Where the Wild Things Are--The Johannesburg Zoo

 Years of traveling have taught me one important thing about traveling—you can plot, plan, and meticulously arrange, but the best things happen by chance.  And sometimes holding together that carefully organized plan is more trouble than it’s worth.  I’m sure this is a lesson of South African origin because although South Africa is a much less hectic African country than some of its brothers and sisters, time here moves way differently than home.  Impatience in SA will only give you high blood pressure while you wait for things to happen “juuuuust now.”  ‘Just now’ being a famous South African phrase indicating that something will happen anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours from now.  I am in no way exaggerating about the upper limit of that timeframe.  Trust me.

My most basic plan for going somewhere is:

1) Get plane ticket

2) Make sure passport is in order

3) Have a confirmed place to stay for at least the first night

4) Learn how to say ‘hello, thank you, sorry’ in the lingua franca

Everything else is just details... 

When I planned my current trip to South Africa I confirmed my 2-week time slots with the friends I would be working with, asked if I could stay with them while I shadowed, and made sure I had the correct vet clothes/gear sorted out for each place.  Just about everything else was up in the air…which is not how I operate these days.  Vet school has been an exercise is squeezing tightly to my schedule because it feels like any minute can be a wasted moment.  Our time is just so precious.  It’s actually kind of maddening.  I really don’t like living this way because I’m much more of a ‘let it flow’ kind of person.  But, you know, one day I will get to be a human I like again.  I tried to make lists of things I wanted to do and people I needed to see, but eventually I stopped.  My tourist list is pathetically awesome (which = attainable!) and consists of two things: visit Venda, ride Gautrain.  I’m 50% done with my list, in case you were wondering.  I know my current mode of death-grip planning would not work in SA.  I just had to let it be.  The people I wanted to see would slowly appear when I was in the same time zone and I was sure veterinary (and other) adventures would abound. 

Well…I was right.  My time at the Johannesburg Zoo is the perfect embodiment of this concept.  My bird vet friend arranged for me to go to the Zoo for a few days to shadow.  What an excellent surprise!  The Zoo has on-site accommodation for visiting students and collaborators, so I lived in the Zoo House for a few days.  How cool!  See…the best things happen by chance! 

My quiet red panda neighbor chowing down
Not pictured: my loud lemur neighbor

The Zoo was pretty slow while I was there.  Their hospital is under construction, so they are working in a temporary space.  I arrived on a day when auditors were there, so there was a lot of paperwork to catch up on for the vets.  We would do a procedure or two a day and most of the rest of the time I spent chatting with a fellow South African clinical year veterinary student or playing with a young caracal, serval, and striped hyena.  My time was still very informative.  I am not interested in zoo medicine or wildlife as a future career path, but there are few people that could not be excited by the prospect of getting some wild animal adventures worked into their day.  Plus anything that is not my area is always a chance for me to learn something new.  Honestly the concepts are the same with those animals I have never heard of.  The vet there told me that really you just have to know what it toxic to a particular animal and use your other basic knowledge for the rest.    

The new hospital under construction

 Overall it seems like zoo work is a lot of knowing bird stuff.  The bird species definitely outnumber the mammals, so I again got to see more bird work in action.  We anesthetized and did radiographs on an endangered wattle crane and re-bandaged a grass owl’s wing.  There were also a ton of birds roaming freely around the grounds.  It definitely made my epidemiologist spidey sense tingle.  Birds are notorious for spreading disease and with the world on high alert for avian influenza I thought the free roaming bird thing was strange.  I talked to the vet about it and it sounds like it’s something that is being talked about.  The new director of the zoo is a veterinarian well versed in epidemiology and public health, so I’m guessing he would champion such efforts.  The birds were quite pleasant to experience on my early morning zoo walks, but sometimes disease control is more important than pleasantries.  At least if you are a vet.

The craziest thing I did was help give a venomous snake some oral drugs.  I put a tube into its mouth while it was being held and then delivered some anti-parasitic drugs with a syringe.  Yeah, I stuck my hand in front of a poisonous snake’s mouth.  It was freaky, but I’m glad I did it.  Again, it’s good to do things that make you nervous. 

One thing that really struck me about the role of the veterinarian at the Zoo was how much that person has to interact with all parties on the grounds.  The vet is a true ambassador who must work with the keepers and handlers, the general workers, the administration, and basically anyone that is involved with an animal there.  It’s actually pretty unique as most people seemed to just work in their area.  There were private farmers that transported animals on/off the property and to/from game farms.  The vet must work with these folks as well.  The people skills involved in orchestrating the medical care of these animals is off the charts.  It really takes a special person to be able to make all that run smoothly.  Props to the vets there!     

Catching a naughty elephant on a morning walk
The grass is always greener! 

Since I lived at the Zoo I got to be on the grounds outside of hours the public was there.  I went on a few walks before and after the Zoo was open.  I really wanted to walk around in the dark, but it’s still South Africa and it really was not safe to do alone.  There is security that roams the grounds, but the Zoo is right in the middle of Johannesburg, so…nope.  Not the best idea.  Another South African lesson I know well:  You can’t always get what you want especially when it comes to the degrees of freedom I enjoy as a single woman in the USA. The Johannesburg Zoo is pretty old, but they really have some nice features.  There is also a national zoo in Pretoria, which is about an hour away.  It seemed like the National Zoo was kind of like the big sister, but I see a lot of potential at the Joburg Zoo.  They have a lot going for them and a new director is a veterinarian.  The staff veterinarians are also fairly new, both in their careers and in their time employed at the Zoo.  That almost always translates into vibrancy and they were very excited about making the Joburg Zoo into a conservation powerhouse.  I see big things in the future of that zoo. 

Vet students united!
Me & Kelsey

Besides having a red panda and a lemur as neighbors, one of my favorite things about being at the Zoo was my time spent chatting to the other veterinary student shadowing there.  We are both clinical year students, although she is a little farther along in her year than my class is, and had some other common ground in that I also studied at the school she is currently attending.  I’m “happy” to report that we have both been going through very similar experiences in our final year, albeit a continent apart.  They have roughly the same amount of clinical time that we do in terms of number of weeks and they cover roughly the same subjects for roughly the same number of weeks.  She dislikes being told “you’re the doctor now” (when you patently are not) just as much as I do and has faced a number of the other challenges that are really too long to list here.  I guess basically it’s good to know others are facing the same things.  Always makes me feel a little bit less crazy.

I was really welcomed at the Zoo.  Everyone was so nice to me and I really had a great time.  I even got to spend time with the new director of the Zoo.  I will have an interview with him and the staff vets online soon at the U of IL College of Veterinary Medicine’s website.  I’ll link it here once it’s up.  Many thanks to all those who gave me the opportunity and took the time to teach me.  I had a great time!      

Zoo crew & me
L-R: Dr. Kresen Pillay, me, Melanie Reddy (vet nurse), and Dr. Johan Naude

       

My not-so-graceful fall from the Ivory Tower

I spent the past two weeks working at a small animal/exotics practice in Johannesburg that primarily sees birds.  I was completing my “Primary Care” rotation, which can be done either at my school or out in the real world. Primary care consists of all the normal general practice things like vaccinations, itchy skin, and your average vomiting cat.  I chose to do this rotation in South Africa so that I could extend my stay in the country and also to get a feel for baseline care here.  I chose this practice because my good friend works here and I wanted to brush up on my birds. 

I have always loved bird-watching, but birds are not my favorite when it comes to dealing with them up close.  I find them kind of creepy.  Tiny dinosaurs, right?  However, since my degree says I can practice on any animal, I felt that maybe I should turn my bird frown upside-down.  I have been working at it slowly since I started school.  I definitely don’t hate birds now and, the more I learn, I can see that they are actually quite cool.  But, there are still large gaps in my most basic bird knowledge.    

Wings & nails

I spent the first few days observing from the exam room to the surgical suite (called “theater” here).  The majority of the birds we saw came in for “wings and nails” which consists of trimming the first 5 feathers of the wing and the nails either getting dremeled or soldered to an acceptable length.  The first 5 feathers at the tip of the wing help initiate flight and the next ones in help the bird turn and stop.  If you trim the first 5 then the bird can’t take off which helps keep pet birds from flying away. A bird that flies away here could easily survive in the wild because of the warm climate.  The most popular birds in SA (African Grey, Cockatoo, Cockatiel, Ringneck, Macaw) are not indigenous and could create problems for the local birds.  In fact a few “strays” came in while I was at the clinic.  Those birds were kept, tested for beak and feather disease, and sent out for adoption if the owner could not be found.

Some other frequently seen conditions:

Feather cysts (have to be removed surgically)

Injury from landing too hard on the ground

Fractures of the wing/legs

Feather chewing (can be fixed by “imping” or gluing on a surrogate feather)

The ol’ down-with-seeds nutrition talk

Bird emergency support care

There were a number of birds that presented in severe distress.  Birds are prey species and excellent at hiding their ailments.  When a bird is acutely & severely sick it is not likely that it will make it out alive.  At least 5 birds came in this way with various problems/clinical signs and none of them survived.  The Catch-22 is that the more you handle a sick bird to fix it, the more stressed it gets, and the more likely it is to die.  Sometimes you just can’t win.  This is hard for everyone, especially the owners who just saw their bird acting fine an hour ago and now it’s dead.  As they say in South Africa, “Ag shame, man.”   

Look at me, Ma!
(secretly freaking out inside!)

I did a lot of basic bird techniques during this rotation.  I practiced basic handling which, funny enough, is not that different in principle from handling any other animal.  The number one rule of animal handling is “control the head.”  When you control an animal’s head the rest *usually* follows.  Also you tend to get bitten less.  For birds it is best to use a towel so you can kind of burrito their wings and body as you grasp around the head with your thumb and forefinger.  Birds look like they have thick necks, but it’s all feather fluff.  They actually have quite scrawny necks.  For larger birds you can just hold them where the wings connect to the body.  If you are handling a raptor (like a hawk, owl, or falcon) then your primary goal is to control the feet (rather than the head) because they have spectacular talons to avoid.  Although handling is pretty fundamental it was actually quite scary for me.  I bet I had a funny look of concentration on my face most of the time and I know my heart was racing more than once.  I always value these moments because it feels good to best something you are kind of scared to do.  I got to hold a macaw and African Gray perched on my hand…which was AWESOME!!  I bet my friend was laughing at me because he does it every day, but man I was feeling myself in that moment. 

I also practiced gavage (tube feeding), all the different sites for euthanasia, taking blood from two sites, making blood smears, doing Trichomonas testing, and probably a lot more.  Heck, they even let me do “wings and nails” on a few birds.

There were plenty of dogs and cats to see…and even some rats, bunnies, monkeys (!), and guinea pigs.  I got to practice some of my skills and try new things like doing a dental on a dog.  From what I can tell, most of the care and drugs are pretty much the same as what I have seen/been taught in school.  I have a lot of knowledge gaps in small animal things.  In fact, I kind of suck at all of it.  I feel bad that my knowledge is crap, but I also do not want to work in this area.  Vet school is a constant battle between “knowing all of the things” and trying to invest some extra energy in the things that seem more relevant to your future.  The ER vet on call in the hospital is not a reproduction expert and the dermatologist is not up on her/his infectious diseases of cattle.  But, as a vet student we apparently need to know it all.  As they say in SA…”eish.”         

A native wild pigeon gets a superglue cast

One unique thing about this practice, besides the fact that they are one of the few bird practices around, is that they take any wild animal that comes through the door with no questions asked.  Well…maybe a few questions to get the history.  The clinic pays for treatment and hospitalization, but people can make a donation.  The majority of the animals that came in were…you guessed it…birds!  The majority of the birds that came in were pigeons, but we also saw some beautiful raptors and “garden birds.”  Pigeons in this country often carry a protozoa called Trichomonas and although it’s treatable, it often recurs.  If a bird comes in with Trichomonas it is euthanized because there is little that can be done to keep it from becoming infected again and it can give this protozoa to other birds in the clinic.  To do the test you swab the mouth and crop, prepare a wet mount slide, and have a look under the microscope.  I did not see any positives while there, but it is a fairly common occurrence.  Many of the birds had fractures and sadly many of the birds had to be put to sleep.  In other words I got to practice performing many physical exams and euthanasias.  Wild birds must be fit to stay wild, so if their medical problem (like a bad fracture) prevents a full recovery then they get put to sleep.  Birds that can be fixed are treated, handed off to volunteers or rehab centers, and then get released back into the wild.  This is a great service to the community, not only for the treatment these un-owned animals get, but also for the peace of mind the person that brings the animal in receives.  Win-win!

As far as clinic basics…most of the drugs were the same, although the trade names were often different.  Synulox is Clavamox and so on and so forth.  There are also different names for some common things like a catheter is called a Jelco, presumably because that is the brand name.  It was interesting to see the difference in labor here vs. at home.  There are veterinary nurses here (AKA vet techs), but this practice used hired workers that would normally be cleaners and nannies in South Africa as the people that did the animal care and handling.  I’m sure that is much cheaper, but you get what you pay for.  There was a lot of frustration from the vets about missed directions and slip-ups (like leaving cage doors open) that probably could be avoided if nurses were employed.  Having these workers also allows the vets to be more authoritative over the employees which is a distinctly South African phenomenon that I do not have time to explain here.  I guess I’ll just leave it at saying it was an interesting dynamic to observe.        

I learned that an African Grey that falls to the ground can often injure its beak or chest on impact because those birds are top heavy.  Cockatoos often injure their butts because they are bottom heavy.  Either way…falling can be a painful experience.  I think this would be an excellent way to describe my first venture out into private practice since gaining admission to the ivory tower known as vet school.  There were a lot of practices I observed that made me cringe.  One doctor repeatedly performed surgery without proper scrubbing, gowning, masking, or even wearing gloves.  I could not believe it because of how much this has been drilled into my head in school. (Remediate!)  I didn’t even see any gloves out if I wanted to use them, although further searching revealed some boxes in a cabinet somewhere.  Tables were rarely cleaned in between patients and sometimes even the thermometers were not cleaned.  There were many other basic hygiene things I observed that I thought were kind of lacking.  The epidemiologist in me was crying in a corner somewhere.  I realize that what I have been taught is the “gold standard” of care in the most pampered environment possible, but there is no substitute for basic hygiene.  Overall the care of the patients was decent, but I saw a lot of easy things that could be improved.  The practice is changing hands soon, so it is likely that a new set of procedures will be implemented as a younger set of vets run the show.  Any experience is one worth learning from whether it’s good or bad, so I can definitely say that this proved to be a very valuable learning experience overall, plus I got to see some amazing animals…like a crowned crane.  I wouldn’t trade my two weeks for the world.  I thank my friend for not only giving me the opportunity to work with him, but also for being patient with me.            

Welkom terug

I had hoped to weigh in on my first few days of South Africa before I had vet things to say, but I got swept up into a daily work grind.  Apologies.  First a few thoughts on being back in SA and then I’ll deal with vet stuff in another post.  I wish I could talk about all the breathtaking things I have done in the last few days.  I suppose that is what the people want from a travel account.  If you need travel juiciness then check my quick run-down of Doha, Qatar.  But this piece is going to be a little less touristy and a little more home-y, homie. 

There are two things that never get old in SA: 

1) Having people say “welcome home” to me

2) Being called “My sistah”

South Africans always remind me that this too is my home…at least in some form or another.  When I am in the USA people ask me “when are you coming home?” and now that I’m back they are welcoming me back to my “home.”  It gives me warm fuzzies and believe me I could use all the warmth I can get while I’m free from the icy grip of the Death Star. 

I had a lot of anxiety about coming back here, but anxiety is just kind of my baseline right now.  It’s weird for me because I would not consider myself an overly anxious person.  I was anxious about a lot of things.  I wasn’t looking forward to packing for two months away from home.  I was worried about being away from my dog for that long.  I was anxious about bringing the right quantity and quality of gifts to the ones I love.  I was anxious about my vet abilities because overall they are pretty crap right now.  I was anxious about having a 2010 view of SA in a 2016 world and not just in societal ways, but also in my personal interactions.  People have kids, cars, and jobs now.  We are all different from back then.  Hopefully onwards and upwards.    

But all that anxiety has melted away.  I am probably the most relaxed I have been since I started vet school.  A winning combination of sleeping and hugs.  The first night I was here I was sitting in the backyard of my friends’ house and I just thought, as I looked up at the stars, ‘this is not weird at all.  I’m just at my friends’ house.’ 

So my first week was basically just landing, sleeping off my jet lag, reconnecting, and starting at the vet clinic I am shadowing at while in Joburg.  There have been a few injections of excitement as I remember things like the tuisnywerheid and biltong exist.  I also took my first ride on the Gautrain today.  Nothing fancy, people.  Just home.  I guess homecomings aren’t usually spectacular on their face, but they do make an impression on the heart.  That’s about as corny as I can be, but it’s totally true.  Thanks for the love, as always, dear South Africa.