VET ON THE

WILD SIDE
Next to James Herriot, David Taylor may well be the
world’s best-known veterinarian. His outrageously
adventurous life as a zoo vet- doctor to the exotic
beasts of the world—has been the subject of his popular
series of books, including Zoo Vet and Next Panda,
Please. Now, in Vet on the Wild Side, Taylor continues
his tales of life as the world’s only traveling wild-animal
doctor. Kidnapping dolphins from a hotel swimming
pool in Cairo; smuggling scorpions out of Arabia;
convincing a sea elephant to take a twelve-hour trip on
a cargo plane—a jet-vet’s work is never dull. Taylor’s
rollicking exploits are endlessly entertaining, and the
characters he meets on his travels—from pandas to
gorillas, from octopi to sharks to the Loch Ness
Monster- are a wondrous, colorful menagerie. A must
read for animal lovers, Vet on the Wild Side is also
storytelling at its zany best.
VET ON THE WILD SIDE
All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle,
freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle,
dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, „Pied Beauty‟

VET ON THE
WILD SIDE
DAVIDTAYLOR

St. Martin‟s Press New York

 To the memory of my father,
Frank Taylor,
of
Diggle and Taylor‟s, Rochdale.
Contents

Introduction

1. Hannibal‟s Animals
2. Running After Rhino
3. White and Wonderful
4. Dolphins in the Dumps
5. The Year of the Panda
6. Full-flavoured Cuba
7. Arabian Plights
8. Down to the Sea Again
9. Animals on the Box
10. One by One
11. A Whale of a Time
12. Baboons and Busybodies
Introduction

As I write, it‟s almost exactly twenty years since I left

general practice in Rochdale, Lancashire, to found the
world‟s first independent, peripatetic veterinary
service devoted exclusively to exotic animals. Since
1957 I had been working part-time with the once-great
Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester, learning from people
like Matt Kelly, the head keeper, many of the
traditional ways of handling wild animals and coping
with their illnesses. I‟d also learned that, when I
began, there was little in the way of dedicated
zoological medicine, and meagre interest in aardvarks
and axolotls, zebras and zorillas among veterinarians
in general.

The world of an aspiring zoo vet was wide open, I

realized, and awash with opportunities. New methods
of safely control-ling timid or dangerous beasts by
means of flying syringes were just around the corner
and about to revolutionize exotic animal management.
The first safari parks and marinelands, housing new
and exciting species, were being set up and they
would demand new and exciting kinds of medicine.

So it was that I bade farewell to the old surgery on

Milnrow Road, the two o‟clock and seven o‟clock
consulting hours for dogs and cats, the calls to bleak
Pennine farms to calve cows and castrate pigs, the
riding stables with broken-down hacks and a
reluctance to pay the bills.

Through Belle Vue I met zoo men from other parts of

Britain, and one encounter led to my spending a year
and a half at Flamingo Park in Yorkshire where I
began to work seriously for the first time with marine
mammals. The park‟s owner, Pentland Hick, sent me
around the world on study tours and buying trips,
and thus I made friends and clients in the international
zoo fraternity. I had a run of luck in always being in
the right place at the right time; when the first dart
guns were developed, when phencyclidine and M.99,
the two most important anaesthetics in the history of
wild animal medicine, needed clinical trials, when
Windsor Safari Park, the London Dolphinarium,
Marineland Cote d‟Azur and so many other places
opened and looked for veterinary involvement.

Working at Windsor, sometimes travelling down

twice within twenty-four hours from my home in the
North, brought me into contact with Richard Reed, a
free-lance press photographer, and a collection of his
pictures of me attending to my exotic patients
eventually made the centre pages of the London
Evening Standard. Because of that I was invited on to
the Jack de Manio programme on BBC radio, and John
Newth, an editor with the publishers Allen and
Unwin, hearing the broadcast, tracked me down with
the proposal that I should write my first volume of
autobiography, Zoovet.

„Zoovet‟ and its four sequels were eventually turned

into three series of drama on BBC television as „One by
One‟.

I left Rochdale, divorced (the life of a vet-in-a-suitcase

is hard on a marriage) and came to live in Surrey in
1976. By then I had had a partner, Andrew
Greenwood, for several years and while he, based in
Yorkshire, could cover the North and fly out of Leeds
or Manchester, I was better placed for the South and in
easy reach of Heathrow and Gatwick.

The jet-vet life itself is one to which I have become

addicted.

Always on call, always with The Bag packed. A gorilla

in Italy today, a dolphin in Spain tomorrow. Then on
to Timbuctoo or Toronto. Everyone wants to carry my
luggage; exotic places, exotic beasts. Paid to swim with
a whale and then relax over Blue Dolphin cocktails, to
touch and tend great rarities like pandas and okapis,
to eat Thai food this week, Icelandic next, to see a
golden monkey in the morning and the Forbidden
City in the afternoon, to operate on a circus elephant
in Granada and spend the night in the paradox beside
the Alhambra.
Yes, it‟s all that but . . . Wading in icy water so
frequently has taken its toll of my knees, escorting a
dolphin or sea elephant on a twelve-hour trip in a
cargo jet is chilly, boring, tiring, smelly work. In
twenty years, every brief holiday has been interrupted
and I‟ve spent fourteen Christmases and as many New
Year‟s Eves away from home, sometimes sitting alone
in an airport bar or covered in blood, grease or dirty
water beside some desperately ill or injured animal.
Going to the toilet so unfailingly causes the telephone
to ring that I truly believe there is some sort of circuit
between the lavatory seat and British Telecom. There
are normally samples of giraffe or whale liver on top
of the fish fingers in the deep-freeze and tubes of
dolphin blood, ready for pregnancy testing, near the
milk in the refrigerator.

The phone begins ringing at five a.m. - it‟s nine o‟clock

in Arabia and they‟ve been at work for two hours by
then - and it goes on till midnight when my
Californian colleagues finally call it a day. Through
the post come packets, not always well sealed, of
droppings, pus, blood, urine and assorted organs.

I‟ve had a raw brain suspected of being rabid arrive in

nothing more than brown paper, and other things that
smelled appal-ling after turning into unrecognizable
soup in transit.
Nevertheless, I have never picked up any disease from
my patients, though some of them have suffered the
most bizarre infections, and I collect fewer bites and
scratches than most vets in general practice might
expect. I‟ve made a lot of money - and happily spent it.

All in all, this beastly life is better than anything else I

could imagine.

Now read on . . .
1 Hannibal’s Animals

Forward, you madman, and hurry across those horrid Alps so that
you may become the delight of schoolboys. - Juvenal, Satires

Everyone knows that Hannibal went over the Alps

with some elephants. Full stop. Unless you are a
classical scholar, that‟s about it. Who Hannibal was
and why and how he took to the high, very high, road,
with a herd of jumbos, most of us have forgotten, if we
ever knew.

So when, in 1987, I met Merv Edgecombe for the first

time and he launched at once into an outline of his
plans in the machine-gun-burst style of delivery and
mild Yorkshire accent with which I was going to
become very familiar in the months ahead, I rooted in
vain through the attic of my memory for any dusty
recollections of schoolboy lessons on Roman history
forty years before. And found none.

„It‟s like this, Dave,‟ (I hate being truncated to „Dave‟,

but then, I suppose a „Merv‟ would do that naturally).
„What we want from you is seven weeks. Look after
the elephants. Spain to Italy via France. Ian Botham‟s
going to walk with them over the Alps. Hundreds of
miles. And we don‟t want any trouble with the
animals.‟

I looked at the young man with his close-cropped hair

and confident PR-man‟s smile. „Tell us the problems,
tell us what you need,‟ he continued, „we‟ll sort it out.‟

„Er . . . well . . .‟ I began, but then Merv was off again.

Ian‟s keen as mustard. Raring to go. And it‟s all in the
best of causes, to raise cash for the Leukaemia
Research Fund.‟

Every two or three years someone had contacted me

out of the blue with a similar idea. Once I‟d even given
a medical to an elephant at Dudley Zoo, which was
supposedly going on such a march, but nothing had
ever come of it.

„If old Hal did it over two thousand years ago, why
can‟t we?‟ Merv was still in full flow. „Including
floating them across the River Rhone on rafts!‟

„Hold on a minute,‟ I said. The Alps were one thing,

punting five-tonne elephants about on a river that
compares for size with the Thames or Rhine was
another. „Are you seriously proposing re-enacting
Hannibal‟s epic journey, yard by yard and mile by
mile?‟
Merv beamed, „But of course! Imagine. We‟ll storm
through the gates of Turin, with Beefy Botham on top
of the lead elephant! The media will go ape-shit!‟

In the year 218 BC there were two great Mediterranean

empires, those of Rome and Carthage. Hannibal was a
Carthaginian (he would nowadays be an Arab citizen
of Tunisia) sworn by his father, Hamilcar Barca, to
eternal enmity with Rome, which had recently
conquered the Carthaginian territories of Sicily,
Sardinia and Corsica. A brilliant general, and only
twenty-nine years old, Hannibal already had a string
of military successes behind him when he decided to
launch a campaign against the heartland of the Roman
Empire itself. He would march an army from
Carthaginian-occupied Spain east across France and
into Italy. His army of around thirty-eight thousand
infantry, eight thousand horsemen and thirty-seven
elephants would fight their way to the gates of Rome
itself - if he could somehow surprise the Romans by
entering Italy when and where they least expected it.
The way he achieved this is one of the most renowned
feats of military history.

„The elephants are the central characters in the walk,‟

Merv leaned forwards over the table, intense and
bright-eyed, the ex-Daily Mail reporter on to a scoop.
„They give Ian the glitz that we‟ll need to keep the
media hot to the bitter end.‟
I remembered that many years before my friend Dino
Terni, the Italian zoo director, had taken one elephant
over a small part of Hannibal‟s route with some
English university students. They had encountered no
major difficulties - but had only walked for a week or
so, all at the elephant‟s chosen speed. Botham and his
fellow walkers would, I knew, set a formidable pace of
five or even six miles per hour - for hours on end.

„We set off early each morning,‟ Merv explained.

„Every town and village we pass through will shower
cash for the Fund, there‟ll be a veritable army of back-
up people - mobile kitchen, sports doctor, you name it
- and by three o‟clock we‟ll stop and rest up for—

„Three questions,‟ I said, interrupting. „The elephants:

how many, where from, and can I have an absolute
veto on everything and anything to do with their
welfare?‟

„Three elephants. From a zoo, we think; it‟s up to you

to advise us. And yes, you can have a veto - what you
say goes for the elephants.‟

„Zoo elephants won‟t do,‟ I replied. „They can‟t be

relied upon to walk across country, where they‟ll meet
traffic, dogs and people making a noise. It‟s got to be
circus elephants. And another thing. No matter what
Ian Botham and his friends can do, the elephants can‟t
walk the whole way. For them this can only be a “
token walk” .‟

Mervyn‟s face dropped. „What do you mean by that?‟

he asked.

„No way can they do the fifteen or twenty miles a day

that the human walkers will be attempting.‟

„But surely . . . in the wild?‟

„This isn‟t “ the wild” where they wander browsing

through the bush.‟

„So what you are saying is . . . ?‟

„The elephants aren‟t even going to try keeping up

with Botham. That‟s it, you‟ve given me the veto and
I‟ll exercise it.‟

Wild elephants walk at between 2.5 and 3.5 mph,

though they can maintain double this speed for
several hours if necessary. A charging elephant will
reach 25 mph, even though it never runs but rather
walks fast. In 218 BC Hannibal‟s elephants, together
with his army, took all summer and autumn to make
the great march. The elephant-handlers would have
been expected to keep the animals moving along
behind the infantry, exhorting them with shouts and
prodding them with sticks and spikes. We have
records of how far the Carthaginians went in a day,
measured in „stadia5, a Roman measurement of
length. The trouble is that the scholars aren‟t exactly
sure how long a „stadium5 was: it might have been 177
or 185 metres (190 or 200 yards), and it even seems
likely that it was a rather flexible unit of measurement.
Hannibal‟s rate of march was on average eighty stadia
per day; probably around fourteen kilometres (say
eight miles).

But such historical minutiae didn‟t trouble me. The

Botham elephants would be going for a pleasant stroll
every day, the distance never more than a few miles,
the exact length dependent on the terrain and weather,
and at a speed which would be of their own choosing.
What we needed were three good-natured circus
elephants, brought up to the roar of the greasepaint,
the shouting of clowns and the oompah-oompah of the
Big Top band. Accustomed to walking in parade when
the circus came to town, they‟d be as traffic-proof as
police horses and happy among crowds. And the
bonus for them, I thought, would be the exercise and
Alpine air, for the principal criticism of the anti-circus
lobby in regard to elephants is that they don‟t get
enough regular exercise. Botham‟s expedition would,
the way I planned it, be a healthy holiday for a trio of
circus jumbos. All we had to do now was find them.
In January 1988, Merv, his director of the expedition,
Patsy (he was organizing the walk very much in the
same way as one would a large film unit on location)
and I flew down to Sicily. A circus, Circo Medrano,
was willing to discuss the hire of three elephants. With
their winter quarters situated near Verona in northern
Italy, the elephants, if we could arrange their
participation, would in effect be walking home from
Spain.

We found the circus encamped on the harbour-side in

Palermo and, after we‟d introduced ourselves, Ugo,
the circus boss, led us to the elephant tent by way of
the menagerie of animals that lived all their lives in
small travelling cages without even stretching their
legs in the ring, a feature of some circuses which
cannot be defended. I caught a glimpse of two gorillas
languishing in a metal and glass wagon — an
unexpected, appalling sight. Gorillas! Highly
endangered in their native haunts, but reduced to this
among the candy-floss vendors and flashing lights of a
tawdry sideshow. Such mini-zoos on wheels continue
to exist with standards of design, space and
construction which, if applied to a static zoo, would
have it closed down within days. It‟s odd that
European governments, including the British, in
general seem loath to insist on a tiger in a circus being
treated no less well than a tiger in a zoological garden
or safari park.
„I wish we could take those gorillas on a walk with
Botham through Central Africa,‟ I said to Merv. He
nodded, grim-faced. „And manage to lose them on the
way!‟ he replied.

In the elephant tent I walked down the line of patient,

swaying animals, letting them inspect me with
sensitive trunks, sniffing my clothing and giving my
pockets a quick frisking for possible sweetmeats.
„These would be the three.‟ Ugo pointed out the
elephants. „Tali and Dido can‟t be separated, then
there‟s Batman.‟ Elephants are like that, they have
their special friends. In circuses it has often caused me
problems when I have had to keep a sick individual
out of the ring or indoors for a few days. It isn‟t as
simple as it sounds. If A stays behind, so must its pal
B. Otherwise, all hell can break loose. And on certain
occasions I can remember a whole group of elephants
refusing, like whales, to be separated from an invalid
companion. „One out, all out‟ is the motto of the Union
of Elephants, and you don‟t argue with Elephant
Solidarity.

Ugo‟s elephants were of the Indian or Asiatic type;

now-adays only two kinds of elephant exist, the
African and the Indian. Once there were over three
hundred and fifty species of elephant on earth,
including a metre-high dwarf form that must have
been charming, and a giant that stood almost five
metres high, whose fossil remains have been found in
Kent.

One of the puzzles about Hannibal‟s expedition

concerns what kind of elephant - African or Indian - he
used. The arguments continue in academic circles. He
could have obtained either sort; although the African
elephant isn‟t domesticated in its native land
nowadays, it is sometimes trained in circuses though it
is not in general as easy to handle as the Indian type.
Confusingly, Carthaginian coins of 220 BC, just before
the expedition, have been found bearing images of
African elephants while Indian elephants are depicted
on Etrurian coins of 217 BC, the year in which
Hannibal conquered that part of northern Italy.

I walked round the three elephants and looked for

common weak spots: bent legs, thick legs, swollen
joints, cracked toe-nails, hernias, „cold‟ or chronic
abscesses. There were none. All three seemed amiable
souls. Alert but gentle eyes, salmon-pink gums, plump
enough and, most important, passing firm loaf-sized
droppings. I poked around in a sample and found the
undigested fibre cut small, no sour smell: their teeth
and bowels were working fine. (So your offspring
wants to be a zoo vet - make him or her understand
that a healthy interest in dung in all its forms is more
fundamental to a future career than the fact that
he/she didn‟ t sleep for a week when the goldfish was
found in a terminal state of upside-down floating.)

I then took the elephants‟ measurements, Taylor the

eleph-ant tailor, for any bespoke garments I might
decide to order for them. Getting the inside leg of an
elephant can be tricky - they tend to be ticklish in the
groin.

„Any history of trouble with the three?‟ I asked Ugo.

He shook his head. „Nada, nada, nada‟ (we were using
Spanish as a lingua franca) ‘estan en condicion perfecta.‟
Batman‟s mighty head nodded as if in agreement and
she - for like the other two Batman was a female-
squeaked a few contented elephant squeaks. I
wondered why she had been given such a ridiculous
name.

Back in the circus boss‟s trailer, negotiations over the

fee for the hiring of the three elephants began. Ugo
wanted an enormous sum of money, plus so much per
day for the keep of the elephants and the handlers
who would accompany them. Merv pumped away at
his pocket calculator, using the figures I gave him for
approximate daily food consumption of an adult
elephant: fifty kilos of hay, fifty kilos of fruit and
vegetables and two kilos of cereals.
„Anyway, whether we hire them or not they‟d have to
be fed,‟ he argued. „The circus has plenty more
elephants, so the show won‟t suffer. And, damn it all,
it is for charity.‟ Bit by bit, Merv beat Ugo down.
Eventually, handshakes all round and the elephants
were rented at what we considered a fair price. Ugo
opened a cold bottle of Berlucchi. Ian Botham‟s latter-
day squadron of war elephants that would lead the
campaign for funds to combat leukaemia was enlisted.

Back in England I carefully considered the

management of the three elephants during the
expedition. Though public support would be
enhanced by reports of human walkers hobbling
bravely on as cramps and fatigue took their toll, the
elephants had to have, and be seen to have, anything
but an arduous journey. I would not permit the
smallest blister or slightest degree of tiredness to
develop in my charges. The veto on what the
elephants could or couldn‟t do was my key to
controlling the situation.

Although I had no opportunity to do a reconnaissance

of the intended route, I studied the maps and listed
the problems that the elephants, Hannibal‟s or
Botham‟s, would encounter.

Using modern place names, Hannibal‟s route in 218

BC started in Cartagena, south of Alicante, and went
north past Valencia, Barcelona and the Costa Brava. It
crossed the Pyrenees and then went along the
Mediterranean coast of France by way of Perpignan
and Montpellier, and after Nimes and Avignon
reached the River Rhone near Orange. At this point
the Carthaginians turned north up the left-hand bank
of the Rhone, and were followed by a Roman army
that had landed in Marseilles in the hopes of
intercepting them. When, however, it seemed that
Hannibal was moving in a direction that would lead
not to Italy but into the lands of the unruly Gauls, the
Romans breathed a sigh of relief and went no further.

Seizing the opportunity given by his feint, Hannibal

now crossed the Rhone near Valence, negotiated the
Alpine passes with the help of friendly Gaulish
guides, and descended via the valley of Susa upon the
city of the Taurini tribe, Turin.

Astounded, the Romans found Hannibal‟s army

invading the Po Valley and, after a series of major
victories, causing them to abandon almost the whole
of northern Italy.

Our 1988 route followed that of Hannibal at least as

far as the Alpine passes. Which pass the Carthaginian
army took through the mountains is the central
enigma of the epic march. Some historians think they
went over the Col de la Traversette, others the Mont
Cenis, and each of five dr six possible routes over the
high mountains has its supporters. We were to go over
the Col de Mont Genevre. My elephants would walk
on metalled roads for most of the way - not for them
the icy boulders of the Alpine cols that I remembered
from my first trekking holidays as a schoolboy just
after the war. But tarmacadam would have its
disadvantages too; I would need to watch their feet
like a hawk. Altitude would pose no problems; our
maximum height would be 1,850 metres. Elephants,
with their lungs strapped by gristle bands to the inside
of the chest wall, could cope easily with that, and
they‟d acclimatize gently in the long coastal approach
to the mountains.

Weather, however, was another matter. April in the

Hautes Alpes can be cold, wet and snowy. Elephants,
being massive animals, don‟t lose heat as easily as say
a dog or a rabbit; and if they‟re well-fed, able to
exercise and acclimatized , adults stand wet and cold
better than you might think for a not very hairy
mammal. Nevertheless, Hannibal lost thirty-six of his
thirty-seven elephants due to severe weather in the
year after crossing the Alps. I could take no chances;
the elephants‟ normal travelling wagon would have to
be always on hand in case of inclement weather, a tent
that could be used as a „hospital‟ would need to be
carried and each animal would have a made-to-
measure waterproof plastic mac. After much thought,
I dispensed with sets of jumbo-sized leather boots; I‟d
used them in the past for single feet to help post-
operative care of septic toes and deformed ankles, but
they are tricky things to keep adjusted for animals on
the move. If they are thick enough to take the heavy
pounding, they can easily pinch and abrade even
lough elephant skin.

The next thing was to assemble items for the medical

box. What were the possibilities of injury or ailment
striking the trio when we were perhaps in some valley
where the nearest hamlet was many kilometres away,
and veterinary services came in the form of the
shepherds‟ standbys of drenching-bottle, pot of
Stockholm tar and sharp penknife? I made a list of kit
for most emergencies: some litres of antibiotic
injection, cortisone-type drugs for sprains and
„rheumatics‟ (a term that encompasses a whole range
of joint, tendon, ligament and muscle conditions that
elephants, like us, can suffer from), sedatives and
anaesthetic for minor operations, tubs of creams,
ointments and salves for skin afflictions, in an array of
colours that would have delighted a medieval
apothecary, and, most importantly, brandy.

Brandy for elephants? As I have written elsewhere, old

Billy Smart, the circus owner, always insisted on
having a bottle of cognac in the medical cupboard. If
you find an elephant with a „cold‟, a stomach upset
after stealing green apples, or a twinge of toothache,
something that frequently happens when they change
one of their curious, ever-moving teeth, a bottle of
brandy will be most gratefully received. Apart from
alleviating • minor upsets, the major advantage of a
bottle of Courvoisier or Hine is that it can be, quickly
and simply, got into the patient.

As a young zoo vet, it didn‟t take me long to discover

that prescribing one pound or half a gallon of this or
that nostrum for a peaky pachyderm was worse than
useless if it wouldn‟t swallow it or, like as not, took it
into its trunk and then squirted it petulantly all over
my head. Elephants have a very acute sense of taste —
they‟ll find a single bitter pill the size of an aspirin
hidden in a loaf of bread, and at once return the loaf
unceremoniously and often in the most unexpected
manner.

Elephants do have a weakness for the grape liquor,

however, a fact that doesn‟t‟ assuage the wrath of the
occasional temperance league members who write
vitriolic letters to me accusing me of setting dumb
animals on the slippery path. These good folk should
watch elephants and baboons in Africa seeking out
and gorging on the overripe, alcohol-loaded fruit of
the miracle tree at the right time of year. Now those
are really wild parties!
So, through the good offices of the landlord of my
local pub, the Half Moon, I arranged for the distillers
to donate a crate of Remy Martin to the walk,
principally for the medical treatment of elephants.

Just before the big press conference held at the Oval to

announce details of the walk, I noticed a brief report in
the Veterinary Record — African horse sickness, a
virulent midge — or mosquito-borne virus disease,
had broken out in Spain, probably due to the
importation of a number of infected zebras.

Elephants aren‟t susceptible to the disease, but the

movement of animals across Spanish borders might be
restricted as a consequence of the epidemic. I rang
Merv and asked him to check on the situation with the
Spanish and, more importantly, the French authorities.
I met Ian and Kathy Botham for the first time just
before the conference started, and found the cricketer
and his wife to be down-to-earth characters, devoid of
sports-star self-importance and deeply committed to
the anti-leukaemia campaign. They were as anxious as
I was to ensure that the elephants would come first at
all times.

Then, half an hour before Ian spoke to the crowd of

journalists, Merv came up to me. „We are in the cow-
pat as far as the full seven-week expedition is
concerned,‟ he told me. „The French aren‟t permitting
any entry of horses or other big livestock coming from
Spain. They say the situation may change if the
Spaniards get the epidemic quickly under control, but
there are no guarantees of that.‟ Leaving the elephants
behind, trapped in Spain, was something we couldn‟t
contemplate. Merv went into a series of brief and
frantic meetings with his associates, with the Bothams,
with the major sponsor, a finance company, and with
Yorkshire Television who were to cover the whole
event. It was decided to lop the Spanish section off the
walk; we would start instead at Perpignan in France -
the expedition would in consequence last for only one
month. It was a blow, but not a critical one. A month
with daily media coverage could still raise a lot of
money for the cause; and though Yorkshire Television
at once cancelled their plans to send a film crew along
with us, their place was taken by Television South. I
was delighted to hear that their team would be led by
David Pick, an old friend through whom, twelve years
before, I had begun my association with the
Southampton-based television company.

Two days before the start of the walk I arrived in

Perpignan and met most of the people who would be
taking part. Besides the Bothams there was a core of
about a dozen people, including Greg Richie, the
Australian cricketer, who were planning to walk the
whole way. Around twice that number were hoping to
manage various proportions of the distance.
There were three television crews and a gaggle of
reporters in hire cars who would follow in comfort.
Then there was a large back-up team of „fixers‟,
messengers, drivers and caterers (many of them
volunteers who had accompanied Ian on previous
charity walks); the handful of Italian circus men
looking after the elephants; Steve Carroll, the medical
officer, who was an expert in the treatment of sports
injuries; Wolfgang Zeuner, a historian and Hannibal
specialist, who for years had planned such an
expedition; and Rex Shayler, who was both walker
and electronics wizard. It was Rex who had designed
and built the physiology-monitoring equipment. He
had come up with the idea of connecting an ingenious
little box of tricks, which the elephants would carry on
a light harness, to small adhesive patches stuck on
their skin. Information on the animal‟s pulse,
respiration and - it was claimed — other bodily
functions would be transmitted by a built-in radio to a
receiver-recorder in a vehicle travelling along slowly
behind the elephants. There was even an alarm with
flashing red light if any animal showed signs of stress.

For my part I was more than willing to try out the

monitor-ing equipment, but I had doubts as to
whether it would work on the move. As for the alarm -
great, but I had no intention of allowing the elephants
even to get out of puff, as we say in Lancashire, let
alone suffer stress. My eyes and ears, and occasionally
my stethoscope, are the instruments I trust most in
assessing an elephant‟s health and happiness.

Day One of the walk dawned cold and showery, with

a cloudy sky the colour of an elephant‟s back. A lively
breeze blew through the old city gate as everyone
assembled at the start. The elephants arrived in their
wagons at eight o‟clock and I checked them over
before Rex began fitting them up with the monitors
and harness. Around us things were not proceeding
smoothly; there were parking problems, alter-cations
between stewards and pushy photographers and the
difficulties of setting banners in the wind. Reporters
stood grumpily puffing through chilly hands,
policemen blew whistles as if on impulse, children in
traditional Provencal costume strained to hear the
music above the din as they danced pale-faced, and
the French populace, gloomily on their way to work,
regarded the little crowd of short-panted, silly-hatted
Englishmen and three elephants with blank in-
comprehension and hurried by. Merv was standing
swearing; he had just been informed that in France it
was forbidden to collect money as the walk went
along. Such „begging‟, even for charity, was illegal.

Suddenly Botham, who had been talking with friends

in the centre of the crowd, set off through the gate at a
brisk pace.
No gun, no fanfare. It just happened. These
unexpected starts, when Ian simply said „I‟m off , were
to be routine occurrences. Chaos ensued. Botham, with
the knot of serious walkers in tow, burst out of the
crowd. „Come on, get the elephants on the move!‟ I
shouted to Davio, the head elephant-man. He didn‟t
react. I repeated it in Spanish: ' Vamonos!’ He shouted
it in Italian to his team, and at last the three elephants
got under way.

Photographers, dancers, policemen, distributors of

bacon rolls and innocent passers-by, all reeled out of
the way as Tali, Dido and Batman swept forward in
line astern, trumpeting gaily. Hurrying behind the
hind legs of the third elephant, I wondered what it
was like when Hannibal‟s army had set out after
camping overnight near here over two millennia ago.

Similar noisy confusion I supposed. Similar people,

too. We know there was a chief army doctor,
Synhalus, and an army chaplain with the we hope
inappropriate name of Bogus. Whether there was a
Carthaginian equivalent of me, we don‟t know.

The elephants were walking fast to keep up with

Botham‟s group but, even so, they were falling behind
as we went through the centre of Perpignan. Davio
shouted encouragement to the animals to keep them at
full speed, and their legs slapped hard against the
canvas webbing of the monitor harness which had
been loosely assembled around the buttocks to
prevent chafing. After the first three hundred metres
of the seven-hundred-kilometre journey, bits of Rex‟s
harness, wires, adhesive patches, buckles and plastic
battery pouches littered the road - and we couldn‟t
stop to pick them up. So much for the monitoring
programme. We never used it again.

Trotting along behind Batman, and skipping

occasionally to avoid droppings that thudded in my
path, I quickly realized that the elephants‟ speed had
to be cut back sharply. At this pace they would soon
tire; like me they were out of condition. Circus life is
too sedentary. „Slow them down, let them take their
time,‟ I shouted to Davio.

„But, doctor, the walkers are already half a kilometre

in front.‟ „No matter. We start as we shall go on. The
elephants pick the speed.‟ Batman and Co. slowed to
an effortless amble.

My plan for a „token walk‟ was the only way; if the

weather was reasonable and the going not too tough,
we would set off with the walkers each morning, do a
kilometre or two at our own pace, load up the
elephants and drive them on to a point not far from
the next big village, where they could enjoy
themselves in a field or patch of woodland. When the
walkers caught up, the animals would lead them
through the streets and then travel on by vehicle again
until just short of the day‟s finishing line, where they
would again roam free until the sore and sweating
Botham came into sight. Using this system the
elephants walked on average eight or nine kilometres
of the route each day, while the humans tramped on
four times as far non-stop, snatching drinks and
sandwiches as they went. The elephants got abundant
exercise, never became tired and were always in the
right place to draw crowds and be presented to
Monsieur le Maire. In France and Italy, where few
people have even seen a cricket bat, let alone heard of
Botham, Batman and her friends were the key to our
publicity, for the world over elephants are wondrous
beasts, more popular with people than any other
species.

The showers stopped and we soon found ourselves

outside the city, walking along a dry, level road. We
came to a field where three horses ran excitedly to the
fence, ears pricked and tails aloft, to watch our
progress. The elephants didn‟t like the look of them.
They began to trumpet petulantly and passed them
with their bodies skewed crab fashion, and their shiny
eyes glaring. „They detest horses,‟ hollered Davio. I
wondered how they managed with the equestrian acts
that they must surely meet in the circus. From then on
I asked people at the head of the march to pass the
word back if they saw any equines along the route —
elephants running amok in the French countryside
was something best avoided. One of the advantages of
Hannibal‟s battle elephants was their terrorizing effect
on the horses of opposing cavalry. Later, the Romans
were to bring elephants with their armies to fight
against the Britons and when these animals, armoured
and carrying towers holding archers and sling-
throwers, crossed the Thames in the battle for
Londinium (London), they caused a panicked
scattering of the British cavalry.

We had been walking for about forty-five minutes,

with me running round the elephant procession from
time to time to check their gait, when I noticed a slight
change in the style of movement of Batman‟s right
foreleg. She was swinging it outwards an inch or two
just before it touched the ground. I observed it from all
angles as she walked. It was barely perceptible, she
wasn‟t really limping but . . . After a further ten
minutes had passed, I was certain that the outward
swing was more pronounced and Davio, who knew
her far better than I did, agreed when I pointed it out
to him. Disaster! Not three miles out on the first day
and walking on the flat on smooth tarmac, Batman
had gone lame.

I gave the order to turn off into the car-park of a

roadside motel, and there inspected the elephant‟s
limb from toe-nails up to shoulder. There was heat
and a little tenderness around the elbow joint. The
joint capsule was inflamed — for no apparent reason. I
went to the medical box, and made up an injection of
fast-acting corticosteroid. Five minutes later,
surrounded by the reporters and photographers who
seemed gratified at this early augury of an action-
packed trip, I delivered the official medical bulletin on
Batman - she would ride in the wagon for the next
couple of days while I continued treatment. If she
became completely sound, she then could rejoin the
walk. If she didn‟t -at that precise moment Batman
urinated and the torrent poured over my feet. I joined
in the general laughter, but at the back of my mind
something niggled. Why had Batman broken down so
quickly?

The next day, only two elephants took to the road and
I stayed behind for a while to examine Batman and
give more of the anti-flammatory injection. She had
improved, but was still throwing the leg. My medical
box was carried in the cab of the elephant wagon and,
while I was in there routing about for disposable
quarter-pint syringes and needles, I noticed a
cardboard box bearing a medical label projecting from
beneath the driver‟s seat. It wasn‟t any of my stock; I
pulled it out to see what it was. The box was filled
with dozens of bottles of corticosteroid injection, and
there were needles and syringes too. Altogether there
were enough drugs to have treated all of Hannibal‟s
army if every soldier had got javelin-hurler‟s kneecap,
sword-wielder‟s wrist, or whatever their ancient
occupational diseases were. The driver of the elephant
wagon was outside and I went to buttonhole him.
Though I don‟t speak any more Italian than is needed
to distinguish my Barolo from my Bardolino, he
understood my question. Waving one of the bottles of
injection I said „La medicina -perche?’

‘Oh. E per Batman.’

‘Batman frequentemente piccoli problemi con— ‟ I slapped

my elbow.

„Si, si. Frequentemente. Ma iniezione sempre funzionanno

molto bene!’

So that was it. The circus carried the drug routinely for
Batman‟s recurring „little problem‟. When she went
lame she‟d be given a shot without benefit of
veterinarian, and in a few days no doubt be sound
enough, at least for the public to see nothing amiss.
Her elbow joint wasn‟t deformed or thickened, but
there was obviously a long-standing weakness, arising
perhaps from a sprain or other injury years before.
And the circus hadn‟t said a thing about it to us when
contracting to send Batman with Botham on the Long
March to Turin.
Compared with many cases of lameness that I‟d had to
deal with in elephants over the years, Batman‟s sore
elbow was insignificant. But unless she was one
hundred per cent sound, and likely to remain so, I
couldn‟t return her to the walk with all its attendant
publicity. Already, back in England, some of the anti-
zoo and circus folk, before taking the trouble to find
out the facts, had been shrilling about how the
lameness of Batman was what they had predicted if
elephants were forced to climb mountain peaks. After
two more days on the corticosteroid, Batman was
within a whisker of normal. Only an expert could
detect the faint swing of the leg that remained. I made
the decision - Batman should not continue with the
walk, and I wasn‟t prepared to have her in the
elephant wagon for most of the day. She would go
back to the circus for rest among her friends, and I
would visit her there.

We continued through Provence by way of Narbonne

and Beziers. From time to time celebrities would join
us for a day or two to walk, and occasionally to ride
on the elephants. They included the rock guitarist Eric
Clapton, Eddie „The Eagle‟ Edwards of skiing failure
fame, and some well-known sportsmen and women.
The route was still over mainly flat country. We
started and finished each day in a village or small
town and, although the French people seemed on the
whole rather apathetic towards us, the elephants
carefree stealing of fruit, vegetables and
confectioneries as we went by shops and markets
where these wares were on display outside was
tolerated amiably. If Tali or Dido lifted an onion or
two from a tray, the shopkeeper would invariably
rush out to offer the lot. I had to keep an eye on such
free-loading. The effect of elephants gorging
themselves had occupied me so many times in the past
- the consequent cataract of diarrhoea and miserable
colics. On chilly mornings when I thought my charges
were rather „peaky‟, I gave them a slug of half a bottle
of cognac, pouring it into the end of their trunks which
they willingly curled up into a U-shaped cup that was
then thrust into their mouths and sucked dry with
evident delight.

As the days passed the elephants‟ condition, like that

of the humans, steadily improved. The fresh air, ever-
changing scenery and exercise did them a power of
good, and I noticed that they spontaneously increased
their rate of march. Once Batman left us the weather
remained dry, cool and often sunny for the rest of the
journey through France. Wherever possible I scouted
ahead in a car to find something like a mud-wallow,
thicket or shallow pool in which the elephants could
enjoy themselves. Although Botham wouldn‟t stop for
anybody or anything when walking - even people
who flew in to present cheques to him had to do it „on
the hoof — he willing to make a diversion from the
route to go with the animals through some bit of
countryside that gave them special pleasure. At Cap
d‟Agde they paddled in the sea, and outside
Montpellier they spent a morning wandering happily
in a vineyard where the vine stocks were low and
gnarled at that time of the year, though the elephants
were so delicate in placing their feet that they didn‟t
damage a single plant. Always contented, they
regularly made the pleasing loud purring noise that
elephants make when all is right with the world. The
animals revelled in the new sights, sounds and smells,
the wayside herbs to be sampled and the constant
trickle of humans bearing edible gifts.

And there were other things, like the day two

Englishmen, one a vet I knew, arrived from an
organization called Zoo Check „to investigate‟ us. I
don‟t imagine they would have flown out to check on
any of the thousand and one elephants travelling with
Continental circuses, but with us there was the
possibility of poaching some of Botham‟s publicity.
We had, from the beginning, welcomed visits from
anyone from animal welfare organizations, and
indeed the French equivalent of the RSPCA gave the
Walk a donation after sending a representative to see
how the animals were being treated. The Zoo Check
couple seemed bent on „exposing‟ something or other,
for they skulked about, ran away from reporters in the
most ridiculous fashion and didn‟t turn up for a press
conference to which they were invited. The problem
for them, I suppose, was that the elephants were
patently being well cared for, and if one complains
about circus elephants not getting enough exercise, it
is difficult then to argue that they shouldn‟t go on easy
country walkabouts.

When Hannibal came to the River Rhone he faced

several problems - a Roman army on his tail, hostile
tribesmen on the opposite bank and the need to get his
elephants across the wide expanse of water. In 1988 it
was only the last task which concerned us.

Hannibal built rafts, moored them securely to the bank

and covered them with sods of earth to make them
appear like projections of the dry land. Elephants are
understandably frightened of ground that gives under
foot, and normally refuse to put their weight on to
anything that wobbles in the slightest.

The last elephant to leave Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester

died because of a ramp that she didn‟t want to climb
after feeling the wood give a little. Hannibal‟s
engineers apparently did an excellent job, for all the
elephants boarded the rafts which were then cast off
and towed or punted across the river. Some elephants,
panicking, upset their rafts and men and animals fell
into the water. We don‟t know whether any men
perished but none of the elephants were drowned, for
they were in shallow water and continued the crossing
by walking on the river bottom with their trunks held
up above the surface. Elephants invented snorkels
many thousands of years before men first went diving!

Merv and his team had arranged for British Army and
French Foreign Legion men to provide us with army
rafts for our re-enactment of the Rhone crossing. I was
apprehensive about the scheme and, not having seen
any of the proposed equipment, worried that it, too,
might easily be destabilized and perhaps capsized by
three five-tonne giants suddenly becoming nervous
and very literally rocking the boat. Fortunately for me
and the elephants, though not for the television crews
and press photographers, I was not called upon to
decide whether to risk the raft crossing. A few days
before we reached Orange on the Rhone, the Army
pulled out of the operation and we subsequently
crossed the river in safe, if unspectacular fashion, by
way of the road bridge.

A week after Batman had left us, Merv and I drove

down to Toulon where the circus was pitched for a
couple of weeks.

We took with us several one-pound bags of sugar

cubes, the elephant equivalent of grapes for the
human hospital patient.
I found the elephant to be walking sound once more,
with no sign of anything amiss with the elbow. But
much as I loved the friendly animal, I had lost trust in
the joint and turned down Ugo‟s offer to return her to
the Walk. During the rest of the Walk, apart from one
instance when Tali stood on the prong of a pitchfork
and suffered a small penetrating wound of the sole of
one foot, I didn‟t have any accidents or outbreaks of
disease in my couple of patients. By contrast, Steve,
the medical officer, was constantly at work with giant
blisters, sprains, foot infections, toe-nail removals and
even a fracture of the shin caused by excessive
walking - he was a magician whose techniques could, I
swear, have got a man with no legs on the march
again.

In Nimes there are several important, well-preserved

Roman ruins, including the amphitheatre and a
temple, the Maison Carree. The elephants were filmed
by TVS making an impressive entrance into the arena
of the amphitheatre; then, rashly, I agreed to them
going up the steps of the Maison Carree to stand
under the great portico of the building. The flight of
steep, shallow, stone steps was easily negotiated by
the animals going up, but to my dismay it began to rain
when they were both being filmed at the top. Their
feet were broader than the depth of a step and their
weight would be tipped forwards coming down the
smooth stone, which had almost immediately become
slippery. I realized that the slightest mistake would
result in a horrendous fall. Fractured legs usually
mean dead elephants. What a fool I‟d been! My
stomach turned to ice.

Some of the television crew were standing nearby.

„Quick!‟ I shouted. „Get any dirt or gravel you can find
- scratch it up with anything and sprinkle it on the
steps.‟ We all began searching for patches of bare
earth. A camera assistant used his clapper-board to
scoop soil, a researcher raked at the ground with the
end of a microphone pole. I told Davio to keep the
elephants under the portico until we had gritted the
staircase as well as we could. It didn‟t look much, but
perhaps it would help.

The rain slackened to a steady drizzle. When we were

ready, I decided to bring the elephants down
backwards. That way they would perhaps fall into the
steps and slide down on their bellies if they lost their
foothold. The disadvantage was that they couldn‟t see
where they were going and had to feel their way
blind, aided only by the gentle encouragement of
Davio, murmuring to them in the pidgin German that
is the common language of circus elephants.

First was Tali. Very, very slowly, tentatively searching

and tapping for the step with her sensitive toe-tip, she
found a hold for the front half of her hind foot,
carefully tilted her weight on to it, balanced and then
inched back a forefoot. It was an awesome sight. The
great grey bottom of the elephant poised over the
steep drop and the patient, methodical, snail‟s pace of
the limb movement. The minutes passed. David Pick,
the producer, was ashen-faced and leaned against a
pillar, unable to watch, while I felt like vomiting. But
the enormous grey bulk of the elephant was steadily
descending. We were witnessing a rare demonstration
of the measured control of power. I, a stupid human,
had got them up there and now these great animals
were getting themselves down by sheer intelligence,
concentration and agility. After what seemed a year
Tali stood before me on level ground, snuffling in my
pockets for sugar, as calm as a cucumber and looking
as unconcerned about her mastery of the heights as if
she were a chamois rather than an elephant.

Now it was Dido‟s turn. We could still have a tragedy

on our hands. But Dido proved as nimble a performer
as her companion and used the same ungainly-looking
but successful back-end-first technique. When at last
she was safely down we cheered for all we were
worth, and then David and I slunk off to the nearest
bar for large brandies to steady our nerves. I‟ll never
forget my mistake at the Maison Carree.

With the country becoming more hilly as we

approached the Alps, we were keeping to the valleys
and there was little in the way of gradient to trouble
the elephants. When the elephants walked, I walked,
when they relaxed on an Alpine meadow with Botham
and the „serious‟ walkers panting towards them ten
kilometres back, I had time to explore the wayside
churches and sample the wines and cheeses of
Languedoc.

Only two severe climbs awaited the walkers, the Col

de Cabre and the Col de Mont Genevre, and I made a
reconnaissance of these high passes by car and
decided that the elephants would do no more than a
few hundred metres on each of them, and none at all if
the weather was bad. Each day I inspected the
elephants and had been pleased to note that by the
time we reached Pont de Quart their feet were in
perfect condition.

Circus elephants frequently develop overgrown soles

due to having relatively little exercise. The horny pads
become very thickened and sometimes under-run by
smelly, rotten erosions which need prompt attention.
Chiropody, in the shape of a vet or blacksmith paring
away the excess sole and cleaning out the decaying
patches, is an essential routine for elephants who don‟t
do plenty of walking. And elephants won‟t always
obligingly lift up their feet like some world-weary
pony to let you chisel and chop away, painless though
it is. There are some circus-trained elephants who will
lie down on one side on command, and let me work
with my collection of files, pincers and knives, but
most of the others need sedatives or even anaesthetics
so that I can work without being kicked, belaboured
by the trunk or simply sat upon.

As we entered the final week of the walk, however, I

saw that our elephants‟ feet had been not only pared
down and cleaned by the walking on asphalted roads,
but that there was now the first sign of the beautifully
smooth white soles continuing to be thinned by
contact with the sharp granite particles in the asphalt.
The animals were walking fast and enthusiastically
but, even with the few kilometres they were doing
each day, there was a risk that before long I might be
faced with tender feet. At once I informed everybody
that from there on the elephants would walk only one
or two kilometres a day and spend the rest of the time
out at grass or as guests of honour at the civic
receptions.

Despite fears (and secret hopes, I suspect, on the part

of the media) that the climb over the Cols might
trigger cardiovascular crises in one or two of the
walkers, they all made it — and quicker than
anticipated. The weeks of walking had made
everyone, including the elephants and me, much fitter;
and now the animals, still picking their own speed,
could almost keep up with Botham and the leaders
whenever they set off together. Bitter winds and rain
confined the elephants to their wagon when we
traversed the Col de Cabre, but on the Mont Genevre
we would cross the French-Italian we reached Pont de
Quart their feet were in perfect condition.

Circus elephants frequently develop overgrown soles

due to having relatively little exercise. The horny pads
become very thickened and sometimes under-run by
smelly, rotten erosions which need prompt attention.
Chiropody, in the shape of a vet or blacksmith paring
away the excess sole and cleaning out the decaying
patches, is an essential routine for elephants who don‟t
do plenty of walking. And elephants won‟t always
obligingly lift up their feet like some world-weary
pony to let you chisel and chop away, painless though
it is. There are some circus-trained elephants who will
lie down on one side on command, and let me work
with my collection of files, pincers and knives, but
most of the others need sedatives or even anaesthetics
so that I can work without being kicked, belaboured
by the trunk or simply sat upon.

As we entered the final week of the walk, however, I

saw that our elephants‟ feet had been not only pared
down and cleaned by the walking on asphalted roads,
but that there was now the first sign of the beautifully
smooth white soles continuing to be thinned by
contact with the sharp granite particles in the asphalt.
The animals were walking fast and enthusiastically
but, even with the few kilometres they were doing
each day, there was a risk that before long I might be
faced with tender feet. At once I informed everybody
that from there on the elephants would walk only one
or two kilometres a day and spend the rest of the time
out at grass or as guests of honour at the civic
receptions.

Despite fears (and secret hopes, I suspect, on the part

of the media) that the climb over the Cols might
trigger cardiovascular crises in one or two of the
walkers, they all made it — and quicker than
anticipated. The weeks of walking had made
everyone, including the elephants and me, much fitter;
and now the animals, still picking their own speed,
could almost keep up with Botham and the leaders
whenever they set off together. Bitter winds and rain
confined the elephants to their wagon when we
traversed the Col de Cabre, but on the Mont Genevre
we would cross the French-Italian border and we‟d
have only two days‟ journey downhill to Turin still
ahead of us. I decided to let the elephants have their
final stroll in the high mountains. It was cold and
foggy and snow lay on the ground as Tali and Dido
solemnly marched over the border, to be greeted by a
large and happy crowd of people in traditional
costume. There were soldiers and musicians straight
but of Italian opera, carnival figures and, yes, an Italian
cricket team from Turin — all wreathed in the grey
and clammy mist. To the blare of a brass band and the
excited clapping and chatter of the crowd, we began
the descent into Italy, led by the colourful throng. The
elephants must have felt they were back in the
grandest of circus parades.

The entry into the busy metropolis with its teeming

traffic was something of an anti-climax. Where
Hannibal‟s army had swept in and conquered the
stronghold of the Taurini, we battled to keep the
walkers from being split up and run over by the
Italian motorists, and walked with a protective cordon
around the elephants to stop children darting into
their path and getting injured. At last, after twenty-
one days‟ journey, Ian and Kathy Botham, and the rest
of the gallant band who had legged it every inch of the
way, stood with the elephants in the great Piazza
Castello before the town hall.

While Botham and the others attended a civic

reception in their honour, I said farewell to the
elephants, for the wagon was ready to take them
straight back to the circus. The remaining sugar lumps
were dispensed and, for the last time, their trunk tips
delicately rippled through my hair and inside my
jacket. Like Hannibal, we hadn‟t lost an elephant —
though he‟d had twelve times as many. Apart from
Botham‟s magnificent effort in raising so much cash
for a vitally import-ant cause, the walk had also given
something valuable to the gentle elephants - a once-in-
a-lifetime taste, however small, of freedom. Wouldn‟t
it be great if every circus elephant was entitled to an
Alpine holiday from time to time?
2 Running After Rhino

But you‟ll never become a rhinceoros, really you won‟t . . . you

haven‟t got the vocation.
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros

So the Arabian Nights got it wrong. It was clearly stated

that I should see two human figures when I had
finished cutting. Try as I might, I couldn‟t make them
out.

This was in 1 960 and, as a young vet exploring the

still largely unknown realms of zoological medicine, I
was in the dispensary cum clinic cum head keeper‟s
sanctum attached to the Victorian-built elephant house
at Belle Vue in Manchester. After months of effort we
had finally lost the battle to keep the old female
rhinoceros alive. She had been an irascible and
uncooperative patient right to the end, when her
weight had plummeted so that she was little more
than bones clothed in iron-hard hide. The weight loss
had been accompanied by the intermittent appearance
of blood in her urine. My diagnosis, based on no
experience and with the few colleagues in London and
Chester Zoos who‟d ever been called to see any sort of
sick rhinoceros unable to suggest anything better, was
chronic kidney disease.
Safe, easily administered sedatives for such
formidable animals had yet to be developed so
sampling blood for analysis from an ear vein was
impossible, although on one occasion, Matt Kelly, the
well-known Irish head keeper and Mancunian
„character‟ did get some blood from her by quick
thinking.

I‟d tried everything by way of medication from

streptomycin injected after putting her in a massive
steel handling crate, or crush, each day and literally
hammering the biggest hypodermic needle I could
find into her buttocks, to pints of cider vinegar poured
into her drinking water. This was at the suggestion of
my father; at the time cider vinegar and honey was in
vogue as a popular panacea, and he swore it had

simultaneous wonders for his arthriticky knees,

catarrh and haemorrhoids. Certainly I had the
impression that the rhino improved for a while with
the cider vinegar, something that hadn‟ t happened
with anything else. But there was the difficulty in
those days of having to use the metal crush on a
regular basis. It was the only way of giving injections,
but the animal detested the contraption and crashed
about in it irritably, making the six-inch steel posts
tremble and dust shower down from the roof timbers.
In the process she abraded the skin over her ridged
face and buttocks, and though it wasn't serious and
she was unaware of the superficial lacerations, they
had to be treated with antiseptic creams, for rhino skin
is very prone to infection, and the thinner she became,
the more protuberances there were revealed that could
be damaged. That meant more use of the crush and so
on - a vicious circle.

One night, Matt phoned me to say that he„d obtained

the blood sample from the rhino which I had for so
long impotently desired.

'Me bhoy, oi‟ve got a bit of the claret for ye. Will it be
enough for your experimentin‟?‟ Matt in those days
was the terror of young vets like me. A man of great
charm and charisma, he was one of the best of the „old
school‟ of zoo men. Long on experience, expert and
skilful when it came to enticing a weakly gazelle calf
to drink or an elephant to open its mouth, they had
little time for tyros like me - full of book-learning and
new-fangled nonsense, but unacquainted with the
subtle ways of handling delicate or fierce cold-blooded
or hot-tempered exotica. Matt was an artist - he knew
how-to catch a conscious leopard safely by the tail, the
herbs that could tempt a listless antelope to eat, the
way to hypnotize a crocodile and the knack of
recapturing an escaped humming-bird by attracting it
with a bright flower. He understood and was greatly
loved by chimpanzees and elephants, he had brought
back a great collection of hoofed animals by boat from
Africa to Manchester single-handed, and he could talk
the hind leg off a donkey. I learned a great deal from
him; and eventually, grudgingly, in the years to come
he was to learn something from me and what he called
„cesstatious science‟, whatever that meant.

So my mentor had got some blood from the rhino.

How, I wondered. What arcane bit of Irish ingenuity
had he demonstrated yet again? But it was simple
enough. He explained that the rhino had lunged at
him as he was perched on the side of the crush
smearing ointment on her, and she had nicked her lip.
The small wound dripped slowly, and he had dashed
to the dispensary for a heparin tube of the sort he‟d
seen me use to collect blood from more easily sampled
animals.

He cautiously put an arm through the bars of the

crush, risking having it pulped, and, taking care not to
touch the animal, gathered six or seven drops before it
stopped. It was enough to do a few basic tests. The
rhino proved to be profoundly anaemic and the
anaemia was of the haemolytic kind - the red blood
cells were being destroyed within the circulation
system by something, in a similar way to what
happens in severe malaria of human beings. We still
don‟t know the true cause, or causes, of this
syndrome, which I have seen several times since then
in rhinos, but I believe it is generally a form of Weil‟s
disease, the dreaded rat-borne disease which infected
miners in the old days and, more recently, has been
suffered by water-skiers using for their sport flooded
gravel pits where rodents lurk and contaminate the
water.

When the Belle Vue rhino died, Matt was very keen
that I should saw off the animal‟s horn. It was well
shaped and about thirty centimetres (a foot or so)
long. I was naive in those days.

„What do you want it for?‟ I asked the head keeper.

„Well, as a souvenir, ye know. She was an old friend,‟

he replied.

„What will you do with it?‟

„Ohh, polish it, mount it or somethin‟.‟

„It‟s the first rhino horn I‟ve had the opportunity to

examine in detail. I was hoping to cut it, to look at its
structure in detail - it‟s not horn you know, it‟s really
just tightly com-pacted hair.‟

Matt‟s face took on the sour „more scientific malarkey‟

look that I was getting to know well, and he clicked
his teeth. After a long pause he said, „Well, go ahead
then and cut it, if ye must. One cut, moind. Don‟t chop
the whole bejasus to smithereens!‟

„If I cut it in two, it‟ll make two souvenirs. Perhaps I

could have one.‟

„Err, well . . . erm . . . no, come to think of it, oi‟ll give

half to my friend in Tib Street.‟

„Tib Street?‟ Sounding now rather exasperated, he

said „Yes. I‟ve a friend down there who swears boi
rhinoceros horn for headaches, nose bleeds and all
manner o‟ things.‟

„What on earth does he do with the horn - stew it?‟

„Oh, I don‟t know. But he says it‟s done a world of

good for his headaches - the only thing for migraine.
Doctors aren‟t much use, ye know,‟ he added with
emphasis.

There are so many legends about rhinoceros horn.

Which is where the Arabian Nights come in. In the
second voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, it is related that, if
a rhino horn is cut in two lengthways, „several white
lines will be seen representing human figures‟. I didn‟t
see the lines when I sawed that first horn in front of
Matt, and I haven‟t seen them since in any of the
dozens of horns I‟ve had to remove for surgical
reasons.

Another fable, and one long believed, was that if a

suspect liquid were put into a cup made of rhino horn,
it would effervesce if it were poisonous. But the best-
known bit of nonsense, and the one with appalling
consequences for rhinos as a species, is the belief that
rhino horn is a powerful medicine and aphrodisiac. In
the Far East there is an enormous demand for
rhinoceros horn as an ingredient of potions used in
tra-ditional medicine. The aphrodisiac qualities of the
stuff are not, as we tend to think in the West, the main
attraction, but rather its reputation in treating
conditions of the head and nose. I suppose the
reasoning goes that, growing where it does, the horn
must be a repository of all that is strong and powerful
in that part of the body.

Thirty years ago, at the time of that first rhino death in

Belle Vue, there was little attention paid by the world
in general to such things as rhino poaching and its
connection to a trade in horns. When Matt presented
me with a bottle of whisky a week later - a gift, he
said, from his friend Mr Cheung in Tib Street as
thanks for the present of some horn (actually I think
Matt sold him both halves) which was certain to
alleviate his bothersome migraine - I didn‟t give it
much thought; it was another of Matt‟s perks, ‟like
rendering down the fat of a bear I‟d post-mortemed to
sell as a much-vaunted Lancashire cure for
rheumatism, or collecting the cast tail feathers of the
peacocks that wandered round the grounds for
Manchester florists, who used them in flower
arranging.

At that time there were perhaps seventy-five thousand

black rhino in Africa. Now their numbers are down to
around four thousand. In the 1970s, and even more in
the 1980s, we became belatedly aware of what was
happening to the rhino in Africa. Poachers with
powerful automatic weapons continue to slaughter the
animals, drawn by the riches that can be theirs for
selling horns to the Far East for the medicine makers
and to North Yemen in Arabia for carving into
traditional „jambia‟ dagger handles. One big horn can
fetch up to £50,000!

Sometimes I have to amputate a rhino horn where it

has been damaged by fighting, or has grown in a
curve that threatens to press into the flesh of the face.
What am I to do with these lumps of wood-like
material, each weighing four or five kilos? Firstly, it
must be said that in this country they could be sold
easily for export to Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan by
devious routes. From time to time, I get calls from
people, not always with oriental accents, asking me to
bear them in mind when I come across rhino horn
disconnected from its rightful owner. These folk also
show an intense interest in genitalia - of tigers, lions,
sea lions and deer - apparently imagining that my
week is spent gelding these exotic creatures rather
than encouraging them to reproduce. And the prices
they suggest for, say a deep-frozen tiger penis or pair
of leopard testicles, are staggering — enough to make
any big cat that overheard and understood such
telephonic absurdities clutch his groin and run.
Secondly, my partner Andrew and I would never
dream of selling rhino horn or the private parts of
other beasts, for the major reason that, although an
animal which has died in the zoo or safari park of
natural causes has no further need of these
appendages, and though no poaching or other cruelty
would be involved, it would contribute to the trade in
these things, helping, if only in a small way, its
survival and prosperity. That‟s the last thing we want.

But of course rhinos, like humans and other animals,

continue to die - if only from old age - from time to
time. More than once, when I have performed a post-
mortem on a rhinoceros, someone has then sneaked in
and removed a horn while I was showering or having
a meal with the zoo director. When, in 1988, I sawed
off the damaged horn of a white rhino at Windsor
Safari Park, an attempt was made to steal the „trophy‟
from the office of my friend Terry Nutkins, where I
had left it on the shelf. I am now of the opinion that
the best thing for these accursed protuberances is to
burn them as soon as they are cut off.

It was June 1987. Standing on the white-dust road

beneath an implacable mid-afternoon sun, just outside
the town of Massa, north of Pisa, the Italian soldier - a
member of the corps who serve as police - hitched the
strap of his sub-machine gun over the left-hand
shoulder of his smart but oppressive dark-blue
uniform. Bees hummed over the yellowing verges. The
occasional car, open-windowed, with radio blaring
full volume, passed by. He could smell nothing but
dust and hot air. The caribiniere was in a post-prandial
mood.

Two hours to go to the end of the shift and lunch,

taken as usual in Giuseppe‟s, still lingered agreeably
in his stomach — the carpaccio, the linguini ai funghi
and the Tuscan wine. Tomorrow would be his saint‟s
day, Lorenzo di Brindisi, he had the day off and
Milano were playing football on television.

Life was molto bene round these parts. No mafiosi like

Palermo or Calabria, no Red Brigade terrorists, none of
the frenzied crush of Roma. Nothing much in fact.
Molto bene. Which suited him and his heavily pregnant
wife down to the ground. The carabiniere looked down
the road to his right where it made a bend over the
railway crossing. Madonna}. Walking towards him was
a rhinoceros. No mistake - he‟d seen one once at the
zoo in Torino and others on television films. Grey
against the white dust, horn pointed menacingly
straight at him, the great beast was lumbering steadily
in his direction.

Rhinoceroses, as the carabiniere knew for certain, are

not members of the native Italian fauna. There are a
few wolves and brown bears in places, water buffalo
have been domesticated and can be seen working on
farms, there are wild boar, vultures, eagles, marmots
and chamois in the Alpine regions and three kinds of
venomous viper, but since prehistoric times there
haven‟ t been any Italian rhinos. But here it was,
strolling along like a cow going home for milking. No
zoo or safari park for miles around. It couldn‟t be an
escaper, surely. He didn‟t feel ill, and the amount of
wine he‟d drunk at lunch was no more than his
accustomed two bicchieri. The carabiniere unslung his
machine-gun and looked round, heart thumping, for
some-where to hide. This fierce beast that had
materialized out of the Romagnan soil could be a man-
eater!

Fifty yards up the road, away from the rhinoceros,

was the edge of a vineyard. He ran for all he was
worth, jumped down the shallow bank and crashed
through the nearest row of leafy vines. Turning, he fell
to a crouch, and peered through the foliage.
Miracoloso, the monster wasn‟t following him! It was
continuing to walk sedately along the road and would
soon be level with him.

At that moment he heard voices. A group of men came

into view; they were about a hundred metres behind
the rhinoceros and some were running. There were at
least ten of them, several carried coils of rope and they
were led by, madonna, two of the local policemen who
were chattering furiously and waving their pistols in
the air.

The rhino‟s name was Tommy. The last time I‟d seen
him in the flesh was when he was a two-year-old; he‟d
been born at Longleat Safari Park and I‟d gone there at
the request of an Italian zoo-dealer to give the animal
a clean bill of health. Like most of the white rhinos
born in safari parks (and Longleat‟s breeding record in
this respect has contributed as much as any to the
successful saving of this species from extinction)
Tommy grew up to know and like human beings.

Unlike the black rhino, a tetchier type, the white or

square-lipped rhino is almost as docile as a cow. I
have often walked in among a group of two-tonne
rhinos reclining on the grass, scratched their backs, sat
on their armoured haunches and even slapped an
injection into one of them. Tommy was so tame that he
starred in a British Telecom television advertisement
as „Ryan O‟Neal‟. After I had confirmed that the
young rhino was a perfect specimen, he was sold and
went by sea to his new owners in Italy. I didn‟t know
it at the time, but he was not destined for a zoo or
safari park. He was joining a circus.

There are some animals which it is difficult to justify

as in any way suitable for the life of a travelling circus.
The rhino is one of them, but Tommy was at least in
the best of circus hands. Circo Americano, one of the
three finest circuses in Europe (the other two are
Circus Krone of Germany and Circus Knie of
Switzerland) take infinite care with the welfare of their
animals. I had been called many times to attend to
patients in the circus, particularly elephants of which
they have an unusually large herd. My first work for
Americano had been to remove a tumour the size of a
water-melon from an elephant‟s upper leg. The
operation had been a complete success, and I became
accustomed to receiving phone calls from some city or
small town in France, Germany or Italy where the
circus was encamped, taking the next flight to the
nearest airport, hiring a car and arriving to find
everything prepared to the finest detail for
examination and treatment of some sick animal.
Afterwards, there was always the delight of seeing the
show, the spectacular three-ring type unlike anything
presented by British circuses, and then going with the
Togni family, owners of the circus, to dine.
Continental circuses know all the best eating-places on
their touring routes and are generally old and valued
clients of the patrons. If there are fresh white truffles or
the first wild strawberries in town, they get them. All
part of my life of veterinary gastronomy!

At Circo Americano, Tommy had happily acted as a

living mobile platform for acrobats in the ring, though
I never saw him perform. Then, on this day in June,
with the circus come to town in Massa, he hopped it.
For no apparent reason: curiosity, desire to stretch his
legs or go in search of some fresh grass, perhaps.
Tommy simply trotted out of the circus while he was
being watered.

Two tonnes of good-natured , trotting pachyderm is as

easy to stop as a Scorpion tank. You can' t put the
brakes on by grabbing its passing tail or standing in
front of it, arm raised traffic-policeman style. A rhino
is very short-sighted and doesn‟t even look at what it
charges. Guided by acute senses of smell and hearing,
it just puts down that horny head and goes.

With circus workers in full pursuit, Tommy went

through Massa town centre, charging nobody, injuring
no passers-by, simply a rhinoceros going AWOL,
savouring no doubt the aromas of bread and garlic
and chicory as he trotted past the food shops and
ignoring the familiar human voices, barking dogs and
honking motor cars. To the gawping citizens of Massa
this was a fine commedia. Two policemen who had
been standing, aimlessly smoking, in front of the
parish church joined the band of circus men as they
puffed by in hot pursuit. Action! In Massa! The
honour of the polizia! Gradually Tommy began to tire,
and he slowed to a walk. Flavio Togni, in command of
his staff, told them to hang back. He calculated that
when Tommy had had enough, he would come to a
halt. With familiar encouraging words, and by
producing the apples that he‟d stuffed into his pockets
when he saw Tommy making off, the rhino could then
be coaxed into the wagon that was already following
slowly half a kilometre behind. The main thing was to
avoid harassing or panicking the animal. Flavio had
dealt with such escapers among elephants in the past,
and the „softly, softly‟ patient approach had always
been rewarded. He told the two policemen who
insisted on leading the pursuers what he planned to
do. „Don‟t get in the way, don't do anything rash, don‟
t “ push” the beast. We know what we‟re doing and
there‟s no danger to anyone if we just take it easy.‟
Another kilometre, and Flavio guessed Tommy would
run out of steam.

It was at this point that the carabiniere (no lover of the

civilian police whom, like most of his colleagues, he
considered to be the Italian versions of Mr Plod)
surveyed the scene from his cover in the vineyard. I
can only imagine what he was thinking, for later his
superiors would not let us talk to him about what
subsequently happened. The monster was walking
past him now, and it looked as if the two policemen
were going to take a pot at it with their hand-guns. He
could see how the local, nay the national papers,
perhaps even the Corriere, and television too, would
report it. Dangerous killer rhino wreaks havoc in
Massa!

The carabiniere rose to his feet and emerged from the

vine leaves. He clicked the safety catch of his nine-
millimetre sub-machine-gun to „off‟ . Flavio and the
other spotted him immediately. „It‟s okay, signore,‟
shouted the circus boss, „every-thing‟s under control.
We'll have him caught in a few minutes.‟ The rhino
was now walking away from the carabiniere at an even
slower pace.

„But the photographs, the interviews on television

tomorrow will all be of that pair of flat-footed,
parking-ticket contadini!’ thought the carabiniere
perhaps. „Such a creature cannot be taken dead or
alive by one of them. What will folk in Massa say
when they know that I, Lorenzo, was there when the
monster rampaged through the countryside, and did
not act?‟
The carabiniere's sense of duty to the good people of
Massa had never blazed so fiercely. He lifted his gun
and, pulling the trigger, sprayed the rhino with
bullets. It was the first time he had fired the weapon in
anger and he felt like the good-looking guy in „Miami
Vice‟.

Tommy shuddered briefly, stopped walking but

didn‟t fall. When Flavio came running up to him he
even accepted an apple. Thin trickles of blood ran
down from a number of small holes in his dusty grey
skin.

La commedia e finita.

Accustomed as I am to off-beat opening lines when I

answer the telephone - „The dolphin‟s swallowed a
football‟ or „I think there‟s a vampire bat in the loft of
my house in Bagshot‟ - Flavio Togni‟s „Doctor, our
rhino‟s been machine-gunned‟ took my breath away.
He quickly told me about the shooting. „We need you
to come and get the bullets out of him - or he‟ll die!‟

„Load him with penicillin and pick me up at Pisa

airport,‟ I replied.

Apart from a few animals that had been peppered

with shotgun pellets, I had no experience of gunshot
wounds in exotic animals. As I packed some rhino
anaesthetic, surgical instruments and emergency
drugs into The Bag, I reflected gloomily on the
impossible task ahead. No chance of X-raying to
pinpoint the position of the bullets - even in the large
animal clinic of a modern veterinary teaching hospital,
the X-ray machines couldn‟t penetrate such massive
creatures. And I knew how frustrating it was to try to
track foreign bodies blind through their entrance hole.
The natural movement of the muscles quickly and
often progressively changes the position of an object
such as a sliver of glass or metal. Searching for broken
hypodermic needles in the old days, before they were
laminated, could take hours in a small animal even if
you started at once right at the spot where the needle
went in.

But bullets - the plural was appropriate in Tommy‟s

case - could travel no one knew how deep in rhino
tissue, and they didn‟t necessarily travel in a straight
line. Flavio had said they were nine-millimetre low-
velocity bullets; perhaps they were lying just beneath
the skin. If they were, was it really necessary to go
after them? So many questions, so few answers.

My pessimism deepened as I saton the BAflight from

Heathrow, surrounded by summer holiday-makers.
„Have you been to see the Leaning Tower before?‟
asked the jolly lady sitting next to me, slugging back
one Bloody Mary after another.
„Progfog,‟ I replied. „Progfog.‟

„Er . . . Pisa . . . Have you been to the Leaning Tower

before?’ She enunciated the words slowly, clearly,
loudly in case I was both an idiot and a foreigner.

„Progfog blatch. Progfog,‟ I repeated.

The jolly lady nodded sagely. „Oh, I see you don’t speak
English. Ingleeeeesi?’

„Progfog.‟ If necessary I can keep this up for a long

time.

Smiling sympathetically, the jolly lady returned to her

Bloody Mary, and didn‟t say another word.

My imaginary language is a boon when travelling by

air.

It gives me peace when I need to think. Headphones

serve the same purpose on long haul flights. But the
more I thought about Tommy, the more doubtful I felt.
What a pity Dr Wolpickel didn‟t exist!

Two years earlier I‟d been telephoned by a man who

introduced himself as MrJones, a Baptist minister from
South Wales. „Hello, is that Dr Taylor?‟
„Yes.‟

„I wonder if you could help me. I‟m trying to trace a

colleague of yours, Ulrich Wolpickel.‟

„Who?‟

„Wolpickel. Ulrich. You are David Taylor, the zoo vet,

aren‟t you?‟

„Yes, but I‟m afraid I don‟t know any Wolpickel.‟

„He‟s a zoo vet. German. Specializes in brain

operations on rhinoceroses.‟

„What?’

The minister went on to explain. A year before he‟d

helped out a German tourist who claimed to have had
his money and belongings stolen while on a cycling
holiday through the valleys. He found him a bed for
the night, a change of clothes and some cash. The
German was a charming, cheerful character. He told
Mr Jones how he was a veterinary surgeon and that
his main line of work was surgery within the skull of
the rhino, and that he had originally been inspired to
go into the zoological field after reading my first
autobiography, Zoo Vet which was published in
German under the name Ein Herz fur Wild Tiere.
Wolpickel stayed with the minister and his wife for a
week. They all got on famously. He went to the chapel
with them, and reinforced the singing of the thin
congregation with his loud and not unmelodious
voice. The week stretched to a month.

The minister and his wife found themselves growing

very fond of the nice young German vet who did such
fascinating work, and when he one day announced
that he must return to Germany to attend to a
particularly sick rhino, they provided him with a
further £150 on top of the £800 he‟d already borrowed
from them, and looked forward to seeing him, as he
promised, in a fortnight‟s time when he would be back
in Britain to have a meeting with David Taylor on
certain advances in rhino surgery, and to repay his
debts to his good Welsh friends. As you will have
guessed, that was the last they saw or heard of the
amazing Dr Wolpickel. Of course, he‟d left an address,
but it turned out to be non-existent. And when they
checked via Directory Inquiries, there was no one with
the name of Wolpickel in the town of Soldau, which
was where he claimed his family home to be.

A year went by and still the Reverend Mr Jones and

his wife continued to believe that there must be some
innocent explanation. Maybe Ulrich was snowed
under with brain-damaged rhinos. Or he had had a
nervous breakdown after too many long hours at the
operating table. Eventually, recalling Wolpickel‟s
frequent references to me, the minister looked me up
in the local library and telephoned. It was surprisingly
difficult to persuade him that he had been well and
truly conned.

„But he talked so knowledgeably about exotic animals,

particularly rhinos. About surgery. About the
anatomy of their skulls.‟

„How do you know he wasn‟t talking nonsense,

Reverend?‟

„It sounded so correct.‟

„He‟s a fraud, plain and simple.‟

„Then how did he come to know so much about you?‟

„From the books - easy.‟

„And you are sure, Dr Taylor, that there is no German

vet working on rhinoceros brain surgery?‟

„Mr Jones. Firstly the skull of the rhino is so

enormous, thick and complicated that no one,
anywhere, has ever performed brain surgery on one.
Secondly, rhino brain diseases, ones that conceivably
might require surgery, are very, very rare. I‟ve never
come across a case. If Wolpickel, or whatever he was
really called, ever tried to make a living out of rhino
brain surgery he‟d go broke!‟

„Well, like I said, he didn‟t have any money.‟ The

naive and Christian gentleman couldn‟t believe it and,
when at last the conversation ended, I‟m sure he went
away still doubting my explanation. Yes, a real Dr
Ulrich Wolpickel could have been just the man for
Tommy, I mused as we touched down at Pisa airport.

The Daily Mail had got there first, and a reporter and
pho-tographer were waiting with a car. Flavio and his
men were busy tending to Tommy. They‟d got him
back to the circus without any trouble and he was
apparently on his feet, though a bit groggy.

„The police and the carabinieri are squabbling like cat

and dog over who fired,‟ said the reporter as we drove
flat out for Massa. „They haven‟t yet worked out
whether it‟s a matter of guilt or glory.‟

There was absolutely nothing glorious about the scene

that confronted me when we arrived at the circus.
Tommy lay dead. He had collapsed twenty minutes
earlier. My sadness was overwhelmed by anger at the
tragic stupidity of the affair.
It wasn‟t the first time that escaped zoo or circus
animals had been needlessly slaughtered by over-
zealous police or militia men.

Although I was convinced that there was little, if

anything, that I could have done for Tommy, and a
full post-mortem in the circus field was impossible, I
decided to probe the gunshot wounds to see whether I
could locate any of the bullets. There was one wound
behind the right ear, another that penetrated the ear
flap and four scattered over the right thigh. In
addition there were the marks of three ricochets. The
most lethally placed bullet was the one behind the ear.
Cutting with a scalpel, I searched for it. I followed its
track as deep as I could, but didn‟t find it. It had most
likely lodged somewhere at the base of the skull. The
other bullets had also travelled so deep and so
tortuously that I had no better luck in finding any of
them. There was nothing more to be said or done.

Disconsolately I flew home.

Later in that year, I laid my hands for the first time on

the rarest and most enchanting of rhinos under quite
different circumstances. Millionaire, gambler,
eccentric, John Aspinall is regarded by many zoo men
as a maverick. Maverick he may be, but a brilliant one,
and he has established at Bekesbourne, near
Canterbury and Port Lympne, overlooking the
Romney Marshes, two of the most important
zoological collections in Europe. His breeding group
of gorillas is arguably the best in the world and yields
enough offspring each year for the planned
reintroduction of complete family groups into the wild
to be practicable in the not-too-distant future. Off
public view there are facilities where endangered wild
cat species can reproduce in tranquillity, and his
elephant herd will also begin expanding naturally, for
unlike many zoos who are unable or unwilling to keep
elephant bulls, potentially the most dangerous of
mammals, Aspinall has spent the time and money on
building the necessary installations for the proper
handling of such giants. He‟s often been attacked by
the media over the series of accidents, some fatal, at
his zoos. But in almost all the incidents there has been
little scientific justification for the criticisms which
have contained more than a little of the bile of envy
and schadenfreude. Aspinall, friend of Lord Lucan and
host to the mega-rich at his Curzon Club, is just too
damn clever by half, but for me he‟s a uniquely
effective zoo owner. Only his frequent Sunday-
afternoon frolicking with his full-grown tigers and
gorillas in front of the public do I regard as foolhardy.
Apart from the risk, small though it may be with
animals who have regarded him as their dominant
leader since they were babies, it is a bad example to
the visitors. If „Aspers‟ can get away with wrestling
with a tiger, might it not be okay for some young buck
to impress his girlfriend by vaulting the safety barrier
and sticking a hand through the wire mesh to stroke a
king of beasts?

In recent years, one of Aspinall‟s most significant

projects has been the rescue of the Sumatran rhino. As
well as the better-known rhino species in Africa and
India, there are rarer and even more threatened forms
which have their homelands in south-east Asia. They
are the Javan and Sumatran rhinos.

There are only about fifty of the former and a hundred

or two of the latter left in the world.

With the blessing of the Indonesian and British

governments, Aspinall has ploughed millions of
dollars into the laborious and time-consuming process
of capturing eight of the few remaining Sumatran
rhinos, with the aim of setting up captive-breeding
programmes in Djakarta and Port Lympne, with four
rhinos being sent to each place. After almost two years
and many expeditions by his staff in the Indonesian
rain forest, the first two animals were caught and
brought to Kent.

Chris Furley, who had been our assistant for six years
in the Middle East and was still associated with our
practice, was now Veterinary Officer for Aspinall‟s
two zoos. When the Director of Howletts and Port
Lympne (an excellent zoo vet in his own right who
had qualified at Glasgow shortly after me) had to go to
Africa on sick gorilla business, he asked us, as he often
does in such circumstances, to take care of the health
of the Aspinall animals while Chris was away. So
when one of the Sumatran rhinos developed a bloated
stomach, John Lewis, another of my assistants who
had also done his stint in the Middle East, went down
with me to see what we could do with these little-
understood creatures.

I like all rhinos, but I fell in love at once with these

Sumatrans with their fuzzy, reddish hair and twin
horns.

One impressive thing about the Aspinall zoos is the

incredibly high quality and broad range of the animal
food. The best of Covent Garden, Billingsgate and
Smithfield produce ends up there. The chimpanzees
and gorillas eat prime condition exotic fruits, some of
which I cannot name. The elephants and rhinos, the
tapirs and the hunting dogs, are the gastronomes of
the zoological world. Every Monday is particularly
special; then John Aspinall leads a small group
comprising his Director, Curators and Veterinary
Officer round the two zoos. It takes all day and is a
sort of royal progress. He inspects, discusses and
expands upon each animal and - and this is his delight
- he hands out titbits, eagerly anticipated, to everyone,
personally. Specially baked fresh bread and chocolate
bars for the rhinos and elephants. Choice meat for the
hunting dogs. Rare fruits and vegetables for the apes.

When he ran the Curzon Club, it was, and I suppose

still is, the rule that the high rollers at the tables were
provided with a lavish array of refreshments
throughout the night. Whatever they might fancy,
their most outlandish potential whim, would be
catered for. A pricked pomegranate in Krug Imperial
for Kashoggi? Iced persimmons, quinces and guavas
for the Sultan of Brunei? Onassis feels like four ounces
of Beluga caviare on green limes and woodcock eggs
at 3 a.m? At once, sir, with our compliments. So every
night the Club, like its major competitors in the world
of bored greed, had to be provisioned with the finest
fare, just in case His Majesty, His Highness, or His
Bankroll might feel like it. Consequently, the following
morning, there was a mountain of delectable goodies
that had not been summoned by the fickle palates of
the Great and the Not-So-Good. John Aspinall had all
of it sent straight down to his zoos. The casinos not
only made the money that funded his real love, the
animal collections, but did chimpanzee takeaways as
well. I wager there are gorillas

in Kent who would make wonderful inspectors for

Egon Ronay and could debate for hours the relative
merits of Chilean or Israeli cherries.
John Lewis and I had the opportunity to see this
cornucopia in action while we were treating the
Sumatran rhino and trying, to put it bluntly, to make
the animal fart its intestinal gas away. My lasting
memory is of the way in which these creatures would
take a whole sweet melon in their mouths and by
sheer jaw pressure crush it. Juice exploded out of their
lips in a golden shower that jetted in all directions and
the ripe pulp was swallowed with audible murmurs of
pleasure. Another one, please! The rhinos took melons
as you would eat grapes. Watching the Sumatran
rhinos I couldn‟t avoid thinking of Tommy. For sure,
these animals wouldn‟t end up as acrobatic
springboards riddled with bullets.
3 White and Wonderful
In Africa, the albino buffalo shares the sanctity of the elephant.
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Essays on the History of Man

„I am black, but comely, oh ye daughters of Jerusalem5

goes a line in the Bible‟s Song of Solomon. Biologically
speaking, black or dark brown pigment, in the forrp of
melanin, is very useful stuff and to be born without
any of it at all can be, for certain individuals, a black
day - if you will pardon the expression.

Albinism - total lack of pigmentation - occurs, though

very rarely, throughout the animal kingdom,
including humans of all races. One in twenty thousand
people is said to carry the recessive genetic factors that
predispose to the condition characterized by white
skin and hair, photophobia and susceptibility to ultra-
violet-induced skin cancers. White foxes, blackbirds,
opossums, monkeys, leopards, racoons, water buf-falo
and individuals of many other species have been
recorded, and everyone is familiar with the albino
breeds of domestic rabbit and mouse. Not being
coloured like your fellows means, of course, that you
stand out and lack the protection of natural
camouflage; and the absence of colour pigment in the
eye, exposing the blood vessels which give the
characteristic red effect, make the delicate structures
within that organ susceptible to damage by bright
light.

My exotic patients have included a number of albinos

over the years. There was Carolina Snowball, a
striking pure-white bottlenosed dolphin caught off the
coast of Carolina, USA.

The other conventionally pale-grey dolphins with

which she lived for many years in the Marineland
treated her like any normal member of the group. One
wouldn‟t expect any colour-bar among such highly
intelligent mammals.

I have tended several albino king cobras - their

deathly pallor made this most aggressive and
dangerous of snakes seem even more forbidding - and
on the children‟s television show „No 73‟, where I
presented natural history items for six years, I once
met a charming albino toad, of the common or
greenhouse kind, which had been found in Yorkshire.

Although toads are shunned by most predators

because of their ability to secrete a noxious liquid from
their skin glands, they are preyed upon by some
animals, and shining like a new golf ball among the
petunias doesn‟t help such a small creature to
maintain a low profile.
But the stars among my encounters with unusual
white beasts were much bigger individuals. The first
was, and still is, unique. Weighing around 180 kilos,
most of it solid muscle, sweet or ugly-faced according
to your taste, and the unofficial mascot of the City of
Barcelona, he goes by the Spanish name of Copito de
Nieve - Snowflake. Fragile, light and melting -he is
anything but\ Snowflake is a macho male gorilla. Not
as white as an albino mouse, his shade is rather a pale
apricot, particularly on hairless parts like the face,
where the blood vessels glow through the skin.

Gorillas can live to about thirty-five years in the wild,

and fifty years in a zoo. Snowflake was probably born
around 1962 and so when Barcelona Zoo contacted me
in 1986 he was a middle-aged gentleman. His parents
were normally pigmented gorillas, but by some freak
juggling of Snowflake‟s genes at the moment of his
conception, he was destined to be different. His tragic
early life was an all too typical one.

Poachers in Guinea killed his parents in order to eat

the meat, sell their heads and feet as tourist curios, and
put up the baby for sale to a zoo or even as a pet. His
unusual lack of colour made him even more of a prize;
like thousands of little, frightened, pining orphans
which have followed him down the same Via
Dolorosa, he was sent to Spain where customs control
of exotic imports was, and to some extent still is,
remarkably lax. He was two or three years old when
this latter day parody of the slave trade in those other
Africans was played out and he arrived in a box,
almost dead from malnutrition and neglect, at the zoo
in Barcelona. Don‟t think that such traffic has yet been
totally abolished. Dr Luera, the zoo‟s veterinarian,
skilfully reared the little gorilla in his own home and
Snowflake grew into a celebrity among zoo animals,
the only albino gorilla that had ever been seen.

As a mature adult (one could hardly call him a

silverback, the usual term for fully grown normally
pigmented male gorillas because of their cloak of
silver-grey hairs) he was in every respect other than
skin tint a thoroughly normal gorilla — totally
vegetarian, with that enigmatic, brooding character,
less mercurial and frenetic than the chimpanzee and
without the tranquil oriental philosophy of the orang-
outang. He became in due course lord of the Barcelona
gorilla family and fathered twenty-one healthy baby
gorillas - but all of them in standard issue, run of the
mill, black. Which was only to be expected. Shuffling
the genetic codes in a fertilized gorilla egg throws up
an albino rather less often than the bank is broken in
Monte Carlo.

But with Snowflake due to approach the autumn of his

life, it couldn‟t be assumed - still fertile though he was
- that he would go on reproducing, like Charlie
Chaplin, into his dot-age. Barcelona Zoo were
determined to preserve the possibility of producing
another albino gorilla for as long as possible. I
supposed they hoped to recreate the great blaze of
publicity that had attended Snowflake‟s arrival.

Some animals that are freaks of nature, wild-born or

con-trived by humans, continue to be greatly prized.
Though their peculiarity confers no fundamental
scientific value, many people, including some zoo
directors, possess a touch of the old carnival sideshow
mentality. White gorillas, lion-tiger hybrids, dolphin-
whale crosses and two-headed snakes, are all potential
crowd-pullers, but don‟t mean any more than the
bearded lady of times gone by. Gorillas are marvellous
beasts under grave threat of extinction, but I don‟t find
a gorilla made any more marvellous just because it
lacks normal pigmentation. Barcelona Zoo had come
up with the idea of a sperm bank, preserving
Snowflake‟s semen and its contained genetic blueprint
for years after his eventual demise in deep freeze. By
diluting the stored semen and using it in carefully
controlled amounts through artificial insemination,
Snowflake might go on posthumously trying to throw
Snowflake Junior well into the next century. To that
end, they wanted me to extract a quantity of semen
from him which would then be treated by a medical
institute that specialized in human test-tube baby
work. It would be endowed with a kind of chill
immortality by being frozen at minus 79 degrees
Celsius.

Artificial insemination, and the associated techniques

of diluting and storing semen, were developed in
animals long before being applied to human beings.
Centuries ago, the Arabs collected semen from mares
by inserting sponges into their vaginas. An Italian
scientist anticipated today‟s deep-freezing of semen by
experimenting on the effects of snow mixed with
stallion semen in the eighteenth century. Artificial
insemination and embryo transplantation are
nowadays highly important and complex fields in
animal reproduction, both agricultural and zoological.
The techniques of semen collection vary from species
to species. Giant condoms can be used on horses, and
artificial vaginas are generally employed with bulls
and water buffalo. Diluting the semen immensely
increases the number of females that can be
inseminated with it but it must be protected from the
effects of the extremely low temperatures needed to
preserve it for years; these necessitate all manner of
chemical cocktails being added to the collected
specimen, and each species has its own particular
requirements. Among the diluents that can be used
with semen are such things as coconut milk, tomato
juice, honey, egg yolk, milk and, particularly good at
stopping the poor little spermatozoa from getting
frostbite, glycerol.
To take the semen from Snowflake would require me
to use electro-ejaculation. This entails inserting a probe
into the rectum at just the right spot in relation to the
prostate gland and the nerves which trigger the
muscular contractions of ejaculation, and applying a
brief pulse of electric current.

Though not dangerous, it is unpleasant for the patient

(or so I am assured by the man who custom-built our
probes for various sizes of animals; he assiduously
tried out the one made for great apes on himself-
without, of course, any anaesthetic).

Snowflake would have to be given a general

anaesthetic-after all, even for the best of reasons, bull
gorillas don‟t take kindly to zoo vets walking up and
sticking something that looks rather like a black plastic
truncheon into their fundament.

The Barcelona zoo veterinarians had little experience

of, and considerable apprehension about,
anaesthetizing the most valuable (after the giant
pandas I take care of in Madrid) animal in Spain. The
responsibility for the operation would be wholly mine.

Twenty years had passed since I „knocked out‟ my

first gorilla, one of the pair that had arrived at Belle
Vue, Manchester, just before the fine new great ape
house was opened by comedians Morecambe and
Wise. Since then I‟d not had any problems,
idiosyncratic reactions or circulatory collapses in
inducing controlled, temporary oblivion in these
mighty pri-mates. A flying dart filled with one of a
range of special concentrated anaesthetic solutions
and fired from a blowpipe or gas pistol would have
the biggest gorilla sleeping like a baby within five to
ten minutes. There was no reason for me to suppose
that Snowflake would be any different from an
ordinary gorilla under anaesthetic but . . .

I made arrangements to perform the electro-

ejaculation on a morning in June, and asked Antonio-
Luis Garcia del Campo, my friend and colleague at the
Madrid Zoo, to meet me in Barcelona. There‟s no
veterinary surgeon in Spain that I trust more as a
collaborator during surgery. Together we had
operated many times on pandas, elephants, komodo
dragons, tigers and much else. Quick, strong and
resourceful, he‟s the man to have beside you when, for
example, you‟re blood-sampling rare Mhorr gazelle at
night in a garden in Almeria with the only source of
light a flickering cigarette lighter, or when an even
rarer okapi collapses under general anaesthetic and for
long minutes won‟t respond to your antidotes.

Antonio-Luis was, and is, my ideal Number One at

times like that.
Although such operations on unusual beasts might
sound more taxing than their equivalent on domestic
animals, I recall many hundreds of surgical cases at
the Milnrow Road surgery in Rochdale where the
patients were cats and dogs and occasionally rabbits,
which gave the young vet I then was as much worry,
and demanded as much nervous energy, as anything
we tackle nowadays on dolphins or gorillas. And if I
fail now, I don‟t normally have the added strain of
facing the distraught owner of Fido or Felix and
bearing sad tidings.

I walked with Antonio-Luis through the pleasant old-

fashioned city zoo set in a park close by the Barcelona
water-front. We stopped to look at the killer whale,
plump and gleaming like a blow-up plastic replica of
himself, and now fully recovered; the last time I‟d seen
him was when he was being bullied by a tyrannical
male dolphin only one-tenth of his weight. Typically,
the killer whale had constantly turned the other cheek
when teased and bitten by the dolphin, even though
one snap of his powerful jaws with their long conical
teeth would have stopped his tormentor —
permanently. When the whale he was covered with
shallow tooth-marks. Although none of them was by
itself a serious wound that haemorrhaged profusely,
the sum total of dozens of lacerations, each losing a
little blood, had produced a profound anaemia. And
the poor whale was sore and stiff into the bargain. It
was the dolphin form of the Chinese „death of a
thousand cuts‟ and I was in no doubt that the meek
forbearance of the whale would shortly end in its
death if something wasn‟t done at once. I had the
dolphin, protesting loudly with angry squeals and
chirps, moved the same day and set about relieving
his victim‟s symptoms with analgesics and anabolic
hormones concealed within the daily ration of herring
and mackerel. The set smile of the bottle-nose
dolphins that we find so engaging can sometimes
conceal a deadly purpose.

When we walked over to the great ape house we

found it to be crammed full of people. The zoo was
apparently going to make the electro-ejaculation of
their star animal a major media event. It had been
decided that instead of operating in the zoo‟s
veterinary clinic, I should work in the covered visitors‟
area in front of the windows through which Snowflake
and his family could normally be seen going about
their daily business. Tall television light stands ringed
the table draped in green cloth. This was an operating
theatre indeed - with emergency transfusion drips,
oxygen bottles, instrument trolleys, gas machines and
suction apparatus as the props.
‘ Estamos en un circo!’ gasped Antonio-Luis when he
saw the tight press of journalists, photographers and
cameramen encircling the floodlit table. And beyond
the expectant audience of Homo sapiens in the front
stalls, a line of female gorillas and their young were
squatting, as it were in the dress circle, noses flattened
to the armour-plated windows and mesmerized by the
feverish activity of these other apes. Snowflake, of
course, was nowhere to be seen. He was in his
sleeping quarters, unknowingly waiting for his
anaesthetic dart.

Rendering him unconscious with the double-strength

ketamine (we have a pharmacist in Yorkshire who
specially concentrates this invaluable anaesthetic for
us) went according to plan and he was then carried on
a stretcher by six sweating keepers down the
passageway and into the tumult. To make way for the
mighty albino, lying like a dead caliph on his bier, two
security guards with whistles and batons went ahead.

Immediate uproar! Constellations of flashbulbs

exploded, the crowd rocked and swayed as each
individual pushed to get close to the sleeping giant,
and the hot air, growing steadily hotter from the glare
of the lights and the mass of human flesh, was filled
with execrations, mainly in Catalan but with the
occasional Castilian "cono' , ‘mierda’‟ and "hijo de puta’‟
distinguishable. The noise was deafening and
continuous.

Antonio-Luis and I, following behind the stretcher,

found ourselves left behind for, though the crowd was
forcibly parted to allow Snowflake‟s royal progress, it
at once snapped shut when the two rear bearers went
through. ‘Sacredenundondelaris!’ roared my
companion, using the mock-Spanish exclamation that
he loves and which I heard as a boy on a Dick Barton
radio programme and taught him when we first met.

„Por favor, let us pass. Por favor, we are the veterinaries!’

I shouted to the backs of a hundred heads. Snowflake
was now lying unattended on the table. Suppose
something happened - his tongue fell back and
blocked the airway or his heart began to flutter!

„Por bloody favor - soy el veterinario ingles. Permitenos

pasar.‟ To no avail. All eyes and ears were focused on
the magnificent leading actor in the drama, lying there
supine with his Falstaffian beer-belly and utterly
tranquil apricot-coloured face.

As I have said, Antonio-Luis is an invaluable Number

One.

With the audience still between us and our patient, he

decided to rely no more on exhortation. A basketball
player of inter-national class, he saw a chink between
two pairs of shoulders in the back row of the crowd
and smashed through, grabbing my arm in tow. Head
down, I was dragged through the buffeting throng,
almost losing my operating gown and having my
shins kicked half a dozen times.

Roll of drums! Crash of cymbals! They would have

been appropriate, for we emerged „on stage‟ feeling
more like knock-about clowns than veterinarians
about to operate. But we were reunited with our
patient. Ignoring now the cries of „Doctor! Please, a
photo by his head!‟ and „Doctor, show us the thing
you‟re going to stick up his bottom!‟, Antonio-Luis
checked the gorilla‟s vital functions while I examined
his genitalia. Everything my end seemed in order, and
Antonio-Luis nodded to indicate that the pulse,
respiration, capillary refill time and heart sounds
were normal. I assembled the electro-ejaculator,
plugged it in and selected the current strength. The
journalists and paparazzi were by now at fever pitch
and imbued with anatomical curiosity. „I wanna get a
picture of his organ!’ screamed a woman reporter -
one hesitates to imagine what sort of magazine she
represented.

„Si, si, show us his pistola! others shouted.

‘Donde esta su polla?’ boomed a loud and vulgar voice.
„Where is his willie?‟

Stone-faced, we bent over Snowflake‟s torso. Both

Antonio-Luis and I knew that they were all labouring
under a common misapprehension. How shall I put it?
Gorillas are big and beefy, but their sexual organs are,
by comparison, remarkably tiny. The really interesting
biological question is why the genitalia of us, the
naked apes, should be comparatively so large. With all
set, I inserted the lubricated probe into Snowflake‟s
rectum while Antonio-Luis held a sterile glass tube to
the end of the animal‟s penis. Our actions induced
sudden silence in the audience. While cameras
continued to click furiously, their operators were
struck dumb. The climax - in more ways than one I
hoped - of our performance was at hand. I pressed the
button to deliver a pulse of electricity.

At once the lower muscles of the gorilla spasmed and

his pelvis arched briefly. ‘Ole!’ A man‟s voice broke
the silence. But not a drop of semen flowed from his
penis.

I adjusted the position of the probe and again pressed

the button. Spasm. Erection. The penis was a blunt
pink shrimp. But no semen. Six times I tried. Antonio-
Luis even massaged the penis. And then on the
seventh pulse - eureka! A globule of semen exuded
from the minute organ, trickled down the tube - and
promptly dried to a useless film in the heat of the arc-
lamps! Never before had I needed to give so many
pulses to obtain so small a sample.

Although he was unconscious of all this embarrassing

pantomime, I decided that we had done enough to
Snowflake. I was unwilling to prolong the anaesthetic
and, after all, if a bottle is empty, it‟s empty. I
withdrew the probe and said „Finito!’ Snowflake
could return to the privacy of his dormitory to sleep
off the drug for an hour or so. Hubbub once more!
„Why? Why? Por que? Por que?‟ shrilled the reporters,
„What has gone wrong?‟ „Is he impotent? Is he
finished?‟ There would have to be a press conference
as soon as we had washed.

Standing in front of the crowd of reporters now drawn

up in a semi-circle, I explained what we had done and
what the

outcome was. For whatever reason, Snowflake was, as

the Americans might say, „clean out5 of semen on that
occasion.

„So what you are saying, Doctor, is that Snowflake

was sexually active with his wife last night, ho ho ho!‟
crowed one journalist, scribbling this vigorously.
„Si, es verdad!’ shouted the rest. It sounded to them like
a suitably sensational explanation. I wasn't saying that,
but they had stopped listening. Next day the papers
were full of it, with some going so far as to depict me
as a sort of mad English scientist doing unspeakable
experiments with perverse sexual overtones.

„Don‟t worry,‟ said Antonio-Luis later, as we sat

munching spider-crab with cold Monopole wine on
the Ramblas. „You know the Catalans - they had to
have a foreigner to blame if Snowflake didn‟t satisfy
their honour. It‟s just bad luck.‟

„Next time, though, I think I‟ll arrange to have

Snowflake kept away from his wives for a week or
two before doing it,‟ I replied. „It might improve our
luck.‟

White cats, not of the long-haired Persian kind, are a

different matter. True albino lions were born in the
Kruger National Park, South Africa, in i960, but every
year or two some little zoo or other excitedly publishes
the news that its lions have had a litter of rare white
lion cubs. Enter the television crews and journalists, all
quick to believe, as indeed the owners do themselves,
that this is something akin to growing a blue tulip or
opening an oyster that hides a golden pearl the size of
a squash-ball. And for sure the lions do have fur of
creamy-white rather than the normal clay colour. For
such white lions, seen in the heraldic devices of
several noble houses, including the Dukes of Norfolk,
a value of thousands of dollars each is put about. But
all is not as it seems. Wait a few weeks, and the early
pale shade darkens naturally and, long before they are
three months old, the cubs are indistinguishable from
other youngsters of less-celebrated birth.

White tigers, however, do exist. True albinos with

pink eyes and no stripes have been recorded on at
least one occasion, but beautiful so-called „white
tigers‟ of another kind are at present all the rage.
White with blue eyes and dark stripes, they quite
patently have too much pigmentation to be called
albinos, and they are in fact an unusual chinchilla
mutation.

White tigers have been found in many parts of India,

but it is those from Rewa with a creamy background
to their coat which are the most famous. The Maharaja
of Rewa began captive breeding of them in the early
1950s, and the first specimens to be seen in the West
arrived at Bristol and Washington Zoos about ten
years later.

In the past few years they have become star attractions

in zoos and circuses in the USA and Europe, and can
cost around $65,000 each, a hundred times more than
an ordinary tiger.
Stukenbrock Safari Park, near Bielefeld in West
Germany, has been a prolific source of interesting
cases since I first became a consultant there in 1974. It
was at Stukenbrock that Dr Ferdi Wurms and I
washed the blood of a chronically sick elephant by
passing it through an ozonizing machine. There, too, I
had first seen a mysterious and still unexplained brain
disease of big cats and, most dramatically, once come
face to face with a tiger in a fog-swathed reserve that
was thought to be empty of animals. There had been
the exciting six-monthly hoof-trimming sessions in the
main reserve with Fritz Wurms driving a Beetle at
break-neck speed in zig-zagging pursuit of zebra and
antelope while I fired tranquillizing darts out of the
vehicle‟s window, and the fitting of plastic ' buffers‟
on to the sword-like horn tips of incorrigibly
aggressive oryx that effectively stopped them from
inflicting mortal wounds on other animals.

In 1987 Stukenbrock acquired a fine pair of one-and-a-

half-year-old white tigers from Cincinnati in the
United States. To house them a spectacular golden-
domed Indian temple was built, surrounded by water,
and containing excellent heated night quarters - and
deep-freezes for a specially prepared brand of meat
which was being imported from the United States.
Joan Collins, the actress, performed the official
opening of the cat house, and I was asked to go and
check over the new arrivals. The pair of tigers were
magnificent animals, adolescents who still retained
some cubbishness, and as friendly and stroke-happy
as any inglenook moggy. I‟ve always had a rapport
with tigers - possibly because I‟m a cat person. Half
the human race is cat-orientated and the other half
dog-orientated, I believe. And cats, large or small,
know which sort you are! But with tigers the
interaction is enhanced by real communication. Say „p-
rr-rooch‟ to a tiger, and he‟ll answer you back. Try it
next time you visit a zoo. „P-rr-rooch-p-rr-rooch,‟ you
go; „p-rr-rooch-p-rr-rooch,‟ comes the reply.

I am at once in with tigers. So it was with the white

tigers at Stukenbrock. „P-rr-rooch-p-rr-rooch,‟ then the
reply and Fritz opened the door that led me into their
sleeping quarters. Just like any of my old house cats-
Lenin, Lupin, Tom, Buck-tooth and the rest — Savari,
the male, and Saheba, his mate, came and rubbed
against my leg - the thigh, not the ankle in their case,
nuzzled me with whiskery muzzles and uttered that
other tigerish sign of friendship, a soft, gently
plaintive „wow‟. Not that they were importuning me
to open a tin of tiger-sized „Kit-e-Kat‟ -just because
they were nice people. And I am no animal
sentimentalist-sentiment yes, sentimentality, no thank
you. The animals were so fussy, so keen to play, that I
had to do most of my examination on the move,
walking slowly beside them with my stethoscope on
their chests as they fawned and fondled.
They were in great shape except . . . Savari was
breathing more rapidly, though no more deeply, than I
expected. Twenty times a minute rather than ten. But
the stethoscope revealed no unusual noises of the
lungs or heart. Taking the temperature by popping a
thermometer up the backside would not have been
tolerated, even by these most affable of big cats.

„Both eating well?‟ I asked Fritz.

„Jawohl. Perfectly,‟ he replied, „though I must say the

stools are a little looser than those of the other tigers.‟
Stukenbrock has a fine collection of Bengal tigers and
the curator, Herr Wilding, has a lifetime‟s experience
of observing and caring for these most superior of
wild felines.

With the heart and lung sounds apparently normal, I

could find nothing to explain the raised respiration
rate. „Right. Tomorrow we‟ll do an X-ray of the chest
and an electro-cardiogram,‟ I said, „under light
anaesthetic.‟ You can‟t do those examinations on
fidgety, fussing tigers. There had been rumours
emanating from the United States that white tigers
were sometimes unpredictable when given
anaesthetics. I couldn‟t find any firm information as to
whether it was true, nor could I think of any
physiological reason why that might theoretically
happen. However, the majority of albinos cannot
synthesize an enzyme called tyrosinase, which
conceivably could alter the way the body handled
injectable anaesthetics. I recall raising the matter of
biochemical anomalies linked with albinism during a
lecture by Dr Mulligan in my second year at Glasgow
University. He didn‟t enlighten me, but said rather
acidly, „Bhoy, you‟re either a fool or a genius‟ - a
quotation that was remembered and printed in the
final year dinner souvenir book. And that was that.
Anyway, as I‟ve already said, white tigers aren’t
albinos. Surely they would be easy to knock out with
one of my regular efficient drugs like ketamine or
tiletamine. I would have the ECG and the radiographs
done within fifteen minutes.

Taking a stool sample for bacteriological and parasite

testing, I made arrangements for the tigers to be given
no more solid food until after the anaesthesia and then
went to spend the night at Hannelore‟s brother‟s
house, just down the road in Sennestadt.

Next morning I was at the Safari Park by eight o‟clock.

A local equine veterinarian, who had agreed to bring a
portable horse X-ray machine for the tiger
examination, was already there with his assistant. The
battery-operated electro-cardiogram was part of my
travelling diagnostic gear. I set it up and calibrated it,
checking that the roll of narrow graph paper was
running correctly. With all prepared, a lungful of air
puffed through a blowpipe sent a lightweight flying
syringe with its content of ketamine into Savari‟s ham
muscle. He didn‟t seem to notice the prick of the fine
needle. Four minutes and twenty-two seconds later - I
always time the injection period - the white tiger was
fast asleep. I gave an injection of atropine to control
drooling and protect the heart, and three of us then
carried him out into the corridor of the temple where
the equipment was waiting. Gently we laid the tiger
down on his side on a large table. After putting on
lead aprons and gloves we began taking a series of six
X-ray films, adjusting the tiger‟s somnolent torso
between each exposure in order to irradiate the lungs
and heart from different angles.

The exposed films were at once sent by car to be

developed at my veterinary colleague‟s surgery.
Throughout I checked the tiger‟s breathing, pulse and
colour at regular intervals.

Nothing was amiss. The respiration rate now was

down to nine per minute and the heart was beating at
a steady forty.

Next came the ECG. I connected four crocodile-clip

electrodes, one to each of the tiger‟s limbs, and fixed
them in place with adhesive tape. Leads from the
electrodes ran to a plug, which in turn was inserted
into the electro-cardiograph. I switched on.
Immediately the hot stylus of the instrument began to
inscribe a black line with a series of intermittent peaks
and troughs on the graph paper that was steadily
spewed out. The squiggly pattern represented the
electrical activity in various phases of the white tiger‟s
heartbeat. A valley too deep, a peak too rounded or an
unexpected hillock in this innocent-looking cartoon of
a range of mountains can signify a damaged valve, an
enlarged chamber or one of the dozen other possible
faults that can afflict the amazing non-stop muscle that
is the heart. But the outline of Savari‟s ever-
lengthening tracing formed that of a familiar horizon -
a normal tiger heart with no nasty surprises.

I checked the breathing again with my stethoscope.

One, two, three . . . the chest stopped moving. I looked
at the ECG, still humming away. The stylus continued
to write the same pattern. Pulse - good, strong.
Breathe! There it was. Another breath, but weaker. The
clusters of peaks on the graph paper began to group
closer - the heart rate was accelerating.

Shallow breathing now, irregular. One, two . . . three,

four. . . five . . . I touched the tiger‟s eyelids gently - no
reflex blink. I tickled the ear - no reflex twitch. My
pulse rate quickened. This was odd; by now the single
dose of ketamine should have been wearing off and
the animal beginning to curl its tongue, stir a leg,
growl even. A full syringe of doxapram, to give a kick
in the pants to the breathing centre in the brain, is
always by my side when working with general
anaesthetics.

I slipped a dose into the foreleg vein and then pulled

the tiger‟s tongue. It lolled out of the mouth.

„Is something wrong?‟ whispered Fritz. The Director, a

tough and experienced animal man, was looking
apprehensive.

„For some unexplained reason the breathing is

sinking,‟ I replied. Just then the doxapram arrived at
the brain and the tiger gave a deep breath. One, two . .
. three . . . It was failing again. The ECG chart was now
depicting a speeding heart, still functioning efficiently
but very much aware of the reduction in oxygen
quantity and trying to help as well as it might. More
drugs by injection to boost the circulation. More
breathing stimulators. Anxiously I watched the ECG
with one eye on my watch and the hand under the
tiger‟s groin taking his femoral pulse. One, two . . .
fading.

„Oxygen from the maintenance shed!‟ I said. Fritz

knew what I meant. Over his walkie-talkie he called
up his head engineer. „Schnell! The cylinder of welding
oxygen and a few metres of rubber tube.‟ A few
minutes later a vehicle roared up and the oxygen
cylinder was wheeled in. I put a towel over the tiger‟s
head and led under it the rubber pipe from the
cylinder. The gas hissed out as I turned on the valve.
By now Savari should have been up on his feet,
groggy, but more or less compos mentis. Yet he was as
flat out as if I‟d given a heavy dose of barbiturates, like
in the old days. It‟s the liver that destroys the
ketamine anaesthetic to clear it from the system.
Suppose, I wondered, suppose that there is some
idiosyncrasy, some biochemical quirk linked to the
unusual colouring of white tigers, that makes them
unable to destroy certain chemicals like ketamine. Cats
aren‟t very good at the best of times in getting rid of
substances like aspirin ~ which is why it‟s so easy to
poison them with it. The rumours about white tigers
and anaesthetics could turn out to be true!

It was a long day. Sitting there beside the unconscious

tiger, monitoring its vital signs, turning it over every
twenty minutes to prevent congestion of the
undermost lung, massaging it, injecting it, testing the
eye, ear and limb reflexes.

Two o‟clock - the tiger‟s ear flicked for the first time
when I tickled it yet again. Saint Francis, ora pro nobis!
Four o‟clock - as I opened the mouth to reposition the
tongue that was in danger of falling back, it closed
rapidly by reflex and I got my fingers out in the nick of
time. We were winning! At a quarter to six when I
nipped hard between two hind toes, the leg flexed.
Fritz Wurms, who had stayed with me all the time,
recognized the encouraging signs. He used his walkie-
talkie again to order bratwurst and Malteserkreuz
schnapps to be brought. We‟d forgotten we hadn‟t
eaten all day.

By nightfall, Savari was conscious again and able to sit

on his haunches and lap water. But he wasn‟t back to
normal until a further two days had passed. Thank
God, though, I hadn‟t lost my first white tiger. The
breathing was still faster than normal but the X-rays
were as clear as the ECG traces.

Nothing wrong with chest or lungs, but the tiger‟s

loose stools turned into definite diarrhoea. Four days
later the laboratory results arrived - the stools
contained an abundance of salmonella.

Salmonella, post-Edwina Currie, has become an in

word. Reading the newspapers one might get the
impression that this notorious microbe is a newly
arrived alien from outer space that is currently
rampaging through the supermarkets, cheese-makers
and chicken farms and making nervous house-wives
wonder whether there is anything that they can safely
give their family to eat. But salmonella has been
around for aeons. Members of this family of germs
cause typhoid in humans and some of them, while
carried principally by one host species, can cause
fever, „food poisoning‟ and serious diarrhoeas in other
hosts. Among my patients I have found salmonella on
occasion attacking nearly any animal you mention -
from giant pandas to camels, from crocodiles to
flamingos. Although treatable with certain antibiotics,
salmonella can, in some cases, strike quickly and
lethally.

Of all exotic animals, the elephant seems to me to be

the most sensitive to this germ. After eating some
contaminated food -say a stale ham sandwich
proffered by a member of the public - there is
sometimes so rapid a course with this disease that
there is no time to diagnose or give therapy. An
elephant with salmonella may go off its food, run a
temperature and then die, all within a day or so and
without there being time for it to show diarrhoea. On
the other hand, a rat or a deer fawn or a pelican can
carry the same strain of the germ with few or no
symptoms for months on end. Tigers come somewhere
in between. With them salmonella doesn‟t usually kill
quickly, but an untreated case may end fatally after a
few days or weeks.

Fritz Wurms was astonished when he heard the news.

„Everything of the best has been done for these tigers,‟
he exclaimed. „The house is newly built, the hygiene,
as you can see, is second to none, there are no pests
like mice or rats in the temple, and the food is the
highest quality.‟ He took me to the refrigerator and
opened it to show the neatly stacked plastic bags of
American chopped meat. It certainly looked more
delicious than the frozen mince or hamburger meat in
my local supermarket.

„Doctor - we‟re spending a fortune importing this

stuff. All the way from the USA. Specially selected,
vitaminized, certified - I‟ve got half a ton of it in here,
and there‟s five tons on its way by sea in a refrigerated
container. What more can I do to keep the cats in good
shape?

And now you say there‟s salmonella. Where can it

have come from?‟ „I assume the tigers were fully
examined and vaccinated by the American zoo vets
before they came?‟

„Of course. I have all the health certificates.‟ I knew

the people in Cincinnati; they were first-class
professionals. If they said the tigers were okay when
they left, they were okay.

I walked round the temple with its moat of clean

water and grassy lawn. All was sparkling new, no sign
of pests, just as Fritz had said. Over-flying birds might
have „bombed5 the outdoor area with salmonella-
carrying droppings, but that seemed an outside
possibility.

„Let me look at the meat,‟ I said finally. „We‟ll do

bacterial cultures on some samples.‟

Out of its bag and thawed, the American meat looked

even better - to the naked eye needing only some raw
egg, chopped onion, condiments and a couple of
salted anchovies to make a perfect steak tartare. But
the naked eye can‟t see everything. I took swabs from
six packs of meat and sent them off to the German
state veterinary laboratory. Half a week later the
results came in. All were positive for salmonella, and
the government vets weren‟t happy.

Fritz Wurms was at once on the telephone to the meat

suppliers in America, demanding an explanation and
refusing to accept the consignment still at sea. „What
do you think you‟re doing, sending salmonella-
contaminated meat to Eu-rope?‟ he stormed. „The state
veterinary authorities are furious that so much food,
certified as fit for consumption, should have arrived
on their territory!‟

„But the meat is fine,‟ came the reply. „Salmonella is

always to be found in such products, don‟t you guys
know that?‟
 „If that‟s the case, why don‟t you mention it with the
rest of the glorious promotional bullshit on the outside
of the plastic packs?‟ demanded Fritz, slamming down
the phone.

The American meat was never fed again, and the

white tigers henceforth dined on the same meat as the
other humbler tigers in the park, meat which was
consistently found to be free of the salmonella
bacteria. A course of antibiotic in the food eliminated
the bacteria from the animals and the male‟s breathing
rate subsided to normal. Both white tigers have
continued to thrive well at Stukenbrock and with any
luck will produce their first litter of white cubs within
the next couple of years.

Since 1987 more white tigers have arrived in Europe,

but so far I haven‟t had to anaesthetize another one. If
and when I am faced with the need to do so again, it
will be with some trepidation. White tigers, like white
gorillas, are different. I wonder how I‟d fare with that
most elusive deep blue-coloured tiger seen once in
broad daylight in Fukien, China in the 1920s. Better
perhaps - blue is my lucky colour.
4 Dolphins in the Dumps
The Dolphin fish . . . is a lover of man.
Erasmus, Colloquia

Abdel Nasser felt like a Pharaoh. Humdilallahl God had

indeed been good to him. Only great, even greater
things, could come out of this. One moment he was a
bell-hop, the bottom of the heap, running, always
running, carrying, shouted for, shouted at, for a few
Egyptian pounds a month, and then, suddenly, he was
a star! From time to time American tourists would
come to the pool-side to admire his work, ask him
questions.

He‟d had his picture taken with a grand French lady -

although she declined to shake his hand afterwards
and he‟d overheard her say to her husband as they
walked away that he, Abdel Nasser, smelled badly of
fish.

Billah! He was the most fortunate of young men. Once,

taking baggage to a room in the hotel, he‟d caught a
glimpse of a television set and the American
programme that was running on it. It was Hollywood
and adventure and him with his two amazing, magical
beasts. He didn‟t know it, but the film was a re-run of
an old „Flipper‟ episode. Abdel Nasser, the lad given
the name of the revered first president of the country,
who lived in a slum near the pyramids, and who
would drink a glass of dirty water straight from the
Nile for a dollar to impress the tourists, Abdel Nasser,
thin, consumptive-looking and often hungry, was the
master of the two clever grey fish that in Arabic are
called darfel and in English, dolphins.

He would never forget the morning earlier in the year

when the Manager of the Meridien Hotel himself had
called him to his office. Going up to the plush suite
he‟d been terrified - if he were about to be sacked,
surely someone in personnel would simply have rung
the head porter. To be summoned by Monsieur Speck
was quite another matter — had some visitor accused
him of rifling luggage or gross impertinence?

It didn‟t make sense - even if he charged naked

through the dining room on a camel, the bell-hop
would have been swiftly dealt with by Personnel. But
then, as he stood before Monsieur Speck with his
scrawny knees knocking inside the uniform which he
was now certain he would never wear again, he heard
the astounding words.

„Abdel Nasser - you‟re going to have to take charge of

the dolphins from now on.‟
When he went back downstairs, it was almost enough
to make the young Muslim ask his friend, the assistant
bar tender, for a stiff arak. He made do with mango
juice.

‘Hanni wa afia!’ whispered the bar tender. Good health

and prosperity - it certainly looked as if it was going to
come the way of Abdel Nasser.

When the luxury Meridien Hotel, situated on the bank

of the Nile in the centre of Cairo, had arranged with
Monsieur Linehard, a Swiss who owned some
performing dolphins, to bring a couple of them and
some sea lions to spend a season in the swimming-
pool, no one doubted that it would be a money-
making sensation. The show would provide a new
source of entertainment for the hotel‟s guests, and
draw in crowds from among the well-heeled sections
of that old strum-pet of a city. Monsieur Linehard had
for long been an anomaly in the world of dolphins - a
man with dolphins and no pool to keep them in. For
years he had moved his patient creatures from one
borrowed or rented pool to another. Detested by zoos
and marinelands, with their constantly improving
facilities for the care and housing of marine mammals,
he was an odd-ball, Mr „Rent-a-Dolphin‟ who - as
international regulations to control the catching and
keeping of dolphins were introduced, beginning with
the principal source, the United States, in the 1970s -
somehow managed to find other, less particular,
sources of animals. Once he shipped a large
consignment of dolphins from Taiwan; most were
dead within days of their landing in Germany. The
notorious minute glass „dolphin pool‟ beneath the
stage of the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Paris housed
some of Linehard‟s dolphins for many years.

Later he had shows in Belgium, Italy and Spain and

when these closed down, sometimes under a cloud of
acrimony, he and his dolphins would simply move on.
In the mid-1980s the Common Market countries began
to take more interest in cetacean species crossing their
borders. Permits were now needed and the scope for
Monsieur Linehard, or anyone else, to pop up with a
portable plastic pool, a tent and dolphins on a piece of
waste ground in the middle of Madrid or Manchester
was severely curtailed. But there are other countries,
and Egypt is one of them.

At first all went well at the Meridien. The Linehard

show attracted much attention. It looked as if
everyone concerned was on to a money-spinner.
Abdel Nasser, the bell-boy going about his duties in
the hotel, occasionally had the opportunity to watch
from afar. He marvelled at the way the European
trainer waved his hands and made the fish do all
manner of things. The man moved his arm and the
fish would leap high in the air. Sometimes they didn‟t
leap, and it seemed logical to Abdel Nasser that the
fish did not then receive their reward of pieces of
much smaller fish. Usually, if he stood for more than a
minute gazing through a window at this fascinating
scene - he wasn‟t allowed to go down to the pool area,
which was fenced off for the paying audience - he‟d
receive a poke in the ribs from an under-manager and
be told to get on with his bell-hopping.

In spring 1988, the Meridien and Monsieur Linehard

fell out over matters which the courts in France and
Egypt may one day decide upon, and the eventual
upshot was that the sea lions and the dolphins were
left in the hotel with neither Monsieur Linehard or any
of his employees around to take care of them. The sea
lions ended up at Cairo Zoo, but the dolphins stayed
where the were — lazing around in the swimming-
pool designed , and with the shows called off.

The Meridien Hotel is itself a miniature metropolis

within a teeming, sprawling city where it is not
uncommon to see a dead man or a dead donkey lying
in the gutter, where, through numberless narrow,
dust-carpeted streets, patch worked of gloom and
glitter and lined by the smoke-blackened niches of
artisans, barbers‟ booths, spice shops and cool
mosques, the life of the Nile delta courses in all its
colours and voices, its rags and gold bangles, its
hennaed hands and tattooed Coptic crosses, its aromas
of coffee, bread, halwa and dung.

Here, hurrying by or sitting in doorways, are fellahin

from the country, Muslim and Coptic townsfolk,
Nubians, bedouin, Syrians, Levantines, Turks,
Persians - and tourists. The Meridien town within a
town is an island in this wondrous, pungent broth of a
place whose multitude of staff will cook the best
cheeseburger or shish taouk in town, instantly provide
a secretary if you feel like dictating your will and
launder your dress shirt or dish-dasha in a trice. They
can attend with perfect efficiency to every need and
whim of the diplomat from Algiers, the businessman
from Paris, the honeymooners from Poughkeepsie -
what they can‟t attend to is two male Atlantic bottle-
nosed dolphins 'squatting‟ in the swimming pool.

For the first time in its life, the hotel found itself with
two guests it couldn‟ t handle. Worse, they were
costing money, making none and occupying the
human guests‟ rightful pool with the furnace heat of
summer not far off. It would take a few days to sort
things out and find somewhere else for the dolphins to
go; meanwhile the hotel would do the best it could.

Before the animals arrived special filtration equipment

had been installed to keep the water clean - the hotel
engineer knew which buttons to press. There was still
an ersatz fish kitchen behind the row of pool-side
cabins and they could continue to buy fish from the
market. What they badly needed was a dolphin-
keeper - someone to take some sort of care of the
animals. Egyptian dolphin-keepers are as thin on the
ground as Egyptian astronauts, so a member of staff
would have to learn the hard way. Abdel Nasser was
sent for. While the erstwhile bell-hop went trance-like
to claim his kingdom — standing for long minutes by
the pool looking down at the two squawking 'fish‟ and
exploring his little kitchen with it‟s knives, buckets
and refrigerator full of mackerel - Monsieur Speck set
about off-loading the animals. With any luck, Abdel
Nasser would be back in front hall in a couple of days.
The financial and legal aspects of the
Linehard/Meridien dispute could be settled all in
good time, but he couldn‟t afford to have the star
performers living in their „dressing room‟ at his
expense. He knew that they were worth a lot of
money; they would serve as collateral in hand for any
claim he might make against the Swiss fellow.

But it wasn‟t as easy as he had foreseen. Dolphins, he

found, aren‟t like fairground goldfish - they need
filtered salt water and marine fish food, and
transporting them requires special methods and
people who know what they are doing. The offers he
had from persons in Egypt, willing - indeed anxious
— to dolphins, were hopelessly unacceptable. Garden
ponds and a freshwater boating lake. The days
stretched to weeks, and the weeks to months.
Desperate by June, and with Monsieur Linehard
irritatingly from time to time slipping into the hotel
and watching from a balcony to see that his dolphins
still numbered two, appeared alive, and were
therefore at least being fed at no cost to himself,
Monsieur Speck got in contact with marinelands
overseas who might be willing to board the animals.
Among them were Windsor Safari Park and
Marineland Cote d‟Azur in Antibes, France.

Michael Riddell, the English director in Antibes,

replied to the request from Cairo in the only way he
could. Yes, he would, of course, give the dolphins a
home, but he would have to have an import licence
from the French government and a guarantee from the
appropriate French and Egyptian government
ministries that he would not be involved in any legal
wranglings with Monsieur Linehard, of whose
exploits over the years he was well aware. A perfect,
empty hospital tank was waiting for the dolphins in
Antibes, together with expert staff, superb back-up
facilities and myself and Andrew as veterinary
surgeons. Michael had no desire to appropriate the
two dolphins - he had enough of his own anyway -
but he was more than willing to look after them until
the business arguments in Cairo were settled; but only
if he got the import permit and guarantee of no hassle.
It was the same for all the major marinelands in
Europe, operating now under govern-mental
regulations. Nothing happened. No permits and no
guarantees were forthcoming.

Abdel Nasser, no longer in bell-hop uniform, but

affecting the style of the European trainer he had seen,
wearing trousers and an old tee-shirt, was living
virtually night and day with his „fish‟. He had become
the envy of the other bell-hops, the assistant bar tender
and the scullery workers. Even that Olympian figure,
the maitre d'hotel, once came down to the pool to ask
questions politely!

When he went home, the neighbours hadn't at first

believed his story of being appointed Hotel Animal
Trainer but they opened their eyes wide and
exclaimed ‘Wallah!’ „By God!' when he passed round
the Polaroid photograph a visitor had given him that
showed him standing next to a glamorous American
lady in shorts and proffering a fish to a jumping
dolphin. And he felt, as the weeks passed by, that he
was getting somewhere with the animals whose
names were now „Nemo‟ and „Limo‟.

Hand-waving seemed indeed to be the key, and Abdel

Nasser did little „shows‟ for himself, and sometimes
even for a small crowd of hotel guests. Everyone
seemed delighted, so it must have been going well,
and though Abdel Nasser‟s shows were free of charge,
once or twice he had a dollar or pound slipped into his
fishy palm after the performance. The paradise
promised in the Koran seemed pale in comparison to
those summer days on the Meridien pool deck with
Nemo and Limo more beguiling to him than any
houris. Apart from the engineer who occasionally came
to look at the filter machinery, the young Egyptian
was left to himself. No interference. No orders. No
bawlings out. The Arab saying is true, he would think
to himself, as he cut the fish each morning - ‘Allah
karim’ . God is merciful.

By late autumn Monsieur Speck was even more

desperate.

Still Nemo and Limo swam in the pool by the side of

the Nile, and somehow the British press had got hold
of the story. The Sunday Times in particular was on the
warpath, lambasting Linehard and calling for
international action to save „the abandoned dolphins
in the Cairo hotel‟.

Abdel Nasser was still at his post, cutting his fish,

„training‟ his animals and doing the very best he could
to keep them happy. Understandably, he was
oblivious to the cloudy green water in the pool and the
flies in his fish kitchen. Abdel Nasser had lived all his
life by the black and turbid Nile where fish lived
happily -he‟d fished them - and weren‟t flies just
living dust? You didn‟t notice flies unless you went to
the abattoir during Ramadan.

November came and with an impasse in the relations

between the Hotel and Monsieur Linehard, and the
dead hand of bureaucracy on everyone‟s shoulder, the
Sunday Times paid towards the expenses of sending a
Zoo Check representative to Cairo to see what
condition the dolphins were in. The Zoo Check man, a
fireman who had worked at Windsor Safari Park years
before, telephoned me in a state of high excitement.
'The dolphins are in terrible shape,‟ he told me. „Bad
water. Ill. Skin disease. I think they‟ve swallowed
something, the bottom of the pool is littered with
bottles and other rubbish. Can you help?‟

„Do you think you can get some blood?‟ I knew that
he‟d watched me do it many times at Windsor in the
old days. I also knew Cairo Zoo‟s vet had no
experience with cetaceans.

„I‟ll try,‟ he replied. „Even one cc is better than nothing.

Take it to a hospital or private laboratory. I‟ll give you
a list of the basic analyses. Then ring me back with the
results.‟

Next day he telephoned. He‟d got a little blood, after a

lot of effort, and I congratulated him. His problem had
been finding anywhere that could provide him with
blood-collecting tubes. My problem was that the
results which he gave me didn‟t make medical sense.
They were grossly, impossibly, abnormal.

The Zoo Check man was doing his best, but it was
impossible to know what proportions of his report
were imagination, hype or plain fact. The lab reports
didn‟t help.

I suggested some provisional treatment if, as the blood

results indicated, the dolphins were infected with
everything from tonsillitis to tuberculosis, but I felt
uneasy about the whole situation. It was a bad mix.
Linehard dolphins in an Egyptian pool. Bizarre blood
results that couldn‟t be trusted.

Well-meaning amateurs taking responsibility for the

care and treatment of some of the most complex
mammals in the world. And, accustomed as I was to
long-distance telephonic veterinary consultation, I felt
myself to be right out on a limb with this case.
Someone had to take a firm grip on a situation which
could now conceivably end in tragedy. Linehard‟s
arguments with the Meridien didn‟t come into it.

The very next day Michael Riddell phoned me from

Antibes, and what he had to say put a completely new
complexion on the Nemo and Limo story. „The French
government will let us bring them in at last. We‟ll give
them a home for as long as they need till things are
sorted out permanently.

The French Embassy, and the British, are working on

the Egyptians. At this rate, by the time the
Linehard/Meridien game comes to checkmate the
dolphins could be long dead.

I‟m sending John Kershaw down to Egypt today. You

go when he has had a chance to report back.‟ There at
last was the firm grip. John Kershaw, the head trainer
at Marineland, is one of the most experienced English
dolphin men. Remarkably strong, though not heavily
built, a fine linguist, resourceful and intelligent, he is
the brother of Nik Kershaw, the pop star. His „feel‟ for
dolphins and other marine mammals, as I knew from
working with him in Britain, Spain and Iceland, as
well as France, is unsurpassed. If John said the Cairo
dolphins were in trouble, they were in trouble. I‟ve
never known him exaggerate or underestimate the
condition of his animals.

John rang twenty-four hours later, at exactly the time

we had arranged. „What‟s the position?‟ I asked.

„Shitsville!‟

„Meaning exactly what?‟

 „Filthy pool water, filthy fish kitchen for the dolphins
(not

the hotel‟s - that's mega-luxury - and the kitchens are

ace), poor quality fish, dolphins in tatty condition, tails
full of pinholes where somebody‟s being trying to take
blood, and some poor, bloody Arab boy in charge of
the whole bordel.‟

„Damnation!‟

„What should I do?‟

„Take some more blood‟ (John can do this as easily as I

can) „and get a proper blooming analysis - I‟ll be down
in two days. Meanwhile, try to change the water and
get some better fish - the hotel must have some for its
restaurants.‟ I needed the two days to go to Germany
to examine a snow leopard that seemed suddenly to
be going blind.

On 17 November 1988 I flew to Cairo. The Meridien

Hotel employs a phenomenal „fixer‟, Salem, who
knows everybody that matters, and he got me a visa, a
place at the front of the passport queue and through
customs in a little under three minutes. It was good to
be back in the city, so rich in well-worn character,
down at heel, but bursting with warm humanity, quite
unlike the soulless kitsch of the Arab cities of the Gulf.
Within half an hour I was at the hotel, and being
briefed by John Kershaw over a pot of Turkish coffee.

He explained how the pool was now guarded round

the clock by burly security guards, that he had
abandoned the unsavoury makeshift fish kitchen used
by the Linehard staff and was preparing food for the
dolphins at a sink and cutting board set up in the open
air, and, most important of all, that Nemo and Limo
were not in good condition, physical or mental. „When
I first arrived they were utterly screwed-up
psychologically, with evil tempers. Bit me hard if they
got the chance. Behaved like a pair of lager louts!‟ John
had never encountered such bloody-minded dolphins.

We walked down to the pool and I was introduced to

Abdel Nasser, a lanky pleasant-mannered young man
with close-cropped hair, who looked to me none too
healthy. It was dark and impossible to inspect the
animals, but the water was visibly cloudy.

„It takes forever to change the water,‟ said the dolphin

trainer, „and I‟m sure the filtration isn't working
properly. When I dived I found the bottom of the pool
littered with foreign bodies.

‟I‟ll do an examination first thing in the morning,‟ I

replied.
John‟s blood results from the local laboratory were as
unlikely as the previous ones. I would take my own
samples back to London. „Any idea why the dolphins
are so aggressive?‟ I asked.

John waited until Abdel Nasser was out of earshot.

„It‟s him,‟ he said in a low voice. „He was the cause.

But you can‟t blame the bugger. He‟d seen the
Linehard‟s trainer apparently waving his arms and
giving fish to the dolphins as rewards for well-
executed behaviours. So when he took them over,
Abdel Nasser imitated what he thought he‟d seen.
Waved his arm without any idea of the correct signals.
Teased the animals by showing them fish and then
denying it to them when, as happened ninety-five per
cent of the time, they couldn‟t understand his body
language. They didn‟t know where they were with
him. He was the human with the fish, but he
unwittingly tantalized and frustrated them. I watched
him at it — innocent as the day is long. No wonder
they became bolshie!‟

So that was it. Dolphins quickly learn to associate a

whole range of movements of the fingers, hand or arm
with the request to perform particular „tricks‟. The fish
pieces are given as a reward for a good effort, and a
whistle if often used as a so-called „bridging signal‟,
blown at precisely the right moment to link the
dolphin‟s actions with the prize, aurally. A dolphin
hears things through the pinhole-sized ear orifices set
behind the eyes and, more remarkably, through the tip
of the chin and the armpits. The full sequence is signal,
often very subtle, perhaps merely the movement of
one finger (dolphins have good underwater and out of
water vision), correct performance of the required
behaviour by the animal, the whistle which in effect
says „well done that time‟ and, lastly, the piece of fish
as a reward. Advanced training can omit one or more
of these four phases, even including the giving of the
reward.

Dolphins love performing. Their biggest enemy,

clearly evident in Cairo, is boredom.

I‟m doing all the feeding myself now,‟ John went on,
„not asking them to do anything, not trying to guess
what Linehard‟s man‟s signals might have been. I‟m
just giving ‟em lots of fish whenever they want it. And
they‟re already beginning to calm down and recognize
me as the friendly guy with a full bucket who doesn‟t
give them any hang-ups!‟ He had plundered the
hotel‟s kitchens for their finest fish and Monsieur
Speck, the Director, was more than willing to do
anything that could stave off any more bad publicity
about the dolphins, and that might possibly bring
nearer the date of their departure. While we were at
the Meridien, John and I lived like kings, on the house,
and anything I needed for the animals was provided
without demur.

The next morning was warm and bright; November is

a great month to visit Cairo. There was a gentle breeze
off the river and black kites were circling high in the
sky as I went down to the pool, running the gauntlet
of uncommunicative men in suits bulging with muscle
and other objects who were on guard and had set up
their headquarters in one of the cabins. The British
press and a couple of television crews were already
there. The pool was not very big, roughly circular with
half of it about two metres deep and the rest half that.

John had managed to get the water level dropped so

that men could wade easily and help him catch my
patients. Something the Meridien hadn‟t been able to
find was a soft strong net, for us to use to sweep the
animals into an area where John could seize hold of
them one at a time. We had to make do with an old
volleyball net. The Egyptian hotel workers who had
been deputed to go into the water with John didn‟t
seem to relish the task, and Abdel Nasser explained to
me that they were not convinced that these 150-kilo
torpedoes with curving dorsal fins weren‟t sharks. But
they did what John instructed through an interpreter,
and soon we had the two dolphins safely lying on an
old mattress by the poolside.
I examined them from tip to tail, checked their chests
with my stethoscope and took some blood from their
tail-fluke veins. Nemo was thin, and had an area of
pneumonia in the right lung. The cornea of his left eye
was scarred by a healed ulcer and there were the
typical scars on his flippers caused by using badly
designed stretchers, or not positioning the animals
correctly, during transport. Limo had similar flipper
scars and an ulcer on the left eye. His weight was
within normal limits. Both dolphins displayed the
black dots denoting pox virus infection scattered over
their skin. After the examination I gave Nemo some
Ceporex for his pneumonia and then the animals were
put back in the water. I looked round the
„dolphinarium‟.

Over the low wall of the pool deck, I looked down at

the bank of the Nile, the dark water swirling below
me, washed-up flotsam drying in the sun and cats
scavenging around the corpse of some small creature.
The sink where John cleaned and cut his food was a
vast improvement on the one that had formerly been
used for the purpose but, as I watched, flies rose from
the great river and homed in on the smell of the fish.

The dolphins had been there too long. The risks were
too great, the conditions inadequate. And Nemo, if
nothing else transpired, was suffering from
pneumonia. I would fly back to London the next
morning, courier the samples up to Oxenhope where
Robert Turner, a pathologist and retired professor of
human oncology, was now running our own small
laboratory.

Then I would make my decision.

My inclinations were, as I told Michael Riddell on the

telephone, to move the dolphins to Antibes as soon as
possible. Then we could give them the best of
attention. Normally we would not consider
transporting a dolphin that wasn‟t in perfect health;
the Cairo animals seemed like the exception that
proved the rule. If Michael could organize a fast
aircraft across the Mediterranean, it would be just like
flying a serious case of human accident or disease to a
centre equipped to give the best treatment. Such
mercy flights happen every day. Michael, who had
once brought a healthy dolphin from Switzerland to
Antibes in a private ambulance with police escort,
agreed. He would make the first moves in setting up
an air ambulance service for Nemo and Limo.

Back in England, Professor Turner‟s analyses

confirmed the fact that Nemo was indeed suffering
from an infected lung -for how long the pneumonia
had been present was anybody‟s guess. I rang Antibes
to say that the transport must go ahead without delay.
Michael had by then arranged for Air France to divert
a Boeing bound for Marseilles from Djibouti via Cairo
in two days‟ time, and had already sent two padded
canvas slings for the dolphins down to Egypt by air.

John, at the Meridien, was busy organizing the

construction of light metal frameworks in which to
suspend the slings as well as fending off the increasing
number of media folk who were by now in full cry.
Monsieur Speck and his executives were arranging
ground transport, minimum formalities and smooth
passage through the customs for the dolphins-we‟d be
leaving during the night when it was cool for the
animals and the chaotic Cairo traffic was at its
thinnest. Salem had the contacts. Palms were greased
liberally. The hotel was also liaising with the Egyptian
government and French Embassy - we still hadn‟t
received official documents allowing the dolphins to
be exported to „a place of safety‟ and there was a series
of meetings with lawyers handling the many legal
aspects of the affair. Monsieur Linehard‟s lawyers
were also industriously beavering away in the hope of
blocking all our efforts to move the animals.

By 22 November I was back in Egypt, prepared for a

quick turn-round . Arriving at 8 p.m., I hoped to be
taking the dolphins out of the pool about 2 a.m. the
following morning, at the airport with them by 3.30
a.m. and in Marseilles for coffee and croissants at 9
a.m. Michael, typically, had arranged for the Antibes
fire brigade to send a vehicle to pick up the dolphins
at Marseilles and for six police outriders to slice them
through the traffic and down the auto route to Marine-
land, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing. With any
luck, by 2 p.m. on 23 November, Nemo and Limo
would be in their new home relishing a few choice
North Sea herring.

It was not to be quite like that. Worried faces greeted

me at the Meridien, and I was hurried into a meeting
with Speck and his lawyers. „It‟s off‟ the Director said
simply. „Linehard‟s lawyer has slapped an injunction
on Air France. They cannot carry the dolphins.‟ This
was serious. The legal battle might go on for months,
if not years - what was to become of Nemo and Limo
while the lawyers grew fat?

„Have you got the “ place of safety” export permit

from the government?‟ I asked.

„Yes, that came through. Though the opposition is

going to protest about it in front of a judge tomorrow.‟

That well-known ass, the law, seemed likely to kick

poor Nemo and Limo in the teeth if things went on
like this.

„So - if we could find some other airline to fly us out,

they wouldn‟t be covered by the injunction?‟
 A lawyer nodded. ‘If you could find such a thing at
this late hour.‟ Everyone agreed it was near
impossible, but Monsieur Speck and his „fixers‟ said
they would try. Salem was sent for.

I went and ate supper with John. With both of us in a

glum mood, the baked garoupa fish tasted of nothing.
Then, suddenly, at ten o‟clock, a waiter called me to
the telephone.

It was Monsieur Speck. Would we go to his office right

away?

He no longer sounded defeated. „Great news!‟ he

announced, as he shut the door behind us. „We‟ve got
a plane! A 707. ZAS Airlines. A little outfit that runs
mainly between here and Holland. We‟re in touch
with their president. He thinks it‟s a great idea, will do
it for free, and has ordered his staff to pull out all the
stops. And what‟s more they‟ll go straight to Nice, not
Marseilles!‟

A miracle had happened. If this came to pass, we‟d

avoid the road journey from Marseilles to Nice.
Marineland is only ten minutes‟ drive away from Nice
airport.

„When do we go?‟ John asked.

 „Our estimated time of departure is 4.30 a.m.
Everything is arranged, but we must keep it top secret.
If the Linehard lawyer gets wind of this, he‟ll drop an
injunction on ZAS as well, even if it means waking
some judge up in the middle of the night!‟

The following half-hour was more like a gathering of

SAS commandos planning a desperate mission. As
soon as the last diner had left the restaurant, Speck
would see that the lights were switched off, so that
they did not illuminate the pool area through the
windows overlooking it. The security guards would be
stood down, the equipment ready for the Air France
transport, including the lights which had been set up
round the pool, would be taken away and stowed in
an empty cabin, and all journalists and television
crews (with the exception of one, which would be
pledged to secrecy) would be told that, because of the
injunction, the move was postponed indefinitely.
Cairo is full of spies and it was essential to give the
impression to anyone who came into the hotel on
behalf of the opposition to see what was happening
with the dolphins, that there was no activity and that
preparations appeared to have been disbanded. No
activity - no panic to get another injunction. And the
name of ZAS had to be as closely guarded as that of
Jahbulon is by Freemasons.
Only one or two key people in the hotel were let into
the secret. The one television crew was important; we
would need to use their hand-held lamp so that we
could see to catch the dolphins. John and I must act
the part, sitting forlornly in the bar for an hour,
bemoaning our bad luck over glasses of beer and
helping the word to go round the hotel that we were
contemplating flying home empty-handed the
following day.

With the pool in darkness and the hotel‟s public rooms

fairly empty of people by half an hour after midnight,
we would then go to the cabins and start assembling
the gear. Everything would be done indoors, quietly,
and if it meant breaking a bit of wood off a doorway in
order to manhandle through the two dolphin
frameworks with their slings when the time came,
Monsieur Speck was more than happy to let his
carpenter repair the damage the following day. At 2
a.m. on the dot we would emerge from the cabin, meet
the television crew and ask them to shine a lamp on
the pool. We would catch the animals, grease their
skins carefully with the special mixture that my friend
Mr Donald, the chemist in Lightwater, makes up for
me, settle them in their slings supported by the frame-
works, have a shower and then ride off with our
patients in a pantechnicon which would be waiting,
with its lights off, at the back gate of the hotel. Salem
would fix it so that we drove straight out to the
aircraft and that men were on hand to load our
precious cargo at once. Then, with a bit of luck, it
would be chocks away dead on 4.30 a.m., just when
the sky began to lighten.

„With such a small team of people in the know,‟ said

John, „you‟ll have to come in the water with me and
help me catch.‟

The zoo vet wasn‟t going to wait, dry and comfortable

on the pool-side, for the animals to come to him on
this occasion.

„Will it be an underpants job?‟ he asked. He had seen

me so many times go into dolphin or whale pools in
my Y-fronts; it has become, I suppose, one of the
minor spectacles of the marineland world. But on this
occasion he would be disappointed.

„I‟ve brought some jazzy new trunks with blue

parrots on them,‟ I replied solemnly.

In the event, things went more or less according to

plan.

The television lamp only illuminated a small area of

the pool surface, and its reflected glare made seeing
the dolphins under water very difficult. But eventually
we hauled them out, with me puffing mightily, having
imbibed a good half-pint of water.

The pantechnicon‟s engine wouldn‟t fire, so we had to

push-start the enormous vehicle. I puffed the more
after that. But then we rattled and banged through the
pot-holed streets of the city keeping the dolphins
damp with water from plastic flower sprayers. At the
airport there was a long pause at customs, and I began
to worry that another legal booby trap had been
detonated, but no, Salem was there, talking and
talking with a fistful of grubby pounds. Presently we
rolled across the tarmac to the waiting cargo jet.

Quickly the dolphins were loaded, and their

frameworks securely strapped down. They were
surrounded by boxes of fresh green beans. Abdel
Nasser said good-bye to his „fish‟. He looked rueful at
the prospect of his return to the long-suffering ranks
of bell-hops later that day. John and I gave him all the
Egyptian money we had, which seemed to cheer him
up a bit.

A photographer and journalist from Today, who had

somehow ferreted out the fact of our secret departure,
had inveigled their way into flying with us. A pretty
Egyptian hostess who would look after us during the
flight, while we looked after the animals, handed
round coffee. Monsieur Speck and his entourage
shook hands with everybody and looked like men just
reprieved from Death Row. Salem fixed a group
photo-graph with the president of ZAS in the middle
holding a large plastic dolphin that had appeared
from nowhere. And then, with a clunk, the cargo door
closed tight, the engines turned over and at exactly
04.30 hours, ZAS flight 101 was cleared for take-off.

I have never accompanied dolphins on a better flight.

Nemo and Limo lay quietly in their slings, whistling
occasionally to one another, while John and I took
turns to go back, check their skin temperatures, spray
them lightly with water, and use crushed ice for
cooling the flukes and flippers when necessary.

There was, as usual, no need to give them Valium or

other tranquillizers, and with the weather good and
no turbulence to shake the aircraft, we didn‟t have to
reposition the dolphins in mid-flight. There was time
to sleep a little and later eat the breakfast that ZAS had
thoughtfully provided for us.

Half an hour ahead of schedule, we landed at Nice.

Michael and a crew from Marineland were there, as
were the fire brigade with one of their special trucks.
The Antibes fire brigade takes a great pride not only in
tackling fires, but also in involving itself in anything to
do with water - including dolphins. Often in the past
they had happily helped transport animals, including
killer whales, and would turn out with their hoses at a
moment‟s notice if we had to empty a pool and refill it
with fresh water, as I sometimes request when
needing to rehydrate a dehydrated animal rapidly.
Dolphins can drink through their skins.

Now the firemen carried the two dolphins to their

truck.

Blue lights, sirens and twenty minutes later, Nemo

and Limo were floated out of their slings into the clear
blue water of the hospital pool, with four of
Marineland‟s staff in wet suits swimming near them in
case they were at first stiff and needed assistance.
Their help went uncalled for; both the dolphins shot
like arrows through the water, rolling and leaping
with effortless grace. I went on to the feeding platform
with a bucket of fish and they darted over to me at
once. I held a whole herring in each hand, arms
stretched out over the pool.

The dolphins jumped almost clear of the water, each

taking a fish and swallowing it with gusto as they
plunged back.

Immediately they bobbed up again, mouths open,

squawking, asking for more. And I agreed whole-
heartedly with what John said when he came over: „It
isn‟t wishful thinking, David.
They look happier here after only five minutes!‟
Meanwhile, back in Cairo, Monsieur Linehard‟s
lawyers had, at some point during the last few hours,
realized the weakness of obtaining an injunction on a
single airline. There was a better way of stopping
anyone eloping with the dolphins.

At precisely the time when we touched down on

French soil, a new injunction was served in Cairo on
Monsieur Speck and the Meridien Hotel, preventing
them from moving the animals. But of course, by then,
the birds - the dolphins -had literally flown. How
fortunate it was for Nemo and Limo that the lawyers
hadn‟t thought of that tactic the day before.

The temperaments of the two dolphins did indeed

alter dramatically from the moment they arrived in
Antibes. No more petulant squeaking or snapping at
fingers; they positively beamed good fellowship,
played dolphin games and, what pleased me most,
grew plump. Their blood analyses stayed abnormal,
however - constantly signalling the presence of long-
standing infection. They are still under treatment even
as I write.

Naturally a great fuss was made of the pair by

everyone from the press and television to the French
government, who congratulated Marineland on the
rescue operation. Brigitte Bardot, who lives not far
away and is now heavily involved in animal welfare
matters, promised to arrive at the drop of a hat with
an army of like-minded ladies to blockade
Marineland‟s gates should anyone try to take Nemo
and Limo back. And the world and his wife wanted to
be photographed close to the two lucky abandonnes.
„Vive Nemo et Limo!‟ was shouted over many a pool-
side glass of champagne by mayors, beauty queens
and reporters who came to see them. From Cairo other
things were said. „Common thieves and kidnappers‟
John and I were branded, predictably. There were
dark murmurings about Interpol. I suppose that,
legally, we had indeed wilfully absconded with
someone else‟s property. Thief, then, I must confess to
be. But as the arguments continue to rattle back and
forth between Monsieur Linehard and the Meridien,
and lawyers for Marineland, the hotel and the
dolphins‟ owner hold meetings in Cairo, Marseilles,
Paris and Nice, no end to the dispute seems in sight.
Watching Nemo and Limo sporting in the Provencal
sunlight, I am more convinced than ever that my
debut as an international criminal was one of the most
worthwhile things I have ever done.

I don‟t feel the shadow of the guillotine falling across

me just yet.
5 The Year of the Panda
A bearlike black and white animal that eats copper and iron lives in
the Qionglai Mountains south of Yandao county.
Anonymous, The Classics of Seas and Mountains (770-256 BC)

Chinese astrology gives each year an animal‟s name-

the year of the dog, rat and so on. There is, however,
no year in the cycle symbolized by that uniquely
Chinese beast, the giant panda. Nevertheless 1986 was
for me, without doubt, The Year of the Panda - and an
ill-starred panda at that.

It began with my receiving a thorough pasting from

my young friend Chu-Lin, the panda born in Madrid
Zoo after we had artificially inseminated his mother,
Shao-hao. Chu-Lin was by now full grown, but still
enjoyed romping on the grass with his two keepers,
Mario and Angel. Accustomed since shortly after his
birth to human contact, he was relatively easy for me
to examine. I could go in with him, stroke him, tickle
his ears, prod his stomach, and even take his
temperature when he was napping - something that
pandas do, on and off, for around ten hours a day.
Stroking conscious pandas is a great privilege that is
rarely safe even in the few zoos who possess them,
and the feel of the fur is not as soft and pleasing as you
might imagine, but rather harsh and greasy - a
necessary protection in the cool, wet, bamboo forests.

Although I have many favourite animals (of which

frogs are, I think, my most favourite), the giant pandas,
particularly those at the zoo in Madrid, are special to
me- not just because of their great rarity and the thrill
and fascination of having the responsibility for some
of them, but mainly because of their inscrutability,
their innate mystery. I can often get part way into the
mind of a chimpanzee, elephant or tiger - I know what
he or she is thinking, feeling - but I look into the rather
small dark eyes of a panda and see nothing but my
miniaturized reflection in the pupils. Even when
playing together there is a sense of being quietly,
orientally, mocked in the way that Chinese people,
inheritors of a more ancient culture, often regard those
they call gwailo, „foreign devils‟, Westerners, from
behind a mask of impassivity. In the past few years we
have learned a great deal about the giant panda, pi or
daxiongmao („large bear-cat‟ and „he who eats copper
and iron‟) as it is known in China. We have found, for
example, that it is a rather laid-back individual who
travels on average only half a kilometre a day and,
besides its beloved bamboo, also eats wild parsnips
and waterweed and over a hundred other kinds of
plant and sometimes animals like monkeys, deer
fawns and rodents - if it‟s lucky enough to catch one.
But I don‟t know how pandas think - they give even
less away than bears, to whom they are only distantly
related.

I travelled to Madrid with a television crew from

Border Television to film some items for showing on
their popular „Nature Trail‟ children‟s programme. We
filmed sequences on prairie dogs, tigers, okapis and
komodo dragons, and then began the star item on the
giant pandas. After de-scaling the teeth of Chang-
Chang, the old male, with an ultra-sound machine
under light anaesthetic (a procedure that I have to do
once or twice a year in order to control the
accumulation of tartar deposited by the special sloppy
diet he has), we decided that I should present a piece
about feeding the pandas and then end up having
some fun with young Chu-Lin. I had played a panda
version of tag with him before.

Things started to go wrong when I began to talk to

camera about bamboo, and how inefficiently the
panda digestive system utilizes the stuff. „Imagine,‟ I
said, „eating around thirteen kilos of hard, indigestible
stems like this every day,‟ and, ever conscious that
television is a visual medium, bit down hard on a
thick piece of bamboo to illustrate the point.

A flash of agony shot through my mouth - half of an

incisor tooth had snapped off!
Tending thereafter to mumble through partly closed
lips, I proceeded to the fun and games scene. Out
came Chu-Lin on to his grass paddock with its logs,
trees, climbing frame and water barrel - great for
playing tag around. „Now Chu-Lin and I will play our
favourite game of tag,‟ I announced as the camera
rolled again, trying to smile without opening my
mouth, and with my upper jaw throbbing. „He‟ll chase
me and touch me with one of his forepaws that carry
those remarkable extra bamboo-grasping thumbs.
Then, I‟ll chase him.‟ Oh, what fun, children, was the
impression I had to give. Oh, what I‟d give for a
Distalgesic and a shot of Novocain, was what I was
thinking.

I had made the elementary mistake of presuming

upon a giant panda, of deciding on tag without first
asking him whether tag was the game he felt like
playing today. It at once became evident that tag
wasn‟t on the agenda. No, he had in mind another,
rougher game-all-in wrestling! The rules were simple;
he was sure I‟d pick them up straight away. He would
grab me with his powerful forelegs, throw me to the
ground and then hold one of my arms in his jaws
which are as strong and toothy as you‟d expect in a
bamboo-chomper. When I yelled it would count as a
fall. Nothing serious, nothing malevolent about this,
you understand - just a new panda game he‟d
dreamed up during one of those inscrutable fre-quent
naps.

All of this was being filmed from outside the

enclosure; the director, camera and sound men were
on the other side of the dry moat that stops Chu-Lin
going out to play his games with the public. To the
television crew everything appeared to be going well.
The all-in wrestling, which they hadn‟t expected, was
far more spectacular than the tag which they had.

Of course, while my playmate was going for me with

the enthusiasm of Mike Tyson, do not imagine I was
just standing there. Not at all. I was doing three things
simultaneously: trying to describe in clear, interesting,
calmly enunciated English what delightful animals
pandas are, children, though (with some emphasis)
they are not as cuddly as you might think; skipping
backwards with one eye on the camera, another eye on
the logs, trees and moat towards which I was being
driven; and brilliantly improvising a countermove that
would keep Chu-Lin occupied. This countermove
worked quite well at first. I shall call it, as a wrestling
commentator might, a Reverse Head Panda Push. I
found that if I pressed down on to the top of Chu-Lin‟s
head as he grabbed my knee, he would curl up into a
ball, release me, do a forward somersault -and then
renew the attack. The television crew thought this
first-class entertainment for the kiddies.
But I was tiring fast. The panda consisted of around a
hundred kilos of chunky muscle and he just kept on
grabbing.

He badly wanted that fall, with his teeth holding my

arm.

Like a child or a puppy who gets over-excited during

play and loses a little control, so Chu-Lin was
increasing the force of his movements. My strength
began literally to drain away and I was breathing
hard. The panda‟s teeth sheared through the leather
jacket I was wearing; he was determined to bring me
down. I was now in serious trouble, gasping for air
and sensing, to my horror, that I would shortly
collapse. The Border Television crew continued
filming, unaware of my predicament - I was obviously
hamming it up a bit — but that was nothing new.

From somewhere in my bowels I gathered enough air

to shout 1MarioP The keeper, who was standing
watching from outside the paddock gate, understood
at once. He dashed in and pulled Chu-Lin off me. I
have never felt so near to flaking out as at that
moment. I was bruised, stiff and exhausted. My friend
Chu-Lin had given me a more frightening experience
than anything I could remember, even including the
elephant at Belle Vue which tried, with malice
aforethought, to crush me against a wall with its
forehead, or the zebras that hunted me in the reserve
at Windsor or the leopard that got his claw hooked
into my Achilles tendon. Nowadays I‟m quite proud
of the patches on the leather jacket that are my
souvenirs of Chu-Lin‟s game!

When we‟d finished filming, I went with the television

crew to spend a pleasant evening in the old part of the
city near the Plaza Mayor, going from bar to bar
having tapas of jabugo ham here and octopus there,
accompanied by the red wine of the house. It was
when I went into the men‟s room in the ninth or tenth
bar that I thought I saw an unusual tint to my urine,
rather like that of rose wine. But it was so dark in the
tiny loo which consisted, typically, of just a hole in the
floor flanked by two porcelain foot grips, that I
couldn‟t be sure.

When I mentioned the phenomenon to my friends,

someone suggested it was the strong, rough wine
we‟d consumed. It didn‟t seem likely, but sometimes
people do pee red after eating a lot of beetroots.
Perhaps the wine of the Plaza Mayor was coloured
chemical plonk. It certainly didn‟t taste like Vega
Sicilia.

Back at the hotel I made straight for the bathroom and

urinated in the sink so that I could see the colour
against the white glaze. No doubt about it. Rose
d‟Anjou. I had no pain or frequency. The following
morning the colour was still there, but apart from the
post-panda stiffness and the sensitive half-tooth, I felt
fine. Had Chu-Lin somehow damaged one of my
kidneys, I wondered, but when the ruddy tinge
disappeared later in the day and I was passing what
could be taken for Muscadet, I thought no more about
it.

It was in Milan two weeks later, while on one of my

regular inspections of north Italian zoos and safari
parks that the colour appeared again. This time it
came accompanied by sudden, severe back pain. I flew
home at once and an X-ray revealed that Chu-Lin had
nothing to do with it; there was a stone like a prickly
Heinz bean lodged in my right ureter. It meant an
operation and two weeks in hospital; for the first time
in my life as a zoo vet I had to take time off work. But
there was a phone by the bed to keep in touch with the
outside world and I was consoled by two things about
the hospital in Windsor: the first person to come to
meet me at reception was the chef, who asked me
what my preferences were (he turned out to be a
master with vegetables); and the prescription of my
surgeon, who said I could have gin and tonic or
champagne whenever I liked from the time I came
round from the anaesthetic (neither of which one
fancies at a moment like that -but the thought was
cheering).
Not long after I left hospital, Antonio-Luis, my
veterinary colleague in Madrid, telephoned with news
of Chu-Lin. The x animal had, for no apparent reason,
begun to drink more than usual. What did I suggest he
should do? The first thing was to analyse a sample of
urine, looking particularly for evidence of the kidneys
leaking protein, and for sugar, the well-known sign of
diabetes. Diabetes is quite common in animals and,
apart from domestic pets, I‟d had cases in camels,
wallabies, monkeys and several other species which
had, on the whole, been controllable by daily insulin
injections and a modified diet, although, except for the
monkeys, they hadn‟t responded to the tablets which
are often effective in human patients. It wasn‟t
difficult for Antonio-Luis to obtain the urine sample -
he simply sucked some into a syringe from a puddle
in Chu-Lin‟s sleeping quarters. The tests were
negative. No sugar, no protein - nothing abnormal
about the urine at all.

My friend reported to me each morning on the

panda‟s condition. The thirst progressively increased
as time went by; Chu-Lin was soon drinking gallons of
water every day, and passing correspondingly vast
quantities of urine. Not content with the unlimited,
clean, fresh water provided in his quarters, he began
to develop an obsession for lapping up any drops of
dirty liquid he could find in cracks in the ground or at
the grille of a drain. I decided to fly out to give him a
thorough examination.

Apart from the excessive drinking, I could find

nothing wrong, and the analysis of blood taken after
administering a little Valium was that of a normal
giant panda. This was puzzling. Perhaps a batch of the
special panda flakes, a mixture of cereals and crushed
peas imported from England, had somehow been
prepared with a surfeit of salt. I had some analysed -it
contained the correct amount. Two weeks passed, and
Chu-Lin‟s thirst continued to climb. More ominously,
his weight was starting to fall, and he was no longer
interested in playing with his stepfather Chang-
Chang. Each morning as he left his dormitory and
walked down the passageway that leads to the outside
paddock, one of his keepers checked his weight by
means of the small weighbridge built into the concrete
floor. Normally around a hundred kilos, Chu-Lin was
steadily losing a few hundred grams a day. Soon, from
being merely uninterested in play, the young panda
was in a state of unmistakable depression.

To and fro, between London and Madrid, I travelled,

sampling anything and everything to do with Chu-
Lin, calling in a kidney specialist from the most
prestigious private hospital in the city, telephoning
London and New York to pick the brains of experts in
the obscurest corners of medicine, and trying
desperately to find some way of halting the animal‟s
inexorable decline. It was utterly baffling. No clues in
the samples. No response to symptomatic drug
treatment. I re-read everything I could lay my hands
on concerning water balance in the mammal body, on
kidney function and diabetes, and came to the
conclusion that there must be some sort of leak in
Chu-Lin‟s kidneys, but one which didn‟t allow protein
or anything other than water to escape. Ninety, eighty-
five, eighty kilograms; the poor animal began to
resemble a bag of bones. He was no longer interested
in life, picked gloomily at his food and spent all the
time when he wasn‟t drinking fast asleep.

One of the diseases that I had considered as a

possibility was diabetes insipidus, or „water diabetes‟,
an illness quite unrelated to the commoner diabetes
mellitus or „sugar diabetes‟ and which (unlike the
latter, which is centred in the pancreas) can develop
when something goes wrong with part of the pituitary
gland beneath the brain. Although never reported
previously in pandas, there seemed no reason why it
couldn’t happen to a panda pituitary.

To test the idea, I asked Antonio-Luis to inject Chu-Lin

with an extract of pituitary gland prepared for such
cases in humans. If the thirst diminished rapidly, I
would know I was on the right lines. The injections
were given; Chu-Lin seemed at first to consume a little
less water, but then, despite repeated doses, returned
to drinking like Pantagruel. Antonio-Luis and I were
downcast, and when the panda‟s weight dipped to
sixty kilos, I felt the battle was lost. The animal was so
weak on his legs that the very act of putting his head
down to drink from his bowl was enough to send him
crashing forwards. His profound apathy obviated any
need for Valium or the special treatment cage, when
we were working on him. Desperately I clutched at
straws. Herbal preparations — try them. Homoe-
There are a few veterinary surgeons using the
homoeopathic system in animals in Great Britain.
However inexplicable the unorthodox basis of such
methods may be, at least it‟s harmless; and sometimes
good results have been obtained in cases where
conventional therapy has failed. I contacted a
homoeopathic vet who kindly sent me a supply of
pills in a little packet bearing the arcane legend LYC
10 M. I did what my colleague instructed, and gave
them toChu-Lin, caring not what esoteric realms I was
entering. Anything, so long as it might help my panda.
It didn‟t help.

I was still keeping some odd form of diabetes

insipidus high on my list of possibilities and so I
decided to continue investigations into the panda‟s
pituitary gland. A soft round organ about the size of a
grape in a giant panda, it lies in one of the most
inaccessible places in the body, at the base of the brain.
It is the master gland that exercises control over
glands such as the thyroid, ovaries and testes, as well
as having its own varied and essential functions. X-
rays wouldn‟t show it up and the surgical approach
through the roof of the mouth to inspect it with the
naked eye was out of the question. But I badly wanted
to look at the pituitary - suppose it had some sort of
tumour on it that was causing all the trouble?

There was one machine that could do the job: a CAT

scanner, the multi-million dollar contraption that was
only to be found in a few of the biggest modern
hospitals and which had almost never been used on
animals. I say almost, for we had received scans of
tortoises from California (where else?) which depicted
the innards of those most inaccessible difficult-to-
diagnose of animals, in startling detail. In the Gulf
there was a CAT scanner at a luxury hospital used by
the sheikhs who, caring for nothing more than their
falcons, apart from themselves, had allowed us full
access to any of the departments if we needed it in
treating their pets. A Sri Lankan servant with cancer
wasn‟t, of course, given the benefit of such advanced
medical wonders, but a falcon and some-times a
gazelle deserved, and got, the best; several times I or
one of my assistants would march straight into the
CAT-scanning department with a chesty peregrine or
lame gazelle and the radiographers, radiologists,
surgeons and nurses, all of them expatriates, would
come running as if it were King Faisal himself having
a coronary. In Europe, however, access to CAT
scanners was normally impossible for animals, and
besides, anything above a certain diameter of torso
wouldn‟t be able to pass through the machine. CAT-
scanning elephants and giraffes is out. I reckoned,
however, that the scanner could just about cope with a
giant panda if his legs were tucked in, and that even a
dolphin would be feasible.

For Chu-Lin, then, I needed the use of a CAT scanner.

There was only one in Madrid - at a private clinic in

the city centre. Dr Cerdan, Director of the Zoo,
promised to make representations to the clinic‟s
owners, and if they were agreeable and the Health
Ministry gave us permission, I would go to the clinic
to see whether we could physically get the panda to
and through the big machine.

Things moved quickly; both the clinic and the

Ministry gave us the green light. With Antonio-Luis I
made a reconnaissance of the clinic. We found that the
scanner was on the ground floor, the doors and
corridors were wide enough and, crucially, that the
circular hole in the centre of the scanner through
which Chu-Lin would have to move would just take
his now emaciated trunk. We would scan him after
hours, when the traffic was light and the clinic had
finished with its human patients. Everything was
arranged for the next night and two human
ambulances were booked - one to carry Chu-Lin, and
the other as back-up in case of emergencies.

Antonio-Luis and I went back to the Casa de Campo

and worked out a precise timetable for the operation.

At 9.30 the following evening, our treasure among the

bamboos, for that is what Chu-Lin means in
Mandarin, was coaxed, supported, almost carried into
a large, well-ventilated transport box, which was then
put aboard the first ambulance.

Antonio-Luis, Liliana his wife, the other veterinarian

at the zoo and I travelled with him. Just before we set
off I gave the panda a little Valium to minimize any
anxiety he might feel during what I thought might be
a noisy ride at break-neck speed. How right I was!
With two Guardia Civil motor cyclists in front and the
reserve ambulance behind, and consequently four sets
of sirens and flashing blue lights, we roared out of the
zoo and through the wooded parkland of the Casa de
Campo. The sound was deafening. The Guardia Civil
men were skilled, high-speed drivers, accustomed to
carving their way through the often densely clogged
traffic of Madrid like hot knives in butter. One would
charge ahead to block off junctions, while the other,
John Wayne at the head of the Fifth Cavalry, took us
straight through the red lights. Luckily, we had roped
Chu-Lin‟s box to the ambulance floor - for at every
bend, as the tyres added their screams to the din, my
colleagues and I were bounced off the walls of the
vehicle like peas in a drum. There was almost a
disaster as we crossed Castellana and the driver had to
slam on his brakes to miss, by a whisker, a collision
with a truck driver who felt that his green light was
green, no matter that the loco Guardia waving his arms
about appeared to think differently. Everything loose
in the ambulance, including us, careered forwards,
and slammed into a partition. A portable oxygen
apparatus smashed through a window, showering
glass on our driver.

Now I understood why Dr Cerdan had insisted on the

second ambulance, and Antonio-Luis half-jokingly
remarked that it was an oversight not to have taken
Valium ourselves.

At last, thank God, we arrived at the clinic. Before

unloading Chu-Lin we gave him an injection of light
anaesthetic and, when he was sleeping, brought him
out of the box on to one of the clinic‟s operating-
theatre trolleys. Then the panda was whisked down
the corridors to the CAT scanner department, where
radiologists were already sitting before banks of
computer screens in a side room. Even in his skeletal
state, Chu-Lin had the frame of a dumpy, thick-set
individual. To go through the doughnut-like ring of
the machine meant slimming him further, by trussing
his legs tight into his trunk.

Three canvas straps soon had the unconscious animal

looking like a rather hairy roll of butcher‟s meat.
Gently we laid him on the moving slide that would
pass him, in precisely controlled jerks, through the
scanner‟s centre. As it was the pituitary gland in
which I was principally interested, I asked for
computer images to be taken and filmed every
millimetre from the tip of his nose to the top of his
neck. From then on one-centimetre „slices‟ of the rest
of his body would do nicely.

Nervously, for Antonio-Luis and I are always on

tenter-hooks when the pandas are under anaesthetic,
we watched as the machine was switched on and Chu-
Lin began to disappear, nose-tip first, into the scanner.
If anything went wrong, I couldn‟t do much until he
came out at the other side. The computer screens
began to display cross-sections of his head.

Showing soft tissue as well as bone, scanning pictures

are far more detailed and revealing than X-rays. As the
minutes passed, a succession of images, resembling I
thought the cut surface of one of those continental
pates that contain chunks of truffle, meat and olives,
came up on the fluorescent screens and was stored in
the computer memory. For the first time ever, a live
giant panda‟s whole anatomy was being looked at.
Here was the brain with its various parts, the delicate
mechanisms of the inner ear, there the heart, the liver,
the kidneys-we watched the procession of pictures
that illustrated a whole animal composed of organs,
tissues, liquids, gases, fragile membranes, solid gristle,
soft fat and dense bone, quite unlike the ghostly
shadows captured by X-rays. During the scan there
was no time to study individual images; that would
have to wait till later.

At last, after almost an hour, the amazing machine

spewed forth our panda and he was taken back,
already blinking and licking his lips, to the waiting
ambulance. Again the Ride of the Valkyries would
have seemed like a leisurely evening promenade in
comparison to our furious convoy as it recrossed the
city streets and avenues to take this most illustrious of
out-patients home. By midnight Chu-Lin was back at
his bowl, drinking water as avidly as the fairytale frog
that made the fountain run dry.

The films of the computer images arrived at the zoo

the next morning and we studied them carefully. It
was like poring over an anatomy textbook with
hundreds of illustrations, each one slightly different
from the next. What I knew about the panda‟s insides
had been gleaned from a relatively small number of
sources - the first descriptions by the famous Pere
David (of Pere David deer fame) in 1870 that had so
excited the French scientific world, and the careful
dissection of Chi-Chi performed by London Zoo when
that most popular of pandas died in 1972, after
fourteen years at Regent‟s Park.

I had photographs and measurements of Chi-Chi‟s

pituitary gland. When our scans came to the part of
the head (a pit called the sella turcica) where the
pituitary gland should have been safely ensconced, we
could find nothing that we could identify as the gland
itself. Although this was the first panda scan, the basic
anatomy was clearly identifiable, but neither we, nor
radiologists we consulted, could say, hand on heart,
that such and such a blob on the film was the
pituitary. All mammals have pituitaries. We know
pandas have them. You and I, and pigs and elephants,
can‟ t live without a pituitary.

Nor, we are certain, can a giant panda. The mystery of

Chu-Lin‟s „missing pituitary‟ has not so far been
solved. It might seem tempting to theorize that his had
withered to a mere husk and so caused the disease. I
don‟t believe it, and prefer the explanation that our
interpretation of the scans is in some way imperfect.

We had CAT-scanned Chu-Lin and learned much, but

nothing that could help improve the odds against him.
What now? Every day I was continuing to read
anything I could find about „water diabetes‟ and
associated matters. We were given the animal herbal
„kidney injections‟ and had begun considering using
the curious, and very Spanish, alternative medicine
technique of taking a little blood from the patient and
then at once re-injecting it under the skin. Again, it
sounded crazy, but it was harmless, and some Spanish
doctors swore by it for humans.

One evening, I was sitting in the cramped little study

of my home in Lightwater, reading a paper on treating
certain types of „water diabetes‟ in humans. I came
across a reference to the value, in some instances, of
giving diuretic drugs.

Now, diuretic drugs make people (and animals) pass

more urine than normal and the one thing I would
have given my eye teeth for was to have Chu-Lin
passing less and drinking less. A lot less. But the article
referred to the „paradoxical‟ effect of the diuretic in
treating the disease - no one was sure how, but it did
the opposite of what you might imagine.

I, like most vets, was familiar with the family of

diuretic drugs mentioned, the thiazides. They were
used in evacuating accumulations of fluid in heart
disease and certain dropsies. Nowadays I mainly use
them for reducing soggy swellings on the underbelly
of elephants.

I telephoned Antonio-Luis straight away. „I know it

sounds tonto’ I explained, „but I would like you to
give Chu-Lin some Saluric.‟

Mario, the younger of the two panda-keepers at

Madrid, was on the night shift; he and Angel were
maintaining a round-the-clock watch in the panda
house. As instructed, he had given one of the diuretic
tablets to Chu-Lin at midnight, after crushing and
mixing it with a little honey and yoghurt.

Coaxing the panda to eat anything by this stage was

very difficult. Mario wondered what the latest in the
interminable line of potions prescribed by the
veterinarios was supposed to do; he himself was sure
that the end was near. It was just a question of when.
He hoped it was while Angel was on duty.

Bright morning light streamed in through the

windows of the panda kitchen. It was the best time of
day in the zoo. The animals had the great gardens to
themselves for an hour or two of daylight. Mario
could hear them announcing, in their various ways,
that they had awakened - the distant yawn-snarl of a
lion, capuchins twittering like birds and rousing
sleepy ducks who had spent the night hauled out on
the monkeys‟ island, the clatter of pelican bills as the
birds waddled, like a team of animal inspectors, round
the pathway stopping briefly, as is their wont, to stare
at each paddock or pond before moving on. Soon
Angel would arrive to relieve him; it was time to
prepare the pandas‟ breakfast. Into a stainless steel
bowl the keeper measured the usual ingredients - five
spoons of soya, one spoon of honey, olive oil, invalid
food, dried yeast, vitamin mixture and 300 grams of
panda flakes. He added some hot water and mixed the
lot thoroughly into a porridge.

That, together with some fine branches of bamboo,

would start off Chang-Chang‟s day. Into Chu-Lin‟s
bowl he put a carton of yogurt and a spoon of boiled
rice; if he were lucky the dying panda would lap up
half of it, very, very slowly, before turning his head
away.

Mario went down the corridor, opened the door to

Chang-Chang‟s quarters and went in. „Buenos dias,
viejo,‟ he greeted the old male, still lying comfortably
on his sleeping shelf, and put down the bowl. Chang-
Chang would descend and eat it in his own good time.
Mario went on to the next massive door — Chu-Lin‟s.
He put one eye to the peep-hole. „Perhaps today is the
day,‟ he thought, steeling himself as he had for the
past month, ready for the last act in the tragedy.
This time, however, he couldn‟t see anything through
the fish-eye peep-hole. Strange. It was blocked. Then
he under-stood, he saw. An eye was pressed against
the other side of the peep-hole, trying to look at him!
Quickly Mario slid the bolts and swung open the door.
Wobbly, very wobbly, there stood Chu-Lin looking up
at him - at the bowl! Chu-Lin wanted his breakfast!
Normally there would be signs that the panda had
passed torrents of urine during the night. Mario
looked at the floor — dry everywhere. Chu-Lin hadn’t
peed! His hands trembling with excitement, Mario
bent down and placed the bowl in front of the panda;
almost, but not quite, losing his balance, Chu-Lin
lowered his head and sucked up the yoghurt and rice -
every drop of it. Forgetting to close the door behind
him, Mario dashed back to the kitchen and grabbed
the telephone.

While he was telling the incredible news to Antonio-

Luis, Chu-Lin wobbled into the kitchen and began
sniffing at a bag of panda flakes. ‘Un milagro, un
milagro!’ shouted the keeper down the phone. „It‟s a
miracle!‟ Which it was.

The two keepers (Mario refused to go home at the end

of his shift) watched Chu-Lin all that day. He drank
water, but only a normal amount, and he ate his food,
even a few bamboo leaves, with more interest than of
late, though not with gusto.
I need hardly describe how ecstatic I was after taking
the daily phone call from Madrid at the unusually
early hour of seven o‟clock, nor that, after arranging to
press on with the diuretic regime, I opened a bottle of
champagne for my breakfast.

Two tablets a day did the trick. A week passed, and

still the thirst did not reappear. The panda‟s appetite
grew stronger and soon the needle on the scales began
to move up at his daily weigh-ins. The long slow haul
to recovery had begun, and we experimented to
discover the lowest dose of the Saluric tablets that
would suffice to keep Chu-Lin on course. It seemed to
be about half a tablet each morning.

After a month he had gained seven kilos and was

much stronger on his legs. Another month and he was
at eighty-five kilos, and showed the first signs of
wanting to play again with his stepfather. Slowly I
reduced the dose of the Saluric to a quarter and then
to an eighth of a tablet. Eventually I stopped them
altogether. Nothing untoward happened. Chu-Lin was
a plump, hundred-kilo, chirpy giant panda again and
the crowds of Spanish children could come, as they
had before, to chant, „Chu-Lin, Chu-Lin, Chu-Lin!‟ to
the most famous animal in Madrid as he sat
contentedly in the shade of a tree with his back against
the trunk and his paws resting on his paunch. His
strange illness has never been fully explained, nor has
it so far recurred. Just to see him there, giving an
audience to his admirers, is enough for me.

The next panda poser in that Year of The Giant Panda

involved Chang-Chang (the name means „strong‟)
Chu-Lin‟s stepfather and long-suffering playmate. As
soon as I met him, after he‟d arrived as a gift from the
Chinese government to King Juan Carlos, I suspected
that he was, in human terms, in early middle age.
Pandas are thought to live for about thirty years, and
the more opportunities I had to examine him as the
years went by, the more signs of „senior panda
citizenship‟ I recognized - his teeth, figure, coat colour
all indicated that he hadn‟t been a brand-new‟ model
when he left Peking on his journey of embassy to the
Spanish court. (The King has a palace not far from the
zoo where the panda house had been built ready for
Chang-Chang and his mate Shao-Shao.) In 1986,
however, I noticed something more ominous than
greying hairs when I was giving him a routine medical
check-up. Barely visible to the naked eye, a small,
oblong, smoke-coloured patch had developed in the
centre of the transparent cornea of each eye. Chang-
Chang was totally untroubled by their presence, and
there was no sign of inflammation associated with
them. Through the powerful lens of an
ophthalmoscope I saw that the patches were
composed of minute globules of some liquid, probably
a kind of fat called lipid, lying within the eyes5
window. Such degenerative changes generally occur
in old age in dogs and human beings; like wrinkles,
they are inscriptions of the moving finger of time and
could perhaps only be tackled, if they became very
dense and extensive, by means of a corneal transplant.
Panda trans-plant donors, are, of course, as easily
found as the Philosopher‟s Stone. But I was certain
that the patches were of a size and in a position that
would not interfere with vision.

Doctor Barnett, the veterinary ophthalmologist who

has done some fine cataract operations for us on exotic
animals (including the first-ever in Europe on a sea
lion) agreed, when I described Chang-Chang‟s
condition, that nothing should be done except regular
eye checks. (No, not with one of those optician‟s charts
where you have to read off a line of letters -anyway,
pandas would need a chart with Chinese characters
rather than the Roman alphabet!) Many months
passed and then, one day, Antonio-Luis, making one
of his regular telephone calls, reported that Chang-
Chang‟s eyes had gone much worse overnight. The left
eye looked blue-white from a distance, and there was
also a white spot in the centre of the right eye. More
alarmingly, the panda was sometimes bumping into
things as he walked around. That afternoon found me,
as s6 often, on the British Airways Madrid flight.
The old boy wasn‟t too difficult to examine, and I
didn‟t need my instruments to see that the left eye was
badly ulcerated all around the lipid patch. Erosions
and white blotches were blocking and distorting the
passage of light. A similar process was starting in the
other eye. I was appalled. To have lost the over-thirsty
Chu-Lin would have been a major tragedy; for Chang-
Chang to go blind would be almost as bad. „Get me
the best ophthalmic surgeon in Madrid - we‟ll
tranquillize Chang-Chang tomorrow morning,‟ I said
to Antonio-Luis - and lo, it was done. The following
day a beautiful, green-eyed lady, Dr Pilar, drove into
the zoo - I had the expertise I needed.

Eye injuries and diseases of many kinds are not

uncommon in exotic animals. Elsewhere I have
described replacing the dislocated eye of a Pere David
deer in a storm; and cataracts in orphan animals
caused by artificial foods that contained too much, or
the wrong sort of, sugar caused me many headaches
when I was a young zoo vet. In 1976 in a BBC
television „World About Us‟ programme depicting my
work, I removed the eye of an alligator; and I have
often been called in to amputate the chronically
swollen „third eyelid‟ of a lion or tiger. But the animal
called Homo sapiens is heir to more of the degenerative
type of diseases than many of my patients, because it
lives for longer than most of them and abuses itself so
persistently with alcohol, tobacco leaves, curious diets
and other things. Medical doctors tend therefore to see
a higher proportion of chronic degenerative pathology
than veterinary surgeons who in turn, see more acute
pathology than their medical colleagues. That is why I
valued the opinion of the good Dr Pilar; and as disease
processes in all mammals, including man and giant
pandas, are essentially the same, it mattered not that
she had never before squinted into the eyes of
anybody like Chang-Chang.

Yes, it was a degeneration and the sudden flare-up

was a secondary infection, the ophthalmologist
opined. No, blindness need not follow if we moved
quickly, and no, surgery was not indicated. I touched
the tip of a sterile swab gently against the cornea of
the tranquillized panda‟s right eye and repeated the
procedure for the left. The swabs went with Dr Pilar
back to her clinic. Three days later she telephoned. The
germ that had invaded the lipid patches in Chang-
Chang‟s eyes had been identified. Its name was
Pseudomonas, and it was sensitive to an antibiotic
called gentamycin. We would have to apply some
gentamycin to Chang-Chang‟s eyes four times a day,
and obviously couldn‟t dope him every time in order
to do it.

Chang-Chang is not as friendly a character as Chu-Lin

and it would have been very dangerous to take
liberties, such as poking tubes or droppers close to the
eye, with him. He does love sweet apples, however,
and I devised a method of introducing the gentamycin
drops simply and safely, both for the animal and
ourselves.

His outdoor paddock is divided into two by a wire

mesh fence. With him on one side and us on the other,
he could be tempted up to the mesh by a supply of
juicy red fruit. While, say, Antonio-Luis pushed a
chunk of apple through the fence, I would squirt the
antibiotic liquid into his eye from an ordinary
hypodermic syringe and needle held about half a
metre away from his head. Though gentamycin
solution doesn‟t sting, Chang-Chang didn‟t appreciate
being zonked at regular intervals by some supposedly
adult vet who retained an infantile delight in water
pistols, but his passion for apples transcends such
provocations. Grumbling gently he literally turned the
other cheek - which conveniently allowed me to squirt
him in the second eye!

Chang-Chang‟s eyes improved dramatically, he

stopped walking into trees and door frames, and after
ten days of the apple and squirt treatment he was back
to normal, but still, of course, with the original,
oblong, lipid patches in his corneas. If they ever flare
up again we‟ll start the same treatment at once. 1986
came to a close without any further panda alarums.
6 Full-flavoured Cuba

The Sharke, or Tiberune, is a Fish like vnto those which we call Dog-
fishes, but that he is farre greater.

Sir Richard Hawkins, Observations in His Voyage Into the South Sea

„Doctor, we must hurry. A young man, a neighbour of

mine, has been injured!‟ My companion, a
bespectacled Cuban with black walrus moustache and
snow-white teeth that were permanently on show,
hustled me out of the once-grand house that serves
now as a headquarters of the government trading
bureau, and towards the battered Lada that waited at
the kerb, chugging unhealthily.

„But why me? Surely the hospital services . . I said as

we juddered over the pot-holes through the pleasant
suburb of Miramar with its wide avenues, stands of
royal palms (Roy-stonea regia ) , spick and span
embassies, crumbling villas, smart American-style
motorbike policemen in blue uniforms at the road
junctions, and knots of schoolchildren wearing red
neckerchiefs, on their way to school.

„The doctors have seen him. But he is a special case.

Your sort of case, companero - he‟s been stung by a fish.
And besides, his mother is very worried. It‟s his
wedding next week.‟

Jorge said no more as we made our way along the

Malecon, the Havana sea-wall, towards the old
Spanish Morro fortress and lighthouse that overlooks
the narrow harbour entrance. Going through the
tunnel bored beneath the inlet we ran into the flat
countryside to the east of the city.

It was 1986 and I was on the second of a series of visits

I would make to Cuba. Since the late 1970s, the
number of successful dolphin births in European
marinelands had risen steadily, along with the life
expectancy of these animals, as standards of pool
design, water treatment and health care had improved
by leaps and bounds. We had learnt much about
cetaceans since those early days in 1968 when I‟d gone
to the US Navy‟s Undersea Warfare Division at Point
Magu in California to learn the basic techniques of
handling these unique animals. Losses of dolphins
from epidemic disease like swine erysipelas, or
because water was under-filtered or over-treated
chemically, no longer happened. Cheapjack summer
season and travelling dolphin shows with small port-
able pools have virtually disappeared in Europe, and
there was a welcome framework of national and
international regulations developing to oversee the
welfare of captive marine mammals.
The total number of dolphins taken from the sea by all
the world‟s marinelands in 1986 was less than forty,
fewer than were being bred in the marinelands, and a
minute fraction of the thousands that died, and still
die, every year in the nets of tuna fleets or with their
throats cut by Japanese fishermen.

But these few animals, taken under inter-

governmental licence, and of a species that was not
endangered, were needed for the occasional new
marineland that was being constructed, to replace
individuals dying from old age or disease, and to
bring new blood into breeding groups. We had
reached the stage where three generations of
marineland-born animals were living happily in some
of the big facilities in the United States.

Traditionally, bottle-nosed dolphins had been

obtained from American waters in Florida or the Gulf
of Mexico. In 1986 I decided to explore another
potential source, Cuba. I was attracted by several
factors. The shallow coastal waters of that biggest of
Caribbean islands are rich in dolphins, manatees and
fish and, compared with the tourist-infested US
coastline, a few score miles to the north, almost
completely unpolluted. With few of the pleasure craft,
water-skiers and speedboats that create noise as well
as chemical pollution, and little sewage or chemical
effluent being discharged, Miami-fashion, into the
ocean, the fauna of Cuban waters comprises species
that are no longer to be found near the American
seaboard. Clean seas promised clean, healthy
dolphins. The Cubans, hungry for hard currency,
could offer cheap and efficient air transport to Europe
and, significantly, this would mean in most cases a
faster journey, pool to pool, for the animals. Jet flights
between Havana and European capital cities are
frequent and take around nine hours non-stop.

On my first visit to Cuba, a month before, I had

instantly fallen in love with the place and its people.
There was none of the oppressive police state
ambiance that I had imagined, but immigration and
customs officials who smiled and joked - can you
imagine their US counterparts doing that? — and men
and women of every colour from blonde to blue-black
with temperaments that blended the laid-back good
humour of the West Indies, the Latin passion of
Castile and the innate rhythms of Africa and South
America. Okay, so they‟re not the most efficient of
folk, and their society is woefully short of many things
that we take for granted, among them basic materials.
More important is the fact that they are a loving
people. You may wait, drumming your fingers on the
counter, while the abundant staff behind the reception
desk greet one another, exchange kisses and giggle
over a smidgin of gossip, but you can‟t be angry with
them. Human relations come first with Cubans. Cold
communist dogma and bureaucracy hasn‟t touched
the hip-swing of pretty mulatto girls, the cheeky
honking of the boys who drive past them in the street,
the love of Salsa, the dance, and the pride, found since
the revolution, not only in conquistador blood but also
in that of the African slave and the Carib Indian.

True, the island needs a giant DIY store to supply

millions of gallons of paint and plaster. The walls of
the beautiful town-houses peel and flake, fallen tiles
lie un-replaced and antique wooden doors moulder
and split. The shops are shabby and have little to sell,
the supply of beer is erratic, jeans and trainers draw
envious eyes, air-conditioning units work fifty per
cent of the time, it‟s almost impossible to find a
photocopier, and a letter to England can take six
months to arrive. By democratic standards the Cubans
are not a free people, but they are free of grinding
poverty (you‟ll find more beggars round Waterloo
Station than in the whole of Havana) and of the
diseases of poverty, and they‟re free of American
suzerainty. Education and medical services are of a
high standard and widely available to all, there‟s
plenty of excellent rum and fine cigars at cheap prices,
you can walk through the back alleys of the inner city
without coming to any harm, you can hire a car and
drive anywhere in the country without need of
permits, and the beaches are among the best in the
world.
Enough of the travel brochure!

Having selected a pair of dolphins on my previous

visit and given them a clean bill of health, I was now
in Havana preparing to travel back with them to
Madrid. It took time.

With no aluminium tubing, fibreglass or plastic

sheeting to be had for the construction of strong, light
frames in which to suspend the dolphins‟ travelling
hammocks, massive old-fashioned „coffins‟ of wood
were the only answer. That meant arranging for the
university joinery department, situated out-side
Havana, to start sawing and mortising according to
my diagrams. The offices of Cubana, the national
airline, had to be visited time after time to book spaces
for the animals and their attendants, to ensure that
two seats nearest to the galley on the old Ilyushin jets
would be reserved for a Cuban vet, Dr Jose-Manuel
Fernandez, and myself, so that we could go down
through the trapdoor in the floor of the aircraft at
twenty-minute intervals during the flight to check on
the dolphins in the cargo hold. I had to negotiate the
minimum loading time, so that we could arrive at Jose
Marti Airport at the last possible moment before the
aircraft took off, thus reducing the time that the
dolphins were out of the water.
Airlines in the USA and Europe, much to my
annoyance, often insist on livestock being at the
airport two or three hours before departure time. In
the Cuban system, where the Aquarium, the Academy
of Sciences, the Trading Department and the Airline
are all arms of the government, I found that it was
possible to bend the rules by persistent talking. My
argument ran thus: „I‟ll sign the document releasing
my client‟s money to you, the Trading Department, if I
can have the full co-operation of the Aquarium in
providing a fast well-sprung lorry and lots of men to
lift the animals in their heavy boxes and if the Airline
will let me and the dolphins arrive on the tarmac
when all the passengers are on board and the flight is
ready to go, so that they can be loaded straightaway,
the doors closed and the engines started. To help keep
the animals cool I must have a night flight, the flight
engineer must be willing to adjust the cargo
temperature as I instruct him and the animals must be
loaded into a position so that they are first off when
we arrive at our destination. All these things are
possible in the United States, and I would hope that
Cuba could do as well - if not better.‟ With no one
wanting to be accused of lacking revolutionary
fervour (the island is festooned with hoardings,
placards and flags proclaiming things like
„Commander Fidel says Forward with the Revolution‟
and „We‟re all working alongside Fidel and the Party‟),
I have observed that capitalist individuals from the
West tend to get their own way over such matters.

It was essential also, to go to the airport and find the

glamorous female army major in chic khaki blouse,
contrasting scarf and full make-up, very Israeli I‟ve
always thought, who would give me a permit and a
squaddie to accompany me while I went to measure
the cargo hold and loading door of an aircraft of the
appropriate type. Usually this resulted in me then
returning to the university carpenters, and asking
them to start chopping inches and corners off the
dolphin boxes. The problem seems to be either that the
Cubans never understand my diagrams despite their
protestations of 'Si, Excellente!’ or that no two Russian
aircraft come in exactly the same dimensions.

At the Aquarium, whose director is Professor Dario

Guitart, a delightful, humane and cultured man who is
one of the world‟s great experts on sharks, and where
Che Guevara‟s daughter is a junior vet, there were
other matters to sort out.

The place bristles with staff, provides guests like me

with generous hospitality in the form of mountains of
fried Caribbean fish and devastating Blue Dolphin
daiquiri cocktails, but has no equipment. The
laboratory exists but is furnished with nothing but
some dusty test-tubes and flasks. My final blood
samples before the journey, needed to ensure that the
animals are one hundred per cent fit to travel, had to
be sent to a city hospital. I would receive the results
two days later.

There were the injections of praziquantel to be given

to rid the animals of the curious Nasitrema parasitic
flukes that commonly live in the blowholes of wild
dolphins and which can cause chronic sinusitis.

After all that, there was time to do other things. Like

going to see 'the man stung by a fish‟.

We arrived at the village where the man lived, a

collection of sun-bleached, tired-looking houses with
small, earth-floored backyards, foraging poultry and
sleepy dogs, and clumps of lemon, tamarind, mammee
and custard-apple trees. Jorge led me through a
labyrinth of cool pathways between buildings and in
through the back door of a house, against the frame of
which a number of small cages containing peeping
tropical finches were suspended on nails. Like most of
the Cuban houses I have seen, the interior was
sparsely furnished with long-dull paintwork and
faded wallpaper.

Sitting on a chair by the window was 'my patient' , a

young fellow of perhaps twenty-five years of age. He
was wearing a shirt and under-pants, and his left leg
was propped up on a stool in front of him. 'Miguel, I
have brought the English professor,‟ said Jorge after
we had been introduced and shaken hands. „He will
resolve the trouble with your leg.‟

The trouble with Jorge‟s leg was plain for all to see; the
limb was swollen and an angry red-brown in colour
from half-way up the shin almost to the groin. On the
front of the shin, close to the lower border of the
inflamed area, was a black scab about three
centimetres long, surrounded by a narrow zone of
purple flaking skin. I bent down and gently touched
the leg; it was unnaturally hard and hot. „The fish did
that,‟ said Miguel. „I was crossing the river near here,
taking a short cut, close to the place where it enters the
sea. It is very shallow and I waded across. I must have
stood on the fish - it stung me. The pain is not so bad
as it was. But the leg is solid. I can‟t bend the knee.‟

„The doctors at the hospital . . I replied. „They have

given you treatment which I am sure is the best.‟ '

Si, si,‟ interrupted Jorge, „but you, Doctor, are an

expert in these marine animals, they say. That is why
we want you to advise Miguel.‟

At that moment a small fat woman entered the room,

carrying a tray with cups of coffee. „Professor, thank
you for coming to see my son!‟ she said at once. „The
problem is the wedding. Miguel is to be married in
one week. What are we going to do?‟

Miguel had obviously trodden inadvertently on a

stingray, perhaps one of the marine forms that often
enter estuaries or else the very dangerous South
American freshwater stingray which lives in rivers
such as the Amazon. I hadn‟t a clue as to whether such
a beast occurred as far north as Cuba. The salt-water
kind were, however, abundant in these waters and I‟d
been out dolphin-catching in Florida when the skipper
of the boat I was on, a tough character of Indian
extraction, had been stung by a ray we‟d pulled in
with the nets, and the agony he‟d gone through had
left a lasting impression on me. Stand on a ray, and it
whips up its tail, unsheathing a sharp, dagger-like
spine made of bony material and with a toothed and
grooved blade. The grooves are lined by a soft,
spongy, greyish tissue that produces venom. This
venom, to which there is no antidote, produces severe
pain and, in some cases, a drop in blood pressure,
vomiting, muscular paralysis and death. The serrated
edge of the spine inflicts tissue damage where it
strikes, and even more when the victim, not
unnaturally, withdraws it.

„The wedding, senora, I don‟ t quite understand,‟ I said

sipping the strong black coffee. „With the pain
subsiding, the swelling will now gradually reduce,
and your son will walk as well as ever. There will, for
sure, be no permanent damage to the leg.‟ ‘

Professor! it isn‟ t the leg that concerns me, it‟s his . . .

his . . . testiculos.To put it bluntly - perdoneme, senor- the
old women in the village say that he will not be able to
consummate the marriage! What a scandal that would
be!‟

All eyes were looking at me.

„Well,‟ I said, „well . . . the . . . er . . . inflammation of

the leg, the stiffness, the pain may- how shall I put it? -
make Miguel‟s performance a little less vigoroso than
one might have hoped, but . . . but, you can rest
assured that eventually .. „

„Profesor! For favor,‟ the mother shook her head at me,

„forget the leg - will his testiculos be okay after this fish
sting?‟

„Why, of course, senora’ there‟s no way in which this

sting —„

‟I had mentally measured the distance between the top

border of the now static area of swelling and the
young man‟s private parts, and reckoned it to be a
good four inches „— no way in which this sting will
affect the function of Miguel‟s . . . er . . . equipment.‟
The woman‟s round face was at once transformed. She
beamed like a golden cherub in a baroque chapel,
rushed over and kissed her son and then came to
embrace and kiss me.

Finally, she darted to the house door and stood in the

threshold. Twice, at the top of her voice, she yelled so
that the neighbours couldn‟t have avoided hearing
through their open windows. ‘Oye! The English
professor says Miguel’s balls are okay!’ She used the
rather vulgar word „cojones!’

And that was the end of my consultation. Two of the

neighbours promptly appeared, carrying bottles of
anejo dark rum to share in the family‟s rejoicing, and
there was much patting of backs, and toasts to the leg
and other parts of the anatomy of the patient.

„I knew you‟d solve the problem,‟ said Jorge, as we

drove back to the city, its buildings of white coral
limestone smouldering in the evening sunshine.
„Doctors are all very well for run of the mill
complaints, but when it comes to strange things that
live in the sea, they don‟t know nothing.‟ I said
nothing.

D C Taylor, Stingray Sting Specialist cum Marriage

Counsellor, was savouring the afterglow of the anejo
rum.
The flying of the dolphins to Spain was essentially the
same as the many other transports that I had taken
part in over the previous eighteen years. Originally we
had greased the dolphins heavily, and sprayed them
continuously using a system of perforated plastic
pipes and an electric bilge pump powered by twelve-
volt batteries. This technique, which re-circulated the
water, needed constant supervision to stop the spray
holes becoming blocked by particles of solid
excrement.

Later we came to regard it as a health risk in the way

that it produced a mist of contaminated water that
could be inhaled by the dolphin and might
theoretically lead to lung infections.

Carrying the animals floating in sea water in

waterproof boxes had been tried and found to be
disastrous. One dolphin plus water plus box could
weigh over half a tonne. It was heavy to lift and move
about, cripplingly expensive with air freight being
calculated in dollars per pound, and prone to swill the
animals around, banging them against the walls of the
box, when bad weather was encountered. Worst of all
was the tendency of the water to run over the sides of
the box when the aircraft banked, or on take-off and
landing. Salt water and metal make an unhappy
mixture and, after an episode in the late 1960s, when
an American jet had to land under manual control
because its underfloor electronics had been attacked
by salt water leaking from a dolphin box (the aircraft
subsequently needed to go in for a complete strip-
down to determine the extent of the corrosion), no
more salt-water dolphin transports were attempted.
Nowadays, the dolphins lie in their padded
hammocks, lightly anointed with Vaseline, lanolin or
ladies‟ cold cream over their bodies to keep the skin
from drying out; we use a plastic spray from time to
time merely to keep them damp, and ice cubes to cool
the flippers and the tail. With this technique, a few
litres of water in a can and a sack of ice is all we need
for a transatlantic flight.

And that is the way I attended to the Cuban dolphins,

having remembered to bring to Havana a couple of
small plant-sprayers from my local garden centre in
Windlesham.

Cuba is rich in tropical plant life, but seemingly

devoid of such bourgeois things as garden centres and
plant-sprayers.

There‟s just enough space in the cargo hold of an

Ilyushin IL-62 to take a maximum of three of the
heavy Cuban dolphin „coffins'. It's well lit, pressurized
and the temperature can be held at a desirable sixteen
degrees Celsius if one speaks nicely to the flight
engineer. The entrance is down a ladder, reached by
lifting a trapdoor in the floor of the galley amidships.
For the human passengers, a long flight on one of
these rather primitive, uncomfortable Russian aircraft,
with no film or music provided, and abysmal food, is
an ordeal made bearable only by the comparatively
cheap prices; I much prefer to sit on a pile of mail bags
near the dolphins down below, listening to them
squeak to one another, and to 4ne if I whistle in just
the right way, with regular supplies of rum and coffee
brought down by one of the ever-cheerful cabin staff.

In more than a hundred trans-oceanic flights with

dolphins during the past twenty years I haven‟t lost a
single animal in transit nor had a serious in-flight
emergency. I‟ve had to use tranquillizers on only two
occasions, both during periods of heavy turbulence
and, although I carry with me The Bag containing its
powerful heart and respiration stimulants, its
sedatives and anti-stress drugs, its antibiotics and
painkillers, the majority of the bottles have to be
thrown away unopened when their expiry date is
reached. Travelling with dolphins is almost becoming
boring.

In 1987, on one of my Cuban visits, I was planning the

transportation of a different kind of marine animal:
sharks.
Few people are not fascinated by these remarkable
fish, many of them (and there are around three
hundred species known) anatomically unchanged for
a hundred and eighty million years. Although the two
biggest fish in the world are sharks -and totally
harmless to us-it is the eighteen really dangerous
species, the potential man-eaters that stir us. The
difficulties of catching, transporting and maintaining
such beasts in an aquarium far outweigh those
involved with dolphins or whales, but gradually more
and more exhibitions of large, live sharks are being
successfully set up.

Robert Bennett, my friend and the director of

Marineland in Majorca, wanted to create just such a
shark display. It is easy to obtain small sharks or
youngsters only a few centimetres long, and most of
them will grow quite quickly in the correct
environment, but visitors to an aquarium‟s shark tank
expect, if not a ten-metre-long great white „Jaws‟, at
least an impressive, reasonably big fish that looks
capable of tearing chunks off people. Catching large
sharks and keeping them alive during transport is a
formidable task.

First you must catch your shark using a hollow hook

through which, down a tube attached to the metal
trace, a solution of fish anaesthetic (often the same
chemical that is contained in sore throat lozenges) is
injected. The anaesthetic mixes with the water in the
shark‟s mouth, flows out through its gills and is there
absorbed, with luck rendering the animal dopey, if not
unconscious. Out of water sharks can be as dangerous
as in it; they can snap those fearsome jaws
unexpectedly, hurl their bodies about and thrash their
tails to inflict nasty wounds, for their skin is covered
with thousands of tiny, but real, teeth. Putting them in
sea-water containers is not enough for most species;
they need oxygenated water to run through their gill
systems just as if they were swimming forwards. The
movements of their muscular bodies, packed with
gristle but not a single scrap of bone, can quickly
fracture wooden and plastic boxes.

Robert and I resolved to see if we could bring some

big sharks from Cuba on the same aircraft that I had
used for the dolphins. We went to Havana to discuss
the possibility with Professor Guitart at the Aquarium
where there are several species of shark on view,
including a tankful of nurse sharks, some almost two
metres long. It was Cuban Mothers‟ Day, 14 May,
when we arrived, and everyone was wearing roses in
honour of their mothers, red ones if they were alive
and white ones if they were dead. Over the usual fried
fish and Blue Dolphin cocktails Robert and I listened
as Guitart explained what would be necessary. „Try
nurse sharks first, before moving on to the leopard or
tiger sharks,‟ he said; „they‟re tougher, less demanding
of oxygen, and they look spectacular, particularly
when feeding.‟ He took us over to the nurse shark
tank, set on the edge of the sea. The water had been
drained out except for a few inches, just deep enough
to cover the gills of the large brown sharks with
ghoulish white eyes that lay on the bottom. They
seemed placid enough, unprotesting as two men
walked among them in bare feet brushing the tank
floors and walls to remove encrustations of algae.
Pushed out of the way with a man's foot, they behaved
as amenably as tame sheep; however nurse sharks,
though not the most dangerous of species, have been
known to attack human beings.

„Normally we send only small sharks by air, in plastic

bags containing a little sea water and inflated with air
before sealing,‟ said the Professor, as he climbed down
into the tank with the sharks and stroked the biggest
one along its back. „We have no experience with the
transporting of large ones. Do you have any ideas?‟

„I was thinking perhaps of a long, shallow, watertight

box with a dry compartment for a battery at one end,‟
I said. „The shark would lie half-submerged, and a
pump would circulate water from its head backwards;
a built-in sprinkler would provide aeration.‟

„The box would have to be sealed with a lid - perhaps

a transparent one - and you‟d have to stop the fish
thrashing.‟ „How do you suggest we do that -
tranquillizer in the water?‟

„No - fix it firmly but gently with arched wooden

dividers in the box, shaped to the shark‟s body
contours and padded with rubber.‟ We drew up some
sketches. It looked a good idea - but would it work in
practice, and keep the animal alive for a period of a
little over twelve hours until it arrived in Majorca?
„Let‟s try an experiment,‟ I suggested. „Take the
measurements of one of your biggest sharks, make a
box and put it on a truck and trundle it around
Havana for half a day to see if the method is feasible.‟

Guitart agreed and Robert and I, armed with a tape

measure, descended into the drained tank. Paddling
about with our bare ankles touching twenty-
centimetre broad mouths armed with rows of thorny
teeth was a new experience for me. It was impossible
to imagine what the sharks might be thinking, and
quite unlike doing the same thing with dolphins. Once
in a while a dolphin might playfully nip your leg, but
it was rare for them to draw blood, and I‟ve never seen
a significant bite inflicted by a dolphin on a human
being, even when annoyed. The worst, only a small
cut on the knee, was endured by Rob Heyland, the
actor who played me in the „One By One‟ television
series, when we were filming in France.
Taking the length, width and height of the sharks
proved no problem, but as soon as we tried to lift
them to slip the tape around their bodies in order to
measure their girth, all hell broke loose. The sharks
erupted into contorting, lashing furies. Their muscular
power was extraordinary. Six men couldn‟t hold one
still, as we found out when we called for assistance.
But somehow we got approximations of their
dimensions and then released them. They reverted at
once to their placid mood. The university carpenters
would build us a prototype shark box and we would
then fit it with the plastic tubing, pump and battery
needed for the trucking experiment.

While the carpenters worked, Robert and I had two

spare days in which to explore Havana and the
surrounding countryside.

On my first visit to Cuba I had found it difficult to find

a church that was open - even on Sundays. While
travelling I enjoy, wherever possible, visiting old
churches and going to mass, especially in countries
where the church itself is politically oppressed or
desperately hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Out of
bed most mornings at five o‟clock, it‟s easy for me to
get to an early service and be back for breakfast and
the day‟s work. Over the years, while globe-trotting on
sick animal business, I‟ve strained to hear the „Kyrie‟
in Prague‟s impressive St Vitus Cathedral while a May
Day military parade rumbled and blared outside, been
the only person present apart from the priest during a
December blizzard in Iceland, and had my hand
shaken for some reason by every member of a large
Indian congregation at a church in Arabia where the
infidel cross is prohibited from being erected on such a
building. In Greenland I‟d heard a bishop refer to
Christ as „the harp seal of God‟ - few, if any, of the
Inuits present would have ever heard of, let alone
seen, a lamb; and in Southern France I‟d listened as a
clairvoyant nun of the obscure Antoiniste sect had
studied a photograph of the animal to diagnose the
cause of a whale‟s illness - incorrectly as it turned out.

In Havana, during that first visit, a friend from a

government ministry had asked me what I would like
to see in the city - Castro‟s famous little invasion boat
the Granma? The Hemingway house? The cigar
factory? La Fuerza fortress?

„No - the cathedral, please,‟ I had replied, and off we

had set in the ubiquitous rattly Lada. In the Plaza de
Armas we had stopped outside the tall grey-black
building built in seventeenth-century Spanish colonial
style.

„There it is - the cathedral.‟ I had opened the car door,

when my companion said, „Do you want to walk
round it?‟
„I want to look in it - it contains one of the tombs of
Columbus, I believe.‟

It was immediately obvious that I had embarrassed

my guide. „Er . . . I don‟t think that would be possible,‟
he explained. „It is shut . . . for repairs.‟

„Okay, let‟s go to see some of the other old churches

then.‟

„They may be closed too.‟

„All of them? Is religion dead in Cuba?‟

„Oh, no- complete freedom of religion, Doctor, it‟s just

that . . . these old places need maintenance,
reconstructions.‟

„So - there must be a church open somewhere. I would

like to find one.‟

The Cuban looked decidedly uncomfortable. „The

famous Capitol Building?‟ he offered.

„No, I‟d prefer to see a church - on the inside.‟

We set off again through the shabby streets of the old

city. San Felipe? Closed. Santa Catalina? Closed.

„Is everything being repaired?‟ I asked.

 „Yes, I think so,‟ came the answer. There were no
signs of scaffolding or workmen.

„I don‟t think there‟s a single church working in

Havana,‟ I said eventually, as we sat over plates of
„Moors and Christians‟, black beans and white rice, at
midday.

My companion glanced quickly to right and left, and

then leaned towards me. „After lunch we‟ll try the
church of Belem - I was baptized there he whispered.
„You must understand, Doctor, that I owe my good
position in the ministry to my membership of the
Party, and it would be . . . ilogico . . . to be a Catholic
too.‟

I understood.

That afternoon I struck lucky - the Belem church was

indeed open, and I was able to walk around its dusty
interior.

There were no visitors but us, no clergy or sextons to

be seen, no holy water in the stoups, no lighted
candles before the side chapels, but there was a
microphone on the high altar - the church was still
alive. Just. Much relieved at this demonstration of
religious freedom, my Cuban friend visibly relaxed as
we drove back to the hotel.
„To be frank,‟ he said, „I think Fidel and Christ were
like two peas in a pod - both comandantes of glorious
revolutions!‟

Subsequently, on my early morning walks in Havana,

I discovered another old church, La Merced, that was
open though in a sad state of disrepair. I make a point
of going to the morning mass, celebrated by a weary-
looking Franciscan for a handful of old people
whenever I am Cuba. I suppose it‟s a feeble gesture of
solidarity on my part.

Robert and I made the rounds of the few good

restaurants in Havana, the Bodeguita del Medio,
Papa‟s and, most famous of all because of its
association with Ernest Hemingway in the days before
the Revolution, La Floridita, where the daiquiris are so
cold they make my chest ache and the Moorish crabs‟
claws are unsurpassed. Such eating places are always
crammed full, but I discovered that a table can be
made to appear in the twinkling of an eye by
murmuring the words „guests of the Academy of
Science‟ into the ear of the doorman.

In the West it‟s only pop stars and „celebrities‟ who

can perform such conjuring tricks at Le Caprice or
L‟Escargot, whereas in communist countries scientists,
and particularly academicians, are held in comparable
esteem. I think it would be rather refreshing if a maitre
d‟ at the Connaught was observed fawning
obsequiously before some chap who had just
announced that he was, „The principal scientific officer
for pork pig husbandry research at the Min. of Ag.,
and might Gaston just happen to have free that
favourite table in the corner for diner a deux?’ and to
be heard purring, „But, of course, sir!‟ I was anxious to
visit Havana Zoo to see in particular the large
breeding group of Cuban crocodiles (the rarest, and
reputedly most aggressive, of all living crocodilians)
and also the endangered indigenous green, white and
pink Cuban parrot.

A car from the Academy of Sciences took me there and

I was led on a tour by the Director. Half-way round
we reached the big cat compound and, as I stood
looking at a group of tigers lazing in the sunshine, two
keepers appeared, pulling a billy-goat along by its
horns. To my astonishment they unlocked the double-
gated entrance to the tiger quarters, pushed the goat
inside and quickly swung the gates closed again. The
billy-goat stood blinking and bemused, while the
tigers yawned and regarded him with bored
indifference. „It‟s feeding time,‟ said the Director,
stating the obvious.

At last one tiger got to its feet and walked over to the
billy.
He moved away a few paces. The tiger padded after
him.

I was appalled - physically sickened. Of course I‟m

accustomed to blood and guts, to animals in pain, to
wild creatures doing things their way in the wild. But
this was something I had never seen before, and I
could no more stomach it than I could watch a man
being executed.

„You feed live?‟ I said lamely, my thoughts jumbled.

„Of course, Doctor. Don‟t you do it in Europe? Fresh

food on the hoof. Nothing better - or healthier for the
cats. No risk of tainted meat causing infection.‟
Another tiger stood up and ambled over, sniffing. The
billy-goat was getting the message.

He began to bleat loudly. „They‟re not very hungry.

No pounce for you to watch,‟ continued the Director.
„We‟re too good to our cats. They get fed six days a
week.‟ Maybe it wouldn‟t have been so bad if one of
the tigers had made a quick kill - the slink run, the
ambush, the final sprint, the leap, the precise lethal
bite to the neck, like I‟d seen in India. A perfect
predator killing fast and killing to survive.

This was utterly different. One of the tigers ran round

to the rear of the billy-goat and seized hold of its
scrotum; the goat remained standing and the tiger
began to pull slowly, lackadaisically. „This, companero,
is a horror!‟ I at last found myself able to speak.
„Medieval, barbaric, cruel-‟ I forgot the Spanish words
in the heat of the moment and spat out bastard
Spanglish. „I‟m off back to the city.‟

„But, Doctor, you‟re a zoo man, no? A veterinario?

What is the matter? A goat is a goat is a goat.
Nothing.‟

‘Mierdal Bullshit!‟ I stalked off towards the car-park.

The best pet I‟ve ever had - but he was more than that
- and the most intelligent, was Henry, a white goat
who had lived in the market garden of my home in
Lancashire so many years before. Henry, who walked
to heel, untrained, better than any sheepdog, when
Shelagh and I had gone on walks with him, who could
unfasten any latch or catch, who „hoovered‟ the grass
of fallen leaves in autumn (and stole my strawberries),
who could recognize the engine noises of cars
belonging to his friends - Henry, a nothing?

From time to time the question of live-feeding of

exotic animals had cropped up, though I had never
before come across anyone who did it, and apparently
on a regular basis, with creatures as big as goats. There
had been allegations that in certain British safari parks,
keepers had on occasion let the big cats kill, say, a
donkey, which should have been humanely
dispatched before being provided to them. But I‟d
never found any certain proof that such incidents had
really taken place.

Small animals — mice, rabbits, guinea-pigs and fowl -

are, for sure, sometimes fed, live, to reptiles in a few
zoos; and, perhaps more frequently, by private owners
of snakes and large lizards. Organizations like the
RSPCA are opposed to this practice. For me the
question has always been, is live-feeding humane and
ethical? In the wild, the argument goes, predators kill
to live, they‟re efficient and speedy assassins, it‟s the
law of Nature - red in tooth and claw. Many snakes
won‟t eat, and would rather die of starvation, if denied
living food. So what‟s different about zoos? And now,
with reference to what I saw in Cuba, what‟s the
difference between a white mouse being given as a
python‟s lunch and a goat serving the same purpose
for a tiger?

I think the answer must be that, in the wild, animals,

both predators and prey, are free agents. Both roam
free, both take their chances — and the prey animals
do have their chances.

When, for example, a lone lion launches an attack on a

Thomson‟s gazelle, in only twenty-nine per cent of
cases does it meet with success. Even when two or
more lions co-operate, the success rate only rises to
fifty-two per cent. In a zoo or safari park, however, a
goat has a zero per cent chance of surviving. Also, as
with the Cuban tigers, the behaviour of captive
predators has been modified by human attention.

Animals like tigers live in larger communities than

they would in the wild, and are accustomed to regular
feeding and unused to hunting - their killing
technique can lose its edge, become dulled and too
drawn-out. The quick kill of the hungry cat can
become a protracted game of lingering death.

With snakes the position is rather different. These

reptiles don‟t play at killing games - they either feed or
they don‟t, and their technique is the same, and as
speedily accomplished, whether in the Australian
bush or a glass-fronted vivarium.

Some snakes, king cobras, for instance, will often

refuse dead prey; while others will devour a freshly,
and humanely, killed mouse or rabbit. The small
animals used for live feeding of snakes - rodents and
poultry - in general do not show fear and do not know
what‟s going to happen when they are put into a
vivarium where a snake lies silently sniffing the air
with its forked tongue. The end, when it comes, is as
swift and humane, often more so, as the way in which
they would be dealt with at the hands of a farmer or
abattoir worker. Such prey animals again have no
choice, no chance; but then, neither do the sheep, cattle
and pigs that are slaughtered for people to eat. Snakes
deserve to live as much as tigers or naked apes and,
unlike the latter, only kill to eat or in defence.

They don‟t overfeed for gastronomic pleasure. In

certain circumstances, therefore, for small numbers of
individuals and species, live-feeding of reptiles is, I
believe, justifiable; but never for tigers and other large
predators that are in human care. Good meat, or in
some cases versions of the dried or semi-moist
complete foods that we give to domestic dogs and
cats, is what they should get - always. I went back to
my hotel in a black mood, vowing never to return to
the Havana Zoo - and I haven‟t.

Unlike my friend Robert, who had recently had

published a collection of his own short stories, which
had a distinct, spare, Hemingwayesque style, I‟ve
never been a great fan of the macho American writer.
But in Cuba, Hemingway is quite a hero, with his
house and old haunts on the tourist circuit, and a new
marina named after him. Now that my visit to the zoo
had been cut short, Robert proposed we should drive
out to the fishing village of Cojimar where
Hemingway had written The Old Man and The Sea and
pay a visit to La Terraza, the bar where he used to
drink.
It was a heavy humid afternoon as we arrived in
Cojimar, an unpicturesque place of paint-flaking
bungalows and wooden shanties at the sea‟s edge. La
Terraza was still there, now grubby and fly-blown
with a handful of old men sitting at rickety plastic
tables, but the long wooden bar and the bar-tenders in
white shirts and bow ties standing ready to serve
looked more promising. Both of us were thirsty.

„Two cold beers,‟ said Robert. „Sorry, no beer,‟ said a

barman.

„Two gin and tonics, then.‟

„Very sorry, companero, no gin.‟

„Vodka?‟

„Companero, I regret it, but we have no vodka today.‟

„Whisky?‟

„I‟m afraid not.‟

„Coca-Cola?‟‟

„Alas, no Coke.‟

„Make it two tonic waters with plenty of ice, in that

case,‟ I said.
The waiter smiled broadly and made a thumbs-up
gesture. „Good ice we have,‟ he said; then, after a
pause, „but no tonic.‟

„I think,‟ muttered Robert in English, „we should try a

different tack.‟

Reverting to Spanish, he went on, „Companero, what do

you have?‟

The waiter‟s smile became a joy to behold. „Rum,

companero, and sugar, and I can squeeze the juice of a
lime.‟

„Nothing else?‟

„Water.‟

He tapped a jug full of grey liquid, so that there was

no misunderstanding of the word.

„Well, he‟s got the wherewithal to make us a daiquiri,‟

said Robert, on hearing which word the waiter began
ceremoniously preparing the drinks with much
bravura flourishing of implements and glasses. The
daiquiri wasn‟t at all bad. We sat on the balcony,
looking out over the Caribbean, and talked about our
ambivalent attitude towards Death in the Afternoon and
how I‟d been to see Hemingway‟s parrot, which still
lived in a bar in Barcelona, and what might bring a
man to blow his brains out.

As we were ordering refills, a skinny little man with a

leathery brown face and wispy moustache came over
to us. „Permit me to introduce myself,‟ he said, „Jaime.
We don‟t see many strangers around here these days.‟

Invited to join us for a drink - he took his rum straight

and fast — Jaime went on to tell us of his work as an
artist, specializing in the carving of black coral taken
from very deep water. It was no tourist scam — he just
wanted to talk and drink rum — and indeed we did
later go to see his workshop and collection of exquisite
coral jewellery. Beautiful as it may be, the taking of
black coral - an animal as endangered as the gorilla or
black rhino - cannot be justified and it was an
embarrassment when he insisted on giving us each
coral trinkets to take home. Like many poor people the
world over, Cubans such as Jaime are fiercely
generous and proud; to refuse such a gift would have
been an insult.

During our conversation, accompanied by a steady

pro-cession of daiquiris, talk turned to Hemingway
and his old skipper, Gregorio. Was he by any chance
still alive? Very much so, said Jaime, and still living,
with his wife, in the village. Robert was keen to meet
the man who, it had often been said, was the original
„Old Man‟ of the novel; and Jaime volunteered to go to
Gregorio‟s house, not far away, and see if he would
like to join us for a drink. „He‟s over ninety now, and
puts it down to good rum,‟ said Jaime as he went out
of the door.

Gregorio was still a tall man, stooping only slightly,

bright-eyed and with an open, kindly face. His lucid
Spanish was less drawled and he didn‟t chop off
words in the typical Cuban fashion; this was due, he
said, to his having lived in Cuba for a mere eighty
years since emigrating from the Canary Islands.

As Jaime had claimed Gregorio seemed to benefit from

large quantities of good rum; he talked about his life
with Heming-way with an articulacy that, even as the
day wore on, showed no signs of being influenced by
the number of empty bottles of Havana Club steadily
accumulating on our table. No, he explained, he was
not the original „Old Man‟, but he remembered an
incident which he thought was the one that gave
Hemingway the idea. They‟d gone out in the boat
from Cojimar and the writer was, as usual, reading on
the way to the fishing grounds. Far out from land,
they‟d come across a small dinghy with an old fellow
and a young lad on board.

The boy was fishing under the instruction of el viejo,

the old one, and Hemingway had told Gregorio to
steer towards them in order to pass the time of day
and give them a crate of cold beer. „Bugger off!‟ the old
man had shouted when they got near -and so they did.
Later, at the end of the day, Hemingway had asked
Gregorio to see if he could find the couple again.

They had tried and failed, and despite thorough

inquiries in Cojimar and the other coastal fishing
villages over the months that followed, Hemingway
was never able to track down the old man and the
young boy.

When at last Robert and I were brimming with

daiquiris and Jaime and Gregorio were still happily
slugging the fifth bottle of rum, we made our
farewells, but not before giving back to his home. In
the car he told us that he had a large collection of
autographs of famous people from all over the world
who, mainly before the Revolution, had come to Cuba
because of the legendary Hemingway. „You know‟ he
said, „there is one autograph I would love to obtain,
one more than any other.‟

„Whose is that?‟ I asked.

„Margaret Thatcher - that gorgeous woman!‟ he

replied. „You admire our Conservative Prime
Minister?‟
„What‟s reactionary capitalism got to do with a hot
chica like that? I would like to take her to bed!‟ said the
nonagenarian seafarer, who then went on to describe
in explicit detail his still vigorous sexual capabilities! I
promised Gregorio that, although it was unlikely I
could arrange an assignation with the lady in
question, I would try to get a signed photograph of
her for him. „To have a picture of Margaret on my wall
would put even more lead in my pencil!‟ he crowed as
we finally shook hands.

When I got back to England I wrote to the Prime

Minister, describing the old Cuban‟s devotion (but
omitting the more carnal aspects) and before long I
received a photograph of her signed „To Gregorio with
very best wishes, Margaret Thatcher‟. It is now his
prize possession, fixed, as he said it would be, to his
bedroom wall.

The university carpenters duly presented us with the

shark box. It looked fine and, with the pump and
tubes in place, was soon ready for the shark
experiment. Professor Guitart acquired the use of a
flat-topped truck for a day, and early in the morning
we drained the shark tank again in order to grab the
biggest of the nurse sharks. As I had expected, lifting it
into the box provoked a battle royal. It fought the
combined strength of six men, but was eventually
settled in position, pinned comfortably with the
arched dividers, and provided with just the right
amount of bubbling, moving water. The battery was
checked and the lid, with its transparent window, was
screwed down. So far so good. Shark and box were
loaded on to the truck and Robert and I sat on the back
of the vehicle with it. The driver would drive around
Havana by any route he chose, until he was running
out of fuel, then another driver would take over and
Dr Fernandez would relieve us.

It promised to be a bumpy, unorthodox way of seeing

the city sights. All we had to do was keep an eye on
the shark, watch for any sign of it becoming bright
pink in the under parts - which might indicate oxygen
deficiency, and bang on the roof of the cab if there was
an emergency and we wanted to stop. Robert, Anglo-
Uruguayan, half Latin, half Anglo-Saxon, is the best
conversationalist I know. Acting as nannies to a shark
in the warm Caribbean spring, with Robert expanding
on the Latin-American world of politics he knows so
well, driving through the bustling streets - colourful in
spite of the drab buildings — and the traffic with its
many American automobiles of the 1940s and 1950s
still running, amid the smells of cigars and salt air,
would make a pleasant inter-lude.

And so it turned out to be; off we set from the

Aquarium, through Miramar, along the Malecon, up
the Avenida del Puerto to O‟Reilly- the shark seemed
happy enough, although I noticed that, whenever the
driver stepped hard on the brakes, the big fish would
thrash the unpinned end of its tail left and right. An
hour passed, and then another hour. We‟d done the
Avenida de las Misiones four times and seen the
weather-vane in the shape of a woman, „La Havana‟,
on top of the watch-tower of the fortress, eight times,
when we turned once again

into the wide street that rises up from the sea-wall

towards the old Hilton Hotel, the Havana Libre.

We were approaching some traffic lights when they

sud-denly changed to red. The driver at first braked
hard, then thought better of it and put his foot on the
accelerator in order to shoot through. In that instant
the shark flexed its spine with all its strength. Boom,
boom, boom. Its tail smashed against the wooden walls
of the box. BOOM. Kerraaaash\ Just as the truck began
to pick up speed, the shark box disintegrated.

The shark slid back in a gush of water. Lubricated by

the liquid, it kept on sliding - right ovfer the tailboard
of the truck.

One moment we had a box containing a shark on the

back of a truck, the next the truck was continuing on
its way with a jumble of wet firewood while the shark
lay squirming in the roadway. Without pausing to
bang on the driver‟s cab, Robert and I both reacted by
jumping off the truck - determined to be with our
animal at all times, I suppose - and hit the tarmac
hard, only just managing to keep on our feet. By good
fortune no other vehicle was directly behind us. We
ran back to the shark - it seemed unharmed, but the
gills would quickly dry out in the hot sun. Looking
round, I saw to my dismay that the truck, its driver
still unaware that all three of his passengers had
absconded, was half a kilometre away at the top of the
street and preparing to turn out of our sight. In the
other direction, two hundred metres away, was the
sea-wall and beyond it what we needed more than
anything else - sea water.

„Robert - get some water - your shirt, anything!‟ I

yelled.

My friend was off like greased lightning while I stood,

legs apart, over the shark, waving my arms at
approaching cars.

A crowd began to gather - there was a babble of

voices. „He‟s been fishing. Got a big gun. How the
devil did he get it up here all by himself? Dios mio, did
you catch a monster like that from the sea-wall?‟ A
policeman, blue cap and blue uniform, appeared on
the scene.

„What‟s this — a shark! Hombre!’ He unbuckled his

holster and pulled out his revolver.„The bastard‟s still
alive, companero, I‟d better put a bullet through its
head!‟

„No, no! It‟s okay. It‟s a . . . on its way to the

Aquarium!‟

Thankfully, Robert came panting back at that moment,

naked from the waist up and clutching his sopping
wet shirt. He knelt and draped the shark‟s gills with it.
„We need the truck, or some transport, fast!‟ I said.

„Too big for my motorbike,‟ said the policeman.

„Anyway, like I said it‟s alive. I‟ve seen its head move.
Wouldn‟t want that beast biting my arse from the
pillion seat.‟ Everyone laughed, but this was serious.

„The taxi — that‟s the answer! A tourist taxi!‟ I

exclaimed. one over there - look!‟ One of the slightly
smarter Cuban taxis that take only hard currency
payment for fares was coming up the street. Robert
frantically waved it down.
A few minutes of animated conversation followed,
with the driver talking about „a danger supplement‟,
and my friend brandishing a fistful of dollar bills, and
then it was agreed.

With Robert and me at the head end and the

policeman and two volunteers from the crowd at the
tail, we managed to get the struggling shark into the
back of the taxi. Robert sat with it, and I got into the
front.

„Vamos! Quick as you can. Ten dollars more if you

keep your foot down until we reach the Aquarium.‟
The shark made it. Back once again in sea water, it
swam unconcernedly as if nothing untoward had
happened. Professor Guitart‟s opinion of the
toughness of nurse sharks was justified.

I decided to drop the idea of a shark transport box,

and look instead at the possibility of using a big,
heavy-duty plastic bag containing some sea water and
blown up with air or oxygen, as a means of
transporting the animals. We knew that it worked
with small sharks and other kinds of fish. We tried
some experiments with plastic dustbin liners — they
were quickly torn by the shark‟s abrasive skin — and
then with plastic body-bags of the kind used for
human corpses — they killed sharks, because toxic
chemicals in the plastic leaked into the water.
Eventually I had sent over from England some special,
thick, plastic bags that are normally used to line
certain types of metal beer barrel. These couldn’t leak
poisonous substances, I reasoned, otherwise the
brewers, and even more the beer-drinking fraternity,
would be up in arms - or flat on their backs. The beer
bags worked. They kept the sharks, the water and the
air in, and the complete ensemble flew across the
Atlantic and arrived without losses or any further
trouble in Majorca.

It was all a far cry from the days of my youth in

Rochdale, when the only sharks I encountered were
the dogfish, true members of the shark family, that we
ate straight from the newspaper with a bag of chips
liberally doused with salt and vinegar.
7 Arabian Plights

Far are the shades of Arabia Where the Princes ride at noon.

Walter de la Mare, Arabia

The large, clay-coloured, fat-tailed scorpion lives now

in the curator‟s collection at Chessington Zoo. On
reflection, I sup-pose bringing him back from Arabia
in a plastic box at the bottom of The Bag was a double
illegality. A potentially lethal weapon in my hand
baggage, and no licence to import one of the smaller,
but undoubtedly qualifying, beasts that come under
the Dangerous Wild Animals Act. Anyway, he
travelled well enough, drinking when thirsty from a
ball of damp cotton wool I‟d given him, and he turned
out to be of a species that Lionel Rowe, Chessington‟s
enthusiastic expert on spiders and scorpions, hadn‟t
seen before.

I found the scorpion at sunset on the day I decided

that nine years working full time in the Arabian Gulf
was enough for my zoo practice. My custom had been
each evening when I was in the Emirates to drive up
to the top of the Jebel Hafeet mountain range, timing it
just right so that I arrived at the summit at six o‟clock.
At that hour, when the last rays of sun flooded far
below across the desert - the ancient sea-bed through
which the arid red escarpment on which I stood had
been thrust up, lurching askew, by some cataclysmic
cracking of the earth‟s crust — the sky would be a
lambent wash of water-colour, flamingo, coral and
oyster, and the distant ground, shadowed dunes and
seas of pale sand, were stretched out like a medieval
sepia print of all the known world. Silence, but for the
breeze stroking the rocks. The muezzin‟s calls for the
fourth prayer time of the day were far out of earshot.
If I put a tape of Telemann‟s trumpet music on the
Suzuki‟s casette player, and turned the volume up full,
the sound would echo round the peaks as a fitting
accompaniment to one of the most majestic scenes on
earth. This magical time lasted for less than fifteen
minutes, and then the indigo dusk swarmed up from
Oman over in the East.

That evening, as I walked across a boulder-strewn

ridge, I stubbed my toe on a stone that glowed like a
giant nugget of Welsh gold. As it rolled aside, the
scorpion had been revealed, at once on the alert, sting
arched forwards over its abdomen.

Life in Arabia was getting to be like that - unpleasant

surprises, regularly popping up out of a seemingly
tranquil landscape. Up here in the mountain twilight,
nothing was easier than to walk with old Khayyam
„singing in the wilderness‟.

Down there, trying to make some sense of veterinary

care for the wild animal collections of the Emirates,
was becoming impossible. The bedou Arabs who still
live a nomadic life in the deep desert are becoming
fewer and fewer. Oil has brought unimaginable
wealth, towns and cities, television and air
conditioning, trans-desert highways and stretched
Mercedes saloons, and the easy, lazy life. The bedou
tribesman with his seasonal migrations, his intricate
codes of honour and hospitality, his hunger and
austere diet of camel‟s milk and dates with the
occasional luxury of locusts or a monitor lizard, his
raidings and feuds, is almost gone, living for us now
only in the writings of Burton, Philby and Thesiger.
He has been changed and corrected - nothing but the
husk of his former self remains. The shadow of his
traditions, vain gesturings, linger, but the substance is
vanished.

I had been lucky, through hunting with Sheikh Saeed

bin Tahnoon, to find and spend time with some of the
few remaining truly nomadic bedou. For them, as for
their ancestors in the burning, barren wastes of the
Empty Quarter, animals and the ways of animals
remain at the centre of their way of life. Sitting
drinking warm camel milk from a communal bowl by
firelight, I had learned things that my textbooks on
camel diseases and exotic animal husbandry - even the
old British Army Veterinary Manual which I‟d got
from my former partner in Rochdale, Norman Whittle,
and which described confidently how „under fire they
are less liable to panic than other animals‟, „in the
Sudan at least seven camel breeds are found among
the tribes‟ and „three stout planks to enable camels to
cross ditches were found necessary in the Afghanis-
tan campaign‟ - things that even such tomes did not
en-compass.

I had heard from grey-bearded bedou like Mubarak

and Ibrahim of the wondrous white camel herds of the
Dhafir tribe of Kuwait, of the finest camels of all
Arabia, the Batiniya of the Emirates‟ coastal region.
Old Ibrahim had taken me by the hand and walked
with me into the desert to show me the nassi grass and
’arfaj bush which he said were better than any food,
even the Western food stones (he meant pellets) that
he‟d been shown when he visited Abu Dhabi, for
camels. „Tell me about sick camels,‟ I had said to him
as we plucked pieces of meat from a goat roasted in
my honour. „If I spoke for the whole of the holy month
of Ramadan, I could not tell you all,‟ he replied.
„Staghfar Allah, God forbid you should be so
unfortunate, my friend, as to see the ailment we call
jarrab.’
He was referring to camel mange - a remarkably
severe, and potentially fatal, affliction caused by skin-
invading mites similar to, but far more lethal than, dog
mange or human scabies. I‟d lost a camel once at Belle
Vue with just such a disease. „My son, jarrab will kill a
camel in the space of two moons. If you see it, rub the
camel all over with a mixture of crushed sulphurous
rock, red peppers and clarified butter! Beware the
thalath, a plant of the marshes in the Empty Quarter. It
is full of salt and destroys the lungs.‟ I never found out
what this plant, or the disease he referred to, was.
„Sometimes a camel will go lame, but, thanks be to
God, it can be healed with the making of a wasm ‟

‘Wasm?’

„Let me explain, Doctor. A wasm is the burn of a hot

iron. Bzzzzzz.‟ He made a hissing noise.

„A brand.‟

„If you say so. Let us imagine you have a white camel
which is lame on the right front leg. Then take a dark
camel and make a wasm on its right front leg; wallah
you will find that the white camel is sound as this stick
in two days!‟

He had struck his camel stick repeatedly against the

ground.
'Tell me, Ibrahim, what do you do if a camel has
stomach pain - like a man that has taken a young wife
who cannot cook and gives him soured goat meat,
even though her eyes are like those of a gazelle?‟ The
old man laughed a wheezy laugh through a sparsely
toothed mouth.

'Why, then you must make a pudding of barley and

milk and dates, and feed it to the camel. All will be
well, inshallah.’ He had poked my knee with a bony
finger. 'But tell me, Doctor, do you have good date
palms in England?‟

„Actually, we don‟t have any date palms in England.‟

The old bedou‟s face dropped. 'No dates? Then, my

friend, you will have many difficulties with your
English camels,‟ he said.

Muburak, Ibrahim‟s brother, had only one eye - the

other had been lost to a viciously clawing, newly
caught hawk when he was a boy. He could handle a
camel as effortlessly as if it were a labrador dog. To me
the camel is a difficult patient at all times -
cantankerous, easily offended, prone to discharge its
noisome stomach contents all over me at the drop of a
hat, a powerful biter - I have seen a man‟s skull
fractured and one eye destroyed by a camel that
grasped his head in its jaws -and a kicker of great force
and accuracy with any leg. But, while Ibrahim held the
camel‟s head steady, Muburak would take the black
aqal, cord, from his head cloth, pass it expertly round
one of the animal‟s forelegs, and give a pull. In a trice
it was down on its side. Quickly he would bend its
knee and throw a loop of the aqal about it. The
indignantly gurgling camel was effectively
immobilized in less time than it takes to tell.

But it was in hawking that bedou such as Muburak

and Ibrahim displayed their greatest skills, barbaric
though they are in some aspects. I watched Muburak
set a trap one day, a trap to catch a falcon. It was
ingenious and complex. First he laid out on the
ground a fine oblong net set in a framework of thin
sticks. Attached to this was a hundred-metre length of
 Unlike the elephants on the Hannibal walk, Ian Botham
walkedUnlike the elephants on the Hannibal walk, Ian Botham
walked every inch of the way! ( Rex Features)
„Batman* receives an injection after being pulled out of the Hannibal
walk near Perpignan. ( Graham Morris)
This white tigress isn‟t tranquillized . . . just friendly!
Measuring the blood-pressure of a sick lioness at Windsor
Safari Park. ( White & Reed)
„Chu-Lin5 when newly born: baby pandas began life without any
black markings. (J M. Martos)
Taking unusual liberties. Giant pandas are not generally as cuddly
and amenable as „Chu-Lin‟, seen here at the age of one.
A zoo vet must be prepared to try his hand at chiropody! (White &
Reed)
Suitably doped, a male chimpanzee has a rotten tooth extracted
(White & Reed)
The rescue of the Cairo dolphins began after midnight; under
conditions of great secrecy (Rex Features)
While John Kershaw steadies him, I prepare „Nemo‟ for the flight
out of Egypt. ( Rex Features)
This snake at Chessington Zoo has some unsloughed skin still stuck
to its eyeball. { White & Reed)
With the acupuncture needles and the „electric box‟ I brought back
from China. I begin treating a giraffe suffering from chronic
polyarthritis. ( White & Reed)
This little Capuchin monkey doesn‟t know that I delivered him by
Caesarian section nine months earlier. ( White & Reed)
When a killer whale says „Aah‟, I have a chance to inspect his
formidable array of teeth! [Brian Duff )
At the Marineland, Cote d‟Azure, we washed the blood of a whale
suffering from chronic lung abcess.
Using the electronic stethoscope to detect the foetal heartbeat in a
pregnant llama. ( White & Reed)
string which, if pulled, would flip the net over to catch
anything beneath it. The string led to a hole the bedou
had dug in the ground and in which his son,
Mohammed, squatted, concealed by a layer of dry
nassi grass.

Close to the near end of the net a pigeon was tied by a

short length of string that linked one of its feet to a
wooden peg in the ground. The other foot was
attached to a second string also controlled by the boy.
The third element in the trap was a surprising one: a
tame raven which had a bunch of pigeon feathers tied
to one of its feet. The other foot was fastened to a third
two-hundred-metre-long piece of string which again
led to Mohammed in his hole. Crouched beside
Muburak in a hollow edged by tamarisk shrubs, I had
watched through binoculars how the device achieved
its purpose.

First the raven was released and flew high, circling

round and round with the pigeon feathers dangling
from its leg. Far away, several miles in all likelihood, a
falcon spotted the black bird apparently carrying a
pigeon in its claws, and came like a javelin to relieve
the raven of its lunch. As soon as the raven caught
sight of the hawk, it landed and was pulled in by
Mohammed using string number one.
The boy then jiggled string number two to make the
pigeon flutter, the falcon dived at once to make the
kill, and as it began to pluck at its victim, string
number three was jerked rapidly, bringing the net in
its frame swiftly over to trap the bird. Mubarak ran up
and seized hold of the falcon, pressing its wings close
into the body. Out from the hole emerged his son, who
took over the bird, while Muburak produced a needle
and thread from the purse slung round his waist
beneath his dish-dasha. He threaded the needle, passed
it through the falcon‟s lower right eyelid, over its head
and then through the lower left eyelid.

Gently he tightened the thread, forcing both eyes to

close. Deftly making a knot, he bit off the thread and
placed a soft leather burqa, a falcon helmet, over the
bird‟s head, tightening the leather strings that held it
in place, again with his teeth. „Ha!‟ he then shouted to
me, holding the bird aloft. „Look at that! A fine hurr,
saker falcon — worth thirty thousand dirhams, I
swear.‟

Bedou like these men were a delight to be with, to sit

and listen to their stories of camels, their names and
owners remembered even though it might be thirty
years before, the ribald jokes about women and young
boys, the detailed arguments, with much scraping of
camel sticks in the sand to illustrate a point, over tribal
and family territories, roots, wells and quicksands, of
sandstorms and bad, dry winds and of the good star,
Suhail, that is the harbinger of cool weather.

But they were not the bedou among whom my

assistants and I had to work, however. The bedou-
come-to-town, the myriad sheikhs of first, second and
third rank and their retinues of latter-day viziers,
factotums, major-domos, toadies, courtiers, hangers-
on, servants and spies - these were the people we had
to contend with in our daily lives, and the intricacies
of dealing with them, rather than the relatively
straightforward veterinary care of the oryx, cheetahs
and gazelles in the zoos and private collections,
demanded a Machiavelli more than a Doctor Dolittle.

Before an assistant went out to the Gulf for the first

time, I always gave him the same advice. „Read and
digest a copy of Machiavelli‟s The Prince, learn enough
southern Arabic, not that you have any hope of
understanding bedous in full flow of one of the many
dialects, but so that they are not sure how much you
comprehend of their conversation when you are in
their presence. Never lose your temper and, thereby,
face, and know that, even in the deep desert at high
noon, someone is watching you, nothing is secret.‟

Chris Furley, our first assist-ant in the Emirates,

proved an exceptionally resourceful survivor under
the toughest of circumstances. I have written
elsewhere of his acquisition of a Range Rover as a gift
from a sheikh, and how the gift was peremptorily
taken back when Chris was accused by a gardener of
performing sorcery with some blood he had sensibly
drawn from a diseased oryx. It was Chris who first set
foot in the minefield that was later to endanger all of
us — the hospitalizing of sick falcons in the zoo. No
animal, neither camel nor horse, is valued more highly
by the bedou than his hawk. The arts of falconry and
the love of possession of these „kingdom of daylight‟s
dauphins‟ courses in his blood.

Though other falcons have been brought to Arabia

from time to time, the bedou favours only two species
which are perhaps best suited for hunting in the
desert, the shahin, peregrine, and the hurr, saker; by
contrast, when hawking was at its zenith in medieval
Europe, many kinds of falcon were employed, with
persons of a particular class or profession traditionally
flying certain species. Thus lanner falcons were for
earls, merlins for ladies, goshawks for yeomen,
sparrow hawks for priests and kestrels for „knaves and
servants‟.

The large, handsome gyr-falcon of Arctic regions was

the king‟s bird in those days. I have known illicitly
taken gyr-falcons, a protected species, arrive in the
Emirates as gifts to sheikhs; but, not surprisingly,
these hunters of the far north have in general failed to
adapt to the blistering heat of the Gulf. The great
sheikhs, who sometimes can own a hundred falcons at
the beginning of the winter hunting season, do not
necessarily treat the noble birds well by modern
standards of animal welfare. Within the space of a
single season, a few months, they may lose eighty per
cent of their hawks, not to disease or injury only, but
frequently as the results of the birds returning to the
wilderness- to be trapped again, and perhaps even
sold back to the original owner.

The sheikhs are the biggest culprits in the worldwide

illegal traffic in falcons; they fork out enormous sums
for likely-looking birds, ask no questions and pay no
more than lip-service to international wildlife
protection conventions.

Dispensing their oily largess, they have no difficulty in

obtaining the hawks they desire from Pakistan or even
West Germany. Private jet planes carry their
acquisitions across frontiers, politicians and
bureaucrats connive in these days when the currying
of favour with petroleum-rich sheikhdoms that need
to be bolstered against Islamic fundamentalism is the
overriding consideration; and greed, as ever, holds
sway over all.

Within their kingdoms and emirates they are insulated

by age-old feudal systems against the modern world,
so many aspects of which they despise with an
arrogant and distorted puritanism. Despite their
frequent visits to the fleshpots of the West, their love
of its consumer hardware, its girls (and, of course, its
gold), they are still often suspicious of modern
scientific techniques, particularly in medicine, and
when it comes to a sick falcon they are slow to give up
the old ways of the desert that go back to long before
Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina and initiated
the era of Islam.

If a hunting falcon breeds badly, then it must be

suffering from radad - an affliction brought on by
feeding bad meat or because the bird has been cursed
by the shadow of an eagle flying above it. The falcon
must be taken to an experienced bedou falconer who
will burn its face on both sides above the beak with the
tip of a lighted cigarette. If this doesn‟t work, some
goat urine and lizard blood will be mixed with the
food; and when the animal at last stops eating and
becomes thin and apathetic, it is kismet, the overriding
will of Allah. Now try the European animal doctor and
his methods.

In consequence, the majority of falcon patients that we

saw in Arabia were chronic, even terminal cases.
„Kismet‟ was often a dead bird or an inoperable
condition that meant the bird would never hunt again
and would spend the rest of its days in a dim-lit
humid hut. No bedou doubted Allah‟s decision to
snuff out a bird, but he sometimes gave the impression
that he didn‟t think much of the way in which the
English doctor had seemingly nudged Allah‟s elbow.
It was a thankless task; in most cases, when treating a
sheikh‟s falcon, we would deal with the bedou
falconer in charge of the birds, a person of prestige
and much respect in Arab society. We learned early on
that such a man would try out all the ancient, often
barbaric, remedies before coming to us and without
telling his master. If we were successful he would
display the cured falcon at one of the sheikh‟s majlis,
the twice-daily audiences, and describe how he, Abdul
or „Omar or Hamdan, had laboured night and day
with potions made from herbs gathered specially on
arduous journeys to some distant oasis, how he kept
the bird alive by chewing every morsel of raw pigeon
meat for it, and how his brother Faisal or Muhammad
or Sharif, had gone up to the souk in Dubai, to find
some blue stone with which to cauterize the area
where the djinns that were causing the falcon‟s
depression had housed themselves.

He would say nothing of our involvement, however.

After the telling of all this in flowery Arabic to the
sheikh and a roomful of people, retinue and visitors,
the falconer would be given a modest gratuity of a
thousand pounds or a gold Rolex watch, and his
brother would be put on the payroll.
If the bird died, or the wing would never work
properly again, or a foot was a twisted ball of scar
tissue when the sheikh called for it to be prepared for
a hunting expedition, then the falconer would, at
equal length and in just as flowery Arabic relate how,
having almost cured the bird, he took it to the English
doctor who, it was claimed, had much knowledge of
falcon diseases and modern American and European
techniques at his command, but alas, he had found
him wanting, the claims unsubstantiated. This doctor
had used the injecting needle, a sure killer if there ever
was one, and had given him small capsules which
were poisonous. If proof were needed, then he must
have bungled things. After all, these infidel
Westerners had books and strange instruments, but
what did they know about the shahin in practice, the
ways of the houbara and gazelle, such subtle quarry?
Why, he- whose grandfather had flown two shahin
against an oryx calf in Ibn Saud‟s hunting grounds —
had seen that these English doctors couldn‟t even
follow the flight of hawk and prey in the deep desert
when the sky was white-hot, so poor were their eyes
in comparison to those of the bedou. And the sheikh
had listened and then nodded. He had thought as
much.

On one occasion, showing a sheikh by microscope

some slides prepared from the lungs of one of his
falcons that had died from fungus infection, I had
pointed out the fungal spore heads which resembled,
after staining by methylene blue dye, pretty fairy trees.

I had said, „You can see the “ trees” , which are the
cause of the trouble, your Highness,‟ and I had been
publicly ridiculed, with considerable loss of face, by
the sheikh‟s falconer, who said that only an idiot
might imagine trees growing in birds‟ lungs - and
anyway every bedou falconer knew the cause of the
disease was the way the meat was fed or that the
falcon had been brought near a woman who was
menstruating. Most of the bedou squatting against the
walls of the audience room, scratching at the carpet
with their camel sticks and awaiting the usual free
lunch of roasted lamb and rice, seemed to agree that
what I was saying was arrant nonsense.

Based at the zoo in Al Ain, we saw hundreds of

falcons every year - a source of invaluable experience
for me and my assistants, and particularly enjoyable
for Andrew, a keen falconer when he was a schoolboy
at Winchester and now a recognized authority on the
diseases of hawks and other kinds of bird. Most of the
patients came in the cooler months between October
and April, and there were two major medical
conditions that we had to tackle, the respiratory
fungus infection, aspergillosis, that I have just
mentioned, and „bumble-foot‟, a sort of chronic
abscess of the „sole‟ of the hawk‟s foot.
Caught early, we could achieve a very high degree of
success in the treatment of both conditions; brought to
us when the disease was firmly entrenched, we faced
serious difficulties.

The bedou particularly liked us to take the birds in for

hospitalization; they regarded it in the same way that
they might send one of their Mercedes or Chevrolets
to a garage for repair, and expected to return and find
the bird in perfect running order. Hospitalization was,
in principle, something we also recommended for
these cases; we could work on them and supervise
their nursing at close quarters. But of course, one
expects that an owner, told that the bird will be in
hospital for, say, two weeks, will come at the end of
the fortnight hoping to collect the fully recovered
patient. Not in our experience. An owner frequently
did not reappear for three or even nine months. When
he did, or to confuse matters, when he then sent
someone else to collect the bird, it might have been
long dead or, if hale and hearty, he couldn‟t recognize
it! The fact that there was a label on the falcon‟s wakar
al-tair, the stand on which it perches, bearing its name,
was of no interest to him. If he considered that the bird
next door, always a better-looking specimen, was his,
the one he left for treatment, he would lay instant
claim to it. There had been some mix-up with the
labelling, but, no matter, he was taking that bird. Our
lay assistants, Arabic-speakers from Egypt, Pakistan,
Afghanistan or Palestine, terrified of arousing the
wrath of bedou nationals were virtually powerless in
such a situation. They are very much third-class
citizens in the Emirates, putting up with exploitation
and rank discrimination, even though nearly all of
them are Muslims, for the sake of salaries that are very
high in comparison to what they could possibly dream
of earning back home.

We fared little better, neither did the zoo‟s Director, an

old Austrian. „I‟m a UAE national,‟ they‟d say. „I‟m
Sheikh so-and-so‟s falconer or friend. I know this is the
correct bird. I‟ll have the police here in a jiffy if there‟s
any trouble. Guess who, under Islamic sharia law, will
be in the wrong? Finally, if you don‟t unlock the door
to my falcon‟s room — I‟ll smash the lock!‟ Some of
them did just that. The birds‟ rightful owners were not
amused when they eventually arrived to collect their
property.

Leaving the birds, if they weren‟t terribly ill, for six

months or more with us was essentially a way of
having them boarded and treated for free. The drain
on the rather meagre drug budget of the zoo was
significant, sometimes leading to a situation where we
did not have certain drugs needed for other patients
for months on end. The owners paid nothing for our
work or for the medication and when, at one time, we
tried charging them, I got a rap over my knuckles.
Sheikhs always get what they want, and even ordinary
bedou nationals, wealthy though most of them now
are, must not pay a penny, I was told officially.

„But they are not the zoo‟s responsibility,‟ I responded.

„They are not included in our contract, which requires

us to work solely with the zoo‟s large animal
collection. The number of out-patient falcons is
growing to unmanageable pro-portions. The sick birds
arrive at any hour of the day or night - their owners
always being given access by the gatekeepers - and
they may introduce epidemic disease into the stock.‟ A
separate hawk hospital needed to be set up.

My arguments were ignored and, as for the privately

owned falcons not being included in the zoo stock for
which we were contracted, I was handed a letter from
the ruler of the region which decreed, in Arabic and
English, that „All the falcons in the country and all
animals belonging to sheikhs, must be considered as
being zoo animals, properly within the purview of the
zoo‟s veterinarians, as they are potential contacts of
the zoo‟s permanent inhabitants.‟ In other words, the
official reasoning ran, they must be treated in the zoo
because they might come into the zoo, a tautology that
could have been applied equally well to the numerous
scavenging dogs of the slums of Zanair, the immigrant
workers‟ township nearby, which regularly raided the
zoo at night killing animals such as gazelle and young
antelope in their paddocks.

Sheikhs and other well-connected bedou, with a few

notable exceptions, had always treated the zoo‟s staff,
particularly the Indian, Pakistani and Afghani keepers
(as well as the animals) in, to say the least, a high-
handed fashion. No cars allowed in the zoo - so they
would drive in for a tour round. Gates closed at six
o‟clock — they would insist on entrance at seven.

If they felt like fun, they would hand lighted cigarettes

to the monkeys, encourage their children to throw
stones at the ostrich‟s eggs or at the bears, those
despicable animals that everyone knew were just hairy
pigs, and so unclean. In 1979 they had stoned a fine
old Iranian wild boar to death. Woe betide anyone
who remonstrated with such fun-seekers, unless they
relished spending a night in jail or, if the sheikh was a
high-ranker, being ordered out of the country. If a
sheikh wanted a bird to test his falcons on, he would
direct the nearest keeper to open its cage and catch it
for him — no matter that it might be a bird of paradise
or a rare cock of the rock. If he wanted to dump
unwanted animals received as gifts - eagles, a leopard
or an ostrich - a man would be sent to drop off a box
containing the beasts at the zoo gates, normally with
little or no notice.

The general attitude of the bedou to the animals in the

zoo was strange and often primitive. I remember the
President of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, coming to the
zoo and, while driving round, pointing out animals
which he considered to be ugly and ought not to be
allowed to reproduce - the hornbills, for example.
Fortunate indeed is the zoo that can breed these
fascinating and spectacular birds. He detested mixed
groups of animals - gazelle, antelopes and African
birds in one immense paddock co-existing as they
would in the wild. All species must be kept separate,
he ruled, and he came back a year later to check that
his orders had been carried out. He wasn‟t at all
pleased when he saw in one enclosure two strikingly
different kinds of antelope, a sandy brown and white
hornless one, and a black and white one with spiral,
twisted horns. „Why have these animals not been split
up as I commanded?‟ he fumed. „Do it at once, now!’
None of the petrified keepers dared tell this Olympian
personage that the animals in the paddock were all
blackbuck - male and female - and they obediently set
about separating the two sexes.

Sheikh Zayed, we found, was a man of unswerving

opinions on all things biological. Some kinds of tree
were bad and should be uprooted. Some fodder that
we gave the animals was „poisonous‟ and should be
discontinued forthwith. These animals should be sent
to his private island, notwithstanding the fact that it
was high summer and we warned of the dangers of
tranquillizing them in very hot weather. Those
animals must be sent from his island to the zoo
without delay (on one occasion they numbered ten
thousand pheasants) even though the zoo had
nowhere to house them. In such a feudal society, the
ruler‟s word is law and truth.

The problem of the hospitalization of falcons in the

zoo grew worse. More and more birds occupied cool
rooms near our office in the zoo, and two keepers did
nothing but feed and water them round the clock. To
ensure that only the rightful owner collected a
recovered bird, we tried to institute a security system.
Everyone bringing a falcon to the zoo would have to
sign a chit in the administration building, and we
would take a note of his vehicle registration number.
Only a man coming with the same vehicle and with
the same name as that on the chit would be able to
collect a bird. Identification of the birds themselves by
tagging or ringing was unacceptable to the bedou; it
would be „dangerous‟ or „hinder their hunting
abilities‟ were the usual explanations.

But of course, sheikhs and bedou falconers go by

Churchill‟s dictum that rules are made for the
obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men, and
they simply didn‟t co-operate. Chit or no chit, a man
would arrive at our office, day or night, and claim a
bird; or simply demand to see all the sick falcons.

When Chris or I was present it was often possible to

send them away by feigning complete inability to
understand the language, or disappear by locking the
door and hiding in the pharmacy with the lights out if
we saw them approaching. I encouraged the growth of
dense bushes with judiciously clipped peep-holes in
them, outside our office, through which, when sitting
at the desk, I could see the kilometre of drive that ran
straight to the main gate.

Somehow we coped with the bedou owners who

arrived months late to find that their falcons had been
claimed and signed for by somebody else. Many of
them would take the chit and, because everyone
knows everyone else in that tribal society, go to deal
with the matter face to face. Others would simply lay
claim to another bird as rightfully being theirs, or be
prepared to accept the one left behind by the other
bedou.

Add to that the deep-freeze full of dead falcons that

we kept, each labelled, in case an owner wanted to see
the corpse of the bird that he‟d brought to us in
extremis so long ago, and you can understand that the
whole business was, to put it mildly, chaotic.

The only part of it that I enjoyed was the surgery,

almost all of which involved „bumblefoot‟ operations.
While Philip, our Indian lab assistant, held the hooded
falcon, I injected liquid anaesthetic into its breast
muscle or administered halothane gas through a small
face-mask. A couple of minutes later the bird was
unconscious. Bumblefoot abscesses, usually caused by
a staphylococcus germ that gets into the foot, often
because a talon has been allowed to overgrow and
prick the sole, are grape-sized lumps, frequently with
thick, multi-layered walls like an onion. They may
occupy most of the foot where the toes join, and
eventually ulcerate; the effect on the bird is chronic
pain, difficulty in perching, permanent distortion of
the foot and frequently dry gangrene of one or more
toes. The vet‟s aim is to dissect out this gristly ball,
avoiding the delicate tendons that control the talons,
as well as the nerves and blood vessels. It is almost
micro-surgery.

My assistants who, unlike me, spent most of the year

in Arabia, and dealt with far more cases of
bumblefoot, were considerably more skilled than I
was at this intricate operation.
After an initial pair of curved scalpel incisions had
been made, that came together at each end to form an
ellipse enclosing the „bumblefoot‟, the tissues were
carefully teased apart, keeping close to the outer wall
of the abscess capsule.

Sometimes it seemed that I was removing all the soft

flesh of the foot. Eventually I would be left with a
gaping hole, in the depths of which the glistening
threads that were the tendons and ligaments so
especially essential to a bird of prey lay exposed. After
swabbing the wound and dusting it lightly with
antibiotic powder, I set about closing up, using silk
sutures.

Gauze pads as dressings, held in place by strips of

elastoplast, completed the operation, and after half an
hour I had finished.

The falcon was wrapped in a cylinder of blanket cloth

to keep it from fluttering its wings and injuring itself,
and then placed in a cardboard box in a quiet corner of
our office where we could keep an eye on it until it
had fully recovered from the anaesthetic.

It was amazing to me that some longstanding

bumblefoot cases, where I felt that I‟d almost
completely filleted the bird‟s foot, healed perfectly and
hunted again, able to seize houbara, stone curlew or
hare in those powerful talons.

It was in spring 1985 that Chris, then our assistant in

Al Ain, telephoned early one morning to say that a
few days earlier someone had broken the locks of one
of the falcon „hospital wards‟, and taken what he
claimed was his falcon. Now another bedou had
arrived, found that his favourite peregrine had gone,
and was making a fuss. Typically, falcon-keepers,
curator, Director, officials of the Ruler‟s Department,
Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, were wringing their
hands, sympathizing with Chris‟s problems, but
shuffling off all responsibility for such a crazy
situation and offering no help or support.

The aggrieved bedou was coming to Chris‟s office

twice a day, delivering threats to take the matter up
with Sheikh Zayed himself, unless he got his falcon
back or received compensation to the tune of twenty
thousand pounds from the English vet.

Ominously, he began putting it about that the doctor

at the zoo had sold his bird!

Knowing how the dice are loaded in such affairs in

Arabia, Chris and I discussed contingency plans for a
quick flight from the country if it became necessary. It
was fortunate that, because he worked for Andrew
and me, he was allowed to retain his passport, unlike
the direct employees of the Arab government and
many companies, whose passports are held by the
employer. It was also lucky that he was due to go on
leave in a few days‟ time, and I would be replacing
him. „Keep clear of the bedou,‟ I told him. „Spend your
time out of the office, working with one of the sheikh‟s
private collections or in distant parts of the zoo until I
take over.‟ When I arrived in Al Ain, I at once
approached the Director with a request that all falcon
work in the zoo should cease.

He sympathized, but said that the sheikhs wouldn‟t

agree.

There was no way of stopping them sending their

birds in, and we could not refuse to treat them.
Reluctantly, I decided that all treatment of the out-
patient falcons would have to be down-graded. All
would be attended to using methods that required the
bird to be brought back on a daily or weekly basis.
None would be admitted for hospitalization. To get
over the problem of the diminishing drug stocks in the
zoo, I would issue prescriptions - the owners would
complain, I knew, but they could do nothing about it
so long as I prescribed medicines that weren‟t kept in
the zoo pharmacy. The town of Al Ain is full of
chemists who have all the latest pharmaceutical
products on their shelves.
Habaish, the owner of the missing falcon, a squat,
blue-jowled man with a Hitler moustache and dressed
in grey dish-dasha, arrived as I expected in the
veterinary office on the afternoon of my arrival. By
then Chris was already on a Singapore Airlines flight
to the Far East. Backed up by two glowering young
bedou who typically walked uninvited around the
office, picking up instruments to inspect, opening
books and going through into the pharmacy to look at
the shelves of bottles and the armoury of dart guns
and blowpipes, Habaish salaamed me brusquely and
sat down in the chair in front of my desk.

‘Wayn doctor?‟ he said. „Where is the doctor?‟

„It is I,‟ I replied. „I am the doctor.‟

„No. Wayn Doctor Chrees?‟

„Doctor Chris has gone.‟

‘Gone!’

„Yes.‟

„Gone where?‟

„Out of the country.‟

„When does he return?‟

„Perhaps never. Can I help?‟ I pulled a long face, and

tried to give the impression that Chris regrettably was
gone for good.

Habaish frowned. „So you are the new doctor?‟

„Yes,‟ my emphasis conveying an air of permanence, I

thought.

The bedou said no more, but rose, called his friends

and they all left.

Chris was on holiday for a month, and whenever

Habaish popped in again, at increasingly long
intervals, to check that Chris was indeed gone, as he
assumed, for good, there I was.

He never raised the matter of the missing falcon.

Eventually he stopped coming altogether and we
never saw him again.

There was never a dull moment working in the Al Ain

zoo; apart from the variety of medical and surgical
cases in the vast animal collection, the intrigues and
Byzantine politics of the all-male microcosm within its
boundaries kept me fully occupied.
One day I brought some fossils that I‟d found on Jebel
Hafeet during one of my mountain sunset trips, and
showed them to a group of keepers gathered at the
gate waiting for the bus to take them home. There
were various kinds of ancient mollusc in the lumps of
sandstone. „Look at these sea snails, hundreds of
millions of years old,‟ I said.

They turned them over in their hands. „Like conches

and the oysters I‟ve seen on the beach in Goa‟ said one
Indian.

„Where did you find them, Doctor? In the creek at

Dubai?‟

„Oh, no,‟ I replied, „up there on the Jebel.‟

„On top of the mountain?‟ an Iranian asked

incredulously. 'But there is no water at all up there.‟
Like a fool I walked straight into it. „Not now, there
isn‟t. But millions of years ago there was, when all this
desert was at the bottom of the ocean, and animals like
these represented the most advanced forms of life on
the planet.‟

The group of men stood silently looking at the fossils

and then the Indian said, „It is a lie, Doctor. It cannot
be so.‟
„But that is the way things evolve.‟

„Evolution - I have heard that word,‟ a Pathan from

the Afghan border said. „It is untruth. The Holy Koran
cannot be mocked. Allah made things as they are. This
evolution is a lie contrived by the godless!‟

„Yes, it is so, Doctor,‟ cried another Afghani. „Sea

creatures were created in the sea. To say they
“evolved” on mountain-tops is a heresy, a lie. These
things are trickery.‟

I put the fossil back in my bag, and kicked myself for

forgetting the anti-Darwinist teaching of Islam. Next
day I was visited by a stern, bearded Imam from the
religious police, who gave me a wigging and warned
me against preaching infidel heresies among the good
Muslims in the zoo. „The sheikhs are God-fearing men
who, by example, demonstrate the truths of the Holy
Koran and they insist that in this Islamic state their
population is not corrupted and lured into Satan‟s
clutches. Remember, Doctor, that the sheikhs will not
permit ungodly talk.‟

I remembered how so often, when I stored my vials of

pox vaccine for inoculating falcons in the refrigerators
of the sheikhs‟ palaces, I had difficulty finding space
between the stacked bottles of vodka and malt whisky.
I remembered the hundreds of spiked receipts I‟d been
shown by my friend, the Controller of a certain
sheikh‟s estate (I‟d been there, working with the
private antelope collection) for cash paid out to
prostitutes imported from England, Germany and
Austria for stints of two weeks at a fee of £12,000
apiece.

I remembered, and said that I would earnestly bear in

mind everything the Imam had said. „Good, and God
strengthen you, Doctor,‟ replied the cleric as he rose to
his feet.

There were the men who came offering large amounts

of cash for aphrodisiacs: „The medicines you must
surely give to fortify the potency of the tigers and
gorillas,‟ they explained. They had tried eating sharks‟
meat, a common local remedy for impotence, to no
avail. Other visitors wanted dope to make their camels
run faster in the Dubai races.

„Do you not have something, Doctor, that would give

my white camel a boost?‟ one old bedou said. „It‟s
legal and above-board here. When I was a lad we
would insert a plug of cannabis into the beast‟s
rectum. That would do the trick! But now the police
catch sellers of cannabis. We drench the camels with
strong black coffee before a race, but it is not very
effective. They say you have wonderful medicine here
for the wild animals, the fleet-footed oryx and the
gazelle. Please give us it so that my white camel goes
like the nafhat, the blast of wind of the Arabian Desert.‟

There were the Omani gate-men who raised the

rumpus on religious grounds when Chris Furley‟s
fiancee, Karen, came to visit him, forcing us to find a
way of by-passing them through a little-known gate in
the boundary fence. After that, when Chris‟s
successor, John Lewis, went to work for us in Al Ain,
his fiancee, Linden, went out purporting to be his wife.
No problem - and it was a delight for me when John
and Linden got married a year later on their return to
England, and I broke the news in the zoo and was able
to witness the confusion writ large on the gate-men‟s
faces.

There were the Egyptian engineer and the Sudani

driver who would tap on the door of our bungalow in
the middle of the morning and beg a can of beer which
they drank furtively, standing in the hallway, and the
veiled sheikhas who threw hundred-dirham (£20) notes
screwed up into pellets at keepers as they were driven
round the zoo. There were the keepers, mainly
Afghanis and Pakistanis, who came to me for
treatment of their wounds, sustained during quarrels
which occasionally involved knives; such incidents
had to be kept secret, for they were fearful of being
deported if the Director or office staff got word of it;
and there was the dignified Mohammed Khan, a
keeper of hoofed stock who worked alone, far away, at
the most distant part of the zoo.

A poor, ever-smiling, infinitely polite man, at the

bottom of the zoo‟s pecking order, he wore a British
Army belt round his turban and gave a crisp military
salute whenever we drove out to see his animals. One
day he asked me if I would do him the honour of
coming to his dwelling one evening so that he could
provide a meal for me. We fixed a day and I turned up
at the hovel made of bits of scrap tin, wood and
sacking, as big as a garden hut and clean as a whistle.
He was overjoyed that I had kept my promise, and
proceeded to brew tea and boil me an egg. He served
the egg just as it was on a tin plate and then sat and
watched me eat it. It was always slightly embarrassing
to dine with Asian friends among the keepers; never
did they eat with me, but sat nearby watching, some-
times with a group of male friends and relatives, as
was their custom. Mohammed Khan‟s egg was to me
as grand and generous a meal as any I‟ve ever had.

There was the gentle Afghani keeper of great apes

who told me one day that his brother, fighting with
the mujahidin, had been killed by the Soviet army and
that he would be gone from the zoo for a week or two.
When he returned three weeks later, he reported to me
at once, inquiring about the health of his beloved
gorillas, orang-outangs and chimps, and informing me
that his brother had been avenged; he had killed a
Russian trooper. „I cut his throat, Doctor, as he was
climbing out of a blazing tank with his hair on fire.
Then I cut off his nose. See.‟ He took a small canvas
bag from out of his baggy trousers, and opened it to
show me a wedge of dried brown flesh that had once
been a nose.

Always and everywhere there were lies and

deceptions. The sheikh who announced, with fanfares
of publicity, that he had bred for the first time houbara
(or McQueen‟s bustards) in captivity - he would not
countenance the fact that it had already been achieved
in Israel (or Occupied Palestine, as he would call it). In
fact he‟d done nothing of the kind, but had flown in
eggs, stolen from the wild in Pakistan, and had them
incubated. The gazelles which were knowingly sent
with clean bills of health, to join, and subsequently
infect, the herd of another sheikh - even though our
assistant Peter McKinney had accurately diagnosed
them as carrying a serious disease, Malta fever, which
can also attack human beings. Typically, by protesting
at this irresponsible act and refusing to connive in the
cover-up, Peter added to the list of covert enemies we
were making. Eventually these grisly chickens came
home to roost.
In 1986 and again in 1988 we were humiliated by
being informed, out of the blue, that Sheikh Zayed had
ordered our resident assistant veterinarian out of the
country with immediate effect. In both cases the
reason was given as „the Sheikh‟s decree‟. No
explanation, no justification was ever forthcoming or
obtainable, despite my most strenuous efforts.

Both cases related to the work we had been compelled

to do on the islands of the Ruler and his son the
Crown Prince. The cause of the edicts was the
insistence of ignorant men that animals must be
transported, and therefore darted and anaesthetized,
in the blistering heat of high Arabian summer. The lie
machines began to operate. When, months after the
event, the Sheikh inquired why there were only six,
instead of seven, sable antelope in his collection, his
eager-to-please lackeys were quick to explain - the
English vet, against their advice, had used poisons
that killed them.

An Arab friend of mine explained the scenario, using

an actual example.

„You and your assistants don‟t understand the Arabic

language, you don‟t know what goes on when you
leave the islands, and you have no way of redressing
the lies and rumours that seep like mist through the
Sheikh‟s audiences and network of spies, and are just
as intangible.‟ Recently the man who kept a certain
sheikh‟s bees on one of the islands made enemies
among other members of the household . One night
the scoundrels sprayed insecticide into the hives. The
following day the bee-keeper found all the bees dead
for no apparent reason and, horrified, told his
treacherous colleagues. “What a misfortune! But do
not tell the sheikh!” they counselled, shedding
crocodile tears. “His wrath would be unimaginable.
Inshallah, with any luck, he will not visit the hives or
ask about the bees for many months, maybe longer,
then you can say they died off gradually, from disease
or cold weather.” Some weeks later the sheikh did
inquire about the bees, and the bee-keeper‟s enemies
at once told their master that they had all died and
that their death had been carefully concealed by the
luckless bee-keeper. “For such deceit, see that he is out
of the country by sundown,” ordered the sheikh. That
sort of conspiracy is the risk you run, Doctor, when
working on the islands in particular. Not that you
would conceal animal deaths, but that others would,
and then, when questioned, declare, without your
knowledge — without you ever having seen the
animals in question, perhaps — that you were reckless
or neglectful or incompetent, had not reported the
loss. Remember that to a bedou sheikh the word of a
bedou camel-skinner or goatherd carries more weight
than that of an infidel Westerner.‟
Andrew and I discussed the situation at great length
and came to the inevitable decision; working in the
Emirates was no longer fun, we would pull out of the
Gulf In September 1988 I made my last journey up to
the summit of Jebel Hafeet to watch the darkness well
up from the Oman desert. Then I went back down to
the zoo and walked round the paddocks of oryx and
gazelle and moufflon, the gibbons, hippopotamuses
and giraffes. It wasn‟t pleasant to think that I might
never see any of them ever again.
8 Down to the Sea Again

He always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea

keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July
crowd.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The broad Comacchio Canal runs into the Adriatic at

the mouth of the Gulf of Venice, approximately thirty
kilometres north of the city of Ravenna. Its fresh
water, or sweet water as the continentals prefer to call
it, is neither fresh nor sweet, and bears its share of the
pollutants excreted by north Italian civilization down
to the dying sea. There are many things in its water
that shouldn‟t be there, but on a January day in 1987
passers-by spotted something that was anything but a
pollutant, though it was most definitely not supposed
to be bobbing about in the canal on a freezing cold
winter‟s day; it was a baby dolphin.

How does such a creature, barely one and a half

metres long, come to be all alone far from the sea? No
one knows for sure, but I incline to the view that
dolphin infants - this one was about one and a half
years old - are like their human counterparts, long in
curiosity and short in experience. Just as a child might
wander off from its parents to investigate some
fascinating item in a world full of magic and mystery,
so the dolphin, perhaps wilfully disobeying the
clicking under-water messages of its mother and
aunts, decided to explore the different-tasting water of
the canal mouth and swam in a bit further, intrigued
by the grassy banks, the occasional waterfowl, the
moored boats and the strange, floating debris.

It was all so different from the world frequented by

the school of dolphins to which he belonged - the
shallow, inshore, salty waters off the estuary of the
great River Po. There, though they weren‟t to know it,
the filth in the water nourished the blooming
microscopical animals and plants which in turn were
fed upon by a myriad varieties of tiny, soft slippery
things and crusty, jointed-leg, mini-„sea-insects\ Upon
this broth dined fish, and the fish attracted the
dolphins who, with their sophisticated sonar, could
find them in the murkiest water, often little better than
diluted sewage, even at dead of night with no moon.

The baby dolphin (who was to become known as

Garibaldi after the Italian patriot and soldier and Porto
Garibaldi, the place near where he was found) must
have panicked when he realized that he was on his
own. The excitement of adventure must have turned
lemon-sour when he no longer heard the underwater
communication noises of the adult dolphins and
looked in vain for the familiar streamlined grey
shadows of his family as they effortlessly slipped,
rolled and dived, soared and banked, in the aquabatic
hunt. No joking now! Where was the big bull dolphin
who would kill a marauding shark with one belly-
blow from his bony beak? Where were the aunts who
would take up position, one on his left and one on his
right, to escort him when the school was travelling fast
away from a storm? Where were his friends, his peers
- the other fifty per cent of youngsters who had
survived their first year of life in the ocean - the female
calf he sometimes chased and nibbled, leaving four
shallow love-bite lines on the skin of her dorsal fin, the
male that had had a curious lamprey fish attached to
him for the past week? I imagine he would have given
anything for a taste of salt water, the glimpse of a
silver-flashing sardine, the sound of a breaking wave,
and the whistle of his mother on whom he still
occasionally suckled.

But which way to go? Banks, beaches on either side of

him.

He picked at random one direction in which to swim -

it was the wrong one.

As I wrote in Dragon Doctor, the Adriatic is a

moribund sea; it is expiring slowly from pollution. In
1989 the water‟s filth fed the explosion of floating
algae - blocker of fish gills and defiler of beaches. Who
knows what damage this coloured slime inflicts on air-
breathing mammals that must surface regularly and
find this gunk plastered around their blow-holes?
Dolphins were already in big trouble in the Adriatic in
1977 when I autopsied a group of twenty animals and
found them all to be afflicted by such complaints as
kidney stones, breast abscesses, chronic pneumonia
and diseased testicles -each disease process related in
some way to pollution.

Garibaldi was theoretically in comparatively less

polluted water while swimming in his canal, but it
wasn‟t salt water.

There‟s a lot of rubbish talked about what happens

when cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) find
themselves in fresh water. „Because of the reduced
buoyancy, they have to work harder to rise to the
surface to breathe, and soon become fatigued‟; „They
die quickly like herring or cod in fresh water‟ and
„Their skin blisters and falls off . I‟ve heard it all so
many times over the years. In fact, dolphins and
whales can survive very happily for many days in
fresh water.

I remember a white beluga whale from the Arctic

swimming way up the Rhine beyond Diisseldorf in the
late 1960s. It was there for weeks. In 1969 an old
bottle-nosed dolphin spent her last few days of life in
the River Severn, but it was a cancer of the roof of the
mouth that killed her eventually, not the fresh water.
Because dolphins „drink‟ efficiently through their
skins, I often put a dehydrated dolphin or whale
(suffering from, say, diarrhoea or certain kinds of
kidney disease) into fresh water for three to four days,
so that its body can rapidly and automatically balance
its fluid levels. The animals don‟t tire, don‟t have
difficulty swimming and respond more efficiently
than with my original method of introducing a bucket
or two of water into them by means of a stomach tube
and pump.

It is true that dolphin skin is microscopically different

from that of other mammals, and prolonged immersion
in fresh water will set up changes in its texture.
Peeling of the upper layers will occur. Properly
managed, with gradual reduction of the salt content in
the water, it is possible that a sea-living dolphin‟s skin
could adapt to fresh water and take on the structure of
the skin of dolphin species that live naturally in fresh
water, animals like the Susu of the River Ganges, the
boutu of South American rivers and the „white flag‟
dolphin of the Yangtze River system in China.
I discussed this possibility with Professor Sir Richard
Harrison, the world-renowned cetacean expert, on one
occasion.

We agreed it would be an interesting experiment, but

an unethical one. One doesn‟t take unnecessary risks,
even for scientific purposes, with our friends the
dolphins.

Garibaldi‟s difficulty in the Comacchio Canal wasn‟t

so much the fresh water, as the absence of suitable
food for him and the psychological stress upon an
animal so young and isolated from his fellows. Down
the coast from Comacchio, at a distance of some eighty
kilometres, is the Adriatic Sea World at Riccione,
where my friends Leandro Stanzani and Giuseppe
Caniglia deftly combine infinite care for the dolphins
in their pool with what Hannelore considers to be the
most entertaining dolphin show in Europe, and with a
real concern for conservation of the world beneath the
waves. No mere showmen these, Leandro and
Giuseppe put hard cash, effort and ingenuity into
scientific work with the threatened dolphins and other
marine life of the Italian waters, not least through the
organizations they created: the Foundation for the
Defence of Marine Mammals and the Study of their
Environment, and the Centre of Cetacean Studies,
whose conferences attract scientists concerned with
marine environmental issues from all over Europe.
If anything happens around the coasts of Italy
concerning the mammals that live in the sea, the
Riccione people are normally among the first to be
notified. And so it was with baby Garibaldi.

Leandro at once called his team together, loaded a

Transit van with all the necessary gear, and set off at
full speed up the autostrada to the north. Just before
leaving, he put through a telephone call to me. I was
eating my breakfast of Marmite and toast and listening
to LBC‟s half hour of light classical music that goes out
each weekday morning at five, when the phone rang.
„I think there‟s a young bottle-nose dolphin in trouble,‟
said Leandro. „Will you be around when I ring later,
after assessing the situation?‟

Yes, I would be around, I told him, though past

experience had taught me that such rescue missions
rarely ended success-fully. The animal either wasn‟t
where it had been reported and had literally vanished,
or it was dead on arrival, or in extremis. Few of the
whales, dolphins and porpoises I‟d been involved
with in rescues after strandings or where animals had
gone, like Garibaldi, a-wandering in rivers or
harbours, had survived. My autopsies had revealed
that many of these sporadic vagrants were diseased -
lungs or inner ears full of writhing black worms or
brains shattered by haemorrhages provoked by the
presence of other flukeworm parasites. Some were
unweaned weaklings, others tired geriatric cases come
to the end of the road. There had been critical wounds
from boat propellers, contamination with oil spillage,
and starvation where an individual had been without
sea fish for many days and attempts to catch it had
lasted as long. But it was always worth pulling out all
the stops and trying. We‟d had our moments of
triumph - the pilot whales in Malta, though human
error lost them later, a common porpoise at Brighton,
some frost-bitten killer whales in Iceland. Some of
them, God willing, were still sharing what De Quincey
called „the multitudinous laughter of the sea‟.

When the Riccione team arrived at Comacchio they

found a small army of men waiting to help them.
Police, sub-aquadivers, the Department of Forestry
with boats, extra nets, diving gear and vehicles, were
all standing by in the freezing mist of an early
morning in which the reeds and grasses at the water‟s
edge were encrusted in frost that glistened like
diamond dust. There was hardly any breeze, and the
surface of the canal water was broken only by the
regular rising of the little dolphin for a sharp, short
intake of breath. Leandro and Giuseppe saw at once
that it was indeed one of the Atlantic bottle-nose
species, Tursiops truncatus, the „Flipper‟ with the
permanently smiling curve to its mouth.
With Leandro co-ordinating things on the canal bank
and Giuseppe in his wet suit leading the divers, it
didn‟t take long before three nets were set in the water
and Garibaldi was gently manoeuvred into an ever-
decreasing area where he could be grabbed when he
came up to breathe. Having caught dolphins in this
manner on many occasions in the past (when for
example, I wanted to haul one of the Riccione animals
out for a health check), Giuseppe had no difficulty
throwing an arm round the youngster‟s body at just
the right spot, immediately in front of the pectoral
flippers. The other divers moved in to lend a hand,
and a minute later Garibaldi was safely tucked into the
padded dolphin stretcher that had been lowered into
the water. Carefully, ever so care-fully, the animal was
lifted into a boat which took it to a jetty where the
Transit waited. Before suspending the stretcher in a
waterproof framework lined with thick plastic foam,
Leandro greased the critical areas of the animal‟s body
(around the blow-hole, the eyelids, and in the
„armpits‟) with lanolin. Then, without further delay,
the van set off for Riccione, Leandro and Giuseppe
travelling with Garibaldi in the back and spraying him
from time to time with sea water.

The decision to take the baby dolphin to the Adriatic

Sea World was the logical and responsible one; it was
important to examine him to see what, if any, damage
had been done to him by his youthful adventure, and
to decide his future with great care. Just dropping him
back in the ocean off the beach at Comacchio would
have been the easy, but an idiotic, option.

If he was ill, if he was not weaned sufficiently to catch

and swallow fish - something baby dolphins may not
fully master until they are two years of age - if he was
alone, marooned as it were, at sea, he would almost
certainly not survive in what is an unremittingly
hostile environment. I‟d seen older, wiser dolphins
and whales than Garibaldi simply carried, even
towed, several miles out from land by well-meaning
animal lovers, only to turn up, beached, dead or
dying, somewhere along the nearby coastline within a
matter of hours or a few days. But Leandro and Co
were determined, if at all possible, to return Garibaldi
safely to his own people.

My Italian friend telephoned me from a service station

enroute for Riccione. „David, we've got it. A beautiful
little thing!‟ he reported.

„How does it look?‟ I asked.

„Not bad. A sore tip to its beak where it‟s been

colliding with God knows what. Some skin disease.
But it‟s not emaciated, and it's a strong little porco
mellone!’ „Get a blood sample as soon as you're back in
Riccione. Ask the lab to do a full array of tests.'
„Okay. You'll be coming down, I assume?‟

„Of course. In the meanwhile, put him into the

separation pool where he can see and talk to your
dolphins through the mesh.' „Do you think it would be
best to keep him on his own?'

There's always the fear of introducing epidemic

disease when a wild dolphin is brought into a
marineland. At Riccione we could put him in a
portable plastic pool with its own filtration system.

I thought about it for a few moments. Then I said, „No.

Let‟s house him in the separation pool and put Pele in

with him to look after him.' Pele is Riccione's brightest
and friendliest dolphin. There was a risk of disease
transmission, but not a significant one, I gambled, and
with modern drugs it's so easy to rid wild dolphins of
the parasites which they always carry in stomach, liver
and intestines. What Garibaldi needed above all else, I
reckoned, was the close contact of his own kind -not
just the sight and sounds, but also the touches and
caresses. Dolphins are highly tactile folk.

As soon as they arrived in Riccione, Leandro took

blood from Garibaldi's tail vein and sent it to the
hospital we always use down there. Blood analysis is
the lynch-pin of cetacean medicine. You'd be surprised
what we can learn from a few teaspoonfuls of blood:
the sex of an animal (important often with newly
caught killer whales); the degree of dehydration in the
body; whether a female is pregnant or not (from as
early as two weeks after conception); the familial
relationships of particular individuals; the required
dose of an antibiotic; in the early stages of acute
disease, whether a chosen a is the correct one; the
function of major organs, such as liver and kidneys;
and the presence of poisons, as well as the routine
pinpointing of infections, anaemias, blood parasites,
blood cancers and deficiencies of vitamins or minerals.
Over a quarter of a century we have built up lists of
normal ranges for over sixty blood tests in some of the
seventy-six species of cetacean, and my files contain
the records of hundreds of whale and dolphin
individuals with their „norms‟ and idiosyncrasies. No
valuable racehorse, no pampered poodle, is studied as
deeply and as regularly as our marine mammal
patients around the world, a system that improved
even further when Andrew and I, together with
Professor Robert Turner, an eminent pathologist, set
up our own research laboratory in Oxenhope, near
Andrew‟s home in Yorkshire.

Seaside resorts in the middle of winter are peculiarly

de-pressing places, but at least Riccione keeps one
good hotel and one first-class seafood restaurant open
to help restore the spirits. While hibernation grips the
remainder of the town, and the boutiques and beach
bars are shuttered, the marine-land never sleeps but
continues to maintain its animals‟ health, not least by
playing and working with them, by the never-ending
monitoring of the water, the meticulous preparation of
vast quantities of food imported from the North Sea,
the servicing of the pumps, filters and chemical dosers
that must withstand the ravages of sea water and
chlorine, the training of staff and the organization of
study courses. Everyone, both human and dolphin,
was excited at the arrival of Garibaldi.

When he was lowered into the separation pool where

Pele already waited, and released from his stretcher,
the old dolphin nuzzled him and the two immediately
swam off, side by side, joyfully leaping from time to
time out of the water.

Leandro watched as Pele positioned himself with the

tip of his beak or one flipper just under the baby‟s
chest when they dived the first few times, just in case
the little dolphin needed any assistance in surfacing to
„blow‟. The other dolphins pressed themselves hard
up against the mesh to watch what was going on with
wide eyes, and the level of communication noises in
the pool (chattering a welcome to the newcomer, I
suppose) rose dramatically.
I drove down from Bologna in the evening and caught
my first glimpse of Garibaldi swimming under the
protective wing-like flipper of Pele in the glow of the
pool‟s floodlights.

Leandro was right: he was a beauty. Preferring to

make an examination in daylight, I arranged to catch
him early the following morning, and Leandro,
Giuseppe and I went off to have dinner in Il Pescatore
with Dr Notarbartolo, an Italian marine biologist.
Over mantis shrimps, linguini with pesto sauce and
Brunello wine, we discussed Garibaldi‟s future. All of
us were in total agreement that the baby dolphin
should go back to the sea. But first he had to be fully
fit; and second, we had to find him a family. Sadly,
there was no way of helping him to rejoin his
biological mother, but we were resolved to provide
him with foster parents at least. Unlike some animals
(lions, for example) dolphins, with the exception of a
very few macho males, are loving and concerned
about their own kind, particularly the young, weak
and the very old - models of Christian virtue, one
might say, and St Francis of Assisi would no doubt
have agreed.

„Garibaldi goes when we have done three things,‟ I

repeated, „made certain he‟s healthy, satisfied
ourselves that he‟s weaned enough to survive on fish,
and found a school of Tursiops in the Adriatic,
somewhere between here and Venice, ideally in the
centre of that zone near Comacchio.‟

We could begin with the first two objectives the next

day. The search for a suitable school of dolphins
would depend on what we found out about
Garibaldi‟s physical condition.

„Then, when you‟re happy that all is well with our

bambino,‟ said Notarbartolo, „I‟ll organize an aircraft to
go dolphin-spotting.‟ Garibaldi wasn‟t well. The end
of his beak was raw and inflamed, he was covered in
the tiny black freckles that indicate pox infection, one
lung was congested, and, most important of all, his
blood analysis revealed evidence of infection. What
was more, he showed no interest in solid food in the
form of small herring thrown into his pool on that first
day.

„Maybe he was still fully on a milk diet,‟ said Leandro,

somewhat gloomily.

„Injections of amoxycillin, and force-feeding of half a

kilo of fish twice a day,‟ was my response. „He's
probably overwhelmed by all the fuss being made of
him!‟

It was our good fortune that I turned out to be right, or

perhaps Garibaldi did not relish a repeat of the
painless but undignified experience of having his jaws
held open by wet towels, top and bottom, while
herring, lubricated with cod liver oil, were slid, head
first, by the person with the smallest hand (usually
me) over the back of his tongue. In any event we only
had to force-feed him twice. The next day he chased
and snatched a herring sinking through the water and
swallowed it. And then another. Leandro and
Giuseppe cracked a bottle of spumante when he‟d
scoffed his half kilo.

One of the necessary conditions for his release had

been fulfilled, and with him gobbling whole herring,
daily injections would no longer be required. The
antibiotic and other medicines could be secreted
within the gills of a fish, along with a special vitamin
tablet.

The baby dolphin did not respond to my treatment as

rapidly as I had hoped, and as the days turned into
weeks, more blood analyses were needed and several
changes in medication. At last, however, Garibaldi‟s
body, which had perhaps had its resistance reduced
by pollution, did begin to heal satisfactorily. The
numbers on the computer print-outs from the
laboratory crept closer to the normal values for
Adriatic bottle-nose dolphins. By March we met in
conference and decided that the time had come when
we could safely begin planning Garibaldi‟s return to
what we intended would definitely not be „the lonely
sea and the sky‟. My Italian friends had the idea of
marking the baby in some way so that he might be
recognized, watched out for, by fishermen and marine
biologists in the future.

Horses can be branded, cows can be tagged, pigs can

have their ears tattooed; it‟s not quite so easy with
dolphins. Tattoos fade from their skins, for their
healing powers are much faster than those of other
mammals. Metal or plastic tags inserted into the dorsal
fin or tail flukes are easily torn out in the boisterous
life at sea. Electronic chips under the skin weren‟t the
answer, though they may be the ideal method of the
future for identifying all sorts of animals, provided
they are at closer quarters. We required something
that could be viewed at a distance, perhaps through
binoculars, which was more or less of a permanent
nature, and which, above all, was humane. The best
idea was to freeze-brand Garibaldi with the simple
letter G on one side of his dorsal fin. It was agreed that
Leandro should arrange for a G-shaped branding iron
to be made, and I gave him the formula for a special
low-temperature mixture of dry ice and an alcohol.

Classic fire-branding, cowboy-film style, undoubtedly

hurts like hell, albeit for a short time; freeze-branding
is much kinder, the intense cold instantly numbing the
skin nerves.
One day we hauled the baby dolphin out of his pool,
dried the skin on the left side of his dorsal and pressed
the G-brand against it for a few seconds, after cooling
the metal instrument by immersion in the dry ice and
alcohol mixture. At first the brand didn‟t seem very
distinct, but after some days had passed there was a
perfectly white G standing out sharply against the
grey of the dolphin. It was easily visible at a hundred
metres through binoculars. Now all depended on Dr
Notarbartolo and his colleague Dr di Natale finding
some dolphins that Garibaldi could join.

Flying out of Rimini airport in a small, single-engine

air-craft, Dr di Natale spent many days going up and
down the coastal waters searching for dolphin schools
of a reasonable size. In bad weather, or even if there
was some choppy water, his hunt had to be called off;
you can‟t spot the wave-like grey fins of grey dolphins
in grey waves, as I knew only too well from many
similar expeditions in the Florida Keys in the late
1960s. On good days however, when the water is clear
and glass-calm, an experienced observer can easily
count dolphins, estimate their lengths, and even
hazard a guess at their sexes, from the air. But the
Adriatic in March is frequently storm-lashed, and its
water cloudy with stirred-up sand - di Natale and
Garibaldi were up against the weather!
And then, on 12 March, they struck lucky. In bright
light over an oily, swelling sea, di Natale looked down
for the hundredth time that morning and saw what he
had been looking for: a- school of bottle-nose dolphins
about thirty-strong, with at least three calves among
them, feeding leisurely at a point some seventeen
kilometres east of the port of Rimini.

His radio message was relayed by telephone to

Leandro at Riccione. „Ma-donnal We‟ve found
Garibaldi a family!‟ he yelled. It was „all hands to the
pumps‟ to get the baby dolphin ready, Giuseppe and
two of his lady dolphin-handlers changed into their
wet suits and prepared to catch the animal, while
Leandro and the others put all the gear into the Transit
van and made arrangements for a police escort on the
short journey to Rimini. The coastguards volunteered
two fast patrol boats, and their crews were already
standing by in Rimini port with the engines ticking
over.

One hour later, greased all over with lanolin and

having been given a final protective long-acting
injection of antibiotic, Garibaldi made the second, and
I hope final, road journey of his life, accompanied by
the wail of a police siren and flashing blue lights. At
Rimini he was carried in his stretcher on board one of
the patrol boats and, as soon as he was comfortable,
the vessel, with its escort, moved out towards the open
sea.

Guided by map references supplied over the radio

from the spotter plane, the patrol boat reached the
area where the dolphins were fishing in a little over an
hour. It was a cool, bright morning with a sky the
colour of a pigeon‟s egg, a hazy white sun and calm
water. The aircraft circled overhead.

Leandro, like all of us feeling a mixture of happiness

and regret, began to wipe the excess grease off
Garibaldi‟s body with dry towels. The voice of di
Natale crackled over the loudspeaker. ‘A sinistral Cento
metre! A sinistra!’ There they were - one hundred
metres off the port side - dark sickles breaking the
surface, the brief shadow of a curved back streaming
with spray. The baby dolphin was lifted in his sling
over the side of the boat whose engines had at once
been stopped by the skipper. „Wait till I give the
word!‟ shouted Leandro to the men holding each end
of the stretcher poles. He leaned over the gunwales,
watching Garibaldi‟s blow-hole. The thirty-second
respiration interval seemed like an hour. Then he
breathed: a rapid exhalation and an even more rapid
inhalation.

‘Go!’ cried Leandro, and the men released the

outermost pole. Turning over as he fell the short
distance through the air, the dolphin splashed into the
sea, and in the twinkling of an eye righted himself.
One upward kick of his tail flukes and, like a grey
arrow, he dived from our sight. On the patrol boat‟s
sonar machine, I listened to the underwater clicking of
the dolphins and imagined I heard a chorus of
welcome.

Not long after, as we chugged slowly in great circles,

the dolphins decided they‟d had enough fishing and
moved off at speed. Somewhere among the dorsal fins
that broke the flickering surface from time to time
until they were too far away to be distinguished, was
„little G‟.

Should you take your summer vacation in somewhere

like Cattolica, Rimini or Lido de Jesolo at some point
in the next twenty-five years (for that is how long
Garibaldi may well live if the pollution doesn‟t get
him), and you‟re lucky enough to come across a school
of dolphins when you‟re out sailing one fine day,
watch out for the letter G - and make a point of letting
me know. I just want to know he made it.
9 Animals on the Box
I‟d be a dog, a monkey or a bear, Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, A Satire against Mankind

„Never work with animals or children‟ - so runs the

well-known theatrical apothegm. Over the past fifteen
years I‟ve contrived to work with both many times on
television and film, and I know by now that there‟s a
grain of wisdom in the advice.

My first appearance on television was with a lion cub,

Simba, in 1965. And sure enough, he caused trouble.
Simba had been bitten on the back by his father, one of
whose teeth penetrated to the spine, setting up an
abscess in the bone, and partially paralysing him.
Shelagh and I nursed him back to health at our home
in Rochdale, and when he had had his surgical drain
tubes removed and was walking normally, almost
ready to return to Belle Vue, Yorkshire Television
asked me to take him to Leeds to appear in the
evening „Calendar‟ programme. Fine - no problem.
Until Simba relieved himself, and left a neat pile of
odorously steaming droppings in the middle of the
studio floor during rehearsals!
 „Sorry about that,‟ I said on behalf of the unconcerned
young lion, the size of a labrador dog, who had
returned to lie quietly at my feet. „Where is there a
shovel or brush? I‟ll sweep it up.‟ A knot of people
had gathered; they were watching the turd as if it were
about to explode at any moment.

„Oooh, you can‟t do that!‟ said the floor manager.

„Absolutely verboten, sweetie. You‟ll have the whole
studio out.‟

I didn‟t comprehend at first. „Look, I‟m sorry about the

smell,‟ I repeated, „but animals will be animals. Tell
me where a shovel is and I‟ll have the offending turd
out in a jiffy. A puff of air freshener and everything . .
.‟

More people came to join the group gazing at the

droppings. There was much quiet talk and shaking of
heads. „Darling, it isn‟t the lion‟s shit per se that‟s the
problem. It‟s that you can‟t shift it.‟

„Why not?‟

„Unions, dear boy, unions. That‟s what they‟re

arguing about over there.‟

„You mean which union is responsible for, has the

privilege of, de-lion-crapping a studio?‟
„Precisely.‟

I walked over to the impromptu union meeting. Simba

stayed yawning with boredom beside my chair. The
floor manager was, of course, right; it was what I
suppose is called a demarcation dispute. The
building‟s cleaners, custodians of all buckets, mops
and shovels, wouldn‟t touch the stuff, but weren‟t
prepared to let anyone else do so; the props
department, who move equipment around within the
studio, were prepared to move the turd for an
extortionately large special payment; and the director,
an old school friend of mine, Barry Cockroft, was
happy to do it, but all the others were adamant that
crap, other than the literary variety, was way outside
the province of an NUJ member.

„Er . . . I‟d be most pleased to shift it,‟ I interrupted.

Everyone glared wordlessly at me, rather as if I‟d

taken my trousers off in church. Being an outsider I
didn‟t even figure in the Byzantine politics of
television studios. I walked back to my chair.

Over the years I was to witness many similar incidents

where television unions behaved unscrupulously,
motivated by a mixture of greed and bloody-
mindedness, holding the companies to ransom and
occasionally prejudicing the well-being of animals
involved in programme-making. Usually, however, I
found that even the most intransigent union members
would see that my creatures didn‟t come to any harm,
though they had no compunction in switching off all
the electricity or walking out of the building if a shoot
ran one second overtime without them being
guaranteed bonus pay - merits that would have
astounded Croesus. By explaining the risks to, say,
snakes or pigmy hippopotamuses, if they were left
without heating, it was possible to make arrangements
for power, a light, a heater, whatever, to be provided
just for the animals. People in general make exceptions
for animals; when there was a Transport and General
Workers Union strike at Belle Vue, years ago, the
union exempted the keeping staff from „coming out‟,
and during the dock strike I had no difficulty in
getting a band of striking dockers to unload half a
dozen white rhino arriving by sea for Windsor Safari
Park.

Having said that, I can also remember the strike of

workers in Canada where pickets prevented food
supplies getting into a dolphinarium, with the
consequence that several dolphins died.

Anyway, back to the now cooling but still noisome

lion droppings. Time was slipping by. Ten minutes to
„on air‟ and no one would permit anyone else to
remove the stuff.
„The problem is, darling,‟ said the floor manager as we
waited, „it‟s sort of unprecedented, you know, nothing
in the rule books. Normally our guests don‟t shit in the
studio!‟ Five minutes to „on air‟ and the anchor man
and the director were beginning to look decidedly
edgy. Then it struck me.

Those droppings out there were Simba‟s, and as the

lion cub was technically mine, so was his excrement! If
I‟d dropped my watch on the studio floor I‟d have
picked it up and no one would have thought anything
about it. Leaving Simba again, I made a bee-line for
the droppings, pushing my way through the still
debating union folk. I bent down, scooped up the
cause of all the trouble in both hands and marched
towards the studio doors.

„Hey!‟ yelled someone. „You can‟t do that. You‟re not .

.„

„I‟ve done it, brothers. It‟s my lion‟s shit, not YTV‟s! I‟ll
do what I like with it. Anyway, I‟m the only fully
paid-up member of D.U.N.G., the Distinguished
Union of Night-soil Gatherers, on the premises!‟
Pushing through the double swing-door I made my
way to the Gents, flushed the droppings away and
scrubbed my hands. When I returned to the studio, a
cleaning lady was finishing mopping residual stains
from the floor.
„Oooh - you‟re a cheeky bugger, but at least it‟s
brought things to a head,‟ said the floor manager. „The
cleaner got an extra tenner for wiping up after you.‟ A
props man glowered as he saw me sitting down again.

Barry Cockroft came over and whispered in my

ear.„Thanks a million.‟

Simba, still good as gold, placidly peed a large golden

pool on the floor at this point and gave a few yawns,
but three minutes later the show went ahead without a
hitch.

My second television performance was in 1970 at the

BBC in London for a programme called „Pets and Vets‟
where I dealt with a variety of exotic animals,
including a pet potto that belonged to Val Crisswell,
an artist friend of mine from Yorkshire. Pottos are
charming little animals that most people have never
heard of. They are prosimians - members of a group of
man‟s distant primate relatives that also includes
lemurs, lorises and bush-babies - and come from
Africa. One of the curious features of the potto is the
protective shield formed by prolongations of the neck
vertebrae, which become spines that actually project
through the skin above the shoulder-blades. When the
animal is attacked it buries its head in its hands and
displays its shield.
Val‟s potto made a friendly pet-about-the-house in
Pickering, chose a cupboard as its den, and happily
hunted caterpillars, beetles and millipedes in the
garden. A country lover, it mustn‟t have thought
much of „The Big Smoke‟ when Val brought it down to
the studios and I interviewed her as the typical owner
of an exotic pet. For no reason at all, under the flare of
the arc lights, with the cameras rolling and me
babbling away about what was it like to have a potto
rather than a moggy curled up by the hearth, the potto
seized hold of Val‟s nose with his sharp teeth and
wouldn‟t let go. Blood trickled down, and the potto
hung on. A spirited Yorkshire lady, Val wasn‟t the sort
to be fazed even by such an alarming situation.
Sounding as if she‟d got a very heavy cold, she
continued to answer my questions with the lower
quarters of the potto cuddled in her arms.

„Id‟s vedy nice habing a poddo in de coddage,‟ she

continued as if nothing had occurred; „he‟s maidly
nocdurdal, sleeps during de day.‟ The blood streamed
by now, but still she carried on. „Lubs fruit, specially
plubs, abbles . . .‟

At last the director called, „Cut!‟

„Great telly, great telly!‟ he bubbled as he came on to

the studio floor. „It just shows how some of these
quaint little furry things are a bit more of a handful
than you might expect!‟

The potto was still clamped on to Val‟s nose. It took

two pairs of hands, hers and mine, to prise the
creature‟s jaws open. „Are you okay?‟ I asked lamely
as we walked to the first aid room. „Of course I am,
silly,‟ she said, holding a handkerchief to her nose. „He
was just being a potto, wasn‟t he? Find me an
elastoplast and let‟s take him to the nearest pub. I
could do with a beer.‟

In 1975 I was back at ITV presenting animal items on a

series called „Don‟t Ask Me‟ along with David
Bellamy, Miriam Stoppard and Magnus Pyke, where
precise scripting and pre-packaged research was the
order of the day; I much prefer doing my own
research, and have always subsequently been allowed
to do so on natural history programmes both for BBC
and ITV. „Don‟t Ask Me‟ wasn‟t much fun, but at least
I discovered the delights of working with tiny animals
in front of the camera. I still consider my most
interesting presentation was the time when I stood in a
large glass box full of flying mosquitoes, holding a
tuning fork of the same pitch as the sound produced
by a female mosquito in search of a mate. A tap of the
fork produced a faint hum which instantly attracted
all the male insects in the box, and a few seconds later
I found myself holding a tuning fork covered with a
thick wriggling layer of amorous would-be suitors.

When we flew in some common octopus from the

Mediterranean for this live programme, the poor
creatures expired enroute. Surprisingly, however, they
still „worked‟ even when dead. We discovered that the
pigment cells in octopus skin which, by contraction or
expansion, enable the animal to blend with its
background - a phenomenon I‟d hoped to demonstrate
- continues to function normally for many hours after
their demise. The viewers never knew that the octopus
which adopted a pale and speckled appearance
against the sandy bed of one aquarium, and then took
on a darkly blotched, almost chequered, design when
transferred to another with a chess board lying on the
bottom, had given up the ghost at thirty thousand feet
somewhere over the English Channel long before the
programme went on air. There were other deceptions,
such as David Bellamy and his demonstration of
ostrich eggs with shells so strong that they can bear
the weight of a man; but that‟s another story.

After „Don‟t Ask Me‟, and with my move to Surrey

following the break-up of my marriage to Shelagh, I
began to work on „Animal Magic‟ from the BBC
Natural History Unit in Bristol.
Under George Inger, the producer, who was to
become a good friend, I had a much freer rein with the
items I presented.

Johnny Morris, the heart of „Animal Magic‟, was

fascinating to work with. Immensely kind, utterly
professional, always good-humoured, he was, as you
might expect, a brilliant conversationalist with wide
experience of the world of zoos and a deep love for the
countryside, as well as being an accomplished
musician and singer and a fierce campaigner for Real
Ale.

For „Animal Magic‟, among other things I prepared

unusual foods that people eat around the world —
salted woodlice, ants and locusts for example - and
sampled these exotic dishes with Johnny on the
programme. On one occasion I presented an item
about the rare medicinal leech, placing a couple of the
beasts on my hand where they immediately set to,
cutting painlessly into my skin with their Y-shaped
mouthparts, and gorging themselves on my blood.
Talking straight to camera, I was vaguely aware that,
as the leeches rapidly filled up with blood, the
„overflow‟ was running down on to the table at which
I sat. Glancing down, I saw a crimson puddle
beginning to form around my wrist and I tried to
conceal it from the viewers as best I could. However, a
fire officer cum first-aid man standing in the wings-
there‟s always one such person on duty when a studio
is operating - spotted the haemorrhage and believing,
wrongly, that I was in trouble, dashed on to the set
and started strapping up my hand with gauze
bandage right in front of the live cameras!

The best moment on „Animal Magic‟ for me was when

I did an outside broadcast from Weston-Super-Mare. It
was March, and a large herd of donkeys, owned by a
man who supplies most of the „donkey derbys‟ in
southern England with runners, contained many
heavily pregnant females or jennies.

I had had the idea of taking the children viewers into

the wonderful moment of birth — of a baby donkey.
George could spare a film crew for one day; all I had
to do was find a donkey that would give birth on a
particular day.

Donkeys, like all equines, are awkward customers

when it comes to predicting the date of parturition.
They can almost wilfully, one might imagine, delay
and delay the moment — until your back‟s turned.
Zebras are particularly deceptive. They can have
bellies like big bass drums for weeks after you first
swear that birth is „imminent‟.

I went down to Weston-Super-Mare and inspected the

herd, which numbered about sixty animals. From
among them I picked out the four most heavily
pregnant-looking females and gave them a full, hands-
on examination. Two were on the brink of foaling, I
determined, with markedly slackened ligaments
around the pelvis, a relaxing cervix and vulva and lots
of colostrum in the mammary glands. Live, correctly
positioned foals could be palpated in each jenny
through the wall of the rectum, and I heard strong
maternal and foal heartbeats through my electronic
stethoscope. I arranged for the two mothers-to-be to be
taken to comfortable and spacious loose boxes where
they were bedded down with deep straw, and then I
phoned the BBC to ask for the film crew on the
following morning.

Next day, when the crew was all assembled and

ready, I injected one of the jennies with prostaglandin,
a newly available, synthetic version of a naturally
occurring hormone that initiates the birth process.
Nothing happened for half an hour and then, quite
abruptly, the donkey became restless and we
witnessed the first contractions. From then on the
cameraman had his finger virtually non-stop on the
button as labour progressed at a cracking pace. Fifteen
minutes after the first contractions a healthy black and
white donkey foal plopped on to the straw, quickly
followed by the afterbirth.
Everything had gone perfectly. Mother and foal were
in the best of condition, and we had it all on film.

George Inger produced and directed a „World About

Us‟ documentary on my work in 1976 when he and a
crew followed me on my travels through Britain and
parts of Europe. To be the subject of such a
programme, doing the actual veterinary work as well
as coping with the requirements of both clients and
film crew, is extremely exhausting, tripling the
workload in my estimation. I had given George
permission to film anything that happened, provided
no one got in the way; black moments as well as
golden ones, if they occurred. In return he gave me
something rarely offered by television directors: a veto
on anything I didn‟t like when the film was edited.

It so happened that during the three weeks of filming I

was called to an interesting case about which I‟ve
written elsewhere, involving cheetahs poisoned by
barbiturates at Windsor Safari Park. The worst
affected cheetah needed intensive supportive therapy,
and while setting up a transfusion drip on the
unconscious animal, it suddenly began to develop
convulsive seizures. Things looked bad, and at one
point I thought that I might lose her. I injected anti-
convulsive drugs and circulatory stimulants into the
cheetah‟s leg vein; then sat on straw, waiting to see the
response, with my finger on the pulse under the big
cat‟s groin. Gradually I regained control over the
situation, and in the end the physical condition of the
cheetah stabilized. She would go on to make a full
recovery. During the emergency I had forgotten all
about the film crew working behind me, but when I
relaxed and looked round they were nowhere to be
seen.

George explained later: „1 thought you were in

trouble, so I pulled the lads out.‟

„But that‟s what we set out to film - the real zoo vet‟s
life, the tough times, the emergencies, the failures too,‟
I replied. „Anyway, you‟ve given me a veto.‟

Through being characteristically thoughtful, George

had missed some potentially dramatic footage.

It was as a direct consequence of the „World About Us‟

programme, which was titled „Zoo Vet‟, that I first
worked for Television South. David Pick, then a
director with the Southampton studios, found himself
with a crew, a film to be made - and nothing to make it
about, when he was let down at the very last moment
by a barge theatre company on whom he had planned
to make a documentary. Remembering the BBC
production about me which had just been transmitted,
he telephoned on the Monday morning to ask
whether, by any chance, his team could accompany
me for the week if I was not leaving the country. „No
money in the budget for overseas travel,‟ he explained.
As luck would have it, I was planning to travel around
Britain from zoos to safari parks to circuses during
that time. David and the crew could come along;
ninety minutes later they were knocking on my door.

The result of the week‟s filming was an excellent

thirty-minute documentary, and I‟d enjoyed every
second of working with the TVS people. They were
ideal for natural history work - fast, quick to grasp
opportunities and undemanding of the animals. Later
I appeared in „Afternoon Club‟ several times, doing
things like „cooking for your pets‟, and then began
working on the highly popular children‟s Saturday
morning programme, „No 73‟, which ran for six series
up until 1988. „No 73‟ was a delight - not least because
it went out live, the best, adrenalin-tingling kind of
television.

My particular friend on the show was Andrea Arnold,

who played Dawn. Andrea is a lovely animal-nut,
totally free of show-biz pretension. We worked
surprisingly well together; she has an outgoing,
vivacious, Cockney character, and deep empathy with
all living things, and I was, I hope, her genial,
professional, foil.
The majority of animal items which I presented were
with her. Every Saturday morning some new creature
would be brought to the house that formed the show‟s
centre-piece. There were elephants, hippos, orang-
outangs, reindeer - the whole Ark trooped through as
the series rolled on. Most of the animals which I
predicted might be tricky — bats, pigs, for example -
behaved like angels. The upsets came from
unexpected quarters. There was the chimpanzee who
hated black men, and who happened to be on the
week we also had some coloured basketball players as
guests.

Whenever one of them came near him he would try to

deliver a mighty swipe with a clenched fist. There was
the puma, „guaranteed tame‟, which charged round
the house‟s lounge as wild as could be, and the emu
which couldn‟t get a grip on the smooth studio floor,
and exploded into a cloud of flying feathers every time
it tried to walk.

A baby sea lion, „hand reared, cuddly as a kitten‟, bit

me hard, drawing blood, as soon as the camera swung
to Andrea and me sitting ready to talk about it. A lithe
wriggle, and it slithered away behind a grandfather
clock - invisible. We had four minutes to do on the sea
lion, and the camera was picking up nothing but the
base of the grandfather clock.
„Well,‟ I said, forcing a grin and trying to staunch the
blood with my other hand, „there goes Horace, our
baby Californian sea lion!‟

„Oh, yes!‟ replied Andrea, as flummoxed as I was.

„Tell me, where do Californian sea lions come from,
David?‟

„From California, Dawn.‟ Still I could see from the

monitor that the viewers had lots of grandfather clock,
but not a scrap of sea lion.

„I suppose Horace is shy, David.‟

„Yes, I suppose he is.‟

„Help!‟ I thought. „Still three and three-quarter minutes

to go and we sound like dummies.‟ To our mutual
relief, at that moment Horace relented and poked his
front end out from behind the clock. The camera
zoomed in. I decided not to go and grab him and risk
further embarrassment. Being able to see him at least
concentrated our minds on sea lion matters, and we
managed to get through the scene sounding a little
more knowledgeable about the Horaces of this world.
Horace played his part by staying half in vision until
we‟d finished.
There was the time when I presented an item on
lobsters, bought live by the property department from
a fishmonger in Whitstable. Several of us were looking
forward to having a thermidor for Saturday dinner,
but we had reckoned without Andrea. She insisted
that a driver took the lobsters from the Maidstone
studios back to the sea as soon as the show was over.

Once, when I was demonstrating a selection of live

spiders, somebody brushed against a glass bottle
containing baby black widows. It fell off the table and
smashed, and I actually glimpsed the minute creatures
legging it for all they were worth towards the scenery.
No chance of finding them in the clutter of a television
studio.

„This is a major emergency!‟ said the floor manager,

white as a sheet. „What shall we do?‟

„Don‟t panic,‟ I replied, „remember they‟re only

babies. Bodies the size of pin-heads. Hardly lethal. Get
some aerosol cans of insect-killer and spray around
the scenery.‟

Many cans of fly-spray were quickly forthcoming from

the stores, and the studio was well and truly
fumigated until most of the humans were coughing
and spluttering. It wasn‟t enough.
 „The cameramen are asking what will happen if some
of the black widows have clambered up inside their
machines! The shop stewards are making a fuss!‟ The
floor manager kept looking nervously downwards,
and shaking his trouser bottoms. Studios are warm
places when the lights are on, but quickly go cold at
the end of a show; they‟re also very dry environments.

The chances of the baby spiders surviving the low

temperature combined with dehydration seemed slim
to me, but . . . „Shall we close the studio down at once?‟
asked Janie, the producer, as she emerged from the
control room. „It‟ll need a decision from the highest
levels.‟ The place reeked of fly-killer, a chemical
equally toxic to spiders, and there were many
unusually grim faces as people made for the doors
with all haste.

Later in the morning I was summoned to a meeting at

the top of the TVS building. Senior management and
union representatives were there, along with a man
from Rentokil, the pest control firm. It being Saturday
morning, several had been called from their beds. I felt
I was in the hot seat.

„How many spiders were there?‟ asked the Chairman.

„Two.‟
„How long will they live in the studio?‟

„Not very long, I think. They‟re probably well and

truly dead by now.‟

„How many people could they kill before their venom

ran out, if they‟re not dead?‟

„Look, it‟s not like that. This pair are so small I don‟t
believe their mouthparts are anywhere near big
enough to bite a human being. Black widow babies
take many months to grow into adults, and have to
moult several times. Even the bite of the adult, though
very painful, is rarely fatal. The black widow has an
evil reputation, but it‟s a shy and retiring creature
found all over the United States, and it was
responsible for only one death every four years even
before the modern antidote to its venom was available.
There are several much more dangerous species of
spider around the world.‟

„Can you guarantee they‟re dead, or soon will be?‟

„Not one hundred per cent, but ninety-nine per cent -

with all the fly spray we‟ve just used.‟ „That one per
cent of doubt is enough for me,‟ said someone.
„We‟ll have to close the studio and arrange for
everything -cameras, lights, and special flooring,
gantries, scenery, the lot to be treated by specialists.‟

„At a cost, I estimate of £20,000 minimum,‟ murmured

someone else, „what with the studio out of action for a
couple of days.‟ When the meeting broke up I walked
back to my dressing-room, trying to calculate how
much damage the literally hundreds of home-bred
black widow babies that Lionel Rowe kept in his room
at Chessington Zoo could have caused.

Needless to say, perhaps, the black widows of TVS

Maidstone were never seen again, nor did anyone
working in studio A ever suffer a venomous bite - at
least not from a spider!

The show went on. Brock is, I think my favourite

British mammal, and I was excited at the prospects of
at last working with a tame badger on „No 73‟. My
researcher, Harriet, had arranged for the animal to be
brought to the studio by its owner who lived
somewhere near Bath. One hour before my item was
due to go on air we were told by telephone that there
had been a most unfortunate incident. The van in
which the badger was being transported had
developed a hole in its exhaust pipe while on the way
to the studios, and the escaping fumes had entered the
back of the vehicle, knocking out the badger and a fox
that was travelling with it. Both animals were still
alive, though seriously affected by the carbon
monoxide gas, and the owner had promptly turned
round and gone back to Bath to seek veterinary
attention.

The badger wouldn‟t be on the show. I needed an

animal to work with. Mike, the props buyer,
immediately rang round his contacts, but no one had
anything that could arrive in time.

„I‟ll work with whatever you can get me,‟ I said. „A

guinea pig, or a budgie.‟

There was now only half an hour to go, and the show
had already begun.

„My son‟s got a tortoise at home,‟ said Mike. „I‟ll go

and get it, but it‟ll take me twenty-five minutes there
and back.‟

„Do it,‟ I urged. „There‟ll still be just enough time.‟

Television studios are well-equipped buildings, but
one thing they don‟t have is the odd animal hanging
about in a corner here and there. As the minutes ticked
by, I paced up and down the corridor outside the „73‟
studio, wondering what I could talk about if I had
nothing to show the millions of young viewers. Me as
Naked Ape? A worm from the lawns outside the
building? But it was winter, with hard ground; finding

one would take much time. A stuffed parrot from

props? Ten minutes to go. No Mike to be seen.
Christine, my make-up artist, checked me over.

„I‟ve just seen a dog in reception,‟ she said.

„A dog?‟ I jumped out of the chair, so that she

inadvertently stuck her powder brush in my eye. „A
dog would do fine!‟

Leaving her standing, I dashed off towards the

reception area, one eye painfully full of powder. Sure
enough, sitting at the feet of a large, middle-aged lady
on a sofa near the telephonists, was a basset hound.

„Ah, good morning,‟ I said. „David Taylor. Vet. Not

enough time to explain, but I need an animal, a dog,
your dog. Would you, could you? For the children‟s
programme.‟ The large lady smiled sweetly.

„Well, we‟re here to meet so-and-so‟ — she mentioned

some-never heard of on another programme. „But you
can borrow Clifford, if you like, so long as I can keep
an eye on you both. His manners are impeccable.‟

„There‟ll be a small facility fee.‟

„How very nice.‟

„Now, he, Clifford is a basset. I‟m on in five minutes.

Tell me some of the background to the basset breed.
Do you show him or breed bassets?‟

„My goodness, do I? Clifford here is really called Sir

Clifford Windfall Mandolin of Waterdown. Won Best
of Breed at—„

„Yes, yes. Quite. So bassets were developed as hunting

dogs, and their long ears— „ The lady suddenly looked
as if a cold leapt into her ample decolletage.

„Ears? Ears? EARS!‟ It was a perfect impersonation of

Lady Bracknell, from Oscar Wilde‟s The Importance of
Being Earnest.

„Yes, the long ears.‟

„They are not ears, my good man, they are leathers!‟

„Leathers? Oh, I‟ve never heard the term. But better to

say ears for the kids.‟

„Ears? Ears? You‟ll make a complete fool of yourself,

what-ever your name is. These are leathers. Everyone,
but everyone, knows that bassets have leathers. You
couldn‟t possibly take Clifford on to a television
programme and talk about “ ears” . And you a vet,
you say. Really. No, I can‟t possibly allow you to talk
so ignorantly about the breed. What would the basset
breeders think? What— „

At that moment, saints be praised, Mike Smith

appeared, red-faced and puffing through the swing-
doors. „Got a tortoise, Dave!‟ he shouted.

Leaving Sir Clifford Windfall Mandolin of Waterdown

and his leathers to the tender mercies of his indignant
owner, I grabbed the tortoise (no leathers!) from the
prop buyer, and ran for the studio. Two minutes to my
item and I found my mark on the set.

Andrea was already in position and looking anxious.

„No badger?‟ she whispered. Breathless, I waved the
tortoise at her. „What do you want me to say as
openers?‟ she went on. I had briefed her on badgers at
rehearsal the day before.

„Ask me what animal lives the longest,‟ I said.

„Tortoises are the longest-lived vertebrates- two
hundred years or more, some folk believe. That‟ll
serve as a good introduction. Then we‟ll play it by ear.
Ask me questions, and so on and so forth.‟ The floor
manager began to wave his arms. A red light was
illuminated on camera one. We were on air.
„Mornin‟, David,‟ said Dawn, at once relaxed and
cheerful as ever. „I‟ve got a question I was going to ask
next time I saw you here at 73. What‟s the oldest living
animal?‟

„Morning, Dawn,‟ I answered. „Well, apart from me

(ho-ho-ho) the record breakers for longevity are the
tortoise family. And I just happen to have a tortoise
here. His name is . . . Clifford!‟

Janie said afterwards it was a super item — badgers

couldn‟t have been any better. I wonder if there‟s an
in-word for badgers‟ small ears. If not, I hereby coin
one. Henceforth they shall be known as „nasturtiums‟.

After the first series of „73‟, I began to play more

cameo parts in the chaotic plots of the programme.
Theoretically the vet who lived just down the road
from No 73, I was also variously in costume as
Dracula, a butler, Queen Victoria‟s rat-catcher and
other curious characters — even singing and dancing
on occasion. As a result, it was decided that it would
be prudent for me to apply to join the actors‟ union,
Equity, to avoid causing problems for TVS. An expert
can appear on television to take part in items
concerning his own field of work without crossing
swords with Equity, but when a zoo vet starts march-
ing about clad in Roman armour for a comedy routine-
that‟s different. Obtaining full membership of Equity
was simple; I had years of contracts to prove I‟d
worked „in the business‟, and I paid over a fat cheque
as a percentage of my television earnings. There was
just one snag. My name. „It‟s the policy of Equity for
members‟ names not to be duplicated, and we‟ve
already got a David Taylor,‟ I was told. „You‟ll have to
change your name.‟

At last, a chance to stride the boards with a

resounding appellation: Theophilus Brandenburg or
Clint (Zoovet) Concorde, perhaps, if they weren‟t
already registered members!

„I can‟t change my name,‟ I answered. „Absolutely no

way will I do it.‟

„Well, what about your middle name? Why not use

that?‟ Which meant I would appear as D. Conrad
Taylor. It has a certain ring to it.

„Sounds pretentiously double-barrelled. Won‟t do it

under any circumstances!‟ My mother would have
gone mad. In the end Equity agreed to write to the
actor, David Taylor, to ask him if he minded me being
made a member. Many weeks elapsed before he
replied. So long as I didn‟t go in for straight acting, he
would have no objections. I‟m sure there can‟t be a dry
eye in the house when I inform you that, in
consequence, the great British public, nay the whole
world of theatre, will be denied, in perpetuity, the
opportunity of seeing me do my inimitable Richard III.
„Now is the winter of our . . .‟ Sad!

Andrea and I had proved to be such a successful

combination on „No 73‟, that it was decided to give us
our own series. „Talking Animal‟. We filmed the first
run of six programmes in 1984, and the second a year
later. Working on a lamentably small budget, we
nevertheless made what was a completely new and
refreshing sort of animal half-hour for children. And it
was an utterly enjoyable business, for the first time
blending drama techniques of direction with natural
history material.

We had our moments.

One of the episodes of „Talking Animal‟ was all about

elephants, and I was very keen to show a live hyrax,
the furry creature about the size of a large guinea pig
that is both the elephant‟s closest living relative and
the „coney‟ mentioned in the Bible (which wasn‟t a
rabbit, as many people have supposed). There aren‟t
many hyraxes in British zoos, and those that there are
tend to be timid, hard-biting individuals, totally
unsuitable for handling during filming. Eventually
TVS tracked down a pair of reputedly tame, privately
owned hyraxes and it was arranged for them to be
brought down one afternoon to East Dene in Sussex,
where we were making the elephant programme.

Everyone was ready and waiting for the hyraxes to

arrive, when we received the news that, for reasons
I‟ve never discovered, the two animals had expired
before even being boxed for the journey. Over-
excitement at the prospect of starring in a television
documentary? Anyway there we all were, ready to
shoot, with the only hyrax available being a stuffed
and rather moth-eaten one mounted on a wooden
plinth. Desperate situations call for desperate
remedies. Maureen, the make-up artist, set to work at
rendering this museum piece as lifelike as possible,
dropping glycerine on to the glass eyes to give a bit of
sparkle, glueing on horse hairs to replace missing
whiskers, and touching up the waxy gums with
blusher. Now to get the stuffed hyrax to do something!

I suggested to the director that we half buried the

creature in an open sack, brimful of grain. With some
nylon line tied to its plinth, and running out through a
hole in the sack deep below the surface of the grain,
we could have a props man jiggle it from a distance so
that it might look, we hoped, like a hyrax disporting
itself in the surfeit of food. Which is how the hyrax
eventually „worked‟ while I talked about its biological
significance. Unfortunately, when we viewed the film
„rushes‟ it looked so ridiculous thrutching about, as we
say in Lancashire, up to its armpits in corn, that we cut
the scene out of the final version.

More bad luck occurred on the same day in a scene

where I was going to show that elephants are not in
the least afraid of mice - nor vice versa. At Belle Vue
Zoo in the old days I had often seen elephants and
mice contentedly feeding together from the same pile
of cereals in the rodent-ridden Victorian elephant
house. For „Talking Animal‟ a dozen white mice were
hired, and I demonstrated the point by letting a couple
run up and down the trunk of dear old Ranee, the
gentlest, most lovable elephant in Britain and the star
of Gerry Cottle‟s circus. Ranee purred happily, as she
often does. The mice scampered up and down
investigating the thick grey „branch‟ they found
themselves upon. A lovely image for the camera-and
then Ranee curled the end of her trunk, delicately
lifted up one of the white mice, popped it into her
mouth as if it were yet another one of her beloved
sugar lumps, and swallowed it! All very embarrassing.
That white mouse is the only animal I can remember
losing in many years of film and television work.

The hairiest moment in „Talking Animal‟ filming

occurred at Port Lympne in Kent, when we were
making the snake programme. I was with Andrea in
John Aspinall‟s famous „Whistler Room‟ and the
subject of the afternoon‟s work was the „milking‟ of
venomous snakes, in particular two Egyptian cobras.

John Fowden of Drayton Manor Zoo, a true snake

expert and one of the few people I trust implicitly
when handling extremely dangerous reptiles, had
brought the two impressive-looking snakes down
from his collection. One of them had been „de-
venomed‟ by surgical operation in the USA and was
officially „safe‟. (Although when this animal bit me a
year later on „No 73‟, John came rushing up after my
item had ended and I was sucking my punctured
finger, and asked, to my dismay, whether I felt okay.

„Yes- why?‟ I asked. „This is your de-venomed cobra,

isn‟t it?‟

„Oh, definitely,‟ John, „but you may feel a little

numbness. I think it could be beginning to grow the
remnant of its venom gland again!‟

„Well,‟ I thought, „at least death from a cobra bite is

more pleasant than that caused by a viper.‟ I didn‟t
subsequently go numb, I‟m glad to say, but some
months later I heard that John had decided to stop
working with that particular snake.

He trusted it no longer.
The other cobra John brought to Port Lympne looked
exactly like the de-venomed one, but had its venom
glands intact. It was a fearsome beast. When disturbed
it didn‟t hiss by expelling air from its lung, but
literally roared. It was as mean-tempered as a spitting
cobra and as strong as a king cobra. Because it carried
loads of venom, this was the one to use for the
„milking‟ demonstration.

Milking a snake, an important technique in obtaining

venom for the purposes of scientific research, consists
of holding the head of the animal firmly with its jaws
open, and bringing the two hollow, venom-injecting
fangs of the upper jaw into contact with a rubber
membrane stretched across the neck of a glass beaker.
When the snake feels its fangs stabbed through the
membrane, it reacts as if they had penetrated the skin
of a prey animal, and squirts venom out of the fangs
via an orifice close to the tip. The milky poison trickles
down to the bottom of the beaker. Snake venom, a
complex chemical mixture, contains substances that
have proved invaluable in the treatment of human and
animal heart and blood diseases, and it is also essential
to the manufacture of antivenins, the specific antidotes
to snake bites that are life-savers all over the warmer
parts of the world. To milk a snake successfully, you
require a firm grip on the snake‟s head and a steady
hand holding the beaker. John‟s cobra was a
formidable milch-cow, able to deliver a heftier kick
than any fractious Friesian with a tender udder. „A
real demon,‟ said John, when I asked him about the
cobra and my milking of it on film. „I‟m not sure it‟s
absolutely safe for you to handle. It‟s quick, vicious and
sly.‟

„Very encouraging,‟ I replied. „What do you suggest?‟

„It might be better if I milked it — I‟ll put your jacket

on so close-ups of the milking are of my hands. Long
shots you can do without actually laying hands on the
bugger.‟

„Okay, but what about the beaker? Andrea was

supposed to hold that.‟

„She still can. So long as she keeps it still, I‟ll get the
venom into it.‟

The director and I talked to Andrea about it. She was

happy to hold the beaker, even though her fingers
would come within a few centimetres of the lethal
fangs. We went ahead and filmed all the long shots
with me grabbing the snake with a pair of snake-
tongs, and then prepared for the close-ups.

John put on my jacket, and when the lighting, sound

and camera crews were happy, his assistant opened
the bag in which the cobra was coiled. It roared at
once. John‟s hand darted into the bag and emerged
with a writhing snake held firmly just behind the
head. The business of filming from this angle and that
angle began. Half-way through, one of the lights
flared out.

„Cut, get that mended,‟ called the director.

„Pssssst. Pssssst.’ I turned round. John, still clutching

the cobra, was trying to attract my attention. „Here a
minute, David.‟ I walked over to him. He lowered his
voice to a whisper.

Andrea couldn‟t hear. „Tell those buggers to get a

bloody move on,‟ he hissed. „I‟m losing my grip on the
snake. It‟s worming its way out of my hand!‟

I knew just what he meant. A snake is essentially

nothing more than a tube of muscle covered by
polished scales, and it isn‟t as easy as you might think
to hold even a small one securely. „Any minute now
it‟ll be free, or have enough room to strike me. Tell ‟em
to get cracking, because if I feel it going, I‟m going to
fling it at the nearest wall as hard as I can to stun it at
least, so we have a chance of getting away from it.‟

Chilled, I went over immediately to the crew.

„Everybody who is not essential - props, make-up, p.a.
-out of the room,‟ I said quietly. „The snake looks like
escaping any minute. If John throws it at the wall,
drop your gear and run!‟

The light suddenly came back on. „We can roll now,‟
said the director.

„Okay, do it,‟ I said. „But if John flings the beast,

bugger off like blue lightning!‟

People had begun scuttling for the door, but the

cameraman and sound recordist stayed put.

Fifteen seconds. The fangs punched through the

membrane and the venom oozed down into the
beaker. „Got it!‟ yelled the director. „Cut. Everybody
out!‟ John turned on his heels and threw the snake
down into the waiting bag. He was sweating big drops
- most unusual for him. „Just in bloody time,‟ he
murmured.

Andrea, calm but perhaps paler than normal, asked if I

could find her a glass of wine. „And a large cognac for
me,‟ added John.

„What were you two whispering about just now?‟ said

Andrea. „And where‟s everybody gone?‟
10 One by One
The animals went in one by one There‟s one more river to cross.

Anonymous song

The year 1987 was a busy one for me, both in

veterinary work and in animal filming. I did pace
David Taylor, my Thespian namesake, some real
acting for the first time, playing (in a drama that went
out on New Year‟s Eve on French television‟s TF1
channel) the part of Ton-ton, the veterinarian uncle of
a small boy who discovers a dolphin washed up on
the beach.

Filming among the topless girls on the beach at

Antibes was fun, delivering dialogue in French was
not. For RA1, Italian television, I agreed to let them
attach a special camera to the eyepiece of my
gastroscope when I examined the inside of the
stomach of Chu-Lin, the young panda at Madrid Zoo,
when he had a bout of gastritis. The pictures, of
surprisingly high quality, were then beamed up from
the panda house to a satellite and bounced back down
to the studio in Milan.

With the nicest little television company in Britain,

Border Television, I presented a variety of zoological
topics on the children‟s programme „Nature Trail‟,
including an investigation of that perennial favourite
of mine, the Loch Ness Monster. In one day‟s filming
on and around the Loch we recorded several of the
classic phenomena that can explain many „Nessie‟
sightings: a dark, deformed log floating in sparkling,
choppy water; an upturned boat adrift; a line of ducks
flying low; ever-moving patches of glassy calm water
across a paler breeze-stirred surface; the running line
of hump-like waves produced when the wake of a
boat is reflected off the sides of the Loch and meets
again in the middle; Highland cattle up to their elbows
in mud around the water‟s edge; and a great crested
grebe which, with its long neck, can look vaguely
monster-like when sense of scale and distance is lost.
There was even a bit of a mirage where a warmer layer
of air covered the cold water, bending the light.
Though I interviewed for the programme an honest
married couple who were adamant they‟d recently
seen the well-recorded large hump, like the keel of a
upturned boat, that suddenly appeared and then
abruptly sank out of sight in Urquhart Bay and though
I know, and have briefly collaborated with, Doctor
Rines, the man who obtained the curious underwater
photo-graphs of what Sir Peter Scott thought was a
plesiosaur, I am far less convinced than I used to be
that there is some undiscovered animal in Loch Ness,
and now count it to be an outside possibility. A pity,
though.
My major television commitment that year was the
third series of „One by One‟, the BBC drama based on
my first five volumes of autobiography. For the
production I was script adviser, technical adviser
along with Andrew, and to my delight, a regular
„extra‟. It was contrived that I did a Hitchcock-like
walk-on in each episode, though the producer insisted
I was heavily disguised to avoid causing confusion in
the minds of viewers who saw me on children‟s
documentaries.

Nevertheless, the lady behind the counter in my local

post office always spotted me, no matter that I was
bewigged, adorned with a red walrus moustache or
even had my back to the camera, in the part of a
tourist, waiter or a member of the crowd. For close-
ups of surgery, done on ingenious models of diseased
organs, it was my or Andrew‟s hands that did the
cutting and staunching of artificial blood. All the rest
was the actors - for by this time the principals, Rob
Heyland, James Ellis, Sonia Graham and Yolanda
Vasquez, had really got under the skin of veterinary
work. All were animal-lovers, who had no qualms
about handling anything from a spider to an elephant,
and they were quick to learn how things had to be
done. Rob was first-class at faking injections, using the
syringe and needle with its shaft broken off and,
having worked for a period at London Zoo‟s
veterinary department as preparation before
beginning the first series, he always went about things
realistically and with abundant enthusiasm.

The animals loved Jimmy Ellis in particular, and none

more so than Lock, an amazing orang-outang the BBC
brought over from Hollywood. He it was who had
starred with Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But
Loose, and I had worked with him before on the first
series of „One by One‟, as well as on a Terence Stamp
film, Link, that was made at Shepperton. Lock was an
incredibly talented „professional‟ among animal
actors, with that air of wisdom about him and the
tolerant, placid nature that I find so attractive in
orang-outangs.

He could do a host of things on the command of his

handler, Joe, and the signals were largely -visual ones,
ideal for film work. When Joe made a particular
gesture, Lock would belch, pull faces, stick out his
tongue, stand on his head, tap his skull to indicate that
he thought you were „nuts‟ and much much more, and
he learned new tricks very quickly.

In Link there was a scene where he had to lift a van by

putting his hands under the vehicle‟s frame on one
side, giving a heave and then changing his grip to
push it right over. The weight of tilting the heavy van
was actually taken by a jack-like device under the
chassis, operated by the props men and out of sight of
the cameras. Lock only had to look as if he was
exerting a lot of effort. Joe showed him what was
required, and how the vehicle would be tipped by the
hidden machinery, and the orang-outang then went
ahead and did it perfectly in the first take, with lots of
mock effort and suitably melodramatic straining of
muscles. The director clapped his hands delightedly
while Lock ambled over to sit in the Bath chair in
which he was wheeled, like a megastar, to and from
the set, and waited for someone to push him back to
the purpose-built quarantine area just out-side the
studio.

In fact, Lock played the part of a malign chimpanzee

in the film because no equally talented chimpanzee
actor could be found. To make him look passably like
a chimp, he wore two large plastic „chimp‟ ears on a
headband, and had his chestnut-red hair darkened by
the make-up department. This sort of theatrical
business was Lock‟s life, and he took it all in his stride.
Never once did I see him fiddling with his chimp ears
or resenting having make-up brushes whisking
around his face. He sat, good as gold, and was far less
of a nuisance than many actors who fidget, fuss or
play the prima donna in wardrobe and make-up
departments.

In Britain the orang-outang had to be kept in

government-approved quarantine quarters,
supervised by me and my assistants when filming. We
were responsible for seeing all doors to the studio
were closed whenever he went on stage, for having all
his droppings bagged ready for disposal later by
ministry „droppings-disposal‟ officials, for maintaining
the disinfectant footbaths at the entrance to his
accommodation, for keeping strangers out, as well as
for checking his health each day.

It was different when Lock flew over from Hollywood

to Holland with Joe and Dave, another handler, for the
filming of „One By One‟. Dutch health regulations
were less strict.

There was no quarantine requirement and he could go

for walks wherever we pleased.

Again, Lock turned in a brilliant performance. He was

shown, just once, how to throw tomato soup at Jimmy
Ellis (who was playing Paddy Reilly, the character
based on my old friend, Matt Kelly, the head keeper at
Belle Vue) and he got it right straight away - splat on
target! Then he had to wreck an office; normally so
well-behaved that butter wouldn‟t melt in his mouth,
he watched as Joe demonstrated how a table could be
overturned, files of paper scattered, ink spilled and,
most crucial of all, a telephone sent crashing through a
window. The handler didn‟t actually throw the latter
instrument but merely picked it up and made as if to
do so.

Impassively Lock watched with his big brown eyes.

He got the point. When the camera started turning he
was instantly transformed into a raving lunatic. Tables
crashed, flying paper filled the air, ink splattered, and
the telephone went through the window pane, exactly
where the lens was focused, in a shower of glass.
„Cut!‟ called the director. Lock instantly reverted to
perfect gentleman orang, and shuffled over to hold
Jimmy Ellis‟s hand.

Jimmy and Lock sometimes went for walks together

hand in hand, and were driven round the flat
countryside sitting side by side in the back seat of a
limousine. Pedestrians would stop and stare as the car
rode by and the distinguished-looking, large-faced,
red-haired mijnheer looked out at them and
occasionally, yes really, gave a red-hairy wave of the
hand in the manner of some royal personage. Jimmy‟s
appeal to Lock may have had its roots in the Irish
actor‟s habit of talking to him earnestly in Gaelic. I
think it was poetry, but whatever it was, Lock would
listen intently, apparently entranced by Jimmy‟s
blarney.

Our film locations in Holland were at the Arnhem

Zoo, the Amsterdam Harbour area, and out on the
dykes near the pretty cheese-famous town of Gouda.
At night the BBC had arranged accommodation for
Lock in the great ape house at Artis Zoo, Amsterdam.
And that is where things began to go wrong.

Orang-outangs are highly intelligent and social

animals, endangered in their wild haunts, but
breeding regularly in the family groups of many zoos.
I‟m not sure that they should be living the solitary
unnatural lives of film stars. Such individuals are well
fed and pampered, but are they happy? Are they not
in essence lonely, as so many famous show-biz folk,
imprisoned by the adulation of the public, have
claimed to be? At least these human glitterati do have
the ability, if they wish to, associate with others of
their kind — that‟s their problem, they are often
suffocated by hangers-on and fans.

Animals like Lock live monastic lives by comparison.

Even though they may be born and reared in captivity,
never seeing another orang from the moment they are
born (such animals are to be found in the USA though
almost never in Great Britain), they are still orang-
outangs - „men of the woods‟ — not pseudo-humans
with orang-outang features, no matter how clever and
„domesticated‟ they may appear to be. Their rightful
domus is still the forest world of Indonesia, threatened
though it is by the destruction wreaked by man.
Lock‟s overnight accommodation at Artis was a
comfortable room separated by a wall from similar
quarters housing a family of orang-outangs: father,
mother and youngster. There was no direct connection
between the two units, no way Lock could see his
fellow creatures, but both rooms had a barred grille in
place of a ceiling, and there were armoured glass
windows at the front of each through which the
human visitors looked. The orangs could, of course,
hear and smell one another through their ceiling
grilles.

One evening when filming had finished for the day,

Joe and Dave took Lock back to the zoo and walked
with him, not as before through the side door into the
ape house, but through the public entrance. For the
first time Lock saw the orang family in the quarters
next to his. He was spellbound, rooted to the ground
for long minutes in front of their window.

Reluctant and scowling, he was coaxed by his

handlers down the narrow passageway to the back of
his dormitory. Who knows what was going through
his mind at that moment? It was perhaps the first time
in his life, except for reflections in the mirrors of sets
on which he worked, that he‟d seen his own kind.
There were people like him who perhaps knew what it
was like to be him - there, next door, where the oddly
disturbing sounds and odours had come from. In a
few seconds Joe would have unlocked the door to his
room and he would be inside - alone. Lock saw a
metal ladder bolted to the wall.

Snatching his hand away from Joe‟s, he reached for a

high rung and pulled himself up in an effortless fluid
movement.

Another hold above his head, and before his handlers

could shout his name, he was on top of his quarters,
walking across the horizontal bars of the grille. He
went on, expectant, exhilarated, and found himself
standing looking down into the room of the orang-
outang family.

Joe and Dave were already climbing up the ladder

calling him. He didn‟t hear them. Down below the
father orang, an old, bigger male than Lock, looked up
and did not like what he saw. The male he‟d smelled
for the past couple of days, the one he‟d glimpsed
through the glass a few moments before, was now on
his patch, actually putting a hand through the bars,
pointing, beckoning towards his mate, his offspring.
Fully mature orang-outangs may look plump and
flabby as Buddhas, and wear tranquil, even seemingly
dozy, expressions on their faces, but when they
perceive a threat they can move like greased lightning
and with frightening power. The father orang
attacked, swarming upwards from shelf to rope to
ceiling bars. Broad, yellow teeth bared, he was
prepared to bite the leg off this impudent intruder.
Though the bars separated the two males, arms could
easily be slipped between them. If he could grab one
of Lock‟s limbs he could pull it in and inflict horrific
damage. „Lock! Come here, Lock! Here, guy,‟ shouted
Joe, clambering on to the ceiling of Lock‟s room.

But already a strange battle royal had begun, of

snatching hands, of jaws pressed close to the bars. The
father briefly caught Lock‟s ankle, but the younger
male broke his grip, leaving rake-marks in his flesh.
The two gladiators went at it hammer and tongs,
nearly but not quite getting into a clinch, always
ultimately frustrated by the thick metal rods. Both
males were now in a state of high excitement, and the
female and her youngster had climbed up to lend their
moral support and make threatening gestures.

Lock was a changed character, his blood swirling with

irresistible, previously unimaginable emotions. When
Joe got to him and touched his back as he weaved
back and forth, eluding the clawing hands and
counter-attacking with swift jabs of his own, he was
no longer Lock the utterly reliable, jobbing animal
actor. Suffused with fury, he turned on Joe and bit him
hard and deep in the arm. Now he had another
adversary - but let them all come! The adrenalin
spewed out into his veins.
Badly injured, Joe retreated across the ceiling. Leaving
off his main bout for the moment, Lock followed him,
intent on doing further damage. The expression on his
face was different from anything Joe or Dave had ever
seen before, but somehow Dave, standing on the
ladder and waving a puny stick, held him off long
enough to pull his colleague to safety. The two men
ran down the passageway and shut the door behind
them. Lock returned to the fray, tormenting his
original opponent by swinging up on to a roof joist
and dangling down by one arm, just out of reach,
awaiting his chance.

While Joe was rushed off to hospital, Dave decided to

see if Lock was by now in a more reasonable frame of
mind.

Opening the door leading to the passageway, by just a

crack, he peeped in. Up on the roof joists Lock heard
the squeak of the hinges, swung hand over hand along
the beams until he could see what was going on and,
as soon as he caught sight of Dave‟s face, came
hurtling down to attack. The handler barely had time
to pull the door shut and turn the key before mighty
fists pounded against the woodwork.

Lock was now occupying the service area of the great

ape house, and no one could go in without his
permission. He returned to his perch again on the
joists above the agitated orang family.

I was sitting with Jimmy Ellis in our hotel on the

outskirts of the city, preparing to enjoy an evening
meal of green herrings and Amstel beer, when the
message arrived. Would I go post-haste with my dart-
gun to the zoo. Lock had gone berserk.

„Can‟t be,‟ said Jimmy. „Not him. Some mistake for

sure. Must be one of the zoo‟s orangs. He wouldn‟t
hurt a fly!‟

But when the taxi dropped me at the zoo, and I went

to the ape house, there was no doubt about it. Through
the glass and beyond the grille I could see Lock in his
eyrie, looking decidedly vicious.

„I‟ll demonstrate his mood,‟ said Dave. „Watch what

happens when I try to open the door.‟ He turned the
key again and gave a gentle shove. Watching through
the windows, I saw Lock respond by dropping down
from the rafters, lips snarling. He was clearly ready to
repel invaders.

„He‟s defending his territory. Maybe he thinks he‟s

taken the next door family by conquest,‟ I murmured.
„Or he‟s holding them hostage,‟ said Dave, shutting
the door with a bang yet again.

The zoo‟s curator had arrived, and was looking most

unhappy. „You‟ll have to get him,‟ he said.

„Can I gain access to the service area some other way?‟

I asked.

„From the roof or via the skylight, so that I can dart

him through some hole or other?‟

„Impossible. The skylight is reinforced glass and

doesn‟t open. No other way in — except the door.‟

To dart him I had to enter through the door. It would

have to be a clean shot, unobstructed by the roof joists,
and at not too great a range, if I was shooting
upwards. The gas pistol was designed for close-
quarters work. The first dart must do the trick,
otherwise he‟d retreat back into the roof space and I‟d
be vulnerable moving deeper into the house; but even
then, a perfect intromuscular darting would take three
or four minutes to work. Only on the cinema screen do
tranquillizing darts have an immediate effect. In real
life, no matter how potent the anaesthetic used, you
have to wait for the chemical to be picked up by the
blood at the injection site and transported to the brain
where it exerts its effect. Three minutes is plenty of
time for an orang to catch and kill you.

I loaded phencyclidine, the stuff the junkies in the

USA call „angel dust‟, into a two-cc dart, attached a
short, collared needle and fitted the pistol with a new
high-pressure carbon dioxide cylinder.

„Right,‟ I said to Dave, „when I give the word, open the

door wide. I‟ll go in about three feet. Hopefully, that
will provoke him to charge me. It‟ll be too risky trying
for the usual arm or thigh target on an animal moving
straight at me. I‟ll hit him, God willing, in the belly.
When I jump back, you slam the door as soon as I‟m
out.‟

„What if he makes it to you and the door before you‟re

out?‟

„Then we‟re in the cow-pat!‟

„Have you got a gun with you if we have to . . . you

know . . .‟

„No.‟

„We have,‟ said the curator.

"Okay, bring it,‟ I said, „but don‟t dream of using it
unless he gets hold of me.‟ I detest firearms.

When the curator had fetched a revolver from the

zoo‟s armoury, I nodded to Dave. He turned the lock
on the door to the passageway and opened it fast. I
stepped over the threshold, not feeling at all like James
Bond, with a dart gun held out in front in both hands.
Animals normally do the unexpected, but on this
occasion Lock did just what I had hoped. He came
rushing down from the roof, dropped into the
passageway and hurried towards me, arms
outstretched, eyes glaring and lips curled back. I
pulled the trigger and with a sharp crack the dart flew
to hit him close to his navel.

Abdominal shots are among my least favourites, but

I‟d chosen a short needle to be sure I didn‟t penetrate
into the peritoneal cavity. With a screech, Lock came
to a momentary halt. I sprang back. Dave slammed to
the door, and then with a crash it shook in its frame as
the orang-outang smashed into it on the other side
with all his force.

„Let‟s hope that the explosive charge inside the dart

wasn‟t a dud,‟ I said, sweating profusely. About one in
a hundred is.
Four minutes later, with no sign of Lock going back to
the roof joists and no noise coming from behind the
door, I asked Dave to open it cautiously once more.
Covered by the curator with his pistol (I never like
being protected in this way; suppose my back-up gets
an attack of the jitters, and pulls the trigger and puts a
bullet through my back!) I looked inside the
passageway. Lock was slumped behind the door, dead
to the world. He would be unconscious for half an
hour at least.

We carried him to his sleeping-quarters and made him

comfortable on a bed of wood-wool.

„What about tomorrow‟s filming?‟ said Dave, as I

made sure Lock‟s tongue was safely flopped out of his
mouth, and administered an injection of atropine to
control excessive salivation.

„Lock won‟t be doing anything,‟ I replied. „He will be,

like Elizabeth Taylor often was, indisposed.‟ In fact,
Lock did only a restricted amount of work from then
on; no more walks with Jimmy, no more rides in the
car.

The film schedule was drastically re-jigged. The sad

truth dawned when I had the opportunity to discuss
things with Joe, back from hospital with his arm in a
sling. „When an orang goes wrong, he‟s wrong for
good,‟ the American said. „I can see it in his face. Back
to the States he goes in two days. But I doubt he‟ll ever
work on film again.‟

„Do you mean he‟ll be retired?‟

„I think so.‟

„To a zoo? But he wouldn‟t integrate with an

established orang colony.‟

„No, that‟s true.‟

„So what then?‟ He‟ll just not work.‟

„You mean - just vegetate?‟ Joe didn‟t answer. I had

the distinct impression that Lock was going to move
from a sort of busy monasticism to the life of a hermit -
alone, off show, unwanted, unusable, though with his
basic needs adequately catered for. An actor gone
mad. But he wasn‟t mad. Two days later Lock flew
back to Hollywood with his handlers; I‟ve not heard of
him since.

When we were working on „One By One‟ in Arnhem

Zoo, the opportunity occurred to film the actors
apparently doing some real veterinary work. No
models, no fake blood, no plastic prosthetic wounds
and „diseases‟. A young rhino had a sore to be treated
and so needed to be darted with a sedative, and a
newly-born baby chimp needed checking over, and its
mother had to have her vulva stitches, put in after a
difficult birth, removed. Rob Heyland, with my hands
for close-ups as usual, took part in these and other
excellent unscheduled scenes. There was, however, a
most poignant incident which involved a lion.

We had only just arrived in Arnhem when it was

reported that an old male lion had been attacked by a
younger rival, and had suffered a serious bite wound
of the hind leg. I immediately went to see it, and
found it to be one of the injuries of its kind: a
compound, multiple fracture of the tibia, with the
lower part of the leg hanging on by little more than
tatters of skin. In the well-equipped veterinary clinic
of the zoo, we X-rayed the lion under anaesthetic; it
was as I had imagined. There was no chance of
repairing the damage, and amputation for such a
creature was out of the question. The only course open
to us was euthanasia - by giving an overdose of
barbiturate intravenously while the lion still slept.

In the circumstances, I decided that the anaesthetized

lion and its humane destruction (awful word) could be
filmed with Rob looking at the X-rays, inspecting the
unconscious animal‟s wound, and then pretending to
give the overdose.
The sadder aspects of some of the work I have been
called upon to do as a zoo vet were worth portraying
honestly, and the animal was not being exploited or
having his suffering prolonged. So, while Rob acted
the part, I sat on the floor of the clinic, out of camera-
shot, injecting the barbiturate solution through a
rubber tube that ran up under his operating gown and
down the sleeve to his hand which held the shaft of a
cannula that I had placed in a foreleg vein. Several
members of the crew were emotionally affected by
what was a most moving scene. When the episode was
eventually transmitted, I wonder if any viewers
realized that they were, for once, watching the
unfaked death of an animal.

As I said earlier, the majority of actors on „One By

One‟ were happy to handle the animals and did the
job exceedingly well.

Only once did we have someone lose his nerve, and I

didn‟t blame him.

We were in Oxfordshire to film a scene where the

actor walked a fully-grown tiger on a lead over some
golf links and then past the clubhouse. The tiger had
been hand reared, and came with a good reputation as
an obliging big cat. But a tiger is a very, very
impressive beast with long fang teeth and wicked
claws and even if, like me, you see, mix with, and talk
to tigers every day, a fully-grown male on a dog lead
is, to say the least, something to reckon with. If, for
example, he does no more than decide to go this way
rather than that, you don‟t argue with a creature so
powerful and so quick to tap you on the kneecap with
a club-like paw if you demur. If he wants to play by
putting his forepaws on your shoulders, you will have
to take around a hundred kilos of his weight, and let
his rasp-like tongue, which can lick raw meat off
buffalo bones, part your hair. If you smell frightened
to him - fear changes the odour of sweat - he won‟t
like it, and may take a sample bite out of your
buttocks.

So I wasn‟t surprised when the actor took one look at

the tiger he was going to take for „walkies‟, and went a
palish shade of green. I give him his due - having been
assured by the tiger-handler, on his mother‟s life, that
the animal was as soft as a Siamese, and having been
shown by the director (a) his contract and (b) the
tranquillizing rifle that I would have loaded and
cocked at all times (not that that would have saved
him if the tiger gave the classic neck bite that means
instant death) he said he‟d have a go. With trembling
hands he took the lead and walked a few paces with
the tiger beside him, just for practice. Perhaps the tiger
didn‟t think much of Thespians, or perhaps it didn‟t
feel like a walk over the links on that day; whatever
the reasons it looked at him and nipped his hand,
inflicting a tiny wound.

That was the end of the actor/tiger relationship.

Ashen-faced and wobbly, supported by his wife who
had come to watch the filming, the gallant fellow went
off to sit down with a large cognac. When he
recovered, I suppose he dined out on the incident for a
full year. How now to capture the tiger-walkies on
film? Producer, director, production manager,
cameraman, tiger-handlers, everyone - me included -
went into conference. The tiger-handler got the job out
of his own mouth.

„Look!‟ he said. „That tiger‟s a big baby. It must have

nipped him because he smelled wrong or trod on its
toes or jerked its lead. There isn‟t an ounce of badness
in him, I guarantee. Sheer fluke it was. Couldn‟t
happen again.‟

„Right,‟ said the director, „in that case you are it. You
do the walkies. Put on the actor‟s costume, and we‟ll
slip in close-ups of the actor‟s face later.‟ Thirty
minutes later the tiger-handler, a circus man born and
bred, came out of the wardrobe van dressed and ready
to double for the actor. He grinned broadly as he
collected the tiger from its travelling cage. „Come on,
boy,‟ he said. „Let‟s show these telefolk what a cuddle-
pot you are.‟ The two of them walked a few metres,
and then - yes, you guessed it -the tiger turned its
head towards him and snapped. This time it was the
groin.

When I examined the wound at the top of his inner

thigh, moments later, after he‟d peeled off blood-
stained trousers, it was plain that he‟d been within a
whisker of losing one, if not both, testicles. There was
the second ashen face that morning!

„David,‟ said the director, „do you think you could do

this scene somehow?‟

„Not *** likely!‟ I replied with feeling. The golf links

scene was written out.

Filming with the giant pandas in Madrid for the third

series of „One By One‟ was delightful in many ways. I
played the part of a tourist in a cafe in the Plaza
Mayor, and consumed large quantities of gin and
tonic, pepper-stuffed olives and serrano ham while
sitting where I was told to sit during innumerable
takes of a particular scene on a golden sunlit evening
in August. The BBC afterwards agreed to pay only for
the tonic water. We stayed for a night in the most
charming parador, at Chinchon, close to that village‟s
picturesque circular plaza cum bull-ring, and we shot
some scenes, with special permission, inside one of
King Juan Carlos‟s palaces. But the best thing, the
principal reason for bringing the entire crew to the
city, was the re-enactment of the artificial
insemination, done three years before, of Shao-Shao,
the female giant panda, and the subsequent birth of
Chu-Lin, the West‟s first test-tube panda baby.

To do this meant co-ordinating the filming with a

„real‟ medical examination, under anaesthetic, of one
of the pandas. It was all arranged for the day when I
would be performing various minor procedures on
Chang-Chang, the old male: de-scaling his teeth by
ultra-sound, taking blood for routine analysis, and
inspecting by ophthalmoscope the corneal de-
generation of his eyes which I‟ve mentioned earlier. So
Chang-Chang would have to play the part of Shao-
Shao, Chu-Lin‟s mother. Luckily, one adult panda
looks much like another, male or female. There was
the problem, in this instance, that we would be
focusing on the rear end of the animal, where Rob
would be „artificially inseminating‟ Shao-Shao.
Nestling within the off-white fur in those parts were
Chang-Chang‟s two large testicles! But by then we
were good at faking, although Joyce Dean, the head of
the make-up team, was initially dumbfounded when I
proposed that she might make a „scrotum wig‟!

My main concern was that filming should not interfere

in any way with the work I had to do on the panda,
who would be under only a light, short-acting
anaesthetic. I explained my strategy at a meeting with
the director and principal actors: „Chang-Chang will
be “ knocked out” for approximately twenty minutes.
There is no way that I will agree to extend that period
purely for filming. I need fifteen of the twenty minutes
to take blood, scale teeth, and so forth. That leaves you
five minutes — to do everything. Then, whatever may
be at, he goes back to his sleeping-quarters on his
stretcher. There will be no chance of rehearsals with
the animal, and so I suggest you rehearse exhaustively
with a bale of straw taking the place of Chang-Chang
in the operating room. Finally, there will not be
enough space around the operating table for all the
crew; only the camera team, one sound man and the
two essential actors, Rob and Yolanda, can be in there.
Lights must be set up beforehand by the lighting men,
who should then clear out. The director must peep
through a window. Make-up, wardrobe, props and the
rest are to stay outside the panda complex. And there
must be silence. I don‟t want the animals stressed by
the usual brouhaha.

„How, if we can‟t rehearse with the animal, can we fit

our lines into the action?‟ asked Rob. „How do we
practise the insemination?‟

„Easy. You will rehearse on the straw bale, and

inseminate that! And you should have no pre-set lines
of dialogue. I shall go over the procedure with you
and Yolanda in great detail until you really know all
about it. Then you will be in a position to fake-do it on
the animal in the five minutes you‟ve got, thinking
yourselves into the parts. Say whatever comes
naturally. Be the zoo vets. If, for example, he defecates
while you‟re working, treat it as I would. Don‟t laugh
and look to see if the director has noticed and is
cutting the filming. Deal with the droppings as I
would have to, mention it, or not, as you feel
appropriate. Clear it away with some swabs or a
surgical towel - and carry on. Remember you‟re up
against a time limit that I shan‟t extend, even if the
director goes down on his hands and knees before
me.‟

„An obvious question, David. As Chang-Chang is

male, how do we pretend to put a tube inside his
vagina?‟

„By not using close-ups, and by passing the tube,

masked by your other hand, under his thigh and along
the top of the table. The tube itself is thin, transparent
plastic — no one will spot the deception.‟

For half a day before the filming with Chang-Chang,

Yolanda Vasquez and Rob Heyland, playing in real
life Liliana Monsalve, one of the Madrid Zoo vets, and
myself, worked with the bale of straw. I watched and
listened as they practised coping with all eventualities
and invented their own dialogue for this key scene in
the drama.

I was somewhat nervous when it came to the actual

filming, but in the event all went magnificently well.
As soon as I‟d finished my work on the panda, I
looked at my watch and said, „Okay - five minutes
from now,‟ and the actors took up their positions over
the unconscious animal. If I hadn‟t known what was
going on I would have been utterly convinced that
Rob and Yolanda were indeed experts, calmly and
confidently hoping to make Chang-Chang (Shao-
Shao!) pregnant. Six minutes later the old male was
back in his quarters, beginning gently to rouse and
totally unaware of the strange cinematic sex-change
he‟d just undergone.

The finished film of the operation turned out to be a

great success and by adding on, in a later scene, some
real video footage taken during the birth of the baby
panda at Madrid, the story of how Chu-Lin, the
famous test-tube panda of Spain, came into this world
was accurately portrayed.
11 A Whale of a Time
When Fm playful, I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of
latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Freya or Freyja is the Venus of Scandinavian

mythology. The goddess of love, and the wife of Odin,
she rode in a chariot drawn by cats. She is also a
mature killer whale, caught off Iceland, and living for
the past several years in the Marineland Cote d‟Azur,
outside Antibes, Provence.

Soon after her arrival in France, John Kershaw, the

English head trainer at Marineland, trained her to
swim to the side of the large pool in which she lived
with two other whales, Betty and Kim, to roll on her
back and present the under surface of her broad tail-
flukes. In that position it was then easy to insert a fine
needle into one of the large tail veins and draw off a
quantity of blood into special vacuum tubes. By
sampling the whales in this manner every month, and
having the blood analysed, we built up a picture of
their underlying state of health. When disease strikes,
the blood (particularly in whales and dolphins, but
also in man and other mammals) is the first to show
signs. It displays alterations sometimes weeks or
months before clinical, naked-eye symptoms appear.

In 1986, at one of the routine samplings, I observed the

first shift in some of the white corpuscles that circulate
in the whale‟s blood. It wasn‟t much, but it alerted me.
I asked John to take blood again three days later. Two
successive samples are worth ten times more than one;
they enable you to detect trends. The second sample
confirmed my fears: there was a spot of infection
beginning to grumble somewhere in the animal‟s
body. Nevertheless, anybody watching her scoffing
her fifty kilograms of prime fish each day, or racing
round the pool playing with her friends and jumping
dramatically during the shows, would have thought
that there was nothing amiss.

Up until that time we had calculated the dosage of

drugs such as antibiotics for these gigantic animals by
rule-of-thumb guesswork, multiplying the amount
known to be needed for, say, a cart horse by a factor of
three and then knocking some off because body
surface area plays a part in the calculations as well as
weight, and as weight goes up, surface area increases
disproportionately less. But I had grown increasingly
dissatisfied with this Heath Robinson approach to
therapy. The textbooks on medicine give dose rates for
a thousand and one drugs for man and animals, but
never mention most of my patient species. Each kind
of animal handles a drug, burns it up, destroys it,
excretes it, at its own rate and that depends on its
species, physiology, anatomy, size, speed of living and
so on and so forth. I knew snakes were very slow
clearers of most antibiotics, that guinea-pigs were
strangely susceptible to poisoning by the safest
antibiotic, penicillin, and that dolphins needed three
times as much gentamycin, a broad-spectrum
antibiotic, as a human of the same weight in order to
maintain germ-killing levels in the blood. But for most
drugs, many of which were potentially toxic in
overdose, we didn‟t really know how much to give or
how often to whales in order to do the job safely. With
Freya, I decided to combine treatment and
experimentation in a whale for the first time.

'We‟ll put Freya on to a course of amoxycillin,‟ I told

John, „and ask the laboratories to assay the levels of
the drug in the blood at one, three, six, twelve and
twenty-four hours after dosing. We know the levels of
amoxycillin that are needed to kill sensitive bacteria,
so if you sample Freya at those times we‟ll be able to
calculate (a) whether the dose was right or needed to
be adjusted, and (b) how long bug-killing levels are
maintained.‟

John was more than happy to collaborate, even though

it meant him sampling during the night - his animals
are his life - and we arranged for the blood samples to
be sent by fast courier to specialist laboratories in
France. The amoxycillin experiment went ahead at
once, and we quickly obtained the information that
gave us logical dosage levels and frequency for that
drug in an average adult female killer whale.
Unfortunately the amoxycillin didn't have any effect
on the smouldering infection deep within Freya's
body. So I switched to another antibiotic, cephalexin.
Again we did the samplings and found the correct
dosage level, but again the drug proved ineffectual in
terms of curing the whale. After that came
bacampicillin, lincomycin and doxycycline, with lots
more samples for the labs to assay, but still the signs of
infection advanced unchecked. It was some small
consolation that we were getting information on the
correct use of these drugs which should prove
invaluable in the future.

Freya's lack of response to the treatment worried me

deeply, and when, one day, she began to show signs of
being off colour - listlessness and picking at her food -
I flew out to France wondering what on earth to do
next. I needed to know more about where the infection
was situated. How could we get that information?

I had been involved with the Marineland at Antibes,

Europe's finest, since before it opened in 1970. It was
here I would bring Nemo and Limo, but the original
stock of dolphins and sea lions came from Flamingo
Park in Yorkshire where I was at the time resident as
veterinary officer and assistant director, and Michael
Riddell, the present director of Marine-land, had
trained with me when Cuddles, the first killer whale
in Britain, arrived at Flamingo Park in 1969, and when,
on Boxing Day of the same year, I brought the huge
Calypso over from Canada for a short acclimatization
period at Cleethorpes before going on to France.
Marineland now has a large and ever-expanding
marine animal complex with a ten-metre deep main
whale pool, a breeding unit and creche for king
penguins, and lots of dolphins, seals and sea lions -
including babies.

Behind the scenes it is involved with the French

government's attempts to save the highly endangered
Mediterranean monk seal, marine fish breeding, and
various scientific programmes concerned with the
health of cetaceans. It was at Marineland that I had
first „washed' the blood of a sick killer whale with
ozone, first tried, unsuccessfully, to X-ray the chest of
a whale, first washed balls of leaves out of the stomach
of a dolphin that had an obsession with the tidy
collection of such floating plant material, and first
looked inside a penguin‟s crop with a fibre-optic
endoscope in search of a plastic feeder which it had
swallowed. Other unique experiences for me on the
French Riviera had included falling into an empty
pool and damaging a shoulder which still hurts many
years later and filming the second series of „One By
One‟ - in particular a sequence where the whale pool
was awash with „blood‟ (actually food colouring) and I
was bitten by Miss Brigitte Bardot‟s favourite seal!

I went into discussion about Freya‟s deteriorating

condition with Michael and John as soon as I arrived
at Marineland, and we all walked round the hospital
pool in which the whale was being held. She had
obviously lost some weight: there was a distinct dip
behind her head where there had once been plump,
smooth blubber. Her appetite had now dropped to
only a few kilograms of fish per day, taken with little
enthusiasm. It was all horribly reminiscent of other
killer whales which had suffered deep-seated, abscess-
type infections. Most of them had been situated in the
chest, either in the lungs themselves, or in the veil of
tissue that separates the left chest from the right. A
previous male whale at Marineland had developed
just such a rugby-football-sized abscess in a gland at
the border of the left lung, close to the ribs. The blood
results, the bad smell from the animal‟s blow-hole and
my instinct had all pointed to the infection being in the
lung, but despite the use of high-powered industrial
X-ray machines, we hadn‟t been able to locate and
drain the abscess. The irony was that when I
eventually post-mortemed the animal, I found the
pus-filled cavity in a place where it would have been
relatively easy to slip a large twelve-inch-long needle
between the ribs in order to run off the foul liquid.
Drainage, not just antibiotics, is essential in such cases,
but you can‟t drain what you can‟t visualize!

„Freya could be just such another case,‟ I said to my

friends.

„I know she‟s got a well-established infection of the

soft tissues, and I‟ll bet my bottom dollar it‟s in the
chest somewhere.‟

„Do you want to try X-rays again?‟ asked Michael.

„X-rays aren‟t so good for soft lesions, but if we could

get a reasonably good picture of the lungs, it should
show up an abscess. Our last attempt however, was a
failure, as you well know.‟

Whales are so big and broad, padded with a dense

layer of blubber, that portable X-ray machines just
don‟t have the power to penetrate them. Even the
biggest machines, such as those installed at the
veterinary teaching hospitals, have major difficulties
with horse chests and abdomens.

Michael is an unfailingly willing tryer, even if there‟s

only the most outside of chances, and he‟s a brilliant
fixer. „There‟s a bloke in Nice with a new portable
industrial X-ray that can find flaws in aircraft engines,‟
he said. „I‟m sure I could persuade him to bring the
thing here, if you are interested.‟

„Let‟s try it,‟ I replied. „Nothing ventured . . .‟

The hospital pools at Marineland make medical work

with the whales and dolphins much easier than in
some other establishments. These pools can be drained
and refilled quickly, several times a day if necessary,
and I can get at my patients „in the dry‟ as they lie on
the bottom. The man with the industrial X-ray
machine arrived that evening, and he began setting up
the device while explaining how it could find a hair-
line fracture in a block of steel the size of a man‟s
head. „I weel put eem ‟ere on ze right side of ze whale
wiz ze X-ray source over ze lung wherever you want
‟eem,‟ he said. „Zen you put ze plates wiz ze X-ray film
on ze left side, and I press ze button. Zut! You weel
‟ave ze picture, I promise!‟ We covered the whole of
Freya‟s left chest with X-ray film plates, held in place
with adhesive tape.

„Eh Bien! Stand clear — I now press ze button!‟

shouted the „Voila!’ A motor cyclist took the plates to
the local hospital for development. Twenty minutes
later he returned with the wet films - they were blank.
„Eet ees eempossible!‟ exclaimed the X-ray man.
"Encore! We do eem again!‟ We did „eem‟ again, and
again the developed films showed not a single
shadow. X-rays had again proved useless for our
whales. One week later a strange circular zone of
inflamed skin developed on the right-hand side of
Freya‟s chest - just where the machine had been
focused. It dropped out eventually to form an ulcer,
which three years later has still not fully healed.

Experts deny it, but I‟m absolutely sure it‟s a radiation

burn.

Freya stopped eating altogether and lost more weight.

The blood analyses began to show early kidney
failure. „Fill the hospital tank with fresh water for a
few days,‟ I said, „and tease, coax, cajole fish into her,
any way you can - you know what it means if we have
to begin force-feeding her!‟

Michael and John knew the enormous difficulties well

enough: trying to get a wooden gag into a whale‟s
mouth in order to keep it open, avoiding the
indignantly thrashing tail and snapping jaws, pushing
fish down the throat with your shoulder up against
the teeth and your arm crushed between gag and roof
of the animal‟s mouth. Having a bucket full of
mashed-up fish regurgitated into your face, being
soaked to the skin with the cold water spray used to
keep the beached whale moist, tired out when doing
the feeding for the umpteenth time in the middle of
the night. We‟d all seen people badly injured when
swept off their feet by a swing of a whale‟s tail or
struck by a spat-out gag weighing twenty kilograms or
more.

John and Bruce, the Number Two whale handler at

Marine-land, understood only too well the
implications when I recommended avoiding force-
feeding at all costs, and they set about persuading the
whale by swimming with her, talking, stroking,
tickling her lips with a fresh-thawed herring, mackerel
or capelin, to accept the bare minimum of food.

„What now?‟ asked Michael, ever optimistic, even after

the debacle with the X-ray. „How else do you think we
can look inside her chest. Surgery?‟

„No. The technology doesn‟t exist yet to keep her

going with an open-chest operation. It‟s tricky enough
even with dolphins. „And there‟s obviously no chance
of putting her through a CAT or NMR scanner.‟ If
there had been a chance of squeezing so gigantic a
beast through the aperture in one of those ultra-
modern, enormously expensive diagnostic machines,
Michael would surely have found someone willing to
let us do it, and if we‟d had to fly the whale by
helicopter to Paris with a fighter escort, and then
lower it into the hospital by demolishing the roof of
the building, he would have wangled it somehow, no
matter what it cost!
„There is ultra-sound,‟ I said, „the sort of machine used
on pregnant women, and increasingly on dolphins
and other animals, to produce images by sonar.
Trouble is they too aren‟t powerful enough to
penetrate monsters like Freya.‟

Michael‟s face lit up. „So you want a really powerful

ultra-sound machine? Maybe I can get Thomson to
help us.‟

„Thomson?‟

„Yes. Thomson SNCF, the French electronics

company.

Their military sonar research place is a few miles away

from here, at Sophia Antipolis, the Silicon Valley of
southern France. I‟ll get us an appointment to see a
boffin!‟ And, of course, he did.

A few hours later we drove up to the security post

outside the Thomson complex and, after having our
passports screened („Being Englishmen makes you
more risky as visitors than if you were Russian,‟ said
the security man when he‟d made several phone calls),
we were led through long corridors to the door of a
laboratory that bore a red sign with the French
equivalent of „Warning! Restricted Entry.‟
 „Wait here for a moment,‟ said our guide, „we must
wipe the blackboard clean of calculations before you
enter.‟

When all the abstruse formulae had been obliterated,

we were allowed to enter and were introduced to two
scientists working in a clutter of flickering oscilloscope
tubes and arcane electronic gadgets. „Messieurs,‟ said
Michael, „as you know, we are from Marine-land. And
we have a problem with which you may be able to
assist us. We need to look inside a whale‟s chest.‟ He
explained Freya‟s condition, and what we would like
to do.

The two men listened intently and then, when he had

finished, one said, „We do have naval sonar units of
the required power, but to do what you require would
mean, say, putting the whale into the water in Antibes
harbour, and beaming the ultra-sound at her from a
kilometre away out to sea. Treating her like a
submarine. Hardly practical.‟

„How much detail could we expect if we risked

placing her in a sling in the harbour?‟ I asked.

The scientist smiled gently and made a typically Gallic

gesture with his hands. „We cannot reveal the
resolution obtainable by our equipment in military
applications. And as for the flesh of a whale, who
knows?‟

„What do you suggest, then?‟ I asked. „Give us a week.

We will try modifying one of our portable machines,
and build a special probe, waterproof of course. Then
we‟ll come to Marineland and try it out with the probe
against the whale‟s skin.‟ Michael and I were pleased
with our „penetration‟ of the Thomson sonar lab, and I
felt sure I could keep Freya going for at least another
week. We went back to Marineland, and I made
arrangements for the whale to receive regular
injections of vitamins and anabolic hormones prior to
the ultra-sound scanning.

Seven days later I returned to Antibes on the usual BA

flight, full of loaded gentlefolk, gold-medallioned
poseurs and Panama-hatted City types accompanied
by pale wives, nannies and fractious kids. I found
Freya looking worse than ever.

The two Thomson boffins arrived punctually at the

agreed hour with a vanload of equipment and, while
they set it up on a platform beside the hospital pool,
John lowered the water level until the whale was
barely afloat. The special probe, the size and shape of a
paperback book, and connected to the ultra-sound
machine by a long cable, would be held against the
animal‟s chest by one of our whale-handlers. The
boffins, two consultant radiologists from nearby
hospitals and I would stand above, in front of the
machine‟s monitor screen, recording everything of
interest both on video and Polaroid film.

The scanning began. Although the ultra-sound

emissions were inaudible to human ears, it was
noticeable at once that in certain positions the probe
seemed to annoy the whale.

Quite probably she could hear the irritating whine of

the machine in a way that we could not. Very slowly,
in accordance with instructions shouted down to
them, John and his assistants moved the probe up and
down, forwards and back, over the whale‟s rib-cage.
My eyes were glued to the monitor.

Suddenly the patches of black and white, the bands,

blobs and speckled areas, made sense. I could see,
could recognize the design. For the first time ever
human beings were looking at the organs contained
within a living whale‟s body. There was the skin, the
blubber, the muscles. The ribs stood out in cross-
section. Beneath them was the lining of the thoracic
cavity, a shimmering silver line, then a dark space,
and finally the lung. I could see blood vessels and,
farther back, the typical, sharply angled diaphragm of
the whale, the liver and a portion of the stomach.
While we watched, a pretty shower of silver confetti,
fish in the stomach, was tossed up by the natural
contractions of that organ. ‘Fantastique!’ I shouted,
slapping one of the Thomson men on the back.

Even the powerful Thomson machine could not send

its beam through to the centre of Freya‟s chest, but as
we watched, and grew more familiar with the sonar
images, it became apparent that there was something
abnormal inside the animal. Having viewed the video
we made at the time on many occasions since then, I
still consider the best description of what we saw, the
lesion, is a „dragon‟s head‟. Between the ribs and the
outside of the lung on the right-hand side of the whale
there reared a miniature fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus
rex, about the size of a grapefruit according to the scale
on the monitor screen.

I discussed the „dragon‟s head‟ with the radiologist.

The „fiery breath‟, „gaping jaws‟, and other features of
the image suggested adhesions, strands and nodules
of fibrous tissue, and that, in turn, gave us a diagnosis.
Freya had a form of chronic pleurisy.

This was a most heartening outcome for me. Chest

abscesses could have proved hopelessly inaccessible
for drainage, but with a more diffuse infection on the
lung‟s outer surface, I could concentrate on re-
doubling the attack by drug treatment, and begin to
use the cortisone family of chemicals against the
adhesions. Thomson‟s boffins with their submarine
warfare secrets had achieved a spectacular result in
the fight to save the life of a killer whale.

To celebrate, Michael took the team up to Mougins for

a memorable dinner at Roger Verge‟s.

We continued the assaying of antibiotic levels in

Freya‟s blood when I started giving her erythromycin
(the drug most commonly used in treating cases of
legionnaires‟ disease), and powerful shots of cortisone.
Slowly her appetite began to pick up, and she started
to swim around the hospital pool instead of hanging
forlornly in one corner. Two weeks after the diagnosis
of pleurisy the Thomson scientists came back, and we
repeated the ultra-sound examination; the „dragon‟s
head‟ was still recognizable, but it was clearly smaller
in size and had begun to fragment. As time went by
Freya‟s improvement was maintained and eventually
she went back to the whale pool and her friends, her
weight restored, eating with gusto and keen to join in
the shows.

We continue to check the killer whale regularly, and I

still don‟t consider her to be absolutely one hundred
per cent normal, the healed scars in her chest cavity
probably niggling her from time to time. But with any
luck it will be many years before I see her lungs with
my naked eye, thanks to the glimpses of them that I‟ve
had by means of the marvellous machine that turns
inaudible sound waves into pictures.
12 Baboons and
Busybodies
If you don‟t pay no mind to diseases, they will go away.

James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival

One of the more curious aspects of the lunatic fringe of

Animal Liberationists is that they often seem to relish
killing animals.

It may, of course, have been simple invincible

ignorance when, for example, a bunch of these fanatics
„liberated‟ a large number of mink from a mink farm
(a kind of establishment which I find distasteful, to say
the least) and in so doing opened a Pandora‟s box: for
the mink, ferocious little creatures, at once set about
slaughtering any animal, from chicken to kitten, that
they came upon in the surrounding countryside, and
not because they were hungry. From time to time
these people threaten, even attempt, to kill animals in
zoos, to „liberate‟ them, I suppose, from this mortal
coil. Once slug pellets were thrown into a dolphin
pool on the assumption that the animals would
swallow them with toxic effects; and I have known
several cases where Animal Liberationists have set fire
to zoo buildings, with animals inside, to „draw
attention to the scandal of creatures in captivity‟.

So when the Chairman of Windsor Safari Park

received a call one evening to say that Animal
Liberationists had poisoned the Park‟s baboons, all in
the good cause, I was not unduly surprised. Half a
dozen baboons, mainly females and youngsters, had
indeed been found dead and dying that morn-ing, but
by the time the phone call was made, my assistant
John Lewis and I were already convinced that the
cause was something far more deadly than publicity-
seeking petty criminals; the Animal Liberationists had
simply jumped on the bandwagon after hearing of the
incident, and had tried to take the perverted credit for
something they did not do.210 Vet on the Wild Side All
the baboons, around ninety in number, had been fit
and lively on the Friday evening. When the keepers
arrived at the new baboon reserve at a quarter past
eight on the Saturday morning, they found six corpses
in the night-house. Three other baboons looked very
ill. An hour later John and I arrived at the Safari Park,
and went straight to see the sick animals.

I find baboons, such as the Hamadryas species at

Windsor, in many ways the most interesting of
primates. They look more „human‟ than other
monkeys, can pull all sorts of faces, are intelligent and
sociable, and live in groups with a complex hierarchy.
This is the baboon whose name comes from the Greek
for „wood nymph‟, that was worshipped by the
ancient Egyptians as Anubis, that was thought, in the
seventeenth century, to be half man and half animal,
and whose long, straight muzzle may have given rise
to the belief that dog-headed men existed. Adult male
Hamadryas are brave and formidable individuals
armed with dagger-like fang teeth.

They will defend their family and friends against the

most dangerous of predators, and even lions and
leopards generally steer well clear of them. The vet
working in the open on an injured or otherwise
incapacitated baboon has to keep an eye peeled for
other baboons who will come rushing to the rescue,
hairy and furious like ancient Norse berserkers.

John and I stood in the porch of the baboons‟ night-

house and watched the animals. Most were
expectantly waiting for their door to be opened so that
they could swarm out on to the reserve where they
would spend the day busily playing, sorting out their
domestic disputes, foraging for seeds and beetles in
the grass and, as ever, contemplating ways of escaping
into the surrounding forests that belong to Her
Majesty The Queen. When the Billy Smart family had
owned the park, the baboons had tried clinging on
beneath the chassis of motor coaches and riding out as
stowaways. They5d mastered the art of giving one
another a leg-up or forming small baboon pyramids to
overcome electrified wire, and they devised a way of
diverting the attention of a noisy Alsatian running on
a long leash at the gate, by sending one of their
number to tease it, while the main band of absconders
slipped through unnoticed by the preoccupied dog.

Windsor's baboons in those days had been expert

auto-mechanics, able to strip the rubber seals off
windscreens with a few quick picks of their hard and
muscular fingers, thus enabling the glass to fall out,
and they collected a garage-ful of accessories each
season: aerials, hub-caps and windscreen wipers. The
vultures who shared the old baboon reserve with them
appreciated the monkeys' acquisitive tendencies,
particularly towards the aerials and wipers, for they in
turn picked them up and used them as nest-building
materials when the baboons had finished playing with
them.

It must be fun to be a baboon. On this particular

morning, the animals seemed as optimistic and
impatient as usual -except for a handful that had the
appearance of being hung-over. We caught them and
examined them closely. No symptoms other than tired
weakness- they were all the same- and when the
others were released into the reserve, they would have
preferred to stay behind, like humans who needed to
catch up on sleep after a night on the town, but the
bossy males wouldn‟t let them. They took them by
hand, or threw an arm round their shoulders, and
bustled them out.

Once in the reserve, where the sun was already strong,

it being the middle of the hot summer of 1989, the
ailing baboons became rapidly weaker before our
eyes, and individuals full of joie de vivre only minutes
before began to slow down dramatically as if all
energy was draining from them, melted in the heat.
„Let‟s go and post-mortem the ones that died during
the night,' I said to John, „then we'll come back and
perhaps be in a better position to do something for
these.' Already, with six dead and as many ill, it was
as bad an epidemic of something as I could remember
in the twenty years since I'd taken my Royal College
Fellowship in the Diseases of Primates.

The cadavers of the dead baboons were waiting for us

in the post-mortem room. Gloved up, and with liberal
quantities of iodine disinfectant to hand, we began the
dissections, working at opposite ends of the table from
each other. John had done his PhD on human tumours
at the Charing Cross Hospital and, after working with
us in Arabia for a year, had been veterinary
pathologist at London Zoo. I had done human
pathology after graduating in 1956. Both of us remain
keen on this modern, scientific version of the old
Roman sooth-sayer‟s art of haruspication - divination
by the inspection of animals‟ entrails. All of the six
baboons had an identical post-mortem appearance.
Full stomachs, no visible signs of disease. But, as with
Sherlock Holmes‟ curious incident of the dog in the
night, such absence of evidence was evidence in itself.
We could rule out heat-stroke and acute septicaemias,
blood poisonings caused by germs that can cause
rapid death.

We took samples of stomach contents, blood, muscle

and major organs for laboratory tests, and then
scrubbed up and drove back to the baboon reserve.
„Could be malicious poisoning, perhaps,‟ said John,
„though it‟s difficult to see what and how.‟

I told him about the many such poisonings I‟d seen in

zoos, including the spate of incidents many years ago
at Chester Zoo where a member of the staff had been
strongly suspected of being the culprit. „The majority
of my poisoning cases have been with barbiturates of
one kind or another - often sleeping pills,‟ I added. „At
least death from those drugs is painless. Not so for the
dolphin at Rio Leon in Spain that was killed by a
hazelnut-sized crystal of copper sulphate secreted
inside a herring!‟

Two more baboons had died and eight were lying

sprawled on the ground when we reached the reserve.
Again the symptoms were the same, and as sparse, in
all the affected animals.

Nothing dramatic, no diarrhoea, no vomiting, no

blood, no pain, no fever - just weakness, progressing
rapidly to death.

We paid particular attention to their faces. No pin-

point pupils in the eyes, nor the extreme dilatation
that might signify barbiturate overdose. Just a drool of
saliva along the lips. We took blood to look for the
presence of poison, although for me it just didn‟t feel
like a case of poisoning.

„They are having difficulty swallowing,‟ said John,

pointing to a string of saliva.

„I‟ve never seen it in primates,‟ I replied, „but the more

I look at these poor little devils, the more I think of
botulism.‟

John nodded vigorously. Just what I was thinking. Hot

weather. Nothing to see in the post-mortems. No signs
of gastro-enteritis that might be caused by salmonella
or some-thing like that.‟

„In which case, we‟d better start hunting for a source

in the reserve straight away!‟ Botulism is one of the
most deadly forms of food poisoning.
Though caused by a bacterium that multiplies in
putrefying organic matter, particularly of animal
origin, it isn‟t an infection, but an intoxication. The
germ itself is ubiquitous and, given high temperature
and humidity together with a suitable decaying food
stuff, it will begin producing a chemical poison that is
one of the most powerful known to science. It is the
poison, persisting even if the bacteria themselves are
destroyed, that causes the rapidly lethal effects
through paralysing the motor nerves of the body.
Human outbreaks are uncommon, but have been
associated with such things as contaminated meat- or
fish-paste and, recently, in the United Kingdom,
hazelnut yoghurt.

In periods of drought when water levels in ponds and

rivers fall, and the quantity of dissolved oxygen is
unusually low, birds may feed on maggots that have
themselves picked up the toxin from dead fish and
other creatures; and because the poison is soluble in
water it can likewise contaminate water sources.
Recent hot summers in Britain have seen wildfowl and
swans dying from the disease in the Norfolk Broads
and the royal parks of London. My experience of
botulism was limited to cases in birds, and to an
outbreak handled by Andrew which had involved
circus lions fed on contaminated chickens.
No botulism expert, I nevertheless felt reasonably
convinced that it was the likeliest explanation for the
baboon deaths. To prove it, I sent the samples by
courier to several laboratories among those that are
prepared to work with primate material. (Many,
including some government ones, will no longer touch
monkey or ape material for fear that it might contain
one of the „new‟ and often lethal viruses, such as that
of Lassa fever or B virus, that have come out of the
African forests in recent years.) Just in case I was
wrong, I also sent it to one that would look for
poisons.

With Paul, the curator, we walked around the baboon

reserve looking for left-overs of anything that the
animals might have been eating on the previous day.
Their standard diet was vegetables, fruit, bread, dried
rice and cereals. Some-times surplus cooked meats
from the cafeteria, unsold at the end of the day, were
sent down to the baboons; in winter I am particularly
keen that they should regularly be fed beef or chicken
incorporated in a specially cooked and delicious-
smelling stew that also contains onions and carrots.
Searching in the reserve we found some roasted
sausages, boiled ham and the scattered remains of the
rice and cereal mix. Of course, as I said to my
colleagues, it was more than possible that whatever
might have caused the trouble had been totally
consumed by the baboons and was now just part of
the mush of stomach contents in our sample bottles.
Only a tiny quantity of contaminated food is enough
to cause trouble; no more than two little maggots
carrying botulism toxins are sufficient to snuff the life
out of a wild duck. The sausages, ham and grain we
recovered were bagged and sent to the lab.

Treatment of the sick and the so far apparently

unaffected baboons was now our main concern, but
there isn‟t much you can do for those already showing
symptoms. The iron lungs that are employed with
paralysed human botulism patients can‟t help our
animals. Botulism anti-toxin isn‟t available
commercially in this country, so when he‟d been
treating his lions, Andrew had imported, under
licence with the Ministry of Agriculture, a quantity of
anti-toxin from the United States.

We still possessed some, though it was theoretically

out of date.

A welter of regulations, the delight of the apparatchiks

of governmental bureaucracy, restrict what doctors or
vets can do with medicines that have to be obtained
from abroad when you want to use them. Though they
can be imported under licence, they must only be
used, according to the grey men from the ministries,
on the species specified in the licence.
Caring little and knowing less about baboons or any
other non-farmable, non-domesticated animal, such
functionaries do at least know that a baboon is not a
lion. When I spoke to the Ministry of Agriculture
about my suspected cases of botulism and mentioned
in passing that I intended to use our small stock of
American anti-toxin on them, a quaint conversation
ensued. „You can‟t do that without a licence,‟ said the
grey man.

„The baboons are dying, and I‟m going to try to protect

as many of the so far unaffected ones as possible, after
treating the sick individuals with it.‟

„You‟ll need a modification to the licence.‟

„Today is Saturday. They‟re dying as I speak.‟

„We should be able to issue the modification on

Monday.‟

„Big deal!‟

„The licence was issued for anti-toxin to be used on

lions by your partner.‟

„This is an emergency! These are real animals, not

statistics on off-white ministry paper. I‟m responsible
for them. I want to use the anti-toxin. Now.‟
„No need to sound so cantankerous, Dr Taylor. I‟m
sure everything can be sorted out on Monday. Use on
other species of such material without licence is a
prosecutable offence.‟

„Go ahead and prosecute. I‟m treating them with it

within five minutes!‟ We used what anti-toxin we had
and, though it slowed the course of the disease in the
sick baboons, they still died. I worried about whether
my diagnosis was correct.

„Treatment of botulism in animals is often said to be

virtually hopeless,‟ said John, when I aired my doubts.
„And maybe the anti-toxin had lost its potency. I‟m
sure we‟re on the right track.‟

By the Monday twenty baboons were dead, and still

others were showing symptoms. On Tuesday the total
was thirty-five, but there were no new cases.
Wednesday brought the total mortality figure up to
forty-two. Thereafter no more deaths or cases of illness
occurred.

At breakfast time on Wednesday morning the phone

rang. It was one of the bacteriology laboratories to
which I had sent samples. „The baboon blood was full
of botulism toxin,‟ said the microbiologist who had
done the tests. „It killed white mice within minutes.
And we found it in the stomach contents, too. Mouse
protection tests prove it to be botulism Type C. There‟s
no news yet about the possible source. We‟re still
trying to grow the bug from all the samples you sent.‟

I was relieved that at last we knew for sure the nature

of the epidemic. During its five-day course the bodies
of almost half of the Windsor baboon colony, the
biggest in Britain, had been sent to the incinerators, by
far the worst holocaust in my career with exotic
animals.

By a week later the laboratories had found the

botulism germ in some of the boiled ham samples
we‟d sent in. Puzzled, for the ham in the cafeteria was
of the highest quality, hygienically handled, and had
been shown to be free of bacterial contamination, I
made further detailed inquiries as to what happened
to the surplus meat when it left the kitchens for the
baboon reserve. The last piece of the jigsaw fell into
place when I discovered that, on the day before the
outbreak began, someone had made a fundamental
mistake. They had given the baboons ham that had
lain, contrary to the normal strict procedures, for three
or four days in a closed, black, plastic bag exposed to
the unusually hot weather. Botulism bacteria in
particles of soil within the bag had multiplied
enthusiastically in the warm humid conditions, while
feeding on the ham.
Human error, as so often the case in such isolated
incidents, had exacted a terrible price amongst some of
humans‟ not too distant relatives.

Baboons had been at the centre of a quite different sort

of problem at Belle Vue Zoo twenty-five years before.
It happened during the time when, for a few months,
Matt Kelly was acting superintendent. He telephoned
me one breakfast time, clearly in a state of
considerable exasperation. „Moi office has been
occupied,‟ he announced hoarsely, „by a pride of . . . of
women! Sittin‟ in me room. Won‟t budge, bejasus.
And they‟ve talked me to a standstill!‟

Now that was a serious matter; the ever-loquacious

Irishman, whose words could charm anything on two
or four legs, out-talked! My curiosity burned bright as I
waited for him to clear his throat and continue.

„These . . . these . . . ladies have a complaint— ‟ Matt

sounded as if he were about to spit into the telephone.
„A complaint, bhoy, a whole barrowload of
complaints.‟

„About what, Matt?‟ I interjected.

„You moit well ask. It‟s the baboons, and one of the
black apes, and the mandrills in particular and . . . and
. . . You‟ve got to come down.‟
„But what are they complaining about?‟ For its day,
Belle Vue‟s monkey collection and colony of baboons
were among the healthiest, best-housed and most
fecund in the country. I couldn‟t imagine what . . . „Oi
can‟t say on the phone. Oi . . . oi . . . it‟s . . .‟

Curiouser and curiouser. Matt was never one to mince

words.

„Well, is it some incident of what they imagine is poor

management, or an injury, or an illness they‟ve
spotted?‟

„No . . . Please, David me bhoy, come down.‟

„I will, but can‟t you give me a clue?‟

„The . . . the ladies . . . are sitting here as oi speak. Errr

. . . oi can‟t say no more.‟

„But are any of the animals in trouble? Do I need

anything special — drugs or instruments?‟

„No. Just come down, me bhoy. It‟s . . . it‟s sort of a

moral . . . moral . . .‟

„Dilemma?‟
 „Doilemma - yes, one of those. The ladies, the darlin‟
ladies, have been infected with a doilemma.‟

Highly intrigued, I took my „Woodhouse‟, the

favourite toasted sandwich loaded with bacon,
tomato, mustard and Worcester sauce, that Shelagh
and I had named after the Jacobean farmhouse in
which we lived, and went out to the car. What on
earth was the „moral dilemma‟ that had apparently so
flabbergasted the experienced head keeper cum
superintendent? Munching my breakfast I drove the
familiar route, more or less the same one that I‟d taken
when going to school in Manchester from the age of
ten. Down through Heywood, the place we used to
call „monkey town‟ because it was said that all the
stools in the pubs in that town had holes in the centre
through which the inhabitants could let down their
tails, through Middleton, passing the pet shop where
once my daughter, Stephanie, and I had been cornered
by a spitting cobra, up Bogart Hall Clough to Blackley,
and then left between rows of blackened terraced
houses, to arrive at last at the gates of the great park
with its speedway, ballrooms, exhibition halls, pubs,
funfair, old brewery, railway sidings, firework island
and, most magical of all to generations of folk born
and bred in Greater Manchester, its zoo, still with a
Victorian elephant house and sea-lion pool.
Forty minutes after he‟d spoken to me on the
telephone, Matt opened the door of his office at my
first knock. „Come in - glad ye‟re here.‟

He was now the relaxed, courteous, smiling Matt I

knew so well. The superintendent‟s office was not
large, its volume being further reduced by bookcases
bursting with old zoological tomes and the bound
records of Belle Vue‟s long history. Shelves and walls
were cluttered with bleached skulls, bundles of exotic
bird feathers, dusty, stuffed animals and mounted
antelope horns.

At the far end in the light of a corner window was the

heavy mahogany desk. This morning, sitting on chairs
in front of him, were three middle-aged ladies. The
trio were of similar medium height and matronly
build. All were wearing dark coats and dark hats.

Matt steered me towards a chair next to his facing the

women across the desk and introduced me. „And these
ladies are . . .‟

„Mrs Schofield.‟

„Miss Ogden.‟

„Miss Butterworth.‟
They identified themselves crisply.

„Now the situation, David,‟ said Matt, „is that these

good ladies want action boi me . . . us . . . on a matter
that has me banjaxed. They see a problem with the
baboons that just isn‟t a problem.‟

Miss Butterworth, her round and curiously flattened

face with small black eyes resembling that of a
gingerbread man before baking, wagged a gloved
finger vigorously. „Mr Kelly, it really is outrageous for
you to pretend there is no cause for concern, serious
concern.‟ Her high piping voice was that of a child.
Her companions nodded, and crossing their arms
under their bosoms, hitched them upwards in unison,
a movement that seemed to signify their resolute
solidarity with the speaker.

„It‟s a matter of morals, of civilized behaviour,‟ she

continued, „of the effect these creatures will
undoubtedly have on children, and God-fearing, well-
brought-up adults.‟

„The rate-payers of Manchester,‟ chipped in Mrs

Schofield, thick-rimmed spectacles perched far down
her aquiline nose. „Wholesome Christian values under
siege as ever by the legions of permissiveness,‟ said
Miss Ogden, in a broad Lancashire accent, barely
opening her thin-lipped, perfectly straight slot of a
mouth.

„The Old Adam!‟ trilled Miss Butterworth cryptically.

„I‟m sorry, but you‟ll have to explain,‟ I said, looking at
Matt. „Is this a veterinary matter?‟ He made a sort of
grating noise and then clicked his teeth. „Oi think oi‟ll
leave it to the ladies to state the nature of their
grievance.‟

Miss Butterworth fumbled in her handbag and

brought out a small Bible. Clasping it in both hands
she directed her eyes, currants in a circle of pale
dough, at me. „It‟s a subject of considerable
embarrassment, not to say lewdness,‟ she began.
„There are monkeys in Belle Vue, baboons, and most
notably the mandrills, that should not be on show to
the public.‟

„Why not?‟ I asked.

Miss Ogden and Mrs Schofield were both looking

down fixedly at their crossed arms. „Because . . .
because . . they are, quite simply, obscene.‟ Heads still
down, her companion nodded in agreement.

„In what way can animals be obscene?‟ Matt lay back

in his chair, eyes closed and with a faint smile on his
lips. Obviously he‟d gone through all this earlier on.
„It is because they are blatantly displayed, rudely
displayed - for visitors, mothers, children,
impressionable youths, to see.‟

„But what exactly do you mean?‟ There was a faint

squawk from Matt, which I imagined was an
imperfectly suppressed guffaw. „It is a zoo‟s
responsibility to see that animals do not flaunt, do not
disgust the public with . . . with their pudenda.‟

„You mean their sex organs. And they don‟t, except for
man, wear clothes to cover them.‟

„We realize that, Dr Taylor. And I should emphasize

that my friends here and I are all animal-lovers, as
well as being workers for the Greater Manchester
Christian Crusade. We have cats. Miss Ogden has a
budgerigar. Our complaint, our insistence, is that
certain monkeys here flaunt their . . . things . . . in a
most promiscuous way, and that the zoo does nothing,
has done nothing over the months we have been
monitoring the lamentable state of affairs, and despite
several letters from the Crusade and Mrs Lumb, our
pastor, to attend to these creatures.‟

‘Attend to them?‟

„Yes. It cannot be normal for that monkey, the

mandrill I believe it is called, to have such an
excessively, artificially, red and blue face and red . . .
posterior.‟

„Quite!‟ murmured Miss Ogden. „And the way the

male mandrills and baboons . . . exhibit themselves . . .
in a condition of . . . excitement and . . . abuse
themselves so frequently, must indicate they are all
psychopathically abnormal. There‟s a black monkey
that is positively perverted! And all of their depraved
antics can be seen by unsuspecting visitors.'

„Shocking,‟ averred Mrs Schofield. „So we demand

that something be done,‟ continued Miss Butterworth.
„As the people responsible for the animals here, Mr
Kelly and you should take these unsavoury beasts off
display until you have treated the problem
successfully. I must say, Dr Taylor, that as veterinary
surgeon here you seem to have been wilfully lax in
neglecting this problem for so long.‟

She was of course, right-up to a point. Our baboons

enjoyed an uninhibited sex life, just like baboons
always have, and the male mandrills‟ startling colours,
perfectly normal in mature adults, did add a certain
dramatic quality to these handsome animals‟ frequent
priapic revels. There was indeed a Celebes black ape
(actually a kind of monkey) who hated men but
adored women, and would try to entice a female
visitor to stretch out her hand towards him by
winsome looks and friendly gestures, and who, when
she responded, would shoot an arm out through the
mesh and take hold of her sleeve while masturbating
with his other hand. He was rather odd, having been
raised originally as a pet and then given to the zoo
when he became a difficult adult. But he‟d never
harmed anyone.

Most people ignored or smiled at the animals‟

Rabelaisian behaviour; although there were some,
elderly ladies in the main, who seemed utterly
fascinated by what went on. Several came regularly
to eat sandwiches on one of the benches outside an
exhibit where such things could be guaranteed to
occur.

We had observed that in other parts of the zoo, the

couplings of the tapirs and hippopotamuses were also
popular among such silver-haired voyeuses.

One thing was certain - we could, and would, do

nothing about these displays of natural behaviour.
„I‟m afraid that I cannot go along with your attitude
towards these things, ladies,‟ I said. „If you think
monkeys are promiscuous, you ought to watch our
tortoises in summer or dolphins in one of the new
marinelands! Where would it all end if we began
trying to interfere in such areas of animal biology?‟
For one thing, we‟d have no more babies!‟ interrupted
Matt.

„And anyway, there‟s nothing I could do even if I

wanted to suppress their normal inclinations.‟
Actually that wasn‟t quite true - in individual cases of
sexual aggressiveness in males of various species, I
was beginning to use the sort of drugs administered to
sex criminals in order to diminish their libido.
Nowadays I regularly prescribe such reversible anti-
sex-hormone compounds for dangerously macho
dolphins, antelopes or even ostriches, if they go
around beating up their weaker brethren.

„Surely you could “ doctor” them?‟ suggested Miss

Ogden.

„We breed our animals, missus!‟ replied Matt, rather

irascibly.

„Well what about covering them up, or taking them

off-show during their lascivious moods?‟

„Cover them?‟

„Yes. Cover them. It‟s not impossible. The Crusade is

gratified to hear that in America a campaign has been
launched by like-minded Christians to cover up
domestic animals of the more flagrant sort.‟
Matt‟s face, no longer smiling, was now an interesting
shade of puce. He continually clicked his teeth and
fiddled with a peacock feather taken from a vase on
his desk. „Coverin‟ animals? what sort of malarkey is
that?‟ he muttered.

I‟d read about it; in 1963 the Society for Indecency to

(sic) Naked Animals was founded in the United States
to promote the wearing of knickers by bitches and
boxer shorts by dogs.

„Miss Butterworth!‟ I said. „This really is all a waste of

time. The idea of our monkeys wearing some sort of
pantaloons or being castrated or doped or put off
show is quite ridiculous. We, and the vast majority of
visitors, like our animals the way they are. If you can‟t
stand to see an animal naked in all its innocence and
glory, then why not stay away from the zoo?‟

For a short space of time the three women stared at us,

saying nothing. Then Miss Butterworth suddenly
waved her Bible at me. „The Good Book!‟ she
squeaked. „It's all in here about corruption and
lewdness and beasts. If you aren‟t prepared to put
things right here we, the Crusade, will mount a
campaign, write to the Evening News, warn our
brethren and the citizens of Manchester not to come to
the zoo. Purity must and will prevail. Mark my words,
you‟ll see the number of your visitors fall like the
Midianites.‟

„So be it,‟ I replied. „Do whatever you feel necessary.‟

„Oi‟m a Catholic, anyway,‟ said Matt.

Miss Butterworth glared at him and said, „That

explains it.‟

Which, of course, it didn‟t. There followed a long and

awkward silence with much bosom-hitching by the
women, who showed no signs of leaving.

Then, suddenly, Matt stood up; he was smiling gently

once again. He walked over to a chest of drawers in
which some of the zoo‟s curios were kept, and began
routing about. Presently he returned to his desk
carrying several objects. „You talkin‟ about animals‟
sexual ways, ladies, got me thinkin‟. In moi little
museum here of zoological oddities and the loike,
oi‟ve got some bits and pieces that moit interest you.‟

He picked up a small bleached bone. „D‟ye know

where this comes from, ladies? This here is the bone
from the penis of a wolf! Oi use it in me lectures.
Think of it, a penis with a real bone insoide!‟
Three pairs of eyes bulged as they regarded the head
keeper. „And this,‟ - he now brandished a large molar
tooth - „this is scientifically very interesting. It‟s a
tooth, one that David here took out from a
Przewalski‟s horse a couple of years back.

But it didn‟t come out of its mouth. Oh no! He found

it, would you believe, growing in one of its testicles. A
tooth tumour that had made one testicle as big as a
melon. Imagine! And here oi have . . .‟ I watched him
reach for the long, antique whip made from the
phallus of a sperm whale.‟

„That‟s quite enough, Mr Kelly,‟ cried Miss

Butterworth in a surprisingly loud treble, „quite
enough. I can see that unholy vulgarity permeates the
fabric of this place. Come along Marjorie, Ruth.‟ She
rose. Her companions followed.

Matt hurried to show them out.

When he had closed the door behind them we looked

at one another, and began to laugh like unhinged
hyenas.
DAVID TAYLOR established his unique globe-
trotting veterinary practice over twenty years ago; he
has since become the subject of a BBC television
series. His home is in England.