Your Pet's Best Friend

Custom Artwork from the past

Once upon a time, there was a very talented young artist named Em Naughton.  Em had a lot more talent than she did money for veterinary services, and so we worked out a deal.  She did these for me more than 30 years ago, but they're still good.

At that time, I was trying to get a brass quintet going.  We had all five instruments (two trumpets, French horn, tuba, and me), but could never get more than four of them to rehearsal at the same time.  I was playing the trombone part on my baritone horn (which is much like a euphonium, which is much like a horn that wants to grow up to be a tuba, but sounds like a trombone, range-wise).  I might have been able to recruit a trombone player, but then I wouldn't have gotten to play.  And it was MY idea.

Brass quintets sometimes have cool names; sometimes the ensemble is very cool, but the name is pretty vanilla: St. Louis Brass Quintet, Canadian Brass.  Since we had such a hard time getting together and my instrument was a little non-standard, I coined the name Irregular Brass (nothing to do with digestion, thank you).

Em did this logo for me, and I put it on a T-shirt, which I still sometimes wear to Municipal Band rehearsal in the summer time.

I have always been a big fan of the Indiana Jones movies (at least the 1st and 3rd) and "Temple of Doom" hadn't been out long when I asked Em to do this one for me.  While I hadn't forgotten about it, it had been in storage for a very long time.  I once used it as "opening credits" for a video about the clinic that I sent to a management consultant.  Other than that, it's been in a closet. Now it's out in the open, or at least it's in my office for my own enjoyment.

How much do I enjoy it?

This much.

Butch the Lion at the Hayti Zoo

Hayti had a zoo? Improbable as that seems today, it really did. When I was a kid, I loved nothing better than going to a zoo. I was always fascinated by animals and loved seeing them. It didn’t occur to me then what their life in a cage must be like, and my enjoyment was unalloyed. It seemed to me that every town should have a zoo, so it seemed to me that Hayti was on the right track and Kennett was behind the times.

A trip to the Hayti zoo was a treat, even though it couldn’t compare to the Memphis zoo. Still, you could see some monkeys, some deer, raccoons, and you could smell the skunk, though you couldn’t see him. There was a black bear named Susie. A sign on her cage said “Susie eats Wonder Bread”. My dad said the bakery probably donated the stale bread they couldn’t sell.

And there was Butch the lion. That’s how it all started, I’m told, but my knowledge of the beginning is all second hand -- before my time. My story comes at the end.

What I’ve heard is that a man acquired the lion as a cub and kept it as a pet. He used to carry it around with him in his truck. When it got too big for him to keep, the good people of Hayti somehow got the idea for a zoo. In 1958 Butch became the property of the City of Hayti. I was told that the original owner would visit him and wrestle with him. I also heard that Dr. Moore, the veterinarian, had his shirt ripped off by Butch.

Folks say you could hear him roaring all over town, and from Butch the lion the town of Hayti grew a zoo.

Fast forward to September of 1979. It was my second year out of veterinary school, and I had moved home after my first year spent in Pocahontas, Arkansas. I got a call from the city of Hayti asking if I would take a look at Butch, as he wasn’t doing well.

In those days, we had the idea that a veterinarian ought to be ready and willing to look at any living creature under man’s dominion. Referral to a specialist wasn’t a ready option in our rural area, so “stepping out of your comfort zone” was part of the territory on a regular basis. And we’re talking about working on a lion – how cool is that? Of course I would take a look at Butch.

When I arrived at the park in Hayti, I met Vee Holland. Vee had been the city employee who cared for the zoo until he retired. He continued to take care of the zoo without pay in his retirement. The city wasn’t exactly flush with cash, and they weren’t investing in the zoo. In fact, they city council had proposed closing it a few years earlier. This was politically unpopular. I’m not sure if there were mobs with torches and wooden pitchforks, but I heard they hung the mayor in effigy. At any rate, the city government backed down in a hurry from the “save our lion” folks. Despite budget woes and the impracticality of maintaining the zoo, getting rid of Butch was political suicide. Ignoring his health was getting unhealthy, too.

One investment that they had made was to put a chain link fence around the building to separate Butch from his admirers. Butch lived in a concrete block building that could be heated in winter, and had a fan for summer. There was a repurposed jail cell on the front where he could get fresh air and be admired. When I had visited as a kid, you could stand at the cage bars and stick your hand right inside, had you been so foolish. I knew a girl who got spattered with lion urine as she was admiring Butch. Spectators were safe from that now.

Butch was supposed to be about 22 years old (which I learned was pretty old for a lion in any zoo, even a big metropolitan zoo). He was very thin, and lethargic. There were some skin tumors on his face. Vee told me that he wouldn’t eat anything but beef kidneys. He offered Butch other things, but he had no interest in anything else. There was a packing house in Wardell at that time and Vee drove there himself to get them. They supplied the kidneys at no charge, which was a win for the city, but hardly a balanced diet for Butch.

As you might guess, we hadn’t spent any time on lion medicine in veterinary school. Fortunately, I had two good resources. As a student, I had spent two months with Dr. R.E. Hertzog, who cared for the animals in the Kansas City Swope Park Zoo. The veterinarian in residence at the Memphis Zoo was Dr. Mike Douglas, a native of Senath, and he was always happy to help me when I had an exotic animal question. They helped me put together a plan of treatment.

I was surprised that I couldn’t just present the treatment plan and estimated cost. I did that, but then they had to have a special city council meeting to approve it. After the earlier brouhaha, nobody wanted to be the point man on a decision affecting Butch. As Benjamin Franklin said, “We must all hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.” Nobody wanted to be hung, not even in effigy.

Vee was really glad to be doing something for Butch. He was very attached to him. He cared for all the animals (which was Butch, Susie and two monkeys now), but Butch was special.

 

 

 

 

Butch would drink out of a garden hose for him, and Vee would reach through the bars to pet him. Vee encouraged me to pet Butch, but I let discretion be the better part of valor.

 

 

We started treatment with anti-inflammatories for his arthritis, nutritional supplements to balance his diet, and anabolic steroids to stimulate appetite and weight gain. When it was time to give him injections, I used a syringe on the end of a pole.

Butch responded to treatment. His appetite and condition improved and I felt pretty good about myself as a lion doctor. Everybody was happy. It was a short-lived success, though.

I didn’t hear anything for a couple of months, and assumed that “no news is good news”. That was not correct. The next call came in December. Butch “wasn’t doing well”. An understatement, if there ever was one.

When I arrived, Butch was prostrate. He hadn’t been able to rise for a couple of days, much less eat anything. This was the first time I had actually entered the cage with him. He was much thinner than the first time I saw him. Too much time lying down on the concrete had put his skin in bad shape even before he got down and out. Now he was lying in his own filth. Vee was doing his best to keep things clean, but it was an untenable situation. It was obvious that it was time to euthanize him and end his suffering. Obvious to me, that is.

I couldn’t just go ahead and do it. First I had to write a letter detailing my findings so that the city council could have a special meeting and vote on what action to take. At least they called a special meeting for that night so that Butch only had to suffer one more day.

The next day, I returned and entered the cage for the second and last time. Butch glanced at me, but didn’t move. I didn’t think he could move at all, but I found out differently. Although he couldn’t rise, he could raise his tail. His paintbrush of a tail swooped up and struck me full in the face, covering face and eyeglasses with stale lion urine and dirt. I couldn’t see a thing until I washed up in his water bowl.

I was able to give him the injections and complete the euthanasia without further mishap. A post-mortem examination revealed a large tumor in his liver. I took it back to the office to measure and weigh it. It weighed three pounds. Hard to say how long it had been growing, but it was almost certainly the cause of his decline months earlier. The rest of his remains were buried in front of his cage.

 

A week or so later, there was a little story in the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper noting Butch’s passing. Some of the details were garbled, but that’s nothing new in the newspaper business. The next day, I got a telephone call from a man named Bert Dickey. He identified himself as the original owner of Butch (though I had never heard his name from anyone in Hayti). According to Bert, the city was supposed to return Butch to him if they ever got rid of him, and he wanted to know what happened. I gave him the story, and then he wanted to take possession of the remains. Apparently, he wanted a trophy to display. I tried to explain the miserable condition of Butch’s hide, and that it would have been nothing desirable even if it hadn’t been buried and decomposing already. Then he wanted to know if I had taken his teeth for a souvenir (a man with no knowledge of animal dentistry – you cannot imagine how hard that would be). I referred him to the city council and heard no more from him.

Yeah, Hayti had a zoo – it started with a lion named Butch.

Veterinary Medicine at the Career Fair

In a nearby small town, the counselor organizes a “career fair” every two years.  She doesn’t call on the same professions each time, as she presents the program to the entire body of middle school and high school students.  No point hearing about the same career twice, especially if you didn’t want to hear it the first time.  And most of them don’t.

 She splits the kids into as many groups as there are professions represented, ten this week.  Then each group of thirty kids rotates through, so they all get to hear every presentation.  Even if they don’t want to.  Each presenter has twenty minutes to do his or her spiel… ten times in a row.  I like to talk, but I was a little hoarse by the time the morning was over.

 The professionals had lunch together afterwards. Several of them complained about the inattentiveness of the groups, and even rudeness and disrespect, kids just talking as though they were on the playground.  This despite the presence of supervising teachers.  The very large Highway Patrolman was intimidating enough that he didn’t have much of a problem.  I’m not very intimidating, so I had to take a different approach.

 The best way to get in good communication with someone is to find something you agree on, a shared point of reality – something that is really real to them.  Fortunately, I had that. Sad to say, my “hooks” were the facts that I hated school, starting at a very young age, and that I wanted to leave my small-town home and never come back.  But, as I told them, “never” is a very long time.  Here is what else I told them.

 

Good morning. I am Dr. Everett Mobley.  I’m a veterinarian, an animal doctor, from Kennett, Missouri.  I grew up in Kennett, and when I was your age, I was sure I would get out of there and never go back.  But “never” is a very long time.

 When I was seven years old, I began to wonder what I would do when I grew up.  I liked horses, I loved going to the zoo, I just liked animals.  Maybe I would like to be a veterinarian.  I asked our veterinarian what it would take to become an animal doctor. Well, you get out of high school after twelve years, then four years of regular college, then another four years of veterinary school.  That tore it for me.  I was seven years old, in the second grade, and I hated school already. Four more years? That was more than half my life.  Spend an extra four years in school?  Not likely.  I crossed that career off the list.  Totally off the table. No way, never in a million years.  But “never” is a very long time.

 Fast forward and I’m a freshman in college.  I really don’t know what I want to do with my life.  “That’s okay.  Just get your basics.  You have plenty of time to make a decision.”  I did that.

 Now I’m a sophomore, approaching the halfway mark.  The halfway mark to what?  Gee, I don’t know.  Man, if I spend four years in college, I need to have some marketable skill when I finish.  I don’t want to be just looking for “a job”.  I need to know how to DO something.

 Of course, not everybody has this viewpoint.  There’s everything from “you need a liberal arts background” to the General Studies Degree, which is a college degree in nothing.  You spend four years taking classes that don’t look too hard and graduate with a diploma that is roughly equivalent to the one the Scarecrow receives from the Wizard of Oz.  That may be okay if your parents really, really love you, but it won’t be worth much in the job market.

  The theory behind the General Studies Degree is that you have a unique career in mind and need to design your own curriculum because nobody ever did it before.  Has anybody read the Sherlock Holmes stories? [Side note: 3 out of 300 said yes.] That’s what he did.  He was going to be the world’s first consulting detective and there was no degree program for that.

 Most people who graduate with a General Studies Degree just have a degree in partying.  Again, not worth much in the job market.

 At this point I revisited my previous choices and found that I still liked working with animals.  And now, four years (though a long time), is no longer more than half my life.  So, that’s what I decided to do.

 So, what do you need to do to become a veterinarian?  It seems obvious that you will need to take a lot of science courses – you need to understand how the body works and how drugs work, and there are specific course requirements posted by the colleges of veterinary medicine.  It will take you at least two years of undergraduate college to get those knocked out.  Most people have completed a four-year degree before they apply to veterinary school.  That’s not bad, since only one in four applicants will get in, and it’s good to have a “plan B”.

 I recommend that you take some basic business classes: business law, general accounting, and economics.  If you ever have your own practice, you will be de facto a small business owner.  You will have to manage inventory, personnel, profit and loss, deal with government regulations, and so forth.  Spend eight years learning to be a doctor and zero years learning to run a business, and you will have a hard time running your business.  That’s what happened to me.  You will be hemorrhaging money and won’t know why or how to fix it.  Then it’s the school of hard knocks, or taking some business management courses.  That kind of education is expensive.

 If you just plan on working for someone else, you should still take the business  classes. You want to understand what is going on.  Are you making money for the guy (or gal), or losing money for him?  If you’re losing money for him, you will soon lose your job, as well.  If you’re making a lot of money for him, you can go to him and say how valuable you are, and you need a raise.

 The admissions committee will look at several things on your application.  The committee will look to see if you have any experience working in the veterinary field.  They don’t care if you know how to do technical stuff. They do care whether you really understand what the profession is about. 

 There are people who tell me, “I want to be a veterinarian because I like animals and I don’t like people.”   Good luck with that.  Animals don’t come in by themselves.  They come to see you with their people.  Your job is all about the relationship between the people and their animals.  It may be the farmer who wants healthy, happy animals that produce lots of fast-growing, healthy offspring.  It’s how he makes his living.  It may be the person who lives alone and that cat is their only friend.  If something is wrong with the only friend you have in the world, that’s a big deal.

 Another thing they will look at are your grades and test scores.  They will have to be really good.  There are two reasons for that.  One is that it is an objective criterion – it’s a number.  Either you have a good number or you don’t.  In our litigious society, the only thing more common than lawsuits is prescription drug addiction. “Not happy? Take a pill.”  If you don’t have the grades, you can’t say you were discriminated against because you were too tall or too short or too pink or too green.  You don’t have the numbers.

 The second reason is that if you cannot excel in the undergraduate courses, you won’t be able to handle the veterinary college curriculum.  Professional schools are so much harder than regular college. 

 I thought I was really smart.  I was the high school valedictorian, National Merit Finalist, blah, blah, blah.  My idea of studying was to attend class, take notes, turn in my assignments, and review my notes the night before the test.  I was not prepared for being in class all day, staying in the library until eleven every night, and still not getting it all.  “How did I get so dumb over the summer?”

 I didn’t really get dumb.  It was just a LOT harder than anything I had done before, and I hadn’t been slacking, either.  I carried eighteen credit hours and had a part time job.  I was either in class or working from 7:30 AM until 5:00, six days a week the year before veterinary school.  Veterinary school was a lot harder than that, and I had to learn some real study habits for the first time in my life.

 So, you have to make your grades.

 Veterinary college admissions are about eighty percent women now, versus eighty percent men when I was in school.  I don’t really know why we have this demographic shift.  Some people think that it is because women are more compassionate and thus more attracted to the field.  Others think it is because men look at the amount of time and money that must be invested in their education and feel that they need a greater return on their investment than veterinary medicine provides.  This would mean that making a good living is less important to women than to men, which doesn’t seem logical to me.

Think about this.  You spend six to eight years in college. All this time, you’re not making a salary.  Even a job flipping burgers would make a fair amount of money in that time.  A decent job in a factory would have made quite a bit of money.  That income is lost, eight years of your life that you weren’t making any money.  Plus, you’ve spent a lot of money on your education.  The average new veterinarian graduates with around $150,000 in student debt.  You can’t go to work for minimum wage and live and service that debt, much less make up for the eight years of lost income.   Average starting salary (and average is the best of the worst, the worst of the best) for new graduates is less than $50,000 per year. The government will take about a third of that in taxes.

 This means that veterinary medicine is not a get-rich-quick scheme.  You can make a decent living, but you choose this career because you want to do the work. And what is the work?

 If you grow up here, you see your veterinarian as a sort of pet repairman.  If you grew up in central Missouri, you’d see something totally different.  Most of Missouri doesn’t look like the flat land around here – it’s rolling hills and pastures.  We are the second largest cattle producing state after Texas.  If you grew up there, you’d think of your veterinarian as the doctor who comes to the farm for occasional emergencies, and who helps your dad plan the herd health program and evaluate production statistics.

 There are lots of other careers in veterinary medicine.  Your education will be broad-based enough that you can do lots of things.  There are jobs in industry, research, the military, and public health.  Inspecting meat doesn’t sound very glamorous, but keeping a safe food supply is important.  It sounds a lot more important when about nine million pounds of hamburger gets recalled.

 You really don’t want some googly, nasty carcass ground up into your hamburger.  If you saw a roast in the supermarket with a big, nasty, yucky glob on it, you’d pass it by.  Once it’s ground into hamburger, it all just looks like hamburger.

 It’s a good thing that you get a broad-based education in veterinary school, because you might change your mind about your career goals.  Very few students begin their application with their dreams of inspecting a meat-packing plant.  Yet many change their goals. I had planned to do nothing but horses, but family matters led me to return home (remember that “never” is a very long time).  In Kennett, I do a little bit of everything, but it’s mostly dogs and cats, and I enjoy that.  I’m also well equipped to do it.

 One of my classmates was certain that dairy medicine was his destiny.  He talked of nothing else, just dairy, dairy, dairy. That was his plan and he didn’t have a “plan B”. 

 For two years, you have intensive study of basic sciences, like anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and microbiology.  Then for the next two years you have clinical studies in two-month blocks.  For two months you study small animal surgery, two months of horse medicine, two months in the clinical pathology laboratories, and so forth.  You also have “free blocks” where you undertake a preceptorship or externship – you work in a veterinary practice to get first-hand practical experience. 

 With two months until graduation, Doctor Dairy finally had a preceptorship in a dairy practice in Wisconsin, dairy capital of America.  He hated it.  It was the same thing, day after day: milking problems, stomach problems, retained afterbirths.  Fortunately, he had a broad-based education.  He took a job in a very high-quality small animal practice.  But doggone it, he had to be on call three nights a week – his time was not his own. And he couldn’t practice the medicine he knew. “We can fix this.”  Except sometimes people couldn’t afford it, and they euthanized the pet.  It drove him crazy.

 He decided he’d get a government job – regular hours, no emergencies, good benefits. He’d be a meat inspector.  He hated that so much that he didn’t even finish the training.  What he wound up doing was going back to school and becoming a pathologist, and he became an authority on the bacteria E. coli. That may not sound impressive, but remember that nine million pounds of hamburger?  My classmate was on television, because he was (as he said) “E. coli when E. coli wasn’t cool”.  He was in demand to speak all over the world.  It was a long way from the dairy.

 I like what I do. My days are never the same, they are never boring.  If you like animals and people, veterinary medicine is a great education and a lot of great careers.

 

Veterans' Day - remembering Tom B. Mobley

This is the Purple Heart my father was awarded in World War II.  I never saw it until after he died.  We found it when we were cleaning out his dresser.

On November 5, the United States Army Field Band & Soldiers’ Chorus gave a terrific concert in Kennett.  While there was a variety of music, the overall mood was certainly patriotic.  They played “Armed Forces Salute”, a collection of the theme songs of all the service branches. The director asked that veterans of each branch stand to be recognized during their theme.   He also asked that any family members of a veteran stand, so that you also should have been standing if a spouse, father, mother, sibling or child had been in the service.

I didn’t stand, as I would have felt a little like a fraud, standing up for something my father did before I was born.  That doesn’t mean I’m not proud of it, though. 

Dad didn’t talk much about his war experiences.  Most of what I know came out in little bits related to some other conversations, or came second-hand from Mom and other relatives.

Dad graduated from Kennett High School in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression.  The family was well-off enough to send him to college, even so.  He graduated from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College).  From there he spent a year in law school at Texas A&M.  Then it was 1941.

He joined the Army (then the Army-Air Force, a concept I was never clear on as a kid).  The only thing he ever mentioned about his training was his experience in Officer Candidate School.  “You’d ask the instructor a question, and he’d say, ‘Good question, candidate. See me after class.’  Only there was never any time after class.”  He finished OCS and became a lieutenant, commanding a platoon of tanks.

He probably looked just about like this picture when he made one last visit to Kennett before shipping out overseas.  He went around town and the farm and his other favorite places, saying goodbye, as he might never see them again.

Most of his combat service was in the deserts of north Africa.  Of this experience he said that it was the only time in his life that he didn’t have post-nasal drip (having spent the rest of his life in the swampy south).  He had also been impressed with the savagery of the flies.  “You couldn’t just fan them away.  You had to make a deliberate effort to catch and kill them, or they would just keep biting you.”

He talked about an officer who strode through the gunfire exhorting them to leave their foxholes, saying, “Do you want to live forever?”  “We called him Fearless Fosdick.”

It was in Africa (somewhere) that he was shot.  He was riding exposed in the conning tower of his tank and was shot through the muscle of his right arm.  It left him with the minor disability of being unable to perform “jumping jacks” properly.  The only time he ever said anything to me about it was while we were watching a Western movie.  I made a remark about some cowboy taking it awfully hard when “it was just a flesh wound”.  He got hot in a hurry, saying, “Let me tell you something: a flesh wound hurts like hell!”

When Italy surrendered, his unit went to southern Italy as part of an occupying force.  According to Mom, one of his jobs there was to verify that the camp-followers had current health inspections before they were allowed to “visit” the soldiers.

As far as the rigors of combat, the only advice I remember was that you should thoroughly rinse your mess-kit when washing it.  If you leave soap in it, you’ll get dysentery the next time you eat.  That’s what he thought, anyway. The dysentery may have been more from incomplete washing (though my speculation on that comes more from watching Boy Scouts).

While in Italy, he frequented a café where a young singer regularly performed “Come Back to Sorrento”.  “She could tear your heart-strings out.”, he said.  He brought sheet-music back with him.  I learned to play it for him when I was a kid, though I personally couldn’t do much with anybody’s heart-strings (good or bad).  I still have it, tattered and crumbling.

Our legacy of that posting was him telling us “Andiamo!” sometimes instead of  “Hurry up!”, plus an Italian flag and a couple of Italian police sabers that he “liberated”.  He brought an alabaster vase back to Granny.

I went with him to an Army reunion at Fort Knox, Kentucky when I was eleven.  All I really remember is that I climbed around on a tank (it was cramped and hot inside), and we went to a big dinner one night.  I didn’t hear any war stories.

That’s what I know about the war experience of my own “Greatest Generation”, and precious little it is, too.  But it’s worth knowing and remembering.

Snakes...why did it have to be snakes?

So said Indiana Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (and we see why in "Last Crusade").  My own feeling about snakes is that I have no problem with them as long as they are not poisonous.  I'm not a great naturalist, though, so I'm unlikely to make a positive identification in the field.  Fellow Scouter John McDonough stops to take a picture when he encountered a timber rattler at Camp Lewallen.  If I encounter one in the wild, I just try to avoid them.  "What kind of snake was it?"   It was a snake kind of snake.  It had no legs: "Mr. No-Shoulders".  "What shape were its eyes?" I was avoiding it, not kissing it.  "Get the hoe, maw!"

It's different when someone brings in a pet snake. Then I'm reasonably sure of the species, plus not very many folks will be keeping a deadly venomous serpent to cuddle with.  There used to be an old boy over at Greenway, Arkansas who brokered exotic animals.  He once brought (among other things) a gunny sack full of garter snakes.  It didn't bother me a bit to plunge my arm into the midst of them.

I'm no great snake expert, but being located in the hinterlands, I'm willing to look at whatever comes through the door.  I do have good resources to call for advice, plus the specialists on Veterinary Information Network.  As with many exotic cases (read "anything besides dogs, cats and horses") I may just be acting as eyes, ears and hands -- a remote sensing device for the faraway expert.  Still, for folks unable to travel a hundred miles, I can often get them some help.

The staff were cleaning out drawers and found some old pictures.  This particular one was certainly out of the ordinary.  "Do you work on snakes?"  Well, I'll do my best.  "How am going to bring it in?" Well, a lot of people just put them in a pillow-case if they don't want to carry them. 

I wasn't expecting a seventy-pound Burmese Python.  The thing was bigger around the middle than a two-pound coffee can.  Cool extrapolation from pillow-case to sleeping bag on the owner's part.  The owner was the Navy recruiter here (about twenty years ago?). The snake had a respiratory infection.  Dr. Mike Douglas, the Memphis Zoo veterinarian, advised me on how to treat it.  It is amazing how fast these big snakes can move.  When you see them at the zoo, you assume that they must have to just "ooze along" because of their size.  They can flip a coil faster than you can move your hand.

I made follow-up visits to the snake's home, as it was winter-time.  The owner had a two-bedroom apartment, with one bedroom devoted to the snake: a room-sized herpetarium.  Single guy, naturally. Of course, that was then, this is now.  I've seen plenty of married couples with multiple snakes.

This is why the sideshow industry has collapsed.  People have a neighbor with a houseful of snakes, seeing the "fat lady" is an everyday occurrence (not to mention that the term is politically incorrect), and as for the "Tattooed Man", tattoos are mainstream now.  My dream of a second career as a carnival barker will never come true...unless...

"Step right up, ladies and gents, see the man with no tattoos. Marvel at his milk-white skin. He's alive, they're all alive."

Riding the Elephant

When I was about eight, an elephant came to the Delta Fair.   She also walked the parade route, carrying "Baby Jack" Allen, DJ and local radio personality on KBXM.  If you looked hard enough through the DDD archives, I believe you could find the picture of a smiling Baby Jack waving from atop the pachyderm. 

Two teen-age guys were hired with a proposal only slighty better than the one Fay Wray got in "King Kong".  "How would you guys like to get paid to be in the parade?"  They got clown costumes, big shovels and even bigger wheelbarrows, and they followed the elephant.

On arriving at the fairgrounds, we found that elephant rides were available, for a very reasonable fee. We used to spend Saturday afternoons watching Tarzan (aka Johnny Weissmuller) ride the elephants.  Who could pass this up? 

I joined the very long line with my money clutched in my hot little hand.  When my turn came, I was miraculously at the front of the line.  We climbed a wooden stepladder and mounted.  Being first in line, my seat was on the elephant's neck, just like Tarzan, like the mahouts, the place that was just made to ride on.  It was like riding a horse, only so much better.  I was the lord of the jungle, lord of all I surveyed.  The elephant's handler gently led her around in a circle, occasionally giving her a light touch with his ankus, saying "Come on, Kerry, come on girl."  "Is this your elephant, mister?"  "She's mine while I got her."  I felt like Sabu and I didn't even know who Sabu was.  It was wonderful.

As soon as we dismounted, I rushed to rejoin the line for a second ride.  Alas, I found myself in the middle of the six or eight riders this time.  This meant I was riding somewhere about the middle of Kerry's mighty back.  It was a mighty back, but it was a little boney.  Imagine a two-by-four placed on edge atop a four-foot diameter culvert.  Pencil-lead sized wires protrude at random every few inches. I had on short pants.  All I could survey was the back of an unwashed head.  Perhaps I was filthy and sweaty myself, but certainly the boys jammed together with me were.  It was miserable, and I didn't line up for a third ride.

Ever since then, when an elephant ride has been available at a circus or zoo, I've taken advantage of it, but it isn't the same.  First of all, you climb some sturdy platform with hand-rails and an attendant.  Then you are helped onto the howdah with its cushions and guardrails and safety chains. You're on top of the elephant, sure, but you're riding the saddle, not the elephant.  The other riders are little kids.

It's not the same.

The trebuchet's maiden voyage.

Set the  Way-Back, Sherman.  About ten years ago, I was flipping the channels and came across a guy in England who had built an enormous trebuchet: a counterweight-driven catapult that uses a sling to further extend its throwing arm.  He was throwing small automobiles and upright pianos, among other things.  He like to see things "blow up" and dynamite is not legal for recreational use in England, so he had built this alternative.  I was captivated, and soon built a small working model.

Without doing much research, I decided I could just extrapolate the dimensions of my model and build a larger scale device.  Sixteen inches in the model became eight feet in the construction, and so forth.  The catch was that I wanted it to be easily transported in "knocked-down" form.  Why?  So I could take it to watermelon fields at the end of the season.  They just plow under hundreds of watermelons that are past their  "sell-by" date.  You could haul your siege engine out to the field and throw watermelons until you got tired of seeing them explode.

Charlie's Welding did some metal fabrication for me.  I used steel pipe for the cross members and wood for the uprights and runners.  Charlie Jackson made pipe collars to hold things together and I spent a lot of time drilling holes and bolting things together.  I was too ambitious, though.  Eight feet tall, eight feet wide, eight feet long, and a sixteen-foot throwing arm.  I only got it put together one time, and the enormous weight needed to move the throwing arm caused the axle to bend.  Plus, it was just too big to handle, even with a crew of four men (myself and three high-school kids).

I disassembled it and did a lot more research.  Then I re-engineered: six feet tall at the four-foot, double-thick axle, with outriggers still keeping the base eight by eight.  I never got it assembled again.  It never threw a missile, much less a watermelon.  My poor baby languished in a pile for the last eight years, four of them outside at my brother's house, where I was going to work on it someday. It was just too big for one guy to handle by himself.  I needed a crew.  I also needed some fresh enthusiasm, as I was fresh out.

I tried to interest the Venture Crew in taking it on as a project, but the former leader wasn't interested.   Ah, but now there's a new event at the Fall Fun Rally at Beaumont: Pumpkin Launching.  The new leadership and crew ARE interested in a working trebuchet.  They've spent several days re-assembling and modifying the beast, and today that rascal is throwing like a champ.  There's still some tuning to do -- maybe even some fine-tuning.  It was sure great to see it throwing.  I hope to get some video up on You-tube.  They've done a great job making my vision finally come to life.

I think this must be what Dr. Frankenstein felt like when the monster finally stirred and sat up.

Never wear a neck-tie around a monkey.

When I was in undergraduate school, I had pet rats for a while.  Of all the pocket pets, the rat would be the most popular and endearing except for one thing: that naked, pink tail (that, and "rat" being synonymous with treachery and evil).  They are smart, active in the daytime, remain docile even after long periods of neglect, non-noisy, and easy to care for.  If they just had a fluffy little furry tail... but they don't.   In those days, we didn't call them "pocket pets", and if you were interested in learning to care for rabbits, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters and rats,  you would need to take a course of "Laboratory Animal Medicine".

Sinclair research farm used to be out in the middle of nowhere. Columbia, Missouri has spread out so much that I think the farm is in the middle of a housing development now.   In those days, it was a relatively isolated facility with several very large steel buildings containing thousands of little research subjects. In addition to the rodents and lagomorphs, there was a colony of miniature swine being developed as potential research animals, and there were breeding colonies of squirrel monkeys and Rhesus monkeys.  Dr. Charles "Bud" Middleton was the director of the facility, and our instructor/mentor for the eight weeks of study there.  He had a special interest in non-human primates, and these breeding colonies were the only monkeys in the University system. 

These monkeys were not research subjects, except in the aspect of how to most successfully raise them in captivity.  As we toured the facility on our first day, Dr. Middleton advised us in no uncertain terms, "Never wear a neck-tie around a monkey."  A monkey is so much stronger on a pound-for-pound basis that you have to experience it to believe it.  I saw a 30-pound monkey jerk a 200-pound man off his feet one day. A small monkey could certaily choke you to death if he got hold of your tie.  My general observations of the monkeys during my time there permanently disabused me of the notion that I might like to have one.

Bud delivered other pearls of wisdom to us.  It was from him that I learned that "A chimp will kill you in a minute."  The performing chimpanzees you see are all juveniles.  Jane Goodall's research showed that chimps will use clubs as weapons, and that they kill to eat meat, including chimps from other groups.  A 125-pound chimp is about three times as strong as the average man.

He made us learn to do hand-ties on our surgical knots.  He regaled us with stories of his time in the Amazon.  He let us know that National Institute of Health grants are often awarded more on the basis of the "old boy network" than on the merits of experimental design (he was a member of the NIH review board).  He was a heck of an interesting guy.  I wish that I had a picture of him.  He had a head of wavy silver hair like a television evangelist and a charismatic southern voice to go with it.

I thought of him when a little kitten came unglued, jumped into the air, executed a 180-degree mid-air pinwheel, and latched onto my neck-tie (I had neglected to zip my lab coat).  As the kitten swung back and forth like Tarzan, I was transported in time to hear the voice of the master: "Never wear a neck-tie around a monkey."  Words to live by.

The staff suggested that we re-enact the episode to get it on camera so it could be posted on You-tube.  I declined, but offered to loan them my tie.  No takers so far.

The Boy-Wonder Equine Surgeon

As I may have remarked earlier, caring for horses and riding horses were my father's only hobby, and practically the only activities that we shared with my father as a family.  The first picture in my website biography is of my wife and I on horseback.  It was taken at the Eminence Cross-Country Trail Ride where we spent our honeymoon, camped out with the horses and my family and about a thousand other people.

When I applied to veterinary school, I envisioned myself as "The Boy-Wonder Equine Surgeon", the whiz-kid ministering to high-dollar pet horses in exclusive neighborhoods. [No doubt there was some subliminal influence from my boyhood reading of comic-books.  I loved Batman and Robin, "the boy wonder".]  Fortunately, our curriculum prepared us for a wide variety of careers in veterinary medicine.  I well recall my classmate, Rodney Moxley, who was single-minded in his ambition to work with large dairies... until he tried it.  From there he went to an exclusively small animal practice, to meat-inspector training, to a return to school and advanced training as a pathologist... and no dairy cows.

My first job was in a very general practice with lots of livestock.  After returning home to Kennett, most of my time has gone into dog and cat repair.  Horses are less than five percent of my practice these days.

What brought this to mind was something I said to a client today.  She wants me to do blood-work on twenty-two horses.  I did last year, but --  "You know, last year those miniature ponies and un-broke yearlings beat me up quite a bit.  I'm not doing the cowboy thing this year.  If you can't handle them, I'm not fighting them."  That's a bit of a change for me.  I used to take some perverse macho pride in being able to get the job done even when the horses were unruly. 

When I was a kid, I read a book called The Horse Tamer by Walter Farley, writer of The Black Stallion.  Many is the time that I have used the circling technique he described (in his handling of a wild zebra) to wear out a horse that wouldn't stand still for treatment.   The downside is that you can get pretty dizzy, and if you lose your footing during the process you could get stomped into mush.  The last time I had to do that (a few months ago), I found myself saying, "I'm too old for this stuff!"  [That's pretty close to what I said, anyway.]   I exercise pretty regularly, but I was ready to rest after that one.

I sometimes joke that equine practitioners wind up with nicknames like "Blinky", "Stumpy" or "Gimpy".    Chemical restraint (a tranquilizer) is a great thing, but you have to be able to handle the horse some to get the stuff into them. When an animal weighs a thousand pounds, they just don't have to be trying very hard to hurt you pretty badly.

Hanging up my "horse-tamer" hat is like seeing your picture and finding out that you've got a bald spot in back that you didn't know about: a little bit of youth trickling away.  On the other hand, I've got too many dogs, cats, and creditors depending on me.  I can't afford to get stomped into mush.

Bodily Functions are Disgusting

There comes a time in a young veterinarian's education when he (or she) realizes that his idea of normal conversation has become somewhat deranged.  When you're in class six days a week, from 7:30 AM until 5:30 PM, and in the library until 11:00 or so, and everybody you see is a fellow veterinary student or an instructor, you begin to think that everyone in the world talks about disease and injury and blood and poop all day long.  Everyone in your world is talking about those things.  Hey, must be normal.  Then you go out for dinner with family over the holidays.  You begin regaling them with some of your better stories and you notice people putting down their forks, pushing their plates away and making uncomfortable faces.  That is, you notice that if you're not so fascinated with hearing yourself talk that you're unaware of anything outside that sublime pleasure.

I find that even people who are very interested in caring for their very own pet's medical problem generally don't want to be "grossed out".  Most people really would rather not deal with the nitty-gritty (or poopy-scoopy) details of bodily functions.  It would really suit them fine if they had a Walt Disney dog whose tail lifts to reveal a smooth and sparkling white behind.   [The exception to that would, of course, be eleven-year-old boys.  I find that young Scouts feel bodily functions are the most humorous subjects in the world.]  This is apparently why people can't just say they've brought a stool sample (much less "fecal specimen").  It's always a "surprise" or a "present" or "his job", or (my personal favorite) "his homework".

On the other hand, if we're going to deal with medical issues, then we're going to have to deal with bodily functions.  This usually goes okay, although there are definitely times with reproductive issues when the discussion can go south in a hurry. 

In the early days of "Your Pet's Best Friend" on radio,  the late great Mr. Rudy Pylant was in charge of my account.  He told me "I hate your show. It's disgusting. It's on at breakfast time and I can't listen to that!"   I mentioned this to Jeff Wheeler, the station manager, and he put someone else on my account. [Lest you think there are any hard feelings, scroll down to the bottom of the Sons of the Western Bootheel page for a video of our musical tribute to Mr.Rudy.]

I try to be conscious of the sensibilities of normal people now.  It's similar to my hand-washing concerns.  After thirty-something years of this stuff, I've more or less lost the capacity to feel dirty.  I get disgusting stuff on my hands and I know that I need to wash them, but if I didn't think about it, I could probably just wipe them on my pants and go on.  I do wash them, though (a LOT).  In the same way, I try to speak of disgusting bodily functions in terms that aren't so disgusting.  That is, unless I'm dealing with Boy Scouts.