Google paid off on that occasion, but I’d had a leisurely half-hour lunchbreak in which to do my research and preparation. The next occasion it came to my rescue I was not afforded the same luxury.
I’ve often been asked what the strangest animal I’ve ever seen in the consulting room would be. There are a few contenders – a Cuban tree frog, a sugar glider and a skunk would probably make the top ten – but there was one consultation that will forever stick in my memory: the armadillo.
It had been a regular Friday in March. I’d started my day at 6 a.m. on the middle of Exmoor reading a tuberculin test for a herd of sixty cattle. It was a cold morning and we were working in a small dilapidated farmyard miles from any other human habitation. The single intradermal comparative cervical tuberculin test (SICCT) is the standard TB test for cattle. Dating back a hundred years, it involves injecting the skin on the animal’s neck with avian and bovine tuberculin, then returning seventy-two hours later to inspect the injection site: if the bovine site has swollen more than the avian site it is highly suggestive that the animal has the disease. This was my return visit, and I knew that the second part of the test was not going to be completely straightforward; it never was with the Exmoor cattle. This was an eclectic herd of year-old animals, which had been bought from market as calves and barely known any human interaction from the day they stepped off the lorry. All were hybrid breeds, mostly from a Friesian–Hereford mother crossed with a beef bull such as a Charolais, Aberdeen Angus, Belgian Blue, Simmental or Limousin. It was the Limousin crosses that always caused the problem. Wild and liable to spook, it only required one of those in a herd to set the rest of the group off. I had spent enough time chasing flighty cattle across fields, marshes and moorland to know that it was always them leading the charge. While my Tuesday visit had gone smoothly enough, the cattle were now primed, wary of the cattle crush – and of us.
As we let them out of the barn into the orchard, the leading steer told me all I needed to know. Head up, eyes alert, snorting as he trotted at a fast pace, he was wild and agitated. In that moment I knew this job, which could have been over and done with in half an hour, was going to take several hours, and require Land Rovers and quad bikes to chase the herd over the moor. Sure enough, the steer immediately led the charge, jumping and circling in the orchard, looking for any weakness in the gate, wall or hedge. After a few moments he found it, and headed for the 4-foot gate separating the orchard from the field and moorland beyond. Making a poor attempt to jump the gate, his back quarters landed on the gate, buckling it, but his momentum was enough to snap the bail twine that had fixed it to a rotten post, and so the gate was dragged 10 metres into the field before the steer finally cast it off as he bolted for freedom. With no gate, and the field and freedom so inviting, the rest of the herd didn’t waste any time following their comrade, leaving the four of us standing in the orchard looking on at the mud being churned up behind them as they disappeared into the distance.
Three hours later I left the farm, job done, but now running late for my next visits.
The rest of the day’s visits passed less energetically: a calf with pneumonia, a few calf castrations, a lame horse with a foot abscess, and then a lambing which turned out to be a caesarean. Since my days as a vet student I had always loved lambing time, and to bring two little lambs into the world and then see them up and suckling Mum, their tails wiggling like crazy, was such a happy sight. Sadly, though, the economics didn’t always stack up, and so we were rarely called upon to assist, but this was a good ewe, and the farmer had been keen, so I had done the caesarean and the two healthy lambs justified the decision.
With my large-animal visits completed, I raced back to the surgery to start my small-animal consultations at 4 p.m. It had been a non-stop day, shovelling a sandwich into my mouth as I drove between my visits, and only giving my dog Max a quick few minutes’ exercise down a farm track. When he gave me a look of disgust I promised him a walk on the beach after work as I coaxed him back into the car.
Arriving back at the surgery, I saw it was 3.45 p.m.: only enough time to clean myself up, grab a cup of tea and my white coat, and then head into my consulting room. I looked over my list of bookings to mentally prepare myself and see if there were any ongoing cases that needed more attention. I was fully booked with consultations running from 4 to 6.30 p.m. Each slot was ten minutes long, so there were fifteen in all. An initial glance told me it was a fairly routine list: half a dozen vaccinations, a lame dog, a couple of vomiting/diarrhoea cases, a cat with a skin irritation … I scanned the list more closely, to see if there were any clients or animals I recognized. The 5.10 p.m. appointment caught my attention; according to the computer, the client was called Mr Smith and the patient was called ‘Armadillo’.
I’d come across some odd animal names in my time. In fact, we used to play a game at vet school, in our final year on rotations, to see if we could identify the animal breed by the name its owner had given it. ‘Charlie’ was going to be a black Labrador, destined for the orthopaedics department; ‘Rocky’ would be a boxer coming in to see the cardiologist; and ‘Tiny’ was obviously a dachshund, off to see the neurologist. ‘Armadillo’ was a new one for me. I clicked on his client card to bring it up. Was this a dog or a cat, I thought? Looking through the information, it seemed that this was a new client with a new animal, and all it told me was that Mr Smith was bringing Armadillo in to be microchipped.
The first half of my session proceeded uneventfully. As I bid farewell to my 5 p.m. appointment, I couldn’t help but notice the client who sat clutching a blue cat box; he had taken up the corner seat, which happened to be in my direct line of sight. He must have been in his mid-fifties, with a mat of white hair and a slightly unkempt bushy beard. He was hunched over the cat box, holding it in a most circumspect manner. I’d seen all sorts of human behaviours within the waiting room – the relaxed, the nervous, the reluctant, the protective – but there was something slightly different about this gentleman which I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
When I looked at my computer screen, my 5.10 p.m. appointment – ‘Armadillo Smith’ – was highlighted to signal their arrival, and of course Mr Smith turned out to be the gentleman in the corner. Standing up with his precious cargo, I was surprised at how heavy it seemed. My logical assumption was that the cat box contained a cat, so if it was coming in to be microchipped, the chances were it was a kitten, and should therefore weigh less than a kilo. The way he appeared to be struggling with the box, however, suggested it was closer to ten times that weight. Maybe it was a rescue cat that he had adopted? But that didn’t compute, because in that case it should have already been chipped. I sketched a scenario in my mind: a morbidly obese cat that was being killed with kindness as the sole companion of an elderly person who had just died. Maybe this was the son who had now taken charge of the cat, and his first duty was to get it chipped. No wonder he was precious about it: the last link to a deceased parent. If my assumption was correct, this might well be more complicated than a simple microchip. I played through the range of health issues that may have inadvertently gone by the board: fleas, worms, skin issues, dental disease, diabetes, arthritis were all possibilities.