By comparison, the third giraffe proved to be a very straightforward and uneventful affair. Returning to the skies, the helicopter pilot quickly relocated the bachelor herd and Derik darted another one of them with ease. As luck would have it, the capture team was able to bring him down on one of the tracks so we were all quickly on hand to administer the Diprenorphine, and soon had him loaded onto another trailer.
‘That’s how easy they can be,’ Bjorn commented as we strolled back to the trailer, jubilant with our success. ‘But they seldom are. We’ve been lucky today, very lucky. But a successful day is still a great day. It’s time to celebrate, time for a beer!’
As I sat there quaffing my Black Label, I reflected on the day’s events. It had gone well; incredibly well, in fact and, despite the odd tricky moment, we had all got through it unscathed. I cast my eyes across the Afrikaner contingent. I could see the delight and relief on the team’s faces as they gulped down their liquid reward. What was this life that they had signed up to? The barometer of success was gauged by the human and animal participants having survived the ordeal; completing the job was an added bonus. If everyone was safe, then ‘Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die!’ If not … well, you just had to hope for a better day tomorrow. Fearless positivity was the formula.
I silently gazed into my beer speculating on the experiences that made up their portfolio of capture tales, suddenly envious of their adventurous lives, where the conservation and protection of a species was top of the agenda, far away from selfishly climbing the ladder of self-importance. There is a beauty to working with animals that humbles even the most arrogant of men and nowhere is this truer than when dealing with wildlife. These were Afrikaner men in every sense of the stereotype, and yet there was a gentleness, a compassion, a real humility to them. They were passionate about their Africa and their animals, but they knew that the very animals they strove to protect could tomorrow bring about their downfall. Their life might seem glamorous for a month or two, but the reality was a tough, tiring, unpredictable and physically demanding existence that very few were cut out for.
I felt privileged to have briefly shared that life, but I knew I couldn’t sustain it for very long, and my respect for them grew all the stronger for it.
Giraffes: fast facts
Giraffa camelopardalis: The giraffe
Distribution: Scattered across Africa, from Chad in the north, South Africa to the south, Niger in the west and Somalia to the east.
Description: Tallest terrestrial mammal and largest ruminant. One species with nine different sub-species.
Names: The male is called a ‘bull’, the female a ‘cow’, and their young a ‘calf’. A group of giraffes is called a ‘tower’.
Life span: About 25 years.
Habitat: Savannahs and woodland.
Diet: Giraffes are browsers, eating the leaves, fruits and flowers of woody plants, primarily acacia species, at heights that most other herbivores cannot reach.
Gestation: 400–460 days.
Height: 1.7–2 metres at birth, growing up to 5.7 metres as adults.
Weight: 65 kg at birth, reaching 800–1,200 kg as adults.
Growth: Mothers raise calves in groups called ‘calving pools’. They are weaned at about 1 year, and reach sexual maturity at 4–5 years old.
Anatomy: Giraffes have the longest nerve in the world: the left recurrent laryngeal nerve, which innervates the left side of the larynx, is about 2 metres long. To enable them to pump blood up their 2.5-metre-long neck, their heart weighs up to 11 kg, measuring about 60 cm long with a muscle wall 7.5 cm thick. Their network of blood vessels at the base of the skull, the so-called ‘rete mirabile’ system, regulates blood flow to the brain, restricting it when they lower their head, and facilitating it when they raise it. The skin in their lower legs is abnormally thick and tight to prevent blood pooling in the limbs. As ruminants, they must regurgitate their food to aid digestion, which means the oesophageal muscle has to be incredibly strong to allow food to travel 3.5 metres from rumen to mouth. A giraffe’s intestines are more than 70 metres long.
Body temperature: 38–39 °C.
Predators: Adults are rarely preyed on because of their size and dangerously powerful kick, but they are still vulnerable to lions, leopards and wild dogs, and to crocodiles when they drink.
Conservation: Giraffe numbers have dropped by 40 per cent in the last thirty years, with only about 97,500 now left in the wild. For this reason, in 2016 the IUCN categorized giraffes as ‘vulnerable’, and the West African and Rothschild sub-species as ‘endangered’. This has been mainly due to habitat loss or degradation as well as poaching. For more information on how you can help protect this beautiful animal visit www.giraffe-conservation.org.
3
SWAN
‘His own image: no longer a dark, grey bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it hatched from a swan’s egg.’
Hans Christian Andersen
It was my first weekend on call since qualifying. I had been one of the lucky ones compared with many of my peer group, and I had been well nurtured as a new graduate by my practice. Not wanting to throw me in the deep end until they felt I was ready, I had been kept off the night and weekend on-call rota. Now two months qualified, my time had come.
‘Jon, we’re going to put you on call this weekend,’ Martin had said on Wednesday. ‘I’ll back you up so if you have any problems, concerns or queries, call me, but you should be fine.’
It was reassuring to have a safety net, I’d heard horror stories from some of my friends who had been put on call the very first night of their first job, only to find that, when they needed assistance, their boss had gone out for the evening and switched off their phone. Nevertheless, it was a daunting prospect. The usual filtering out of the more challenging calls that occurred during weekdays would be removed so I could end up with anything, from a horse with severe colic to a cow caesarean. Being pushed beyond my comfort zone was certainly not a new experience for me. It had happened every step of the way through vet school, and now as a new graduate I hoped it would continue through my career, since that is the only true way to learn, grow and improve. However, coping with being on call was the final hurdle in the transition from student to professional, so as Thursday came and went, and then Friday progressed, I felt the nervous anticipation of what was to come in the sixty-two hours between 6.30 p.m. on Friday and 8.30 a.m. on Monday.
The weekend turned out to be a busy one, kicking off at 7.30 on Friday night. A client had come home to find her horse with a large gaping wound on the inside of his upper right leg after getting caught in a barbed-wire fence. She had managed to bring the horse into his dilapidated stable next to her house, but she was convinced that the wound needed stitching. It certainly did. In fact, I was so daunted by the size of it that I decided I required Martin’s assistance, only to discover, deep in this valley on the edge of Exmoor, that there was no phone reception. There was nothing for it: I would have to stitch it on my own. Three hours later, cold, tired and achy after a protracted period bent over between the horse’s front legs, having painstakingly sewn over a hundred stitches by the light of a very dim torch as a howling gale tore through the gaping holes in the rustic wooden shed, the job was completed. The owner was incredibly patient, kind and grateful, and so, on leaving the farm, I had felt a triumphant sense of satisfaction at having dealt with the situation on my own.