hospital patients after swigging a bottle
of whisky in an hour or so. A heavily pregnant female was one
of those still alive. Cautiously I made an internal examination
and felt the calf kick in his comfortable water bed. It was
amazing that it, or indeed any of the giraffes, was still putting
up a fight.
I could do no more that night. Abu al Ma’arri led the way to my
quarters. “Please, Doctor, I hope you will be comfortable
here.” He showed me into a small room which had no door
and was bare except for a straw-filled mattress on the floor,
two carefully folded blankets and a picture of President
Bourguiba on the wall. The other occupant of the room was a
gecko, with a body like a smouldering crusty heap of jewels. He
scuttled behind President Bourguiba as Nasser brought me a
bowl of greasy water in which to wash and a jam jar full of
strong sweet tea. In the light of a lantern I washed, dried myself
on my shirt, drank the tea and arranged myself uncomfortably
under the blankets. From the Arabs’ room came laughter and
murmurs of admiration as Abu demonstrated his prowess at
catching rats with his bare hands and his ability to pop live
scorpions into his mouth, roll them about with his tongue and
slowly extrude them sting first, unharmed and unruffled, onto
the palm of his hand. Despite the noise, the cold and the
blankets’ reek of goat and garlic and sweat, I was soon in a
deep sleep.

The next morning I was up early. One more of my patients had

died during the night; the remaining six were no longer lying on
their sides but sitting up on their briskets. The bellies of five,
including the pregnant female, were no longer resonant like
drums when I tapped them but the sixth was still very blown
out. While the men dragged out the cadavers of the six dead
giraffes,- I went round again in the grey light before dawn
giving more vitamin B and circulatory stimulants as well. By
sun-up most of the animals were looking distinctly better and I
started paying attention to the “Bedsores” on the recumbent
creatures. The still- distended sixth animal I drenched again in
the hope of avoiding more drastic surgery.

Giving the drench some time to act, I looked round the

dilapidated farm. Dirt was everywhere, and a long sloping dung
heap ran right up to the round stone well at which Nasser and
the others drew water by means of a bucket on a rope. There
was a smell of manure and burnt wood. As I sat with my back
against a wall, letting the sun warm my face, I heard a
screeching noise from one corner of the yard. The Arabs were
gathered round what looked like a dog kennel, watching
intently and chattering as Hussein bent over the kennel with a
stick in his hand. Abu was laughing happily and clapping his
six-fingered hands. The screech came again. I could not identify
it. Pig? No. Cat? Whatever it was, it did something to the hairs
at the back of my neck. I stood up and walked over to the knot
of men. They looked round as I arrived and parted to give me
room to see.

Hussein stood in front of a wooden box with a door made of

stout iron bars. Proudly he re-introduced his stick between the
bars and jabbed fiercely at the interior. There was another awful
screech, a scrabbling noise and a thumping and a banging from
inside the box. I bent down and looked inside. The most tragic
animal face that I have ever seen confronted me. The box
contained a hyena. Almost as big as the container itself and
with no room to turn round, there stood a full-grown striped
hyena, trembling, panting, open- jawed, with every visible tooth
freshly broken, one eye wide with frenzy, the other a bloody
mass. His neck and forelegs were a mass of cuts and sores, his
ears were torn and bleeding. By my side, Hussein thrust the
stick into the box and ground it into the cheek of the hyena. It
turned its head as far as it could, but no matter how it tried it
could not retreat from the cruel point. “Tottenham Hotspur,”
crowed Hussein.

I felt my head drain of blood and my face prickle with cold

anger. I straightened up and opened my mouth. I wanted to
shout something, anything. Not a sound came out. The Arabs
looked at me and grinned pleasantly,

“Bad dog,” said Abu, leading me to the back of the hyena’s

prison. There were more bars there' The animal’s hindquarters
showed the same loathsome lacerations as his head.

Hussein came round with his stick. “Kick off,” he said, and
pointed to the hyena’s hock joints. I saw what he felt so proud
about; the poor beast had been hamstrung. The Achilles
tendons on both legs had been severed by a sharp instrument.

I stood with my back to the bars so that Hussein could not

introduce his stick again. My voice returned trembling. “What
do you bloody well think you’re doing?” I wished I knew the
worst Arabic or even French obscenities.

“Bad dog,” said Abu again, his smile growing. “He kills
chickens. Dirty. Smells. No good.”
’‘Not bad dog,” I said, wishing I could vomit the words, “Why
do you wound him? Pourquoi blesser?”

All the Arabs laughed gently. Abu’s two black teeth were bared
as he explained politely, “But Doctor, to teach him. To teach
him. A good idea for a bad dog, n’est-ce pas?”

Hussein, blocked from his victim by my legs, went round to the

front of the box again. I roared, dashed after him and grabbed
the stick from his hands. “No you don’t!” I shouted, and broke
the stick over my knee. “Rien va plus!” I picked up the halves
of stick and broke them again and again until I found it
impossible to destroy the small bits further with my fingers.
The Arabs watched. Abu smiled. Hussein glared sullenly, then
kicked viciously at the hyena’s box and walked away. The
others followed. I crouched in front of the terrified animal and
looked deep into his one eye. He must have been a maverick,
trapped when he left a pack in the hills to come foraging on the
farm. There was nothing I could do for him. Both ends of the
box were secured by rusty padlocks and even if I could have
got to him, severed Achilles tendons are a major injury in man
and domestic animals, not to mention wild creatures.

An hour later the giraffes were continuing to improve except

for the one whose stomach was still swollen. I decided to
operate and literally unload the offending food. It was my first
major operation on a giraffe, a notoriously difficult species to
anaesthetize safely even today in the best of animal parks, but I
injected it with a stiff dose of tranquillizer, then numbed a large
T-shaped area over the left abdominal wall with local
anaesthetic. Abu and the others drifted over to watch as I
disinfected the skin and cut through to the stomach. It was full
of stinking fruit and vegetables, and the overpowering smell of
alcoholic peaches confirmed the cause of the distended bellies.
With my bare hand and arm I reached deep into the digesting
broth, cupped my palm and ladled out handful after handful of
the stuff, making sure as I cast it aside that some would
accidentally splatter my audience’s jibbas. Then I placed a small
quantity of penicillin into the remaining stomach contents to
knock out over-enthusiastic fermenting bacteria and stitched
up. But as I threaded my needle, positioned the layers of
muscle and skin with my forceps and swept the persistent flies
from the operation site I could think of only one thing: the
hyena.

That night I sat alone on the floor of my room to eat my

supper of mutton stew and pitta bread. The giraffes were
almost forgotten as I agonized over the plight of the hyena. If I
broke the padlocks off the kennel, the poor beast could not get
anywhere. I knew the Arabs were giving him food and water
occasionally; he was likely to stay alive for their cruel
amusement for weeks. Then the answer came to me.

By eleven o’clock the Arabs had gone to bed. The farm was
quiet except for the occasional bleat of a goat and the restless
murmurings of drowsing pigeons. After an hour or so I lit my
lantern, took what I needed from my bag and tiptoed out into
the yard. No one stirred. Holding the lantern high to avoid
slipping into the dung heap, I quietly approached the hyena’s
box. I could hear him breathing tensely in the darkness and
could imagine his pulse beginning to race and his shoulder hairs
bristling as he sensed my approach. I pulled the syringe and
injection bottle from my pocket, filled the syringe and blew out
the lantern. Going round to the back of the box, I put a hand
gently through the bars and felt a quivering ham muscle. The
hyena growled lightly. Quickly I jabbed the hypodermic into his
ham and pressed the plunger. He gave a short screech and I
pulled away the empty syringe. I looked round; no one had
been roused by the sound of the “bad dog.”

I crept swiftly back to my room without relighting my lantern,

so I did not see the dung heap until I walked into it. I did not
mind, for as I sat on my mattress decontaminating my shoes
with cotton wool, I knew that the hyena would by now have
passed painlessly into oblivion. Rarely in zoo work do I have to
destroy an animal; even with modern humane methods it is
unpleasant work, bringing death to a living creature. But giving
a shot of lethal T61 to the hyena that dark North African night
was one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done as a
veterinarian.

Next day the giraffes were improving still, and the one on
which I had operated was catching the others up fast. I gave
more injections, and by the second afternoon I was delighted to
see that all bar one, the pregnant female, were on their feet.
They were groggy and only picked at the hay I had told the
men to give them, but at least they were up. “When a giraffe
goes down," Matt Kelly used to tell me, “he never ever gets
up.*’ The pregnant female was running with milk and making
determined but unsuccessful attempts to rise. With any luck I
could get away in a_couple of days.
The third morning, going round the back of the farm buildings
in the direction of the unpleasant hole in the rocks that was our
toilet, I nearly walked straight into a tethered group of six
camels, each with a large bundle of esparto grass on its back.
The nearest spat balefully in my direction. Beyond them, Abu al
Ma’arri and the others were talking intently to four other men,
dressed like themselves in jibbas and skull caps. As I
approached, the strangers began talking furiously in Arabic,
addressing their remarks to Abu and looking suspiciously at
me.

“Salaam aleiktim,” I said.

Only Abu answered, his smile flickering uncertainly. “Aleikum

salaam, Doctor. You come for breakfast? Nasser will make tea
presently and bring it to you.”

The camel men stood silently staring at me. I certainly was not
going to obey the call of nature with this lot watching.

“Merci,” I replied. “After that we must begin darting the

giraffes.” The animals were no longer safe to inject by hand,
except the pregnant female, and I would administer the
necessary drugs by dart-gun.

I walked back to the yard, wondering uneasily what the Arabs

and their new cronies had been nattering about. Twenty
minutes later Nasser appeared with the tea. I drank it while I
loaded my 10 cc darts with chemicals, then went to look at the
animals. The zebras were eating a new consignment of food the
lorry had brought in yesterday, the rhinos were still sleeping
and the giraffes looked in fine fettle. None of the puncture
holes in their bellies seemed to be going the wrong way and the
operation wound on the one animal was healing neatly. I was as
pleased as Punch. The mother-to-be was sitting up alertly and
chewing her cud. Maybe today she would be up.

Suddenly there was a horrible strident scream. My first thought

was, what the hell are they torturing now? But this sounded like
a human and it came from behind the buildings, where the
camels were. I ran out of the yard and round the corner. All the
Arabs, Abu’s band and the strangers, were gathered round the
head of a standing camel. Two men were hanging tightly onto
its leather bridle as it bucked and gurgled. Nearby Abu whirled
round and round, hopping on one foot like a dervish. It was he
who had screamed, I saw, for with his good left hand he
clutched the wrist of his right, a pulped and bloody mass from
which two of the six fingers dangled down, attached only by
shreds of skin. As I watched in amazement the camel suddenly
reared up, arched its neck and, with a bubbling roar, spat out
from its mouth a flat oblong object about the same size and
shape as a tobacco pouch. One of the camel men swiftly .
snatched it up and dropped it down the neck of his jibba, but
not before I had time to see that it was made of oilskin and was
neatly tied with cord. Every one of the men, except Abu, who
continued his distressed dance, had his eyes fixed on me.
Suddenly I realized what was in the pouch and how Abu had
come to have his fingers ground between the powerful molars
of a camel. Fear took a firm hold of my stomach and gouged
deep. I had just glimpsed a rare, hidden, evil thing, the bungling
of one link in a long and filthy chain that stretched from the
poppy fields of Asia to the junkies of Times Square and
Piccadilly Circus.

Abu’s greatcoat was now soaking with blood. The men made
no move towards him. They just stood looking at me. Pointing
at Abu, I said, “Doctor. Mѐdecin trѐis nѐcessaire!”

Abu stopped gyrating and looked at me. He was not smiling:

“Non,” he said firmly. “I will come to your room presently for
attention.”

“But. ..” I began.

“I cannot go to the doctor,” interrupted the injured man.

Hussein stepped forward and I froze to my marrow as he
slowly pointed at me and then, with the same finger, drew a line
across his throat. “Offside,” he said. “Penalty kick.”

Dizzy with fright, I went back to my room and took from my

instrument box the largest scalpel I had. Wrapping a wad of
cotton wool round the cutting end, I stuck it securely down my
sock under cover of my right trouser leg. It was sheer fright,
not melodramatic imagination, that spurred me on as I rammed
a wicked-looking rhinoceros needle on the end of a 10 cc flying
syringe down the barrel of the dart-pistol. Its sharp point poked
from the muzzle. Locking the breech, I cocked the pistol at full
gas pressure. Then I sat on my mattress and laid the puny
weapon within easy reach. I reflected that one of the lesser, but
to me saddest, miseries in the whole squalid affair was that it
was yet another example of the satanic ingenuity with which
Man is prepared to destroy innocent fellow creatures in
furthering his own ends. Those grumpy, imperious, fascinating
camels tethered outside were unwitting couriers of vice. Once
safely across the border into Algeria, they would be slaughtered
and the precious cargo retrieved from their stomachs. I almost
wished there might be some crooked veterinarian in the pay of
the traffickers who, by an operation similar to the one I had
performed on the giraffe, could recover the oilskin packages
less wastefully.

Abu broke into these bizarre daydreams by appearing at the

door of my room. I leapt to my feet, dart-gun in hand, but his
face was haggard and he silently held out his bitten fingers.

“You need a hospital or doctor, you know,” I told him.

He shook his head vigorously. “No. You can do it. Have you
not treated one camel bitten by another?” He stared hard at me.
“Do it and forget it. It is nothing.” Then, deliberately spacing
his words, “It—is—nothing. Please remember that.”

The menace behind Abu’s words hung in the air as I cleaned up

the stumps of the pair of fingers. I was preparing what little I
had in the way of dressings when there was a shout from
outside. Abdul number two came dashing in and jabbered
excitedly in Arabic. Abu said, "The giraffe with calf—she has
got up but has crashed down again.”

Leaving Abu, I pushed through the knot of camel men who

must have been watching the door of my room and dashed
round to the giraffe stockade. There against the wooden fence
lay the female, her legs still and her neck hideously twisted. She
was not breathing and her eyes had the languorous gaze into
infinity that I knew too well. She was dead. In falling she had
broken her neck on the top rail of the fence. Stunned, I stood
for a split second and then shouted to Nasser, who had come
running, “Quick, a knife. Viler

Like a magician, from under his jibba he produced a sharp

stiletto. I took it, jumped over the fence and, running over to
the dead giraffe, for the first time in my life performed the
original Caesarean operation. With a long, raking slash the
womb was revealed, bulging between still' flickering muscle
sheets. I grabbed its glistening outer surface, steadied it, then
cut again quickly and carefully. I thrust my hand in and felt a
warm, slippery forelimb. With no time or need for elegance, I
held the leg tightly and gave a great heave. The ungainly,
tangled body of a baby giraffe rose into the sunlight through
the lengthening split in the womb. I plopped it down onto the
earth and stood gasping with the effort. The little form
twitched. I knelt down and felt the heart. It was beating!

With a wild shout I picked up its hind legs and stood it on its
nose to clear its mouth and nostrils. I slapped its chest, there
was a sneeze, and an eyelid fringed with the most glamorously
long lashes outside Hollywood fluttered. I called Nasser to help
me pick up the heavy creature once again and we shook it with
all our might. Down again. Up again. More slapping of the
chest and then suddenly, wonderfully, the little calf was
breathing stickily but strongly.

Caesar himself had been Born, it was said, in just this manner,
an orphan from the womb. This little fellow was going to live,
and I christened him Julius on the spot. He wriggled and sat up.
His large round dark eyes looked at me, and I wondered
whether, like ducks, baby giraffes are imprinted and
emotionally bound to the first living creature they see.

The whimsy that Julius might be inclined to call me “Momma”

vanished as I heard voices behind me. Looking round I saw the
camel men talking to Hussein and Nasser. They seemed angry,
and one of them pointed briefly in my direction. In the
excitement of Julius’s arrival I had forgotten other, darker
things. With what I hoped was a disarmingly cheerful wave, I
called out, “The baby is hungry. I must take him to my room
and feed him,” and began to half carry, half drag the struggling
giraffe in the direction of the yard. My heart bounded as Julius
and I staggered round the corner.

The yard was empty and there was Nasser’s pick-up truck
parked by the dung heap—with the keys in. Without ceremony
I hauled the baby across the uneven ground and pushed him
like a sack of potatoes over the tailgate of the open vehicle.
Furtively looking round to check that there was still no one
about, I took off my jacket, wrapped it round Julius’s legs and
firmly tied the sleeves together.

Then, with adrenalin flooding through my veins, I ran into my

room, grabbed the dart-gun and my grip and dashed back to
the truck, dropping bottles of medicine, artery forceps and
other bits of equipment on the way. I did not turn back for
them, but as I was about to leap into the driving seat my eye
caught the metal pot of mutton stew for the midday meal
simmering on a wood fire outside the Arabs’ room. As if by
instinct I reached into the grip and fumbled for my small tin of
Altan, a powerful horse and zebra purgative that looks like
cayenne pepper and has very little taste. Stilt I was alone in the
yard. A moment later, Abu al Ma’arri and his friends had
enough Altan in their meal to produce dramatic effects in four
draught horses, and I hoped they would pass a distressing and
cathartic twenty- four hours.

“Compliments of one hyena, you bastards,” I shouted as I

threw away the empty tin and ran yet again to the truck where
Julius lay uncomplaining and wide-eyed. Safely aboard, I turned
on the ignition and pressed the starter button. The engine fired
and I let out the clutch with a bang. With wheels spinning in a
shower of grit, dust and manure we shot forward and charged
out of the yard and up the rutted track. Ten minutes later, with
a little giraffe sucking gently on my right ear, I roared through
the main street of Sbeitla. With only one stop for fuel, Julius
and I went flat out for Tunis.
Half a day later, weary and covered in dust, I was in the office
of Herr Mueller, the surprised curator of Tunis Zoo. Julius
needed expert rearing and with luck I would be on the next
plane for Paris. “Take good care of him,” I said before I left.
“He’s my boy!”

I just had time to call on M. Taouche in his lemon blossom-

scented garden and to tell my story to my client. When I came
to the bit about Abu al Ma’arri and how he went back to having
ten fingers like the rest of us, M. Taouche closed his eyes and
chewed energetically on his cheroot. Whether he was involved
with the sinister affair I could only guess. He said nothing
except to thank me and to promise me a bonus along with my
fee when I rendered my account. That account was never paid:
three weeks later M. Taouche died of a heart attack.
11

Of Bishops and Babies

Christianity, unlike some of the world’s other great religions,
has no particular theology of animals. After establishing that
the Deity constructed whales and other marine creatures on the
fifth day and turned his attention to terrestrial fauna on the
sixth, it has fussed and feuded pretty exclusively over one often
rather unattractive and unreliable species of naked ape. True,
Thomas Aquinas split scholarly hairs over the nature of the
brutish soul, and Francis would have been on the Assisi branch
committee of the RSPCA if there had been such a thing in the
twelfth century; but Protestant bishops can be run to earth in
the huntin’, shootin’, fishin* fraternity, devout Orthodox
peasants of the Mediterranean trap small songbirds by the
million, Latin Catholics leave Mass to attend the ritual torture
of black bulls on a Sunday afternoon. I find it odd. The more I
have studied, looked at and handled animals, seen their intrinsic
beauty, the perfection with which they spin their strands in the
web of life, the more I have tilted towards a unified theology of
all living creatures, the scorpion and the maggot just as much as
the tiger or the whale. Dead, beneath my autopsy knife, they
reveal not just themselves but also what I am: part of the all-
purposeful, all-beautiful, endless wheel of growth and change,
of death and regeneration. Nothing is chaos. Look close, with
seeing eyes, and even a blob of pus is a wondrous, active,
ordered microcosm.
The Church of England often exhibits a rather dotty concern
for animals, however, which I experienced soon after my return
from Tunisia when a vicar friend of mine in a country parish
across the Pennines in Yorkshire invited me to read the lesson
at a special church service for pets. The occasion was graced by
the presence of a bishop, who preached a sermon full of round
plummy aphorisms about sparrows and their welfare-state
existence, Daniel’s way with big cats and how much happier we
all would be if we lived like armadilloes, although for the life of
me I could not make out what it was about these nocturnal
miniature tanks that so impressed the gaitered cleric as
epitomizing the Christian ideal. To illustrate his point he
produced a small, curled-up representative of the species from
beneath his purple cassock. It had been borrowed from a
nearby zoo, and its dramatic appearance had an electrifying
effect on the chancel full of nodding choirboys.

Unfortunately His Lordship mishandled the armour- plated ball

and dropped it, whereupon it rolled down the pulpit steps,
galvanizing the choirboys still more. A full complement leapt
unceremoniously from their seats in both front rows and
scrabbled to retrieve the creature, which made off towards the
organ. The armadillo won by a short head, nipped behind the
forest of pipes and was not seen again until halfway through
Evensong a week later.

The young congregation would never have guessed from the

bishop’s admonition, “In being kind to beasts we are
honouring the work of God’s hands,” that the reverend
gentleman hunted two days a week and was the proud
possessor of a well-used pair of Purdey shotguns. There were
children with dogs and cats, budgies and rabbits. Some
clustered outside the porch with their ponies. Doting parents,
sly-eyed schoolboys with grass snakes in jars and toads in their
pockets, girls clutching goldfish bowls, all sat side by side in the
pews of the seventeenth-century stone church. There was one
lad with a monkey, a chunky, muscle-bound pig-tailed macaque.
It continually raised its eyebrows towards the preacher in the
typical mildly challenging grimace of macaques, which made it
seem like a sceptical, possibly agnostic listener. Its owner kept a
firm grip on the leash with which it was restrained.

Blessing animals is, I suppose, a cut above doing the same thing
to motor bikes or lawn mowers. Services for pets at least
provide the small boys who attend such gatherings with the
hope that something might turn up. On this occasion it already
had, and the absconding armadillo brought back memories of
forfeiting my place on the annual choir outing to Blackpool: a
white mouse released under the long blue cassock of a middle-
aged lady chorister at St. Edmund’s Church had resulted in the
unusual spectacle of the lady vaulting clean over the choir stall
in the middle of the reading of the banns and streaking off into
the vestry.

“. . . and so I leave you with these words. Kindness, patience,

goodwill to all creatures, not least the wonderful creatures that
bring us so much joy. In the name of the Father” etc, etc. The
bishop came to the end of his address. A final hymn was sung
and everyone trooped outside. The bishop was going to move
among the crowd assembled in the churchyard and bless the
beasts—human and otherwise.

In the churchyard it was warm and sunny. My part in the

proceedings was over. I stood watching the milling crowd and
saying good-bye to the vicar before making my way back over
the hills to Rochdale. The bishop was in a jolly, expansive
mood as he wandered through the chattering throng, his right
hand raised in benediction. He cooed to the budgies thrust up
towards his face, tugged the ears of some of the dogs and had
his picture taken as he sat perilously on a donkey. All at once
the boy who had brought the macaque barged through the
crowd waving a leather leash, at the end of which there was no
sign of a monkey. The press of jostling humans and animals
parted like the Red Sea before Moses as a squat brown figure
bounded between them. The pig-tailed macaque shot down the
church path, through the ancient lych-gate and straight through
the partly open window of a sparkling new Bentley parked
directly outside. He was pursued by his owner, closely followed
by all the small boys present, and behind came the rest of us.

Inside the car the monkey was having a fine time. He quickly
pulled open the door of the glove compartment and spilled out
all the contents. A tin of pipe tobacco lying on the front seat
was thrown out of the window, and the plastic cover of the
interior light was prized off and bitten in two.
“Harry!” shouted the monkey’s owner. “Stop that and come
here 1” He opened the car door a fraction.

Harry bared his wicked-looking canine teeth, grimaced as

histrionically as any villain of Japanese theatre, and savagely bit
the right hand of his owner as it moved towards him. Bleeding
profusely and in obvious pain, the gallant lad advanced his
other hand. Harry grabbed it, pulled it up to his jaws and
lacerated the palm with a slash of his fangs. The poor boy fell
back and the door was slammed to. The vicar led the casualty
away.

By now the bishop had pushed through the crowd. “I say,” he

said, his genial expression fading fast, “that’s my car, you
know.” He looked through the window at the macaque, which
by now was flying round the interior like an angry bluebottle in
a jam jar. “We really ought to get the chappie out of there.” No
one volunteered.

Then Harry spotted the dashboard, a surface bristling with

interesting knobs and levers, glinting bits of chrome, plastic and
glass. Just beneath the dashboard was an inviting twist of
coloured wire which the inquiring mind of the would-be
engineer could not ignore. As he reached down and pulled it
there was a satisfying click, and the panel covering the tangle of
assorted gadgetry behind the dashboard fell away.

“We must get that monkey outofmy car,” said the bishop, pale
but calm.
The jungle of gleaming electronics now exposed fascinated
Harry. With one powerful leathery hand he grasped a bunch of
wires and plugs and pulled. They came away and bits of metal
and plastic tinkled onto the floor. The electric clock stopped.

Harry looked at the bishop, raised his eyebrows sceptically and

pressed the horn button. As its wires had just been
disconnected it did not work, Harry pulled and the horn button
broke off. He threw it out of the window.
 “Please, sir, you haven’t blessed Chirpy yet,” said a little girl,
worming her way through to the bishop’s side and straining
upwards with a fistful of budgerigar.

“Hrumph,” said His Lordship.

Meanwhile I was marvelling at the speed with which a small

monkey was dismantling a solidly built vehicle. If a gang
ofHarrys could be trained to work as fast assembling the
various pieces of metalwork that now lay around the inside of
the car, the labour problems of the automobile industry would
be a thing of the past.

“Somebody do something! This bloody monkey is tearing my

car apart!”

“Please, sir, you haven’t done Chirpy,” persisted the little girl,
her budgerigar by now almost suffocated in her grip."

“Next year, next year!” shouted the bishop, purple-faced now

as well as purple-robed. He patted the child so hard on the
head that I expected to see her reel away crosseyed.

I must confess I had thoroughly enjoyed the unique experience.

The inside of the car was now in utter ruin. Harry was sitting in
the back seat, looking round for anything he might have
missed. Stirring myself, I decided I must do something. Pig-
tailed macaques are one of the toughest and most dangerous
species of monkey, and to tackle one single-handed in the close
confines of a car would be foolhardy. I had no dart-gun with
me, but I did have some anaesthetic in my car and plenty of
syringes. I sent the vicar’s wife to fetch a banana while I
inspected the partly opened car window. The gap had been big
enough for Harry to get in, so he could get out as well if he
wished, and I could not wind the window up without opening
the door. I sent a choirboy into the church for one of the thick
hassocks, or kneeling pads. “Now,” I said when he returned,
“get up on the roof of the car just above the window, and when
I give you the word jam the hassock hard down over the side.”

Enthusiastically the boy scrambled up the gleaming paint-

work. The bishop leaned against the lych-gate groaning, a hand
across his eyes.

I held a piece of banana through the window. Harry sniffed at

it, passed it as undoctored and ate it. It tasted good. I proffered
another piece, holding it just outside the window gap. Harry
slowly put his hand out to take it. “Jam it down!” I yelled to the
boy on the roof as I seized Harry’s hand and pulled with all my
strength. Harry screamed and struggled vigorously but the boy
with the hassock had narrowed the gap enough to stop me
pulling an agitated twenty-five pounds of steely muscle and
teeth completely out of the car. In half a second I had plunged
the hypodermic into Harry’s arm and whammed down the
plunger. I released my grip and Harry retreated onto the rear
window ledge, hollering furiously. In two minutes he began to
drool, his eyes became dreamy and he emptied his bowels over
the bishop’s top hat. In another two minutes it was all over;
Harry fell into a.drowsing heap on the back seat and I opened
the door to pull him out. We had been lucky— he would never
be taken in that way again.

There was no hope of getting the bishop’s car to start. It had to

be towed to the next town for major repairs. I offered to drop
His Lordship at the station on my way home.

“Many thanks, Doctor,” he said as I stopped outside the ticket

office. “Wouldn’t have your job for the world. Damned
brutes!”

If the Right Reverend gentleman’s last two words are literally

true, Old Nick is going to have a hell of a time dealing with
Harry one of these days.

Despite my experience with the bishop and his Bentley, in the

normal run of things I do not have to cross swords with the
Established Church. With other faiths things can be different.
There are many Moslem Pakistani folk living in the north of
England, and at certain religious festivals they slaughter lambs.
The rules lay down that the sacrifices must on no account be
eaten by human beings, but it is perfectly acceptable for the
lambs to be fed to wild beasts. At these times vans containing
beautifully dressed and wholesome carcasses arrive at zoos and
Pakistani gentlemen request that the meat- be fed to the big
cats. Solemnly the lamb is unloaded into the meat store and the
van driver goes away, happy in the knowledge that the tenets of
the faith have been upheld. Later, nominally Christian zoo
keepers can be seen assembling in the zoo kitchen, armed with
meat saws and cleavers and ready to decide who gets what for
their family’s Sunday joints.

The Moslem calendar was pinned up in the office of one head

keeper whose animals I treated, with red lines marking the
weeks when the staff could be sure to dine daily on mutton.
Even the youngest assistant keeper of the Pets’ Corner could
tell you when Ramadan ended, although I doubt ifhe even
knew what month Easter was in. Beside the head keeper’s
calendar were pinned two other pieces of paper. One listed the
staffin order of precedence for the share-out:

Zoo director: Loin, 2 shoulders, 2 legs, breast

Veterinarian: 2 shoulders, 2 legs, also likes kidneys,

breast

Head keeper: 2 shoulders, I leg, liver, breast

Asst head keeper: 1 leg, kidneys

Head bird keeper: 4 cutlets

Reptile keeper: 1 cutlet, head

and so on down to:

Trainee keeper: liver.

The other piece of paper was most important. When the lamb
came, it came in abundance, and the head keeper was hard put
to it to see that his staffs taste for the meat did not become
jaded. It read;

Suggestions for all staff:

Mondays: Lamb Argenteuil

Tuesdays: Carr6 d’agneau Dordonnaise

Wednesdays: Lamb Kashmir

Thursdays: Kebabs

Fridays: Navarin of lamb

Saturdays: Lamb and vegetable casserole

Sundays: Epigrammes d’agneau

N.B. Recipes for the above can be had from Nellie in the cash
office.

Nellie kept a pile of duplicated instructions, for which useful

service she received a choice roasting shoulder from the head
keeper every Saturday during the sacrificing season.

Came the sad day when one of the Pakistani meat donors
forgot his gloves and returned to the zoo stores shortly after
making a delivery. Inside he found a dozen amateur butchers
merrily dividing the spoils according to the list of precedence
under the eagle eye of the head keeper. The scene that ensued,
with the Pakistani snatching up a chopper and advancing
hysterically on the red-faced sacrilegists, could have been the
start of a holy war. Luckily the zoo director made an opportune
appearance (coming to collect the ingredients for his favourite
crown roast with cranberry stuffing) and the matter was
temporarily shelved.

Some days later a polite Pakistani called at my home and

introduced himself as the imam of the community whose
sacrifice had been profaned by the zoo. Wild beasts were not
particularly common in the north of England, at least not ones
big enough to devour whole sheep carcasses, so the zoos were
an essential means of disposal. Dumping on the municipal
rubbish tip or incineration were out of the question. Could I
advise him professionally?

Much as I had enjoyed my illicit share of meat, I was ethically

bound to give him the best possible advice. “When you have
sacrified the lambs,” I said, “splash some non-poisonous green
vegetable dye over the carcasses. That will not harm lions and
tigers but will render the meat unappetizing to humans.”

The imam thought for a moment. “Yes, I can recommend that

to my people. Such colouring will not defile the sacrifice.”
It was settled. Supplies of sacrificed lambs to the zoo resumed.
The big cats enjoyed the new arrangements and the threat of a
jehad erupting in the zoo grounds receded. But the head keeper
and his staff had the very devil of a job cutting any uncoloured
meat out of the carcasses, and I noticed that the precedence list
in his office had been altered, Now the very bottom entry on
the list read;

Veterinarian: i kidney (if any left over).

The zoo which narrowly escaped being decimated by a holy

war was one of several in the north of England which I was by
now visiting regularly. Belle Vue was still my major zoo client,
however, as it had been throughout the five years since I took
over the care of its animals from Norman Whittle, and there
Matt Kelly had noticed something odd about the way Simba, a
four-month-old lion cub, was moving.

Simba led a happy, carefree life with his parents and brothers
and sisters until one day, for no obvious reason, his father
suddenly bit him on the back. The wound did not look bad,
just a pair of small puncture holes in the skin, but the cub
started to become wobbly on his hind legs. When Matt called
me in I found from an X-ray of Simba’s back that he was
becoming steadily paralysed; one of the adult lion’s teeth had
penetrated down to his backbone and a spinal abscess had
developed.

I anaesthetized Simba and took him back to Rochdale in my car

and there explored the area deep in the lumbar region of his
spine, where the dirty tooth had set up a nasty pocket of
diseased, pus-filled bone. With a scalpel and a special spoon-
shaped gouge I removed the infected bone and put a small
rubber drain tube into the wound. Stitched up, Simba looked
like an inflatable toy lion with a red rubber valve projecting out
of the middle of his back, ready for someone to attach a bicycle
pump. Now for a long period of postoperative nursing; Simba
was partially paralysed and incontinent, symptoms which would
not go overnight. I needed somewhere to hospitalize him
where I could keep a personal eye on him, and it was Shelagh
who came up with the answer.

Our home in Rochdale, a Jacobean stone farmhouse on the

edge of the moor, had one acre of walled market garden
attached. Shelagh decided to build a lion hospital there. To the
passer-by, and eventually to the tax-man, who considered the
lion hospital a poor cover story to use in industrial Lancashire
when we were claiming the building expenses, it looks like a
wooden garden shed. It is now the home of Henry, my
favourite and most intelligent goat, who no doubt considers it a
perfect goat shed. It was erected, however, Henry and the tax
man notwithstanding, as a bona fide, custom- built lion
hospital. There Simba would be nursed back to health and to
full use ofhis limbs and bladder.

This was the sort of thing Shelagh loves. While I attended to

the medical side, giving the daily injections and checking the
reflexes, Shelagh was Simba’s nurse, physiotherapist, cook,
companion and latrine attendant all rolled into one. Every two
hours she meticulously bathed the protesting cub in baby soap
and water so that his hind parts would not become sore
because of his incontinence, dried him on one of a specially
commandeered bunch of my bath towels and smeared the
vulnerable areas with silicone ointment. Nourished on an
appetizing steak tartare mixture that had me drooling at the
mouth, and encouraged to use his legs outside on the grass
when it was fine, Simba gradually mended.

In these days when lion cubs are cheaper than ten a penny,
when the boxes they are carried in cost more than themselves
and they are worth a hundred times more as a dead skin than
they could possibly be alive, it is sad to reflect that the very
success of breeding and safely rearing lion cubs in zoos and
safari parks over recent years has made some lion owners
regard these big cats as characterless and as expendable as
sausages out of a machine. I know they are lazy fellows but, like
every other animal, the more you know them the more
fascinating their ways and workings are seen to be. That was
something Shelagh and I quickly learnt from Simba.

After a summer of Shelagh’s physiotherapy, and to the relief of

the farm cats who could not pursue voles in the market garden
without finding themselves the quarry of a gleefully growling
creature with sandy hair and enormous paws, it was time for
the fully recovered lion to go back to the zoo. First I took him
to make his and my debut on television. We were going to be
interviewed about the cub’s paralysis and subsequent recovery.
It became obvious when I led him into the studios on a dog
lead that Simba, by now grown to an impressive size, was by no
means filled with awe at passing the portals of the Temple of
the Holy Box. An extra in full costume and makeup as a
Roman senator came fussing down a corridor towards us. Busy
primping himself in a small hand mirror, he had not noticed the
lion ambling along by my side. His sandalled feet came level
with us and Simba decided it was time for a bit of provocative
rough-housing. As the senator passed, the lion clubbed with
sheathed claws at the back of his knees, buckling them and
bringing him crashing to the floor in a flurry of toga and
velveteen jockey briefs. Apologizing, I helped the unharmed
but fluttering actor to his feet. Then he saw Simba sitting
blandly on his haunches waiting for me to resume our
exploration.

“Ooh, my God, darling, what’s that?” he exclaimed, clutching

me with both hands like a scrawny vulture. “Have props
brought a real lion in for the Julius Caesar?" He scurried off,
theatrically casting the loose end of his toga over his shoulder.

We found the studio where the interviewer was waiting for us.
Simba did not like the lights nor the way the sound man
seemed to tease him with the boom microphone, swinging it to
and fro above his head. It was just out of reach; perhaps, Simba
thought, it was some sort of game. He decided to find out.
With a great leap upwards he managed to get one set of claws
on the microphone before the sound man could whisk it away.
The wire-gauze casing of the microphone crashed to the floor.
Simba looked up with watery eyes; not a bad game, this.

When I eventually settled in my seat with the lion at my side,

Simba had a call of nature. Waddling away from me into the
middle of the floor, he squatted and relieved his bowels. Within
moments the studio reeked with the heavy and unforgettable
odour of lion droppings. I retrieved the animal and asked for a
shovel and bucket. “Don’t worry yourself,” they told me, “it
will be dealt with.” Minutes went by and it wasn’t. The smell
got stronger. Two men came into the studio, walked over to
the pile of droppings, talked for a couple of minutes over it and
then went out. The droppings continued to sit noisomely in the
middle of the studio floor. People wandered around with
contorted features and handkerchiefs over their noses,
regarding the monument to Simba’s healthy colonic function
from a respectful distance. I asked again for something with
which to clear up the mess. No one seemed inclined to listen.

“Now come on,” I said loudly, beginning to lose my patience,

“all I need is a shovel and I’ll do the cleaning up in a trice.”

An elegantly dressed girl assistant hurried over to me. “Please,

Dr. Taylor, please,” she said earnestly, taking my arm, “don't
get involved. It’s the unions.”

“Unions—what unions?” I asked incredulously.

“Well, the question is, which union in the building should be

responsible for cleaning up the, er, stuff?”

“But it can be done in less time thair it takes to tell. What

unions are involved?”
“There’s the union that the television centre’s normal cleaning
staff belong to and there’s the quite separate union for the
people inside the studio here, the scene shifters and so on.”

“And you mean they can’t agree who clears up the, er, stuff?”

“No”

“Both unions want the privilege of shovelling that lot?”

“Well, not exactly. You see this type of, well, dirt is extra-
ordinary according to the rule book. It’s not only who does the
cleaning, but how much extra pay will the chosen ones get.”

More folk were now inspecting the mound of excrement which

was the centre of the dispute and walking in circles round it,
conversing intently. It might have been a suspected bomb.
Another girl assistant came in with an air-freshener aerosol and
filled the room with the stench of cheap rose perfume. Mixed
with the existing odour of lion it made a still more repulsive
blend.

“Well, what’s going on now?” I growled in disgust.

“They’re having a meeting in the corridor outside. Then it will

be decided.”

Time went by. The girl drifted off. “Oh, look here,” I said to
the assembled company, without addressing anyone in
particular, “if it will ease matters, couldn’t I as a paid-up
member of the Lion Shitshifters Brotherhood get you off the
hook by removing the stuff with a piece of newspaper?”

“ ’Fraid not, old boy. You’re not a member of the right union,”
replied a voice.

Another ten minutes went by, with Simba’s troublemaking

offering lying centre stage, before a man came into the studio
and announced that the matter had been settled. In just under
ten seconds two fellows with dustpans and brushes had the
studio floor clear and sparkling.

“Which union won?” I asked the girl assistant.

“The scene shifters. They argued that the, er, stuff should be
regarded as a prop, not as ordinary dirt. Eventually that was
accepted. The lion, er, stuff was a prop so they shifted it. As it
was a prop extraordinaire and could be classed as dirty work in
the rule book, they got a bonus.”

I wished Shelagh had had a union from which to claim a bonus

for all the lion, er, stuff that she had removed from Simba’s
convalescent home in the market garden at Rochdale.

There is of course a special satisfaction in helping zoo babies

such as Simba, so I was delighted when Katja, one of the Belle
Vue chimpanzees, presented Robert the thumbremover with a
daughter. Christened Topaz, this sister for Lee, in whose bed
the remains of my pink shirt were still to be seen, had
something of her brother’s adventurous nature and an apparent
interest in race relations! The quarters for the orangutans and
chimpanzees are side by side at Belle Vue, although they are
separated by a solid brick wall so the two groups are unable to
see one another. At the front of the centrally heated indoor
compartments are widely spaced and decorative iron grilles, and
outside these there is armoured glass sheeting dividing the
animals from the humans and keeping airborne human bugs
and viruses at bay. Between the grilles and the glass is a narrow
passageway that runs without interruption the length of the
house.

Normally baby chimpanzees do not venture far from their

mothers, and although we realized that they were small enough
to squeeze through the grille at the cage front, we had never
known one do so—until Topaz came along. She would run
happily in and out of the cage, playing some game such as
chasing her shadow and passing between the metal bars with
ease. Katja, her mother, did not seem to mind, and the little
animal always returned after a few' moments’ expedition into
what for her was the outside world. But one day, as Shelagh
and I were standing w'ith Len outside the plate glass watching
young Topaz play, she suddenly did something new, something
that made us all gasp as we instantly appreciated the possibly
serious consequences.

Leaving the chimp cage she moved along the passageway to the
left until she found herself for the first time in her life standing
outside the living room of the orangutans. She was fascinated.
There through the grille was the great Harold, patriarch and
sage of his group, sitting in the middle of the domestic circle
with Jane and his other wives tending the orang babies, doing a
bi t of grooming of their lord and master and sorting through
the day’s ration of fruit and vegetables which Len had carefully
mixed with their wood-wool bedding to set them a sort of
treasure hunt to pass the time. The three of us stood in growing
apprehension as little Topaz stared goggle-eyed at the covey of
chestnut-coloured men of the woods, as their name means in
Malay.

Of the three types of great ape, gorilla, chimpanzee and

orangutan, orangs have always been my favourite. They are a
peaceable, gentle and tolerant species, and I have become much
closer to them than to the saturnine gorillas or mercurial
chimps. Nevertheless they can be swiftly vicious and immensely
strong if provoked, as when Len had lost a toe and half a shoe
to a liverish Harold. It was impossible to predict what might
happen to a little foreigner like Topaz who suddenly came
upon the scene. Harold and the family had already noticed the
visitor waiting without. It was too late for us to do anything like
rushing round to the back of the house. We might as well stay
where we were, keep our fingers crossed and hope that the
young chimp would quickly wander back to Katja before she
was set upon as an intruder.

Having gazed at the family group from outside the bars, Topaz
apparently found it most inviting, for without more ado she
popped through the grille and shuffled up to the mighty Harold
with her lips drawn back and her teeth showing in the grin that
indicates friendship among chimpanzees. Now for it, I thought.
If Harold or one of the females was in a bad mood, little Topaz
might be pulled limb from limb before our eyes.

In fact, quite the reverse happened. The baby chimp was

accepted into the orang family circle as if she was one of their
young daughters who had just come home from school. She
took her place at the feet of Harold, who looked down his nose
at her and stuck out one index finger, apparently for her to play
with. He never moved another muscle. The baby orangs came
and sat next to her and solicitously arranged the wood-wool
bedding round her bottom to make her more comfortable. Jane
half peeled a banana and ihrust it into Topaz’s face. It was a
wonderful spectacle. Here was Uncle Harold playing perfect
host and benefactor to his favourite niece from next door; you
would not have guessed that he had never before clapped eyes
on her. Topaz enjoyed it immensely, and before long was
sitting on Uncle Harold’s capacious pot belly and gleefully
wrapping his long tresses of red hair about her. Harold
indulged her like a sultan with one of his numerous offspring.

Shelagh and I stayed watching the touching sight for half an

hour. Then we saw Katja come to the grille of the adjoining
cage and start chattering anxiously. She could almost have been
calling to her infant, “Come on back home now, Topaz. You
really can’t presume on too much of Uncle Harold’s time. Be a
good girl and say thank you politely. There will always be
another day.”

Topaz slid off Harold’s belly, put a finger to the lips of the
female orangs in a gesture of closeness and went back the way
she had come. Katja gathered her up in her arms, far less hairy
than those of Uncle Harold, and took her back to father
Robert, who does not possess Harold’s belly either. Were they
saying to her, “Well, tell us all about the folk next door, and did
you have a good time?”

So began a delightful association. When Robert and Katja were

busy or had had enough of the ever-active chimp, Topaz would
slope off and spend a few hours with the neighbours. On at
least one occasion she was seen to take Uncle Harold a present
of a carrot.

The visiting only stopped when Topaz grew too large to slip
between the bars of the grille, but by that time she had other
things outside to interest her. Ray Legge liked to take her on his
rounds through the zoo and would some times let her sit with
him in his office when he did his paperwork. She revelled in
new places and new faces, and was particularly interested in a
group of Arabian camels that had come into quarantine at Belle
Vue some months before. They were a sorry sight when they
arrived. Everyone was thoroughly infested with the
microscopic little mite that causes sarcoptic mange, a very
common skin disease of camels that is related to human
scabies. We began an intensive programme to try to rid the
grumpy animals of the troublesome complaint. We sprayed
them and dipped them and anointed the bleeding areas each
day with soothing creams and ointments, but the mites had
burrowed deep into the skin and were protected from
chemicals by all the thickening and scaliness they had
produced. In the end I decided to bring on the big guns of
organo-phosphorus insecticides, helping them to penetrate the
layers over the mites by scrubbing off the scales with specially
bought yard brushes and hot water.

Topaz accompanied Ray on his many visits to supervise the

keepers brushing and scrubbing the insecticides into the
camels, and she became familiar with their routine of filling
buckets with hot water, adding the chemicals and then applying
them vigorously to the bodies and legs of the diseased
dromedaries. One day after this had been going on for several
weeks an assistant keeper in the great ape house rang Ray’s
office in a panic. He admitted his fault right away —he had left
the door to Topaz’s cage open while cleaning it—and now he
had to report that the young chimp had disappeared
somewhere into the zoo grounds. It was not that she was in any
way a dangerous or unpredictable animal, she posed no threat
to any child or little old lady that she might meet on her travels,
but what might happen if she naively paid a visit to the lion
compound or the polar bear pit? She might not be as lucky
there as she had been with Uncle Harold.

A full search was started, and keepers combed every section of

the zoo from aquarium to elephant house. Eventually Topaz
was found. It was the keeper of the camels who sent for Ray to
come and collect the fugitive, and quite a sight greeted the zoo
director when he went into the camel house. Topaz had
obviously been fascinated by all this business of treating the
camels, and after escaping from her cage she had- gone to their
house to help us out with the anti-mange treatment. There she
stood, in the middle of a group of camels that towered above
her, but which had so far apparently tolerated her presence and
had not begun covering her with ejected stomach contents,
their normal sign of disapproval. The little ape had decided to
give them a good scrubbing down—if the humans were making
such heavy weather of it, she would see what a sharp young
chimpanzee with muscles and application could do. She had
pulled a fire bucket full of water into the thick of the forest of
camels’ legs and had armed herself with one of the keepers’
sweeping brushes.

As Ray and the camel keeper watched, Topaz dipped the brush
into the fire bucket and then, constantly displaying the wry
grimace of appeasement and keeping up a fussy chatter, which
was presumably her way of exhorting the camels to stand still,
she scrubbed away at the limbs and the undersurfaces of the
bellies all around her. She continued doing this after the
humans arrived, pausing only occasionally to look over her
shoulder at them as if to assure herself that her efforts to help
were not going unnoticed by her superiors. It is hard, wet,
repetitive work dressing camels and other hoofed stock for
mange, so perhaps one day such chores might be carried out by
trained groups of chimpanzee veterinary auxiliaries!
It was not quite the end of the affair when Topaz was safely
restored to the great ape house. One week later she began to
show signs of itchiness on her arms and chest, and I found that
she had broken out in a very fine rash. At first I thought it was
an allergic reaction to something she had eaten, but tests
showed that she had contracted the mange parasite from the
camels. Topaz had scabies. She was not very pleased when it
was her turn to be thoroughly lathered and bathed in the
special shampoo every few days but, as I told her, picking up
such complaints is the sort of thing that a chimpanzee has got
to learn to expect when she embarks on a career as a zoo vet.
12

Lee
As if not to be outdone by his sister, Topaz’s elder brother Lee
was demanding a good deal of my attention at about this time.
It was he, resourceful and innovative as ever, who proved to
me that at least one hairy little ape, born without pockets and
not in the usual run of things issued with a wallet, lunch box or
handbag, could give some substance to the ribald fancy about
where a monkey keeps his nuts.

I was driving through Belle Vue’s grounds on my way home

one day after a long session of anointing snakes with a cream to
destroy skin parasites when Len, the ape keeper, waved me
down. With Len you never knew. Not one to fuss over trifles,
he would stroll up and quietly announce the advent of some
dire emergency with inexhaustible sangfroid. Matt Kelly would
buzz about, crimson-faced, teeth clicking and neck veins
bulging like an apoplectic leprechaun, when a crisis broke
among the animals, but Len in the same situation would make a
Trappist reading his breviary seem like a hysteric. Being flagged
down by Len, calm as you please, might mean that all the tigers
had literally “gone over the wall” or that the elephant was in
difficulty delivering quintuplets.

Winding the car window down, I asked, “What can I do for

you, Len?”
“Lee, Dr. Taylor. He’s bristling,”

Hedgehogs bristle. Porcupines make a fine and flam boyant art

of bristling. Dogs when they are in that sort of mood bristle.
Chimpanzees do not. Apprehensive, irate or fighting mad, their
shiny black hair stays as flat as a pancake.

“Bristling? What do you mean?”

“He’s sprouting straw, sort of. His back end. His bottom.” Len
blinked and scratched his head. “Keeps putting pieces up, er,
inside his rectum. Bits of twig too. I just don’t know what’s got
into him. I’m frightened he might do himself some injury.”

I got out of the car and walked over to the great ape house with
the keeper. Robert leered at me as I went by, and the great
Harold, supine in his sunlit seraglio as his womenfolk
conducted his toilet, blew a friendly gobbet of saliva in my
direction. Lee was sitting on a branch in his open-air quarters,
throwing bits of banana skin at pigeons on the edge of the
parapet above him. Lee is not a bird-lover and was not good-
humouredly feeding the birdies. He was vainly trying to knock
one down, a feat which he had achieved at least twice before,
using more potent ground-to-air missiles in the form of half-
apples.

“See what I mean?” said Len, pointing towards Lee’s butt

where it hung over the branch. “He’s bristling.”
Sure enough, Lee’s nether portion was sprouting a fistful of
stems, stalks and similar bits of vegetation. Pieces of straw and
thin twig projected from the chimp’s anus, making a stubby
corona.

“Are yousure they aren’t bits passing through his bowels?” I

asked. "Undigested fibrous pieces that he’s got jammed?”

“Oh, no. There’s no question about it. Lee puts them in there
like that. I’ve watched him at it for more than a week now.
Doesn’t seem to bother him, but I’m worried he might damage
himself internally. Why does he do it, Doctor?”

Why indeed? Lee looked for all the world as if he was growing
an embryonic tail. Had he been watching the pigeons so long
that he had delusions of one day taking to the air? After fixing
himself up with an airworthy straw tail, would he launch
himself from the top of his tree one day, long arms flapping
wildly, and- pursue the pigeons in their own element? A
chimpanzee-versus-pigeon dogfight in the sky above the zoo
would pull in the crowds on a summer afternoon. Sternly I put
such whimsy aside and considered the possibilities. An itchy
bottom? Worms?

“Has he been showing any sign of itchiness, Len? Scratching or

rubbing himself?”
“No, I don’t think so. He seems to select straw and twigs with
some care and, well, just hide them there, as if it’s a handy place
to keep the collection.”

My immediate suspicion was that Lee had pinworm itch and

was using the straw to scratch the irritating area. “I’ll leave you
some worming syrup, Len,” I said. “It’s got a nice fruity flavour
which chimps don’t usually object to. Dose him with it. If he’s
got pinworms, that should do the trick. I’ll look at him again in
a week. With any luck he’ll be bristle-free and unadorned by
then.”

One week later Lee was as healthy as could be. And he still had
his tail. If anything it was somewhat denser and more luxuriant.

“He’s still got a thatched bottom,” said Len blandly. It was true;
Lee’s posterior had a hint of harvest festival about it, of dying
country crafts like straw “dollies” and the ancient custom of
well dressing in Derbyshire parishes once visited by the plague.

The other chimps in the house had not copied the fetish, so I
decided to see if I could find out more by closer examination.
Half an hour after I had slipped a stiff shot of tranquillizer into
his mid-morning cup of hot chocolate, Lee was sprawled
somnolently in the forked branches of his tree, his eyes glazed
and his lower lip drooping. Len and I fished him out ofhis
arbour and turned him upside down. Carefully I pulled the
cache of straw stems and twigs out of his rectum, put them to
one side and looked inside him with an auriscope, an
instrument designed for looking down people’s ears but which
comes in handy for other more exotic orifices such as dolphins’
blowholes and koala bears’ pouches. The foreign bodies did not
appear to have damaged the lining of the lower bowel, nor was
there any sign of parasites of itchy inflammation.

I picked up some of the short straw pieces that Lee had

collected and inspected them. Turning them over in my fingers,
I discovered something that made my eyes widen. Even Len
gave a low whistle of surprise. Lee had not been decorating
himself, rooting for parasites or even trying to fly. If anything
he had been taking a leaf out of the book of those luckless
felons who, until the end of the nineteenth century, were
condemned to serve their sentences on French prison ships.
Living in the most abominable conditions among murderers,
thieves and other desperate characters, they would safeguard
their precious personal possessions—a knife blade perhaps, a
flint, a needle or a few rolled scraps of paper—in the hollowed-
out marrow of a bone. This plan, as it was called, was then
hidden by being thrust deep into the recesses of the owner’s
lower colon.

Lee’s pieces of straw and twig were his form of plan and the
booty he was concealing, not from convicts but from a wily
bunch of chimpanzee gastronomes, was sunflower seeds. Each
day Len provided the apes with a few handfuls of dried
sunflower seeds, rich in essential oils and other nutriments.
These were especially fancied by the chimpanzees, who would
root through their food the moment it arrived, trying to pick
out and eat as many of the black and white seeds as they could
find. The nimblest and deftest got most. Lee, quite amazingly,
had taken matters much further and had provided a unique
demonstration of the ability of these advanced primates to use
tools.

The straws that lay in the palm of my hand had been split
longitudinally. Neatly inserted into the hollow centre of each
stem was a row of sunflower seeds. The twigs had not proved
as handy. They too had been split at points and seeds pushed in
towards the centre but, not being hollow, they had not made
such excellent plans as the straws. Altogether, Lee had a hoard
of sixty-seven sunflower seeds in his little bundle. There was no
question of their having got there accidentally; the chimp must
have put them there after rations had been issued, no doubt
gobbling down as many again at the same time. The ones in the
straws and twigs were for a rainy day or at least for a beanfeast
in the middle of the night when, with only the peacock’s eerie
cry breaking the quiet of the sleeping zoo, Lee could stealthily
retrieve his haul and nibble happily away in the darkness.

Although Lee’s squirrel-like ingenuity was of great scientific

interest, it would eventually produce proctitis, an inflammation
of the rectum. Reluctantly but firmly I told Len to change all
Lee’s bedding from straw to wood wool. Twigs, the bark of
which contains chemicals important for normal bowel action,
were not abandoned, but only ones of too large a diameter to
make comfortable plans were provided.
Lee ceased to bristle. From watching his unchanged behaviour,
his sparkling interest in everything that happens around him
and his continued ack-ack barrage against overflying pigeons,
one can see no sign that he was once thwarted in his bid to
corner the market in sunflower seeds. But sometimes, as I
stand and watch him watching me, I wonder. Maybe the gleam
in his brown eyes means that Lee knows something that Len
and I don’t know: that chimpanzees have more than one
ingenious way of hiding their treasures.

It was as well that we de-bristled Lee when we did, for a few

days later Edith popped her head round my surgery door. “If
you don’t have any emergencies, you’re invited to a party
tomorrow,” she informed me. "It’s a party with a difference, at
the Queens Hotel in Manchester. Some charity has organized a
pets’ luncheon.”

“What’s that?” I asked her. No one was going to get me

tucking into dog biscuits and tinned cat food. Anyway, whose
“pet” was I supposed to be?

“Well, the idea apparently is for the diners to be an assorted

group of tame animals who will ‘bring along’ their owners—
show-business celebrities and well-known figures in the city.
Belle Vue are sending Lee with Len to keep an eye on him.
They would like you to go as well.” I hesitated, remembering
the fiasco of the pets’ church service, but Edith went on, “The
thing is, it’s to raise money for animal charities, so I said you
would go.”
“OK, Edith,” I said resignedly, “book me down tomorrow for
a couple of hours’ duty as gentleman-in-waiting to a high-living
chimpanzee.”

When Lee had been younger I had prohibited him and the
other baby chimpanzees from going out to children’s parties,
fetes and school visits because of the trouble I was having with
the measles, colds and upset stomachs they were bringing back
to the zoo. Now that Lee was older he was being allowed to
attend the occasional function. He enjoyed getting out and
about and was especially fond of going with Matt Kelly on
some of his evening lecture dates. They invariably ended up
after the lecture sharing a glass of beer in a nearby pub, and if
Matt was feeling especially generous Lee might occasionally be
treated to a glass of his favourite tipple, Advocaat.

Next day I drove to the hotel, one of Manchester’s grandest,

where already a seething throng of furry, feathery and scaly
animals along with attendant personalities, city fathers and
press photographers had begun to assemble. There was Lee,
neatly dressed, not in the shirt he had stolen from me but in the
red and white colours of Manchester United soccer team. He
was holding the hand of an obedient and well-behaved Len. On
a large dining table at one end of the room, feeding bowls and
dishes and stainless steel trays had been prepared and filled
with appropriate food for each of the animals according to a
large .seating plan which had been pinned up on the wall. There
would be sunflower seeds for the parrots (I hoped Lee would
not spot them first), fruit salad for the primates, meat and
biscuits for the dogs and raw liver for the cats. There was a
place but no actual food for each of the reptiles, as they were
not thought likely to fancy lunch under such circumstances. By
each plate or bowl was a container full of water. Although
chairs had been provided for the dogs and the chimpanzees,
there were also high stools for the smaller monkeys and
perches for the birds. The idea was that the doting owners
would stand behind their pets, watching as the Noah’s Ark
chomped away to the pop of flashbulbs and the whirr of
cameras.

I located a gin and tonic and stood in a quiet corner, admiring

the kaleidoscope of the animal kingdom before me. A movie
actress with a pair of petite squirrel monkeys that she had
borrowed from a photographer for the occasion stood sipping
cocktails in speechless horror as the little creatures did
unmentionable things on her mink stole, a portly alderman
slopped martini down his waistcoat as the dalmatian on the
other end of the leash he held lunged menacingly at a passing
parrot, and a fruit bat brought along by a local disc jockey got
itself frantically entangled in the hair of a waitress who was
moving round the humans with a tray of canapѐs. The fruit bat
had not been looking where it was going because it was fleeing
the beady-eyed attention of a brace of hawks sitting unhooded
on the gloved hands of a guest dressed up like Robin Hood. It
was this incident which led to the trouble and to my becoming
involved.
The waitress, terrorized by what she thought was a daylight
attack by a vampire bat fancying a nibble at her scalp, dropped
her silver tray and scattered the appetizing morsels all over the
carpet. All hell broke loose, as dogs and monkeys, bush babies
and macaws, all no doubt with empty stomachs in preparation
for the famous luncheon, thought with one accord that this was
it and scrambled, scurried or fluttered about the floor gathering
up bits of smoked salmon on toast, stuffed olives, wedges of
salami on pumpernickel and cubes of savoury cheese. There are
inevitable consequences when a mean and hungry parrot
descending on a tasty titbit of shrimp wrapped in cucumber
finds himself eyeball to eyeball with a Yorkshire terrier, all
tassels and bows and lacquered toenails and dying for a bite to
eat, or when a pet goat, noted for always having her own way,
is holding one end of a stick of celery while the other is grasped
meaningfully by a muscle-bound Rhesus monkey in a sailor
suit. The din was deafening: birds screeching and protesting,
dogs barking, felines of various species spitting and hissing,
monkeys howling and humans shouting and screaming.

Worse was to follow when, the canapes having been devoured,

the animals began to look at one another with an eye to starting
the main course. A swirling, screeching, colourful melee of fur
and feather began to develop in and out of the legs of the
distraught owners. Women wept as their dear Tiddies or-
immaculately groomed Fido disappeared gleefully into the
scrum, glasses were knocked from hands by swooping birds
and, worst of all, leads, chains, leashes and halters of every kind
became tangled and intertwined round chairs, pinstripe
trousers, high-heeled shoes and potted palms. Things worsened
as a City Councillor was swept neatly off his feet, his ankles
lassoed by strands of leather and chain link. Having been
brought low, the worthy gentleman had to endure being
crossed and recrossed by the paws and claws of the rioting
beasts as they struggled to free themselves from the tangle.
To the noise and confusion another horror was now added. A
man from a pet shop had come along with his twelve-foot
python. At the outbreak of hostilities this non-venomous
reptile had weighed up the situation, decided to adopt a neutral
stance and, having extricated itself from the grip of its owner,
made off across the floor to the relative quiet and peace to be
found beneath some seating round the walls. Under the seating
ran a line of central heating pipes, and around these the python
wrapped itself, no doubt to observe the proceedings from the
safety of a grandstand seat. The pet shop owner, pursuing his
errant snake, got down on his hands and knees and started to
extricate it from the piping. It is not an easy job with an animal
of this size: just as you unwind and hold one part of the snake,
another part is winding itself even more firmly into a tight hold.
The owner tugged and tugged and the more he tugged the
more the python resisted and increased its coils on the piping.
Then, as his masters attempts to winkle him out became ever
more desperate, the snake became somewhat alarmed. Like
most other creatures, when snakes are alarmed they tend to
lose control of their bowels, and very soon the dining room of
this rather superior hotel was filled with the indescribable and
unmistakable stench of upset python. Few of those present
could have smelt such an odour before, but the glazing of their
eyes and contortion of their facial muscles showed that none of
them would ever forget the experience.

Meanwhile, the big dining table which had been specially laid
out for the feeding of the animal guests was standing
completely neglected. Its centrepiece was a large iced cake
containing only sponge and sugar, which was thought to be
acceptable to most of the birds and animals invited. Crowning
the cake was a representation of the Manchester coat of arms in
red and gold plastic. The public relations people had visualized
the Lord Mayor cutting the cake and handing out slices to
everyone from pekingese to parrot. Dining table and iced cake
were deserted and forgotten as the skirmishes over the spilled
canapes raged on. I was fully occupied trying to avoid getting
bitten whilst acting as umpire and interposing portions of my
anatomy between the contenders in the bouts around me. Len
was clutching Lee’s hand but the chimp, adopting a superior air
as if such hooliganism was beneath him, waited calmly on the
fringes of the battleground, stooping only to pluck the odd tail
feather from a mynah bird or macaw if it came within reach.
But his stomach was beginning to rumble as the canape hunt
reached its climax; still not a peanut nor a potato chip, not a
cocktail onion nor a gherkin had passed his lips. Then he
spotted the big iced cake. Invitingly unattended it stood, and
the look of it appealed most powerfully to Lee’s sweet tooth.
Without attracting too much fuss, he slipped his hand from
Len’s and sidled over to the dining table,

Lee was actually up on the table sampling the icing with both
hands before Len realized that his companion was no longer by
his side, “Lee! Come off there this minute!” he shouted,
pushing his way through the battlefield as fast as he could.

Lee may not have heard him above the hullabaloo, but he
certainly gave no sign of obeying. He dug his hard black nails
deep into the succulent sponge and scooped out a sweet
mouthful.

Len’s approach was hampered by an irate ferret clinging

tenaciously onto his ankle. “Dr. Taylor, it’s Lee! Grab him!’,’ he
roared, hopping on one leg and trying to unpick his dogged
assailant.

I looked up, saw the looter at work on the table and decided to
let my two canine opponents in one particularly bitter three-
cornered match sort it out between themselves. There were still
a lot of furious bodies between me and the chimpanzee.

Lee summed up the situation like lightning and realized that

Len’s expression was not only one of anguish at the needle-like
teeth perforating his lower limb, but also meant the imminent
confiscation of what was turning out to be a very tasty cake
indeed. There was only one thing to be done. Picking up the
whole cake on its wooden stand, Lee cleared off to look for a
quiet spot where he could continue his lunch away from all
these bothersome beasts. Out of the dining room, along the
corridor, down the stairs went the small chimpanzee with the
wounded-looking cake carried effortlessly on one shoulder.
Looking back briefly, he saw us in full pursuit, accompanied by
a very angry catering manager. Lee reached the lobby still
without having spotted a suitable hideaway where he could hole
up and do the cake justice. Visitors coming into the hotel stood
dumbfounded as the Little midget waiter, obviously some
strange foreign immigrant on the hotel staff, scurried by with
his short order. Some rcom service! A bellboy, arms
outstretched, gallantly tried to halt the cake’s progress. For his
pains he was spat accurately in the eye as the chimp swerved by
with all the skill of one of the international half-backs in the
team whose colours he was wearing.

At last Lee found the ideal place, or so it seemed. An open

door led into the gentlemen’s washroom. Glancing back once
again to check that his pursuers were not too close, chimpanzee
and cake disappeared inside and closed the door. Cautiously I
opened the door and went into the washroom, followed by Len
and the catering manager. There was no sign of Lee, nor for
that matter of anyone else. We were faced by a row of toilet
cubicles, all with closed doors. Now we had a delicate problem.
Behind which door was Lee? I decided to leave it up to the
catering manager—at least he was a member of the hotel staff.
Miserably this poor fellow went from cubicle to cubicle tapping
on each door and inquiring in diffident tones, “Excuse me,
we’ve lost a chimpanzee. Could you please answer so that we
know he’s not in there?” A succession of oaths and other
sounds of indignation produced by obviously human occupants
floated back over the top of the cubicles.

Eventually we came to a cubicle the door of which was firmly

shut, but where the “engaged” sign was not showing at the
lock. “Er, anyone in there?” called the catering manager. “Sorry
to disturb you if there is.”
No answer came. Lee had been run to earth, and when Len
shinned up the side of the cubicle and looked over the top,
there was the chimpanzee sitting happily on the toilet seat with
the cake in his lap and his legs wedged firmly against the door
to keep it closed.

Len prepared to descend on Lee and what was left of his meal
just as the chimpanzee was sucking icing from the little plastic
coat of arms which he had removed from the cake and was
using as a sort of spoon. When Lee saw that the game was
nearly up he took one last frantic scoop of cake and packed it,
together with the coat of arms, into his mouth. Down dropped
Len, Lee made a futile jump to try to escape, the remains of the
cake fell into the lavatory pan and it was all over. Carried out of
the cubicle by determined hands, and with his cheeks bulging
with cake, Lee gulped the final mouthful, forgetting in the heat
of the moment that the little plastic coat of arms was also in his
mouth. An instant later he was coughing and choking. Len had
seen him take the piece of plastic and we immediately realized
what had happened: it wasj am med somewhere at the back of
his throat.

“Quick, slap him hard on the back while I hold him upside
down!” 1 shouted, hoisting Lee up by his ankles with both
hands and letting his head dangle close to the floor.

Len slapped and slapped at the hairy black body and Lee
coughed and groaned but no plastic coat of arms appeared. The
chimpanzee was becoming markedly distressed; the
mischievous escapade was turning into something much more
grave. I laid the ape down on a chair in the washroom and sent
Len to my car for my bag. Anxiously I looked into Lee’s
familiar face and saw that his gums and lips were already
turning slightly blue. His breathing was hideously noisy and
laboured. All his vital energy seemed suddenly drained out of
him. He had neither the spirit nor the power to resist as I
opened his jaws wide and probed over the back of his tongue
with my fingers. I could feel nothing abnormal. Len came
dashing back with my bag and I pulled out my stethoscope.
Normally Lee objected to this instrument—he seemed as
frightened by the rubber tubes as he was by a plastic or rubber
toy snake—and given half a chance he would pick the head of
the stethoscope off his skin and puncture the sound-receiving
diaphragm with his teeth, but now there was no objection as I
listened to his straining chest wall. What I heard confirmed that
the chimp was just not getting enough air into his lungs. The
plastic decoration for the cake was stuck somewhere in his
airway.

Wedging one hand between his teeth, a hazardous position in a

conscious ape were he not in such a critical state, with the other
I pulled his lilac-tinged tongue as far forward as possible. Len
shone my pencil torch down the throat for me. I could see
Lee’s tonsils and larynx very clearly. Across the opening to the
windpipe was an arrow-shaped splinter of red plastic, a tiny
piece of the coat of arms but enough where it was lodged to
threaten to asphyxiate the chimpanzee at any moment.
Still using one hand as a mouth gag, I took a pair of long artery
forceps from my bag and, with Len lighting the way, reached
into the depths of Lee’s throat with the metal jaws. The shard
of red plastic fluttered with each in-and-out of the chimp’s
agonized breathing. Please God don’t let it drop down the dark
red hole into the trachea! I reached it and with a gasp of relief
clamped the forceps firmly round it. Out it came. Lee began to
breathe more easily but still far from normally. Most of the coat
of arms was still missing. I looked down the throat again as Lee
gurgled and his lilac coloured parts began to regain a little of
their healthier, salmon-pink tinge.

Where was the rest of the cursed cake decoration? It was surely
too big to have actually gone down the windpipe. Then a
terrible thought occurred to me. If Lee had split one piece off
the plastic, perhaps he had crushed the remainder into a dozen
smaller fragments, now sucked far beyond my reach into the
bronchial tubes. Ice water ran down my spine as I imagined the
consequences: chest surgery far beyond my experience in zoo
animals. There was just one other place where the bigger part
of the plastic might have lodged: above the soft palate. Suppose
Lee had almost swallowed the coat of arms and then blown it
up again by coughing when the splinter had broken off and
wedged in his larynx. It could have been shot forward into the
space at the back of the nose and above the roof of the mouth.
Perhaps it was there, jammed between his adenoids. To look up
and round the back of his soft palate I would need a mirror of
the kind used by dental surgeons or something long and shiny
which could be bent at the end,
“Please ask at the cocktail bar if they have any stainless steel
plungers for mixing drinks,” I said to the catering manager.
One of those might do. If I could only see the smallest flash of
red or gold for an instant I would know1 its whereabouts.

Lee was by this stage much improved, although still breathing

noisily and with effort. Part of his airway was still obstructed:
the thought of bits of plastic in the lung continued to haunt me.
When the catering manager returned he was carrying a variety
of plungers of differing lengths for my inspection. I selected
one and then, asked Len to hold the mouth open again while
the catering manager was reluctantly pressed into doing
something that catering managers do not normally do in smart
hotels—putting a full nelson wrestler’s hold on a now restless
chimpanzee. With the chimp’s breathing still embarrassed I was
loath to give any form of anaesthetic which might depress his
respiration still further.

Shining my light down the mouth, I passed the plunger

between the tonsils and past the tip of the soft palate. The
plunger’s circular base was now in a position to reflect back up
into the recesses behind the nostrils. Directing the beam of my
torch onto the plunger, I moved the two instruments about,
trying to bounce light off-anything that might be hidden out of
my sight. Suddenly I saw a hazy splash of red reflected in the
stainless steel of the cocktail plunger, I wiggled the plunger and
saw some more red and then a fuzzy flash of gold. It was there!
The coat of arms was lodged above the soft palate.
As long as I could keep Lee breathing via the mouth, I should
have time to get him to my surgery, where I could use special
instruments to remove the plastic, but first I decided to try
something that only works occasionally. Sitting the miserable
little thief upright in his chair, I slapped him hard and abruptly
on the forehead. His head flew back and he looked at me with
an expression of surprise and reproach. Nothing happened.
Again I slapped him hard between the eyes and the little head
flew back onto the hairy shoulders. Lee gave a retch, coughed
once and there was a tinkle as he spat a lump of red and gold
plastic onto the washroom floor. When I matched it with the
fragment that I had extracted with my forceps it fitted perfectly;
the ornament was complete, not a scrap of plastic was missing.

Immediately Lee’s breathing became normal and the strange

noises disappeared. He was feeling more himself, for he back-
kicked the catering manager in the solar plexus, winding him
and forcing him to release his grip. Manchester’s heraldic
escutcheon had been saved, and Lee went home to Belle Vue
somewhat chastened by his experience but with a stomach
fuller than most of the other animals invited to the ill-fated
luncheon. For some reason they have not held such an event
since.

When I arrived home there was the delicious aroma of one of

Shelagh’s fish pies, the treat of the week made from cod, cheese
and dry white wine. I rather fancied a large helping of that with
mashed potatoes after the interrupted and rather insubstantial
nibblings at the Queens Hotel.
“You’ll never believe what happened with Lee today,” I said
cheerfully, slipping off my coat. “I’ll tell you all about it while
I’m getting some of that inside me.”

"You won’t, I’m afraid,” Shelagh replied, darting into the

cloakroom and unhooking her coat. “You’re off back to Belle
Vue. There’s just been a call from Ray. He’s got two polar bear
cubs. And I’m coming with you!”

Good-bye, fish pie! Of course, it was December. I had known

that Crystal, the female polar bear, was once again near her
time. Ray must have heard the cubs squeaking and used the
anaesthetic dart that we had had on stand-by as planned. And
now it sounded as if he had successfully cub-napped a pair of
twins 1

If there was one of the frequent police radar traps on the

Manchester road it would just be hard luck. I was going to get
to Belle Vue in record time. If I was nabbed I would have a
fine excuse, and if they did not swallow my story it would be
worth a fine and an endorsement on my licence to get my
hands on my first newborn, warm and squirming, snow-white
polar cubs.

“What did Ray say?” I asked as I gunned the Citroen, out of

Rochdale.

“That things didn’t look good at all,” replied Shelagh.

My heart plummeted. I wish I had a jet helicopter, I thought.
No doubt every household will have one by the year 2000, but
here I am with twelve miles of road to cover and every vehicle
in front of me seemingly being driven in the middle of the
road, at a snail’s pace, by an opium-eater.

Ray and the twin cubs were in the dispensary when we charged
into the zoo. “I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said as we Went
through the door. His face was haggard with disappointment.
Matt Kelly stood silently by. Two plump, grubby little bodies
lay inert on the table. Newborn all right, but quite definitely not
warm, squirming or snow-white.

“What happened?” I asked as I opened the miniature jaws and

looked at the pallid gums.

“The keeper didn’t notice anything until he heard her

scratching away at her bedding. Then he thought he heard a
faint squeak. I darted her straightaway and we went in. We
found she’d cleared all her straw away from one corner, down
to the bare concrete, and had pushed the cubs there. They were
probably born this morning. When I got to them they were
cold, damp and not moving. Still attached to their placentas.
She’d neglected them again.”

Unstimulated by the tongue-licking and warmth that their

mother should have provided, and left untended on the hard
floor, the cubs had slipped into hypothermia. I picked one cub
up in each hand and squeezed their chests firmly and
rhythmically. I tried to feel an arterial pulse— nothing. They
were floppy and chill and they had the familiar look of death
about them.

“Get some hot water,” I said. “From the tap will do. As hot as
a good hot bath. Quick. In a bucket or anything.”

Matt Kelly had the water ready in seconds. I plunged both cubs
in, immersing their whole bodies except for their little muzzles.
Underwater I continued squeezing and massaging their chests.
“Shelagh, you do one while I do the other.” I passed the
manipulation of one of the babies over to her. “Pump
rhythmically but don’t dig your finger ends in too viciously,” I
instructed. I had seen lungs ruptured and heart muscles
haemorrhaged many times where over- enthusiastic artificial
respiration had been applied to tiny creatures.

Minutes went by and suddenly Shelagh yelled, “Mine’s

moving!”

I looked at its mouth; it was definitely much pinker. I told her

to keep pumping and I struggled on with mine. “More hot
water, Matt,” I said. He topped the bucket up. Then I too felt
it. My cub was moving slightly. It was not quite so floppy.
There was a faint muscular tension growing in the furry lump
within my clasping hands.

“Both out!” I said. “Stethoscope!” I listened to the two now

warm little cubs. Dab-dab, dab-dab. I heard the faint soft heart
sound in one, I turned to the other. Dab-dab, dab-dab.
“They’re alive!” I shouted. “Back in the water, keep
respirating!”

There was no doubt now, both cubs were wriggling their

bodies under water. “Right, out again!” I said. “I’ll take them
both.” I held both cubs by their back halves, one in each hand
at arm’s length. Then I whirled my arms round and round in
fast, wide circles. I hoped the centrifugal force Would throw
out any mucus blocking the cubs’ windpipes. Then it was back
into the hot water. The cubs were struggling manfully now but
there was not a squeak out of their little throats. “Out again!
We’ll try mouth-to-mouth.” struggling manfully now but there
was not a squeak out of their little throats. “Out again! We’ll try
mouth-to-mouth.”

Again Shelagh took one cub while I handled the other. Sticking
the cubs’ snouts into our mouths we blew gently but firmly.
The minute chests expanded. We pulled out the snouts and let
them expire our air. We waited. Moments passed. They were
not breathing automatically. More mouth-to-mouth. And more.
Puffin, squeeze out. The twins were developing the healthy feel
of coiled wire springs in our hands. We stopped and waited
again. The pink mouths opened a fraction, two stubby pink
tongues tentatively probed the outside world and then, giving
me an exhilarating “high” surely greater than any experienced
by a mainlining junkie, they both voluntarily breathed strong
and deep.
Shelagh cheered, Matt and Ray shouted in delight and I laughed
and laughed. I picked up the cubs and turned them over onto
their backs on my palms, a good test for vigour in the newborn.
Cussedly they squirmed themselves round into the head-up,
belly-down position which self-respecting little critters prefer.
An excellent response, and as a bonus they voiced their protest
at being so peremptorily upended and emitted their first,
glorious squeaks of complaint. I have never seen Shelagh so
thrilled.

Within minutes we began dripping a solution of predigested

protein and glucose into the twins’ mouths by way of a feeding
bottle designed for premature human babies. The cubs were
installed in an infra-red heated box, where they scrabbled and
wriggled and grumbled lustily. I had no intention of going
home until I had seen them do one more thing: start to suckle.
The protein and glucose solution was ideal as a first-aid source
of energy, but after that it was going to be all the way to
weaning on tinned Carnation milk.

“Come on, Shelagh,” said Ray when he had prepared the first
milk feed, “you must have the first honour.” He gave her the
two little feeding bottles.

On tenterhooks we watched as she proffered the rubber teats

to the-two protesting cubs. Then there was silence. The twins
had grabbed the teats hungrily and contentedly begun to draw
in the milk.

It was now up to Ray and Matt to organize a two-hourly

feeding schedule round the clock. It would be worth it. Bears
grow very quickly and these little fellows were never to look
back.
“Come on, Shelagh,” I said after scrubbing up and going out to
the car, “bugger the fish pie. Let’s go and have a bottle of
champagne at the pub.-’
13

“Everything Marvellousest”

The little old blind lady in Singapore’s Lion City Hotel stamped
her enthusiastic way up and down my back in bare feet,
grinding her heels into every one of my ill-humoured vertebrae
and accompanying each audible rending of my bones with a
triumphant, high-pitched “Atcha!”

I was on my way back from Bangkok, the cesspool of un-

scrupulous animal dealing, where I had been to check a
collection of beasts being offered for sale by Thai traders. Not
only had the job meant Norman’s wrath about yet another
absence from the practice, it had been a depressing experience
in itself. In noisome, unlit dungeons, I had run my hands over
baby elephants as knobbly as blackberries with multiple skin
abscesses and had gingerly pulled one live, tick-covered king
cobra out of a stinking pile of forty of its long-dead fellows. I
had seen giant bird-eating spiders that had died from thirst—
they need liquid refreshment in hot countries just as much as
the trappers who sell them for one cent and the dealers who
buy them for retail at five dollars—and had discovered that
even after death the reddish hair that covers their fearsome
limbs can cause painful • inflammation. I had also been
knocked about while taking blood samples from a bunch of
anaemic-looking water buffaloes. Slipping while drawing blood
from the jugular of one animal, I had suddenly found myself
with my nose in the mud and both hands protecting the back
of my head as a dozen buffaloes milled round and over me.

Now, along with my bruises, I was in Singapore to spend a few

days'exploring this most kaleidoscopic of Asian islands and to
recuperate from my “buffalo-ing”. The ancient Chinese
masseuse had done wonders in erasing the buffalo footprints,
but she had beaten, drummed, kneaded and trodden copious
quantities of oil of wintergreen into me, I could not scrub away
the all-pervading mentholated smell, and for days after her
ministrations I was as pungent as a bottle of smelling salts.
When I was invited by Feng Lo, a rich Chinese importer of
lapis lazuli, to visit his private menagerie of exotic animals, I
arrived at his bungalow close to the famous Tiger Balm gardens
with as much animal appeal as camphor has for moths.

The pride of Mr. Feng’s collection were his four Hartmann’s

mountain zebras. Fine, plump animals in a shady corral in his
back garden, they were as tame a$ donkeys, he told me; his
nephew had actually sat on the stallion’s back. The zebras
trotted over pleasantly enough when Mr. Feng called them.
They nibbled the sugar lumps he offered, then they looked at
me and sniffed me over. A vapour rub in human form—ugh!
Ears went back. The whites of their eyes flashed. Soft nostrils
wrinkled and snorted. The three zebra mares spun petulantly
away, but just to show how he felt the stallion lunged and bit
me neatly and painfully right on the tip of my nose. Stung by
spider hairs, trodden by water buffaloes, smelling like a throat
lozenge and now this! Mr. Feng hopped from foot to foot in a
frenzy of apologies, but as I clamped a padded handkerchief to
my bleeding nose and watched the stallion fling up his tail and
canter arrogantly away my attention was riveted. One of his
testes was grossly abnormal, about five times the size of the
other. I pointed it out to Mr. Feng.

“What could it be, Dr. Taylor?” he inquired, looking troubled.

“It could be a hernia or it could be a tumour. Which -er it is, an
operation is called for without delay. If it’ a growth it should be
removed, and a scrotal hernia must be repaired before it
strangulates a piece of intestine.”

Mr. Feng scratched his head and sucked the bean-sized Solitaire
diamond on his right index finger. “But who can do it here in
Singapore? The vets here know riding horses. But zebras?” He
muttered quietly to himself in Chinese. Then he suddenly
smiled and prodded1 me in the solar plexus. “Ha!” he said
cheerfully, as if it was now perfectly clear to him. “No problem.
You will do it, Doctor. What a good idea!”

“But I ...” I began. Neither hernia nor tumour demanded

instruments more complicated than those I always carry in my
emergency pack, but the anaesthetic—that was the problem, I
could buy barbiturates on the island, but they would be useless
unless shot straight into a vein, hardly practical on a fighting,
kicking zebra stallion. Chloral hydrate solution in the drinking
water might work, but the stuff tastes so appallingly bitter that
an animal will go for two or three days before, maddened with
thirst, it drinks the knock-out drops; I had never used the
method, feeling it to be slightly barbaric. I had phencyclidine,
but no phencyclidine ever again in zebras for me after the
dreadful night at Belle Vue when I had first tried it on the
species. What I needed was etorphine or xylazine, both
excellent drugs for zebras. There was not a drop of either in
Singapore.
Then I remembered my motto, “Always say yes”. In danger of
extinction in its native mountains of Damaraland, South-West
Africa, this precious creature was not likely to come my way
very often. And it needed help. This maxim, of accepting
opportunities positively in the knowledge that in almost every
case there is time later to change one’s mind if absolutely
necessary, has paid off time and time again in ,my career. To be
sure of being “in” is better than to risk being “out” through
timidity or indecision. It stirs the blood, brings far fewer
disasters than might be expected and should be heartily
recommended to all except young ladies and, so they say,
members of the armed forces. Quick affirmative decisions are
like ice-cold champagne after a cloying meal, clearing the palate
of the mind.

“Right, Mr. Feng,” I said briskly, “I’ll do it. I want your men to
build a stout wooden crate for the zebra, the sort you might use
to transport him. No holes in the sides, absolutely solid. But
with no top on.”

“It will be done by tomorrow,” he replied. “Anything else you

want?”

“Yes. A bottle of chloroform and the address of a good, quick

tailor, the sort that runs up suits for tourists in twenty- four
hours.”

“Ah, yes.” Mr. Feng looked faintly perplexed. “For you, of

course. You want a suit?”
“No,” I said, grinning, “for the zebra.”

While Mr. Feng, clearly puzzled by my sudden attention to the

zebra’s sartorial welfare, set about organizing the crate building,
a taxi took me to an address he had given me. It dropped me in
the old Chinese quarter at the fringe of a large crowd watching
the weaving dragons and warbling, white-faced maidens of a
street opera. Gongs boomed, cymbals clashed, villainous
landlords were revealed and demons machinated as I pushed
my way through the rapt audience into the cool gloom of the
tailor’s little shop.

“I want you to make something unusual,” I told the tailor, a

young man with long vertical moustachioes and a Pink Floyd
T-shirt. “By tomorrow, or better still tonight. For a zebra. Yes,
zebra. Ze-bra. Z-e-b-r-a. Horse, black and white. Stripes.”
Pencil and paper were produced and I sketched what I needed.

Chloroform was a veteran method of anaesthesia and I had

never used it in my life on a large animal. But I had watched
horses knocked out by it while I was at university, and now I
needed a mask of the sort I had seen being used there. A
simple strap round the back of the animal’s ears kept in place a
canvas cylinder divided into two compartments; the horse’s
muzzle fitted into the upper one and the smaller lower one held
a wad of cotton wool soaked in chloroform. A small hole
between upper and lower compartments allowed air to be
drawn through the cotton wool in the lower chamber into the
upper chamber and so into the respiratory system of the
animal.

“But I have no canvas,” explained the tailor.

“Then use some of the firmest felt material you have, the sort
you put inside collars and lapels of suits.”

The tailor caught on quickly. It would be ready at five o’clock

and would cost twenty... well, what about fifteen ... OK but at
eight you are getting it at cost price . . . well, agreed then at five
dollars.

As I drove back to the Lion City Hotel to do repairs to my

nose, I recalled with a shudder the last time I had seen a
chloroform mask fitted to an equine. A final-year student, I had
watched a hunter mare rear in the air at the first whiff of gas,
snatch the halter rope from the groom and spin stiffly
backwards through 180 degrees to crash with the back of her
skull on the ground. Since then I had stuck purely to injectable
anaesthetics. But chloroform was what I was going to have to
use, and on a rare and unknown quantity, I wondered what Mr.
Feng would have said if I had announced that I was literally
starting to practise on his beloved zebra.

The mask was ready as promised at five o’clock and the tailor
had made a very creditable job of it. It seemed strong enough,
and had the silk square normally sewn inside jacket linings
attached to the muzzle compartment: “Jerome Hua—Tailors of
Singapore—By Appointment to Dukes and Kings since the
Tenth Century and Mr. Rocky Marciano.” “The World’s One
and Only Zebra Tailor” would have had even more panache, I
thought.

Since the zebras lived completely outdoors with trees for shade
and no kind of stable, I had decided to operate in the cool of
the next day, just after dawn. Before turning in early, I strolled
through the alleyways round Bugis Street taking in the aromas,
colours and sounds that swirled in the soft evening air. Little
boys scurried round with steaming buckets of rice. Hand-held
firecrackers with a report like a hand grenade exploded showers
of paper streamers over the shabby roofs. Pretty girls in
cheongsams split limes by pulling them down taut thread and
squeezed the juice over heaped half-moons of watermelon. At
one stall a boy was passing sugar cane through an iron mangle
and collecting the sweet, refreshing juice in jugs of ice.
Stopping for a glass, I washed down a couple of painkillers to
pacify my muscles, which were grumbling about water
buffaloes once again.

As I stood drinking, I saw that the next stall specialized in

cubes of some sort of meat, speared onto fine wooden skewers
and coated with a spicy satay-nut sauce. The skinned little
creatures from which the stallholder was cutting the meat were
not immediately recognizable. Curious, I wandered over. Not
rabbits or cats—knowledge of the subtle differences between
those two carcasses once heads, feet and skins have been
removed had come in useful when the Rochdale police were
prosecuting a rogue of a market trader who went out at night
nabbing stray toms for sale the next morning as “fresh
meadow-trapped bunnies”. Encouraged by my apparent
interest, the stallholder pulled my sleeve and pointed to the
back of his stall. Hanging there upside down, with its clawed
feet lashed to a rickety cross-pole, was a live Malayan flying fox,
or fruit bat.

“Him very fresh. You like me kill him? Roast quick. Taste very
good fresh.” The man smiled a solid gold smile and pulled my
sleeve again. The furry brown creature’s wings were bound
tightly with thread that had cut into the flesh and was crusted
with dried black blood. There were holes in the shining soft
fabric of the wing membranes, like moth holes in cotton
curtains.

“How much for him?” I asked.

“Six dollar. But I fry him good. You like.” He grabbed a meat
cleaver. “Him very good with plenty soy.”

“I’ll have him,” I said, taking off my shirt. “Wrap him in this.”

The man looked flabbergasted. Then he dazzled me with, the

eighteen-carat palisade of dentures again. “Ah! You take home.
You know how cook? You got good wife cook?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I know how to deal with him.” I paid my six

dollars, snipped the thread and cord binding the animal and
wrapped him carefully in my shirt with just the tip of his nose
protruding.

“Good appetite, sir,” bade the stallholder as I went off in

search of a taxi.

Back at the Lion City I took the squeaking bundle to my room

and carefully unwrapped him in the bathroom. The cords had
cut deep and his wings were showing as much daylight when
fully extended as' a slice of Emmentaler cheese. It was tricky
working single-handed; Malayan fruit eating bats are up to a
foot long and can nip severely if mishandled. Slowly I managed
to clean up and treat his wounds, and for good measure I gave
him a shot of long- acting penicillin. When I released him he
managed to flutter up to the shower curtain and grab hold,
upside down. From there he watched me with glinting, angry
eyes. Out of the hotel I went again and from the street stalls
which bustle merrily all night long I bought a selection of
peaches, cherries, mangoes and bananas. I distributed the fruit
along the bottom of the bath, used the bidet as a rather
inefficient sort of upside-down shower and went to bed.

As usual before a major operation I lay in bed worrying about

all the complications which might beset my treatment of the
zebra the next day. Singapore nights are humid enough without
the sweats such thoughts provoke. At least I found next
morning that the flying fox had been down to eat some of the
fruit and was now dozing comfortably, hanging from the edge
of the lavatory cistern.
Sticking the “Do not disturb” card on my room door, I went
off as soon as the sky was light to begin operations at Mr.
Feng’s bungalow. Everything was well prepared. The stallion
had been lured into the crate and was now securely fastened.
Keeping a wary eye on the other three zebras and on their
companions in the paddock, a pair of large ostriches and three
brindled gnus, I climbed up the wooden side of the container
and looked down at my patient. He glared up at me, ears back,
and bucked with an irate squeal.

Normally the chloroform mask is put on a horse first and, once

it is secure, the anaesthetic is introduced into the lower
compartment. Bull might have only one chance of getting near
the head of the creature before all hell broke loose, so I had
decided to put the chloroform-soaked swab in the felt mask
before touching gloves with my adversary. Having done so, I
climbed back up the side of the crate with the loaded mask in
my left hand. The zebra was standing below and across me with
his head to my left. Gently I tapped him on his bristly mane
with my right hand. He threw his head up and tried in vain to
get his teeth into me; the crate was just narrow enough to stop
him bringing his head round. Quick as a flash I plunged the
mask over his muzzle with my left hand and leaned way down
with my right to bring the retaining strap over his ears. He
bellowed like a bull, crashed, thrashed, kicked and tried to
spring vertically upwards on all four legs.

The edge of the crate cut into my stomach as, red in the face, I
leaned down into the container and clung grimly on. Suddenly
the stallion reared, his forelegs scrabbling at the wood in front
of him, and I felt the retaining strap of the mask slide crisply
over his poll. Then, as the beast descended once again onto all
fours, his weight combined with my desperate grip on the strap
flipped me in the twinkling of an eye down into the crate. To
Mr. Feng and his men standing anxiously round the crate, one
instant I was there, the next I had vanished. The crate now
contained one irate stallion zebra, its muzzle enveloped in a
fuming bespoke felt mask, and one veterinarian sitting side-
saddle on the zebra’s back, red-faced and winded. If the crate
door had been opened at that moment, there would have
rocketed out a duo that would have given the crowd at any
rodeo the spectacle of a lifetime.

The zebra was still. So was I. Maybe, I thought, I can sit here
until he goes under, like a cowboy having his horse shot from
under him in slow motion. If I stood up I might slip down
between my patient and the crate walls, or my movements
might excite him again. All went well for a few moments, until
the spinning world and the strange, overwhelming smell in his
nostrils sent a wave of fear through the stallion’s growing
drowsiness. He made one final, instinctive explosion of effort.
First crouching slightly and then powerfully extending his legs,
he produced the buck of all bucks. For Mr. Feng and his men
the earlier disappearing trick cleverly reversed itself. One
moment there was just a box; the next a veterinarian rose like a
malfunctioning Minuteman out of its silo and flopped in an
awkward heap on the hard edge of the crate.
This spectacular double act produced a fresh crop of bruises
round my midriff. Painfully I climbed down and sat on the
ground, listening to the zebra’s protests die away as the
anaesthetic took good hold.

“My goodness!” exclaimed Mr. Feng as I panted and puffed

and longed for the little old lady with the oil of Wintergreen.
“That was most spectacular, Doctor. I can see you have done
that many thousands of times.”

“Yes,” I replied. Liar.

The sun was just beginning to pour a thread of molten gold

along the horizon of the South China Sea, and tall grey pillars
of cloud dotted the sky like poplars. There was no sound from
the crate. I climbed up again. The stallion was down,
unconscious. I poked him with my toe. No reaction. “Right,
open the front of the crate,” I shouted. “Pull him out as quick
as you can.”

Six Chinese dragged the patient out and I began my

examination of the enlarged testis. One feel was enough. No
hernia this, but a tumour. The whole organ was hard and
irregularly shaped. Probably a non-malignant growth, but it had
to be removed. The other testis seemed normal and the
animal’s ability to breed would not be affected. After checking
his heart and lungs, adjusting the mask and telling one of
Feng’s men to make sure that none of the other animals in the
enclosure interfered with my little field hospital, I washed and
sterilized the operation site. That done, I made one incision,
withdrew the diseased testis and tied off its massive blood
supply with thick catgut in a special nonslip knot. To make
doubly sure that there would be no disastrous haemorrhage
once the beast was up and running, I placed a second similar
ligature and then cut the testis free. As I would have done with
a horse, I left the incision in the scrotum so that it could drain
easily but packed the empty space where the testis had lain with
a fly-repellent antibiotic powder. It was done. I took the mask
off and after fifteen minutes the stallion groggily regained his
feet and walked slowly off towards his mares,

“Now,” I said to Mr. Feng, “let’s see what sort of growth it

was.”

I knelt on the ground and sliced open the mass with my scalpel
as Feng and his men crowded round. There was a distinct
“ping” as my blade struck something hard as flint in the centre
of the testis. I opened the incision with my fingers and the
Chinese men gave one loud gasp of amazement. Out from the
middle of the swollen organ fell a shining white object the size
of a matchbox. There was no doubt what it was: a perfect
zebra’s molar tooth. It lay in the palm of my hand, complete
with roots, glinting enamel and roughened cusps.

“A dragon’s tooth!” exclaimed one man, gingerly extending a

grubby hand and touching the object with the tip of one finger
as if it might leap up and gnaw him.
“What beast is it that carries teeth in his loins?” murmured
another reverently, spitting on the ground.

There was a babble of excited Chinese debate. One man saw

the mark of the demons in the affair, another thought that if
the English veterinarian had not been so foolish as to interfere
the stallion would have sired the Chinese version of a centaur.
The oldest man, Feng’s gardener, claimed that the tooth should
be planted at once, for perhaps this was the strange seed of
which Lao-Tse, the venerable philosopher, had written and
which might grow into the Tree of Knowledge.

Mr. Feng himself roared with laughter as he pulled his wallet

from his hip pocket, extracted four or five notes and, flicking
his lighter into flame, set fire to them. As the paper money
curled and blackened into fragile ash he blew the fragments
into the air with a puff of breath and another burst of laughter.
“What fortune, Doctor” he cried. “What fortune! You know
what that is. You know. Oh, what fortune !”

Yes, I knew what it was, but during all the commotion I had
not been able to get a word in edgeways. It was a tooth that
had got lost. When the embryo zebra was a microscopic ball
lying in the womb of its mother, the cells of which it was
composed had started to sort themselves out. Those cells that
were to become the brain and spinal cord took up their
positions, kidney cells fell into line over here, liver cells got into
a huddle over there, heart cells gathered at a point that would
one day be the centre of the chest cavity and so on. During all
this sorting out of a thousand and one different kinds of cell,
some got lost, just like groups of schoolchildren making their
way to their allotted coaches at the end of a school outing. This
is how some kinds of non-malignant tumour develop, why
bone tumours can grow in kidneys or, as in this case, teeth can
bud in testes. Once a tooth cell, always a tooth cell. Magic? Yes:
nature’s magic.

Before I could try to outline this fascinating faux pas of

embryology to the exultant Mr. Feng, I had the distinct
impression that the sky had fallen in. A split second before, I
had been watching Mr. Feng prove inexplicably that he had
money to bum. Wham! Now I was flat on the ground, my nose
buried for the second time in a week in material more suitable
for doing good to rosebushes. Worse, 1 was being thoroughly
stomped on by heavy, clumping, scaly feet with iron-hard
toenails. I was being gone over by an ostrich. The man detailed
to keep an eye on the other animals in the paddock had left his
post in the excitement of finding the tooth, and the male red-
neck ostrich had decided to come looking for trouble. Now,
beak gaping, ragged wings flailing in victory, he did his war
dance on me. I could not help noticing that he lacked both the
restraint arid the skill of the little old lady and that instead of oil
of wintergreen he used slimy white droppings. Stoically, hands
once again covering my head, I took my beating until the
ungainly bird was shooed away. As I climbed wearily to my feet
I wondered whether the animal kingdom had put a contract out
on me; there seemed to be no shortage of creatures from
buffalo to zebra to ostrich that were bent on doing me in.
“You must stay for breakfast, Doctor,” said my host, helping
me to his bungalow. “I must discuss with you the good fortune
you have brought me.”

I began to feel the bruises on my bruises easing a little asa

servant brought rice, eggs and lightly cooked vegetables to a
lapis lazuli table. We drank the most delicate of pale jasmine
teas with petals floating on the surface. “Tell me, Mr. Feng,” I
asked, “why did you burn the dollar bills?”

The Chinaman lit a cigarette and smiled. “Because of the tooth,

of course,” he said. “By the way, please pass it to me.”

I pulled the tooth out of my pocket. I had hoped to keep it as a

curio, a souvenir of the operation, but it was obvious from the
way Mr. Feng lovingly turned it over in his fingers and then
locked it in a bureau encrusted with lapis lazuli that he
considered it well and truly his. His zebra, his zebra’s testis, his
miraculous tooth.

“The burning of the money was a traditional custom, a polite

thank-you to the spirits of my ancestors. One must not forget
the old courtesies, Dr. Taylor, even in these days of television
and atom bombs.” Mr. Feng still had not explained what he
had to be so grateful to his ancestors about.

“The tooth is what pathologists call a ‘foetal rest,’ a tissue that

was displaced during ...” I began to describe the nature of the
object. Mr. Feng waved a slim finger at me.
“Quite, quite,” he interrupted, “but I think you do not
understand how Chinese culture looks at such things. For a
tooth to grow in the organ of generation, the source of life and
potency, such a conjunction has profound implications. I could
feel the energy of it when I touched it. I cannot describe what
its abilities, its qualities must be, are.”

“But you don’t believe in magic, surely?”

He smiled benignly and looked at me over his spectacles.

“What is magic ? Today’s science is yesterday’s magic. There
are powers that we Chinese understood when Western peoples
were barbarians in wolf skins. Those powers existed then, they
exist now. They are our heritage, the wisdom of the Middle
Kingdom. Acupuncture, herbs—only now does the West begin
to sniff round things our ancestors knew centuries ago.”

“Well, what are you going to do with the tooth?”

“Quite frankly, Dr. Taylor, it will make me a millionaire.”

“How on earth ...?”

“I estimate it weighs, oh, forty-five or fifty grammes. Do you

realize how much a Chinese with the necessary resources and
need will pay for just a little of that tooth, say a milligramme or
two, when it has been carefully ground into a fine powder? No?
I tell you. At least one hundred and fifty pounds sterling! The
power of my zebra’s tooth is love, my dear Doctor, love.”
I had operated on a zebra with a pathological testis and
presented my client with an aphrodisiac, the raw stuff of love
philtres that would rake in a fortune from oriental gentlemen
who were long in loot but short in amatory abilities. I gulped
and thought of the hundreds of horse teeth lying neglected in
the mud round the slaughter-house in Rochdale.

“Believe me,’* Feng continued, “when Tok Man in Medan

hears about my zebra tooth, he will willingly pay five hundred
dollars for some dust from it. He is a terribly worried man. A
beautiful wife for ten years now and no sign of a child. You
know, he has a sea cow in his garden just so that. . .”

My ears pricked up and I interrupted quickly. “Sea cow, Mr.

Feng? He has a sea cow?”

“Yes, as I was saying, he has a sea cow caught by the fishermen.

Now there is an animal that can turn a man into a lusty young
lover again.”

“How?” I asked, my attention riveted. Surely by a sea cow he

meant a dugong, the strange vegetarian creature that started the
mermaid myth.

“By collecting its tears, Doctor. The Indonesians say that a few
drops from its eyes have never been known to fail.”

Mr, Feng described the Medan sea cow; it certainly sounded

like a dugong, a harmless, totally aquatic mammal that grazes
on underwater weeds and grasses. The Australians had
considered the possibility of farming the beasts, for the flesh is
said to be utterly delicious. I had seen their cousins, the
manatees, in Florida and California, but had never set eyes on a
dugong.

“I would like to see this sea cow if possible,” I said. “Is Medan
very far?”

“An hour by jet. I will telephone Tok Man and I will give you
the air ticket; after all, Doctor, today you have made me a
millionaire.” He went to the bureau and returned with a blue
disc of lapis lazuli, bound with gold and with a rampant gold
dragon in the centre. “And this is for'you. The dragon will
bring you luck.”

It would take two days for me to obtain a visa so that I could

fly out to Medan on the north-east coast of Sumatra, and I
decided to see if I could pass them peacefully consuming gin
slings in the bar at the Raffles Hotel and acquainting my taste
buds with the unique (and as it turned out unexciting and wildly
expensive) savour of shark fin and bird’s-nest soup. With a bit
of luck, hidden away in the fleshpots, I would avoid being
stamped on by a yak or savaged by a tiger that had heard of the
beastly conspiracy to do me in.

But the moment I arrived at the Lion City I was promptly

thrown out. The hotel manager met me in the foyer with my
bill and a pale and angry face. Apparently, ignoring my “Do not
disturb” card, a maid had gone in to clean my room and on
opening the door to the bathroom had been “attacked by a
vampire bat”. The maid had been given several large brandies
and the day off, and the rest of the staff were threatening to
walk out if the monster was not exterminated. The hall porter
was crouched outside my bathroom door with a .22 rifle,
hoping to shoot the bat through the keyhole. The manager had
given strict instructions that on no account was the door to be
opened, which made it pretty difficult for the gun-toting porter.

I paid my bill, bought a Pan Am flight bag to pack the flying

fox in, cleaned up the bathroom and, feeling a bit like Count
Dracula revealed, marched out of the hotel with all eyes upon
me. I decided next to smuggle my companion into the
Singapore Hyatt. After checking in, I set up my “vampire” once
again in his private and now rather plushier bathroom and
dressed his wounds for the second time. Although it might
seem pointless when thousands of his fellows are being
slaughtered or exploited at the need or whim of human beings,
I still feel it is worthwhile to wrestle with the problems of one
individual creature. An animal deserves attention for its own
sake. That is another reason why zoo work satisfies me rather
than the mass medicine of poultry or fish farming.

All the same, I had a problem with my adopted fruit bat.

I did not like the look of the small Singapore Zoo, and I could
not take him with me when I left in a couple of days. For
thirty-six hours I worked hard at anointing and injecting his
wounds while he consumed peaches and mangoes and made
quite a mess of the Hyatt’s marble bathroom. On my last
evening in Singapore I packed him back into the Pan Am bag
and took a ferry across the straits to Malaysia. At the dockside I
hired a taxi and told the driver to take me inland to the first bit
of dense forest. Once there I walked through the long grass
into the trees, loaded a syringe with one more dose of long-
acting penicillin and squatted down. The flying fox had his last
jab, looked at me, squeaked and then launched himself out of
the unzipped bag, up and away. Unsteadily he flew into the
canopy of dark green and disappeared. I hope he made out. I
walked straight back to the surprised taxi driver and told him to
take me back to the boat. Strange fellow, this Englishman, I
could see him thinking. All that way just to relieve himself!

Back at the hotel I rang Norman Whittle to report on my

progress and to check that all was well at home. “I’m in the
thick of the love potion business,” I said, “and I’m off to
Indonesia in the morning to see a mermaid!”

The intercontinental cable hissed for a few seconds as Norman

digested my remarks. “Look, David,” he said finally, “I don’t
understand a word of what you’re saying. If you’re lying drunk
in some oriental bath house while I’m up to my ears tuberculin
testing all Farmer Crawshaw’s Friesians, covered in mud and
muck with it raining nonstop for six days, we’re going to have a
little chat when and if you ever get home.” He put the receiver
down.

I went out specially then and there and bought a coloured

postcard of a Chinese girl in traditional Cantonese dress. It was
the sort of card which if tilted slightly revealed the girl naked
and unadorned. I sent it to Norman bearing the words, “Best
wishes from the bath house. Hic!”
Next day I flew into Medan, a sprawling, seedy town of sleepy
streets with houses stripped to the bare wood by the scorching
sun, clouds of eye-stinging dust bowled along before a hot
wind, and garish, squeaky trishaws. An enormous bald Chinese
gentleman with the figure of a Japanese sumo wrestler, a purple
shirt and candy-striped trousers was waiting by his car to meet
me. “Welcome to Medan,” said Tok Man.

We drove for twenty minutes before Tok Man pulled up beside

a high wooden fence set in a grove of dense hibiscus bushes. It
surrounded a compound set in rustling fields of tobacco and
backed by a broad strip of yellow sand, with the dark grey
ocean beyond. Through a heavily padlocked gate we entered a
cool shaded yard with a bare earthen floor surrounded by
hutches, cages and a variety of wooden boxes.

“I have only a few animals I keep for my . . . personal use,” said

Tok Man. “Feng Lo tells me you are interested in seeing my sea
cow. Come, I will show you.”

He led the way to a large coffin-like box in one corner of the

yard. It had a stout grille set in the top. Looking in I could see
the ungainly shape of a real-life mermaid, a dark brown,
helpless roly-poly with dried and cracking skin and eyes that
were caked and sore. It was a dugong all right and in terrible
shape.
“Why do you keep it so?” I asked in dismay. “These are rare
and precious creatures which need water; you see what is
happening to the skin.”

“Yes, indeed, they are precious, Doctor. Oh, how wonderful it

would be if I could get more tears from the beast! Believe me I
have tried, I have laboured, but I cannot make it weep.”

I could hardly believe my ears. “But...” I faltered.

“You see, Doctor,” interrupted the fat man, “if I can speak in
confidence, I am a man in my prime with a wife who is a true
jewel, but”—his voice hushed—“I have no children. It is a
matter of great sadness and embarrassment to me. I have tried
many things, and always I refuse to lose hope, but I remain . . .
how do you say?”

“Impotent,” I said.

He nodded glumly. “So now I try the creatures I have here.”

“What exactly do you do?” I inquired, grimly fascinated. He

pointed to the various containers around us. “Over there I keep
a bunch of snakes. Every day I slit the gall bladder of one and
run its bile into a glass of wine. I think perhaps it will help.”

“And the sea cow?”

Tok Man sighed. “Each morning I beat it with a bamboo in the
hope of making it weep. But so far I have collected no tears. If
only I could. Sea cow’s tears are most potent,” His face
brightened. “Doctor, perhaps you can show me some trick of
making it weep?”

I pinched myself to make sure that I was not lying in bed at

home having a surreal nightmare. The pinch stung but I did not
wake up. “It would be best if you released the sea cow,” I said
as steadily as I could. “I know no way of producing tears." In
actual fact I did have a chemical, carbamylcholine, which I had
used to increase the tear flow from crocodiles, but I was having
no part of this sick affair.

“Ah well,” said the Chinaman, “I suppose I must press on with

the beating. It eats nothing and I must get some tears before it
dies.”

“Give it some lettuce and spray it with water,” I said, grinding

my teeth fit to shatter them as we left the compound, but I do
not think he was listening.

I went back to the hotel in Medan where Tok Man had found
me a room, but could think of nothing except the sad plight of
the dugong. I had to do something, but what?

There was only one thing for it. At eleven o’clock I walked out
of the hotel carrying just a little money and my small bag of
surgical instruments, found a trishaw and with much difficulty
explained to the driver where I wanted to go. By trial and error
we came eventually to the compound in the hibiscus grove.
Motioning the nonplussed fellow to stand against the high
fence, I hoisted myself up on his skinny shoulders and pulled
myself over the top. The moon was full and seemed to fill half
the sky as I dropped down into the yard. No guard dogs, just a
squadron or two of mosquitoes and the friendly carolling of
tropical frogs.

The first thing I did was to prowl round the fence, looking for
a way out A shimmer of silvery water and a foul stench led me
to a slimy ditch running under the fence towards the seashore. I
went over to the dugong’s box. It was too dark to see much
inside it, but I could hear its soft breathing. I felt round the
grille. It was secured by two bolted hinges and a piece of thick,
twisted wire. A dog barked in the distance as a vehicle rumbled
by. I tried not to think how Indonesian jails might appear to a
European found guilty of burglary, but cold sweat ran down my
forehead and stung my eyes.

With a pair of artery forceps from my bag I began to unravel

the stout wire. Off it came, and a moment later I had lifted the
grille and was stroking my first mermaid. This was no time for
the finer points of animal handling. I pushed the horizontal
coffin over onto its side and with a blubbery plop the dugong
fell out onto the ground. Off I went round the compound
again, until I found a length of sacking. Folded lengthways
several times, this made a strip to put round the base of the
dugong’s paddle-like tail. “Come on, old chap,” I whispered as
I slipped the sacking round its quivering body, “this is no time
to stand on ceremony.”

I began to pull the 200-pound beast backwards over the rough,

dry ground. It was back-breaking work and I knew that I must
have been scuffing the skin on its underside. After what
seemed like an hour, with muscles indignant at my adding yet
further insult to injury, I reached the murky ditch. Dismally I
realized that I would have to go down into the slimy water and
drag my mermaid with me through the hole in the fence. The
mosquitoes had a field day as I slithered and strained first one
way and then the other, basting myself thoroughly with ooze,
algae and creepy-crawlies. At last I was through the fence.
Sweat soaked my hair as I pulled the dugong through after me.

Next came a prickly ploughing through a stretch of reeds. I lost

a shoe. Tiny bats skimmed silently across the moon. I cowered
at every sound, expecting at any moment to be discovered.
Then, mercifully, I heard the first soft hissing of the sea
smoothing the sand. Stopping at the edge of the shore to rest, I
sat down beside the dugong and put an arm round it. All
animals like a cuddle, and I might never get this chance again. I
touched the strange soft muzzle and delicate lips. Its gums were
warm and velvety, its breath grassy like a cow’s.

Then I was up and off again, down the gently sloping beach to
the water’s edge. At last I could remove the sacking and throw
it into the black water. The dugong could smell the ocean and
was restlessly moving its head from side to side. Wearily I bent
down and rolled it over and over like a giant sausage until the
surf caught it and the water bore it off the sand. Its crusty,
flaking back was caught by the creamy moonlight as it
orientated itself, floated on the surface for a second and then,
with a wave of its paddle, dived beneath the foam. It was gone.
Tired, wet and smelling like a compost heap, I trudged round
the edge of the hibiscus grove and slapped my gaping trishaw
driver on the back. “Back to the hotel,” I said, gave him every
rupiah note I had in my pocket and threw my one remaining
shoe into the gutter.

Tok Man arrived in the hotel lobby next day with bad news.
Vandals had broken into his compound and stolen his sea cow.
“Some people will eat anything,” he fretted. “And my wife is
scolding me more than ever. She doesn’t seem to realize I want
children as much as her. It’s a curse on me. Today I will slit the
galls of ten live snakes and drink their bile with wine.”

I should have released the snakes as well, I thought, but he

would easily have got some more. Perhaps ... I decided to give
him some advice.

“Look, Mr. Tok,” I said, “I work with wild animals and, though
I do not talk about it usually, I do know of one substance
which, if taken very carefully—not too little, not too much—
can produce an effect a thousand times stronger than snake bile
or sea cow’s tears. It always works. If I let you have some of
this drug for your personal use, will you promise not to let it
fall into the wrong hands?”
For a moment I thought the corpulent fellow was going to kiss
me. “Of course, certainly, yes, yes, yes!” he gurgled. “How much
do you want for it?”

“Nothing,” I replied. “It is unprofessional and unethical for me

to supply you with it. I do it only as a favour.”

Tok Man was beside himself. I went up to my room and

opened a tin of orange, sugar-coated vitamin B tablets.
Counting out one hundred, I put them into an envelope and
went back downstairs.

“Now, take one tablet at exactly eight o’clock in the morning

and one tablet at nine o’clock at night,” I instructed. “They
always work, without fail. But you must not mix them with
anything else. No snake bile, no sea cow’s tears. They must be
allowed to work alone.”

Tok Man looked at the envelope he was clutching as if it was a

bag of fine black pearls. “Doctor,” he exclaimed, grabbing my
hand and shaking it furiously, “I cannot thank you enough.” He
thanked me all the way to the airport and kept shouting his
thanks as I went through the departure gate.

Well, I thought, if he believes what I say hard enough, those

harmless little vitamin pills will do their stuff, a lot of poor
reptiles will be spared being gutted alive, Mr. Tok will not need
to replace his truant sea cow and the only loser will be Mr.
Feng, who will have one less customer for his ground-down
zebra’s tooth. And that was how it turned out, for two months
later, back in England, I was to receive a cable from Tok Man
in Sumatra: DEAR DOCTOR WONDERFUL. EVERYTHING
MARVELLOUSEST., WIFE VERY MUCH
PREGNANT.

But now, as I flew between the cloud stacks suspended over

the Malacca Straits, I looked down and wondered how the
dugong was faring and whether it was at that moment gorging
its empty belly on succulent bunches of submarine sea grass. I
thought of a fruit bat and a zebra stallion and then of the cats,
dogs and cattle that I might have been busy with at that very
moment in the familiar streets and fields half a world away.
Safe and comfortable respectability in Rochdale, or challenge
and fulfilment? Mr. Tok’s dugong or Mrs. Partridge’s arthritic
corgi?

The decision was taken as the plane touched down again at

Singapore Airport. As soon as I got home I would make my
peace with Norman Whittle and break the news. I was going to
take the plunge and set up my own practice to work only with
wild animals from now on. There was no going back.
Also by David Taylor

Two titles in the new series of ‘Owners Maintenance Manuals’

designed to minimise the problems and increase the enjoyment
of caring for the family pet.

THE CAT

David Taylor, a regular guest on BBC television's Animal Magic,

gives specialist, helpful and humorous advice on living with and
caring for your cat. Everything the cat lover needs to know is
presented with the aid of diagrams and some light-hearted
cartoons.

THE DOG

Comprehensive advice on living with and caring for your dog is

contained in this short, detailed book. There is help on
acquiring a dog and on the day-to-day care of it. Light-hearted
cartoons and diagrams help to put across the information.