4
SNOW LEOPARD
‘They call the snow leopard the ghost cat. Never lets itself be seen… Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.’
Sean O’Connell, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
It had been a great weekend, celebrating my brother’s birthday, in the midst of the manic final few months of vet school – squeezing in the last few weeks of ‘seeing practice’, spending every spare moment reading through one of the twelve ring-bound files of notes accumulated over the last five years, or practising any one of a number of ‘Day One skills’ on the stuffed animals in the practical lab. Long days, late nights, and I was feeling the strain. So to have an opportunity for a brotherly get-together was just the thing to help me unwind. Beer and curry while watching Where Eagles Dare was our usual preference – invariably accompanied, much to my sister-in-law’s irritation, by our word-perfect chorus of almost every line. On this occasion, however, the unanimous decision was to watch an episode of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series, the one that featured the first intimate images of a snow leopard ever filmed in the wild. We all sat mesmerized by the extraordinary footage of this beautiful and rare cat, hunting with such stealth and agility along the sheer cliff-faces of the Himalayas.
Fast-forward a year, and I was working in a mixed practice in rural Devon, with the vast majority of my work taken up with TB testing, farm visits, small-animal consulting and routine operations. It was proving a steep learning curve, at once exhilarating and exhausting, but I loved it and rapidly found myself energized by the variety of patients I was fortunate to work with and help. The fact that one of our clients was a wildlife park, where I was occasionally asked to go and see a sea lion, lemur, capuchin monkey or raccoon was a real privilege.
Over the course of the nine months since I had qualified, I had been to the wildlife park a handful of times, so I knew the layout fairly well, but somehow I had failed to clock that their collection of animals included two snow leopards. That was until my colleague, Dave, called me one morning from our other surgery.
‘What have you got on today? Can you come and help me at the wildlife park? I’ve got to operate on their fifteen-year-old snow leopard Amira. She’s got a wound in her front left armpit.’
I was immediately transported back to that footage in the Himalayas, to the mystery and majesty of this beautiful animal. Of course, this was not the wild – a far cry from it – but to be presented with an opportunity to work with and care for such a beautiful creature was momentarily stunning.
‘. . . Absolutely,’ I replied eventually. ‘When do you need me?’
‘I’m consulting this morning till twelve, so the plan is to do it at about one. Can you bring the portable anaesthetic machine? Will it fit in your car? I can bring the rest of what we need.’
The portable anaesthetic machine comprised a trolley carrying an oxygen cylinder with a set of pipes that fed the gas through a vaporizer to allow an anaesthetic combination to be delivered to the patient. It was quite a bulky and heavy piece of kit, but with a bit of rearranging of my car, it wouldn’t be a problem.
‘I’ve got a couple of visits this morning,’ I said, ‘but I’ll come back and pick it up before I head over to meet you.’
‘Perfect, thanks. See you at one. I’ll call if there’s any change.’
My two morning visits were to a pet pig that needed stitching up after a disagreement with the barbed-wire fence she was trying to crawl under, and then to a bull whose hooves needed a trim. The pig required a couple of sutures; the bull required a dose of sedatives, the recruitment of all available manpower to rope him down, and an uncomfortable time lying at a very awkward angle in dung-soaked straw as I administered his strenuously unwanted manicure. By the time these two visits were done, it was midday, and I headed straight back to the practice, loaded the anaesthetic machine onto the back seat of my car, and drove to meet Dave at the wildlife park.
We arrived at virtually the same time, and had a brief chat about our plan before heading to reception to find Tony, the head keeper, who told us Amira was suffering from a burst abscess in the armpit on her front left leg.
‘I’m not sure what’s caused it,’ he said, ‘but she’s quite lame with it.’
‘Could we take a look at her first,’ Dave asked, ‘and then decide whether we need to anaesthetize her for a closer examination? Where is she?’
‘She’s still in her outdoor enclosure. There’s a run from that into her house, with a cage we can trap her in. She’s trained to go through it, so we can administer any injections she might need.’
‘Great! So we shouldn’t need to dart her. That makes life a lot easier.’
Following Tony through the staff room, and out the back of the main building, we found ourselves among the melee of punters who were just beginning their exploration of the park. In contrast to their meanderings, Tony was very purposeful in his direction. We passed the macaws and giant tortoises, wallabies and lemurs, through a beautiful oriental garden, and then reached a large chain-linked enclosure that was about 25 feet high. A 3-foot-high fence in front of it kept the public at a distance, and signs warned people against climbing them. A plaque mounted on the fence indicated the enclosure’s inhabitants: two snow leopards named Amira and Sasha. Looking into the enclosure, it was at first difficult to identify any occupants at all among the thick foliage, logs and boulders. Tony, however, spotted Sasha immediately, perched on a wooden platform 15 feet up, in the far corner. After a further few seconds he found Amira, who was hiding between two boulders in the other corner of the enclosure. As we stood there watching them, Jason, the keeper in charge of the snow leopards, came over.
‘Can you call Amira over?’ Tony said after making the introductions. ‘We just want to observe her first before we do anything.’
The four of us climbed over the fence and Jason softly started calling Amira over. Alert to the sound of his voice, which was usually associated with food, Sasha silently and effortlessly jumped off her platform and headed straight over to us. Amira was more cautious, initially just focusing her attention in our direction, but after some gentle encouragement from Jason, she stood and gingerly walked over to us, clearly uncomfortable on her front left leg.
‘She’s pretty sore, isn’t she?’ Tony commented.
‘How long has she been lame?’ I asked Jason.
‘In hindsight probably two days. She’s not quite been herself, and she’s been spending most of her time in one spot, which is unusual for her, but it was most noticeable this morning.’
As she came closer, we could see some streaks of dried blood that had run down the inside of her leg. Dave and I crouched down to get a better view of her underside, but her immensely dense, thick fur obstructed our view of the injury.
‘Looking at the colour of those bloody streaks down her leg,’ said Dave, ‘I agree it’s probably an abscess, but she’s clearly quite sore on it, so I think it’s best if we knock her out to look at it properly.’
‘I agree,’ said Jason. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on with her and I don’t want it to progress to something worse.’
‘Where’s the run with the cage?’ asked Dave. ‘Will you be able to get her in without Sasha?’
‘It’s just over there.’ Jason pointed to the left front corner. We could see a wire-mesh cuboid, 2 by 2 by 15 feet in size, connecting to a small whitewashed building on the other side of the enclosure. ‘It shouldn’t be too much of a problem.’
‘Great. Well, Jon and I need to get our equipment, so if you could coax Amira into the cage, we’ll go and get what we need.’