By Luke Gamble15/08/2007
Luke Gamble writes about his experience working with the India Project for Animals and Nature (IPAN)
The jeep was a master-class in road worthiness; both door handles were snapped off, the consistently whining fan belt screamed in pain with every gear change, neither the handbrake nor the windscreen wipers worked, there didn’t seem ot be a definable biting point on the clutch and neither of us were hedging an bets on the reliability of the indicators. As I pondered our predicament, I risked a panicked glance at Clive who flashed me a wicked, toothy grin, just as we rounded the corner to face the oncoming glare of two sets of dazzling headlights about a hundred metres ahead.
Two buses run parallel in the road towards us and the gap between them seemed to be about half the width of our vehicle. Veering to either the left or right wasn’t an option as the edge of the concrete lining the road abruptly ended with an undercarriage ripping two foot drop. Realising that choices were limited and time even more so, I leant hard on the horn and with the sudden onset of a nervous twitch, I half closed my eyes and aimed for the diminishing gap ahead.
The shrill blast of the horn stung through the night air but its piercing drill was smothered by the sound of Clive’s manic laughter as we somehow passed between the two coaches with millimetres to spare on either side. I have no idea how we made it but the boys who rode with us in the back of the truck hardly batted an eyelid during the whole life threatening episode. They had seen it all before and cheerfully informed us it was normal on this notoriously dangerous road between Bangalore and Combarore in Southern India. Sevar, a forest tribal who was hanging onto the back of the jeep with one hand and balancing fifteen boxes and my pack on the roof with the other, giggled as he informed me in pigeon English that we still had the hill section to come with 36 hairpin bends in a two mile stretch of downhill, on this epic three hour journey. It was definitely the wrong time of day to be drenched in a cold nervous sweat.
Composing myself, I offered Clive a quick smile in return, hardly daring to take my eyes off the pot hole ridden road in front of ut. I suspected that far from being nervous, he was probably looking forward to taking his turn at the wheel. I have worked with a lot of South Africans, many of whom are now firm friends, and for the most part they seem to have a crazy streak with a firm attitude to never give up and live every experience to the max. Tough, adventurous and always up for a challenge – generally the more extreme the better – typified Clive’s attitude to life. There are few better companions I could have had watching my back whilst teetering on the edge of the comfort zone of safety and sanity. Yes, I though to myself, there was no doubt Clive was relishing the prospect of driving us back – and he was welcome.
We’d worked together on a couple of trips before, and having previously shared adventures of this nature I was very glad that he’d agreed to come along on this whirlwind tour around a small part of southern India. Our reasons for being there were due to the registered UK charity Worldwide Veterinary Service (WVS). A group of feral dogs had badly savaged a respected doctor in a remote part of India. The doctor was very influential in her local community as she and her husband owned local hospital in which she was subsequently hospitalised for four weeks post attack; three of which were spent in intensive care.
The local township decided that action was needed and set aside some funds to pay per head of dog killed and collected. Local groups of men were unleashed on a brutal mission armed with large wooden sticks and a bundle of intra thoracic injections of MgS04. However, there were a few problems they hadn’t anticipated. Firstly and unsurpisingly, feral dogs are hard to catch. Years of living on the streets have made them quick and vicious when threatened. The men hunting the dogs were clearly not dog lovers and the savvy feral packs had them marked from the start mening that the men were only able to catch puppies, friendly old dogs and the odd injured stray but not making an impact on the most likely culprits who initiated the attack on the doctor.
Secondly the dogs they did manage to remove were quickly being replaced by new ones of a wider and more dangerous nature. These dogs were previously on the periphery of the towns, kept from moving in by the tight territorial pack structure that was now being eroded. Seizing their opportunity to establish their own ‘patch’ the new arrivals were also bringing in distemper and rabies, exacerbating the problemm and posing even greater danger to the public.
The third problem was the final straw that resulted in WVS sending a team. The men were piling the bodies of the dead dogs by the side of the road and the rich Western tourists who were visiting the tigers in nearby forest nature reserve didn’t like it. Piles of dead dogs smell bad, and it wasn’t appreciated as to how much rubbish and waste the friendly old dogs were reponsible for recycling in the slums. They cleared up all the chicken carcasses, all the offal and waste; they also removed all the rats. From an aesthetic point of view, and a public health angle – the current strategy was damaging the tourism to the area.
After receiving a plea from an American animal rights group, WVS had organised a team of three vets to go over for a month and help the charity IPAN (India Project for Animals and Nature) implement a sustainable neutering programme. The team was to teach two Indian vets how to spay, generate a lot of PR and publicity for IPAN and raise the public awareness about what proactive steps were being taken to tackle the problem and stem the tide of the dog massacres. Unfortunately all three vets had pulled out at the last minute and Clive and I had been asked to head over at very short notice for this ‘emergency’. The downside was that neither of us could spare more than a week so the gloves were off and our seven days was proving to be a mission and a half.
Nigel’s full name is Nigel Otter. He is an Anglo-Indian and he runs IPAN with an unfailing work ethic coupled with a fevoured dedication to animal welfare. Managing the IPAN shelter on a shoestring budget can’t be easy; the organisation lives hand to mouth day by day, yet Nigel does it with the utmost humility and moral regard for both animals and people. I’ve never met anyone quite like him and if there is a real life modern day Doctor Doolittle – then Nigel is he.
His twelve ‘boys’ are part of what is effectively a family unit and a wilder mix of character would be hard to find. Nigel used to be a cattle farmer until about a decade ago, but his compassion for the Indian wildlife and stray animals meant that he was drawn into running a shelter that was initally understaffed and in desperate need of his help and expertise. It is very rare to come across someone who has such an innate ability to handle animals. Whether it be a frightened, agressive dog, an injured monkey or difficult horse, Nigel moves from beast to beast with a reassuring confidence, and quite literally has the animal eating out of his hand in minutes.
All creatures are cared for at the shelter and it is a truly remarkable refuge with a mix of geese, buffaloes, donkeys, horses, monkeys rescued from circuses and of course fifty or so dogs, littering the buildings and paddocks.
We had arrived only five days previously and as we journeyed along, I pondered the cases we had seen so far. After a 28 hour flight (joys of last minute budget travel) we had grabbed a couple of hours kip before being asking to look at some of the animals in the shelter and the surrounding villages. The schedule for the week was fairly unforgiving with a main focus on the dog neutering, but the plan was to treat some of the villagers sicks animals first while we recovered after the long journey. It was to be a whirlwind affair as time was not on our side and we only had two and a half days set aside to actually do the neutering. The key was to generate as much publicity and educational material as possible in the town, and it was destined to be a high profile mission as local TV and newspapers were poised to chart our every move.
Clive is an excellent small animal vet, he’s also very up to speed with exotics and zoo work (his wife, Jane, is a zoo vet) and dealing with hard situations faced with limited facilities and equipment doesn’t faze him for a second. He is also great at teaching and having a great deal more patience than myself, we decided on the flight over that the Indian vets would underfo his unforgiving style of tuition during our stay and he would deal with any of the complex surgical cases that came our direction. Mr role was to crack on through the basic bitch spays and deal with any farm animal or equine problems that the local villagers were having, so within hours Clive went off to try to sort out a gangrenous snake bite on a vicious German Shepard, and I was asked to look at a collapsed cow belonging to one of the villagers.
Clive’s dog had already lost the lower part of its back leg and the huge rotting stump that remained had been smeared with a liberal helping of Tamarack to mask the smell. The operation required was not for the faint hearted and Clive started work immediately assisted by ‘The Doctor’, the trainee Indian vet who was based at the sanctuary. Rigging up a drip with the usual liberal mix of anaesthetic drugs such as rompun, ketamine and diazepam, Clive began to resect the rotting femur and oedematous remains of the leg with the help of his new assistant.
It transpired that during Clive’s two hour op, I also had a leg problem to sort out. The collapsed cow had slipped in a water trough and couldn’t get up. It became very obvious of the economic dependence on which the family placed upon this cow as they immediately crowded round me on arrivial, pointing at her stomach and saying ‘please’. The problem was that she was about eight months pregnant and her back right leg was snapped abover her stifle joint.
I was struck by the complexity of the dilemma and despite everyone’s misplaced belief I would somehow be able to fix things, my magic was running dry. Indian’s don’t give up and nothing is a problem, however the cow was in significant pain, the calf was probably too young to risk a caesarean on her and the family clearly didn’t consider euthanasia on ’sacred’ beast.
The ‘boys’ came to my rescue. My cunning plan was to rig up a splint of bamboo and this involved nipping off into the forest with a tiny axe and finding some. Enthusiastically wielding the weapon, I quickly proved to be as useful as a chocolate teapot, and with surpising speed, a couple of Nigel’s boys very politely removed all sharp implements out of my reach and disappeared into the trees, returning in a matter of minutes with a six inch diameter, fifteen foot section of bamboo. Splicing up accordingly, we finally managed to rig up a two sided splint with bamboo and did our best to stabilise the cow’s leg.
It wasn’t a masterpiece of orthopaedic intervention but the family were desperate for the calf inside her and the plan was that if we could just stabilise it enough so she could weight bear, there might be the chance she would be able to get by.
Fate wasn’t on our side. Upon hoisting her up, my heart sank as I realised that her other leg was also irreparably damaged. The ligaments in the other stifle were torn and no matter what sort of support we tried to giveher there was no chance she would be able to stand.
The family were distraught and amongst tears of hysteria, it became apparent they had decided to cut their loses and started to drag her into the back of an old keep in order to take her to the butchers about 4km away.
It wasn’t necessarily the best bargain of my life but while I could appreciate the family had no choice and needed to get something for her, I couldn’t let the old girl be treated like that; so flourishing a thousand rupees (about £12) and loading the cow up with some pain relief, I returned to the sanctuary to inform Clive I’d bought my first Indian cow.
Clive took the news fairly well considering he had just emerged from an epic surgery and looked exhausted. The dog had survived the op but was toxic and would need agressive antibiosis and fluid therapy to pull her through. The last thing he needed was to be dragged off to help me move a sick cow back to the sanctuary but he said it would be not problem to lend a hand as long as we could find a cold beer when we got back. I decided it prudent not to mention straight away that my new acquisiton had two broken legs.
Nigel rallied the boys and before we knew it, he had organised a big truck to facilitate the 1km journey. Having heavily sedated the cow, we gently drove her back and pondered our next move. Euthanasia was clearly the kindest thing but there was also the faintest chance that we could save the calf and so we decided to do a bush caesar. Remarkably Nigel had a rusty old captive bolt, which we managed to service and after a bit of oiling and reassembly, we poised to shoot her cut the calf out within seconds. The odds were stacked against us and even if the calf survived such a brutal entrance to the world; it would be premature and there was no available colostrum to help it through.
But Indian cows are not like the ones back home, and nature can prove amazingly resilient so it was with great joy that I pulled little Megan from the cow’s heaving abdomen and she lived. A large part of this down to the nursing care of Rebecca, a second year Bristol vet student who had joined IPAN for some voluntary work experience and worked very hard to ensure Megan had a good chance in life. Contemplating my new acquisition, it occurred to me that for once I’d made a good deal because although very sadly the cow had been shot, her baby was a little heifer calf and undoubtedly worth at least double what I had paid for her Mum!
The rest of the week didn’t let up for a second. We neutered 65 bitches in two and a half days once we arrived at the town, thanks to the diligence and reliabilty of the catching team and although we had one surgical case we had to go back into, nothing died under the injectable anaesthetic and we even made Indian local TV, Fame of the highest order in Combarore!
IPAN are launching a paravet training programme this year and WVS require experienced vets to join teams heading over there every four months to assist. The programme is both livestock and small animal based so if any vets reading this fancy a trip, WVS would be very grateful for your help. IPAN is also one of the training trip destinations (there are lots of these trips all over Europe as well) whereby four new graduates/senior students participate on a trip alongside two experienced vets and two qualified nurses. If you ever find your career needs a bit of idealism injected into it – have a look at the up and coming programmes on the website at www.wvs.org.uk and get involved!
