Tag Archives: Government vet

Report!

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Vet, , , , , , , ,

I was in the middle of writing this last Saturday when my work phone rang and that was that! No time for blogging last weekend. I shall finish this now, then leave the next installment for another day. Sometimes, life is crazy!

Last weekend, I had my first real report case. Unlike the disappearing seal, this one involved live animals, or rather birds. I had intended to go down to Yorkshire last weekend. My sister, Helen, and some of her family were there and my intention was to take Triar down to introduce them. I had a couple of tasks I had to complete first. Some birds that had been imported (as eggs) from the US had been in isolation for three weeks. I had to inspect their health and make sure all the paperwork was in order before releasing them.

In addition to that, one of my TB cases was on its final test and while I was looking at chickens, that test went clear. After they’ve been locked down and unable to move cattle on and off the farm for months, I try to prioritize getting their restrictions lifted as soon as I can.

I had just completed these two time-specific tasks (it was around midday) and was about to go complete all the surrounding paperwork (I had to look up the import isolation release as it was my first) when my phone rang. It was my line manager. “How would you feel about going on a report case?” he asked.

Well I couldn’t really say no. I’ve put in an application for special pay, competence based, and one of the weak points in my application was that I had never done a report case. If my Veterinary Advisor had to defend my application, one of the easiest ways would be if she could point out I now had done one, competently. And apart from that, I wanted to get the first one out of the way. It’s an important part of the job.

My mind was working quickly. I’d seen last night that there was a bluetongue report case in, to be done this morning and, though it seemed unlikely nobody had gone there yet, it seemed even more unlikely there was a second suspicion of notifiable disease report in our region. The reason I hadn’t been to one was because there hadn’t been any locally in the last year and a half.

”Is it the bluetongue one?” I asked. I had been hoping my first one would be. After all, blue tongue is spread by midges. Infection control is still considered, but compared to diseases that spread directly, animal to animal, or worse, to humans as well, there’s a whole lot less PPE to worry about.

”Um… no,” came the reply. “It’s an avian influenza one in pheasants.”

He told me where it was – an hour in the wrong direction for driving to Yorkshire. Mentally cancelling my planned weekend, “Yes, okay,” I said.

I could hear the relief in his voice, and no wonder. We’d had few report cases recently and alongside our two, there was a third in the north already. Depleted as we are by summer holidays and staff signed off from fieldwork, finding willing staff locally must have been a relief.

I spent the next couple of minutes ripping through my Teams contacts to see if someone could talk to me. I knew where all the gear was, but I needed paperwork and some of it had to be printed out before going. Each different notifiable disease has a different form to restrict movement. They quote the relevant sections of the law, under which the restrictions are put in place, so you need the right one. And then there were sampling forms, which are different depending on whether the birds are classified as wild. I had to take hard copies as those need to go with any samples I decided were necessary.

Frankly, my mind was whirling. I needed someone to give me instructions. Fortunately, one of the Veterinary Advisors called me back and (as is my habit) I started the first of the many lists I was going to need over the next few hours, to keep everything straight. Having printed out all the forms I would need, and having thrown the “grab and go” boxes with all the report case gear in them, I set off.

Traffic was awful. Going round the Dumfries by-pass on a Friday afternoon is a nightmare at the best of times. They’d found me an animal health officer, who was being deployed from Ayr. He wanted to know what kit to bring for sampling and I had to pull into a couple of lay bys to talk to him. The whole exercise was obviously going to take a while and going back to collect something we’d forgotten between us would be a real pain.

There was a small incident when I had been stuck behind a dawdling camper van for some time. There was a short section with two lanes on my side of the road. I pulled out to pass (I bought a car that can accelerate fast for a reason) and some idiot motorcyclist waiting in a queue going the other way dawdled over a double white line and right into my lane so I couldn’t. It’s just as well I wasn’t driving a car marked with APHA on it. It’s a long time since I have given someone the finger while driving, but really, some people are beyond the pale in their selfishness and I was undoubtedly fueled by adrenaline at this point, as well as diesel.

By the time I arrived on the farm, I was my usual professional self. This is my job. It’s the animal owner who’s having a bad day and my task to present a calm exterior and offer guidance. At any time, I could call for advice, but to be too obviously ignorant is to invite worry. My first task was to complete the movement restriction form. There was a section with two boxes on it where I couldn’t decide whether I should write my name, or strike through them. Phoning to ask would be the most obvious indicator to the poor gamekeeper whose birds were dying that I hadn’t done this before. I struck through them, carried on and handed over the form, reading out the instructions on the back to make sure he knew what was and wasn’t allowed.

There was a slightly disconcerting moment, when the gamekeeper looked at me and asked, “Is this your first?”
I was surprised he could tell, but am old enough to know honesty is the best policy at these moments. “Yes,” I said. “It is, actually.”

”Oh,” he said. “I knew from her questions on the phone that the person I spoke to on the phone knew nothing about pheasants. I thought they probably wouldn’t find a pheasant expert. She didn’t even seem to know that partridges and pheasants are different.”

My shoulders sank a couple of inches. I hadn’t been rumbled after all and I did, at least know enough about game birds not to make an idiot of myself.

Having served the papers that locked down everyone and everything on the farm, it was time to start the investigation. Most of the birds were healthy, but I needed to have eyes on them and I also needed to map where they all were. It’s not so hard when you have chickens and they are all in a shed in the farmyard. You can print out a satellite image or map of the premises, put an X on the spot and provide a GPS reading. That reading is essential because if disease is confirmed, that X becomes the centre of the 3km restriction zone and the 10km surveillance zone. This time, I had 15 different GPS readings, spread over different farms: at least I think they were. I was taken to them in a kind of buggy on back roads and tracks. There was no way I could mark where they all were on a printout of the steading.

I lost contact with the team and with time. We drove between pens and I took readings with my OS maps app. I screenshot each reading, took a photo of the pen and any nearby animals and scrawled notes on a piece of paper. How many birds? What species? Were they in or out? The last question was crucial. When they are young, the pheasants are in closed pens with mesh over the top. At that point they are kept. Eventually, the gates of the pens are open and the birds can roam fully. At that point they are wild. In between is a grey zone.

Coming back to the steading, I saw the animal health officers had arrived, one experienced, the other in training. I still hadn’t seen a single sick bird. After yet another conversation with the Veterinary Advisor, I put on a second layer of PPE over the single layer I’d been wearing up until that point and we headed up to see the sick birds. I had with me the Sundstrøm hood that we are given for AI cases. Even though I would be outdoors, I still had to wear the full kit. It was rather bizarre, outside the pen, on a patch of grass on a forest track, donning a hood that would isolate me from everything. It felt very incongruous.

I had occasionally worried about how I would cope with the hood, which blows air into your face, but it was actually fine. I walked into the pen alone and surveyed the sorry picture. Sick birds, feathers puffed out, tails down and looking sorry for themselves, carcasses of others that hadn’t made it. Yet there were no specific signs. Birds with bird flu often have neurological signs and pheasants have been described as having cloudy looking eyes, but there was nothing. I should perhaps, have done some post-mortems, but hadn’t brought kit and there wasn’t really much time remaining. We are on a strict twelve hour limit when it comes to driving for work and Triar was waiting at home.

We went back, again, to the steading and I checked in with my report. Could I rule out avian influenza? I couldn’t. No specific signs to rule it in, but none that would rule it out either. Were they wild or kept. Grey zone. It was time to call VENDU. The Veterinary Exotic Notifiable Disease Unit are the body that dictates what tests should be taken, once the on-site vet decides disease can’t be ruled out. The answer was to sample 20 birds, swabs from the throat and cloaca, plus bloods and two heads.

It was time for the AHOs to don their gear and as they started to do their work, it was time for me to leave. It was a 45 minute drive home and I had to get there by 20:30 if I wasn’t to get a slapped wrist for going over my twelve hours. Luckily there was no traffic now and I made it by the skin of my teeth. I hadn’t eaten all day, so having passed the office (so technically onto my commute) I stopped at the chip shop. The time on the receipt is 20:32, thank goodness, so I could prove I hadn’t gone over!

After that, there was all the follow up to do. Saturday was spent filling in EXD40, a colossal document where I had to transfer all the GPS and other data I’d collected, as well as explaining in triplicate, why I felt that testing was justified. There were calls flying at me as well. Because the birds were tested they would be locked down for at least a week until the final test results were through.

A positive result would be quick, but would raise all the complicated questions about what and how to cull. Again, not like birds in a closed shed. These were ranging about and half wild in pens that spread over acres of forestry. In the event, just as I was about to be sent out on Saturday afternoon to do a valuation (healthy birds are paid for as compensation – a good incentive for early reporting) the initial results came back: not confirmed.
Still, it would be another week until they were certain. Along with my form filling, there was someone from the licensing team doing more form filling. Everyone who might enter, every vehicle that drove onto and off the locked-down premises had to have permission.

And so, that was my first report case. For a week, even after the initial results were back, I had daily contact with the gamekeeper as the mystery disease spread slowly, though still all in that one pen. I supported as best I could and then, with relief, handed over to his private vet. Finally they could go on and sample for other things, now it was confirmed there was no bird flu. And as I said at the top of the page, no sooner was this case handed over, I had a different one to tackle, but this is more than long enough already.

Thanks for reading. Over and out!

FND and Frustration

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I’m a day late in writing this, mostly because I am experiencing what could probably be best described as lassitude: described in the online Oxford Dictionary as “a state of physical or mental weariness; lack of energy.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am still able to function, on the surface. Yesterday and Friday, I met friends and today, I will go to church and walk the dog, but my body feels tired. There is a feeling in my feet and lower legs, as well as in my fingers that is probably best described as if they are fizzing, like I should imagine a glass of cola would feel, if it was able to. If I try to move fast, my body reacts by jerking. That feels similar to the effect you get if you touch an electric fence: the movement comes and there is no control over it. It’s not painful, nor is it alarming these days. It’s just a bit of a bore and rather tiring.

I wondered, for a while, if the fizzing was an anxiety attack. The occupational health doctor told me it wasn’t, one day when I was speaking to her and I said I felt it now. I was speaking and breathing normally, she said; it’s not that.

Looking for patterns, I think this attack is the result of being woken at two in the morning, working a twelve hour day, then having a very hot, hour long walk on the beach, without having any real opportunity to rest afterwards.

Should I have cancelled the friends and going to church? I took Friday off (flexi time) to rest and I would probably feel better now if I had spent a long weekend resting in bed or in front of the TV, but I am reluctant to cancel the things in my life that lift me up, to preserve myself for work.

What didn’t help was that I also spent Friday morning composing a long letter to the neurologist I saw about a month ago. His promised letter reached me on Tuesday and I read through it to the end, including the final paragraph that left me metaphorically gasping.

To go back to the appointment itself, we spent a lot of time discussing history, which inevitably took a while. I was in Norway 15 years, so everything medical that happened there is missing from my files. That part of his letter was reasonable. He didn’t get it all right, but the discrepancies probably aren’t significant enough to be worth arguing about it. As an aside here I will add, that FND is seen by many doctors as akin to hysteria, so I am wary about being seen as fussing too much. If I say that being diagnosed with FND messes with your mind, I hope you can understand what I’m getting at.

He then did something of a physical exam. I’ve had a lot of neurological exams over the years, so I know that he missed a lot out. If I took a positive view, he was concentrating his examination on what our discussion had highlighted as likely areas for assessment. A more negative take would be that he was looking for what he hoped to see, having already decided it was probably FND and needing a positive sign upon which to hang a that diagnosis.

I suspect the latter is nearer to the truth, because as soon as he saw something (head shaking during various exercises where I had to close my eyes to assess balance) he announced the diagnosis and quickly drew the appointment to a close. There was only the briefest discussion on why I was there. I mentioned being sent by occupational health, the problems with having only six sick days before formal proceedings, and how I had been much better in Norway where that didn’t occur, but not really anything about what is actually happening at present, for example as I described above.

His last paragraph then, described what he had heard during that last brief discussion. To my shock, what he wrote was “the biggest problem she has found is that employers in the UK only give six weeks of leave and she had the pattern in Norway where she would work for three weeks, her jerks would start to aggravate and then she had a week off and the jerks settled.”

Having written my response on Friday, I decided to send it on Monday, partly because Friday afternoon is not the best time to send anyone a letter at work and partly to allow myself more reflection time, which has actually been useful.

The real situation is that, in Norway, those physical and mental stressors that trigger the exhaustion (which can eventually require complete rest and absence from work, if I push on too hard) just didn’t happen that often. The job was much more reasonable and we were not chronically understaffed. I took a week off work to rest perhaps four times in three years.

Here in the UK, those events are perhaps coming four times a year and because I haven’t dared to take proper time off to recover, I am probably more susceptible as well. In the last six months, I have probably felt relatively normal for fifty percent of the time. The rest, I experience this weariness. I can still function, but it’s not pleasant and I tend to forget things and make stupid errors, that sometimes I find later and feel glad that nothing serious happened because I couldn’t concentrate properly.

So although I am shocked by what the doctor said, working through what is happening and why has been a useful exercise. I suspect, with all the frustrations in my current job, it is not going to be compatible with my health to continue in the same role, long term. I would add that I know it isn’t me. Many others are circling the drain or (as the health and safety officer corrected me) approaching burnout.

What I am going to do about it remains undecided. I quite like my job and I’m good at it, but my body and mind are not fit enough to tackle it and the risk of staying is that my health could worsen. I am considering reducing my work hours to four days a week, perhaps as a trial. Other alternatives obviously include trying to find something else, either within the civil service or elsewhere. I briefly toyed with the idea of returning to Norway, but I returned to the UK for various reasons and those remain unchanged.

Anyway, enough of that heavy stuff and self analysis. We had another fun training session on Wednesday with Josephine. She sadly only has two months left in her temporary role and they’ve only just started to advertise for a permanent replacement, so it looks like I may be left again without a veterinary mentor/guide while the civil service procrastinates. However, for now, she is a breath of fresh air and great at building up the team.

The exercise involved toy animals again. She set up various scenes, where there were disease outbreaks and we had to look for information and describe how we would go about diagnosis and putting the information onto the inevitable forms.

At the top of the page is a scene where there is an outbreak of avian influenza. That was slightly complicated because of these guys:

I assume that group had to discuss what to do about local wildlife, but my group had to investigate and record a possible bluetongue sampling at this lovely farm:

I got extra brownie points for querying the assorted carrots and other vegetables in the yellow box. This farmer may be feeding kitchen scraps, which is illegal in the UK!

There has also been some amusement at work this week, because of some seagulls which have been nesting somewhere on or near the building where I work. Perhaps others have not been so amused as a couple of people have been dive bombed or poohed on, but a theory of mine was confirmed when we had a number of extra staff visiting on Wednesday for a meeting. These are sexist seagulls and while I have passed out of the door, watched over by a relatively benign beady eye, all the actual attacks have been on men. Clearly there are some advantages to being female!

I’m not going to finish without giving high praise to The Boathouse restaurant at Glencaple. Regular readers may recall a lovely Christmas meal Donna and I had there back in December. I suggested a revisit, having seen an advertisement on Facebook for afternoon tea. It would be an understatement to say that it did not disappoint! As with the Christmas dinner, I took home enough food to last me until the next day and it really did taste as good as it looks!

Anyway, I shall go now. Thanks for reading and have a good week!

Unexpected Discoveries and a Missing Seal

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Travel, Vet, , , , , , , , , ,

I made a happy discovery yesterday evening, when I was travelling to Yorkshire. I like to break my journey at Tebay, but when it’s hot and I have Triar in the car, I tend to push on. Last night though, I was tired enough to stop. On entering the car park, instead of going straight ahead, I turned left up the hill, hoping to find some shade behind the trees. What I didn’t expect to find was a lovely shady dog walk, set among the trees. So as well as crunchy cheese and mango flavoured fizzy water, I got in 1,000 steps and a very pleasant woodland wander.

It’s been an unexpected type of week really. The only visits I had planned were to a farm where I was to TB test eight cattle. They had tested before as inconclusive, following a move up to Scotland from a higher risk area, so they were being retested. That was booked in for Tuesday/Friday (inject and read) so when my line manager sent out a message asking for volunteers to do night duty on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I quickly offered.

Usually, being on call is not too onerous. Sometimes there are phone calls in the evening, but it’s fairly rare, so I was quite unprepared when the phone rang at 2am on Wednesday morning. Quickly gathering pen and paper, I spoke to a vet about an owner whose dog had been in contact with a bat. The dog was now unwell and she wanted some advice. As both bat and dog were in central Scotland, the chances of rabies infection were small, but having been phoned, I had to make sure. Most of the form filling was left for the morning, but I was still up for a couple of hours recording the situation, so the vets taking over in the morning knew I was dealing with it.

So Wednesday morning was mostly taken up with the aftermath. The afternoon was quiet, but I was glad when home time came. However, I had only just sat down when the phone rang again. This time it was my veterinary advisor. Did I want to go on a report case the following morning. I’ve been waiting to do a report case, which is an investigation into a potential notifiable disease outbreak, so I said yes first, then braced myself for whatever she was going to say next. Whatever had run through my head, I wasn’t expecting what came next.

I was being asked to go to a beach where there had apparently been a number of dead birds found, as well as a seal (or maybe a porpoise). I was to test the seal for avian influenza and to do so would involve taking brain and lung samples, while fully dressed in all my protective gear, including my space-age hood, which circulates air through filters and blows it on my face.

I did double check about the hood. After all, I have tested dead birds in Norway for avian influenza and nobody even reminded me to wear a mask. But the answer was yes, I had to wear the hood. To be fair, brain sampling required a hammer, so spray was quite possible, but what struck me as particularly amusing was that this wasn’t a beach in the middle of nowhere. It was near a relatively popular west-coast holiday resort. I understand there were background discussions going on about whether we should let the police know. I was half imagining television cameras turning up, creating mass panic over people donning virtual space suits to approach dead animals that, half an hour earlier, someone’s dog might well have been sniffing.

Having spent two hours on Wednesday evening, learning about techniques for sampling marine wildlife and refreshing myself on donning and doffing PPE safely, and another hour on Thursday morning, ensuring I had everything in the car I might need, I drove an hour and a half and met my colleague , an experienced animal health officer, at the beach.

Partly because it was already warm, and partly to avoid causing alarm, I had decided that we should plot the position of the animals first, then get our final permission and instructions to test from VENDU (the Veterinary Exotic Notifiable Disease Unit). My plan was to photograph the animal or bird (necessary so that an expert can make sure what species it is) and get OS coordinates for each. All those details have to be recorded, so it made sense to do that before getting all the kit on.

In the event, what actually happened was that we walked onto the beach, made our way to the mark on the satellite image where the seal carcase had been recorded, and found… only tyre tracks. There were a number of dog walkers on the beach, so my colleague began to ask whether any of them had seen anything. None of them had. We walked on down the beach. No dead seal. No bird carcasses either.

I called my veterinary advisor. Was it possible the local authority, or someone, had already been and removed the seal? In the background, she started to make enquires to all the possible agencies and groups that might possibly have done so. In the meantime, my colleague and I walked on, scouring the beach with our eyes. After all, the worst possible scenario I could imagine was that we failed to find it after all the prep and travel, only for it to be reported again the next day.

The tyre tracks were explained – the local council had been out, but hadn’t found anything apparently. Nor did we. Despite walking for half an hour along the beach, the only things we found were a number of dead jelly fish and one, single, very rotten bird carcase, where there was nothing much left except bones and a wing. Eventually, we had to admit defeat and turn back. All that remained was to call VENDU and call off the hunt.

I did that, back at my car. I was just driving off when VENDU called back and asked whether we could go back and sample the bird. I said no. Sampling is from the cloaca and the back of the throat. Neither of those would have been identifiable. Not only that, but it was a good half-hour walk back to where we had seen it and there was no guarantee we’d find it again as, by that time, I’d abandoned all thoughts of OS coordinates.

We’ve been told that in hot weather, we have been allocated a £2 cold drinks allowance, so when I stopped for lunch, I ordered an iced caramel mocha. £2 doesn’t come close to covering it, but it was delicious, as was the goats’ cheese salad I ordered along with it.

I had a pleasant drive back down the Galloway Trail. Really, it ended up being one of those rare days where I look back and want to laugh and feel highly pleased that someone actually paid for me to do that. There are truly awful moments in this line of work, but there are some great ones too. And next time I am asked to go on a report case, there will be things I learned this time that will be put to good use.

I rounded off the week reading the TB test. Sadly, there were some animals that tested positive. Another farm, now under restrictions, with thousands of animals that all need to be tested. If I were in charge, I would be looking at banning moving cattle from high risk zones and into Scotland. I know there’s a lot of negativity about red tape, but the eventual cost of allowing those movements is unreasonably high. Then again, after 15 years in Norway, I’d be on board for massive limitation on moving animals around.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a good week.

Scottish Lanes and Yorkshire Skies

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It’s been a pleasant enough week back at work. I’m piling up cases slightly faster than I’m able to do the paperwork, but unless something urgent comes in, I should hopefully catch up with the ones I have next week.

Tuesday was spent training a new locum vet how to conduct a welfare visit. Wednesday saw me conducting a meeting with members of the local council. I work with two of them – Scott and David – on a regular basis and we get on well, but as with everything these days, it all has to be fully justified and written down. Thursday I tested a sheep for bluetongue.

And as all that was going on, all the cattle in my current TB breakdown were undergoing their first wave of testing. Until there are two clear tests, the cattle can’t be moved off the farm to another farm, so the farmer is essentially in lockdown. In the meantime, I have to dig into where the disease might have originated and where it might have spread to. All those animals will need to be tested too.

For now, I am actually on call. There are two “ready to go” vets in Scotland at nights and weekends: one North one South. I’m covering the South, so if any suspicion of notifiable disease crops up, or a welfare case that’s so urgent it can’t wait, then I’m the vet that will deal with it. I don’t know whether to hope something comes up or not. I still have to get my first report case (notifiable disease) under my belt, but obviously I don’t want any animal to have anything bad to crop up. We’re still on high alert for foot and mouth because of the European outbreaks.

After a long spell of warm weather, the pattern has now become more mixed, but Triar and I have been regularly walking down Blackbird Lane together. Well be walking there a lot today because I can’t go far from home in case any call comes in, but I want to get in 15,000 steps today.

I’m still keeping up with my WalkFit challenges and one of those is to do 15,000 steps three times in May. I’ve done two days already and this is the last day in May, so I’m going to go for it. My daily step requirement has stopped rising and is stable at 7,500 steps a day, which suits me for now. I often do more, but on bad days, I can still usually achieve that without too much effort.

There are sometimes cows in the fields lining the lane. I’m working on getting Triar to walk past them quietly. He’s always been something of a barker, but does respond well to bribery.

We did have something of an incident yesterday, not with the cows, but with water. He does love a paddle and there is a fairly disgusting, stagnant looking pool at the far end of the lane. Until yesterday , he had always ignored it, but yesterday he decided to jump in. Despite bathing him for about an hour when we got home, he still retains a definite odour of muddy puddle.

I’m going to finish with a few more photos of Yorkshire from last weekend. The picture at the top of the page was taken from my parents’ conservatory. The rest were taken while out with Triar. I do love a dramatic sky over stone walls and sunny fields. Have a lovely week all and thanks for reading.

Looking Up

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It feels a long time ago now, but last weekend with Valerie and Charles was wonderful. Having slept well after hot chocolate laced with brandy in the hot tub with Valerie, we all headed out on a drive through Kippen to Fintry. It’s a beautiful area of Scotland and one with some special memories for me. Thirty five years ago, as a vet student, I saw practice in Kippen. It was there that I was first sent in to do a consultation on my own on a lovely grey rabbit. There was also a parrot in the waiting room that used to meow at the dogs, then tell them to shut up, if they started to bark.

We stopped off at the Courtyard Cafe on Knockraich Farm for lunch. It was beautifully decorated for Christmas and the lights at the top of the page were above us as we dined. I had a ploughman’s lunch, followed by a mince pie with Bailey’s flavoured ice cream. It was delicious.

Having stopped off at Lidl, Valerie and I had another hot tub session m this time with gluhwein. The thought has just crossed my mind that I told mum yesterday that I barely drink alcohol, and now I’m making it sound as if we had a truly boozy weekend, but it was a lovely moment and the gluhwein was very reminiscent of Norwegian gløg. All it needed was some chopped nuts and raisins.

We went to the Christadelphian church service in Stirling on Sunday morning, where I was made to feel very welcome, as I have been on the other occasions I’ve attended. We stayed for a shared lunch and afterwards I rolled up my sleeves and did some of the washing up. I can feel a real sense of community there, which has been lost in many places, following Covid.

We headed off for a last coffee at the River House in Stirling. Valerie had promised me Christmas decorations and it didn’t disappoint. I love the contrast between the classic beauty of the Courtyard Cafe and the exuberant British, Nordic style decorations here below.

Back to work on Monday and a feeling of nervousness as I went out to blood sample some sheep that had moved from parts of England that are now under restrictions for Bluetongue. It’s too cold now for the mosquitoes that carry it to become infective, but the two sheep both came up a few months back, when the weather was warmer and before the restrictions were in place. Tracing a disease that isn’t spread by direct contact, and which may not show up for some months is a complicated business.

So far, it hasn’t been found up here, but we are staying vigilant. It had been a long time since I had taken blood samples from sheep, but the two visits went okay and I sent all the paperwork in by the next day. I haven’t heard back yet from the debriefing team, even though I spotted an error in one of the forms, so it will doubtless come winging back to me at some point. There are now confirmed cases of avian influenza down in Norfolk, so there could be busy times coming up.

Tuesday was an easier day; I visited a couple of vet practices. Most mixed vet practices in Scotland do some work for the government, checking for notifiable diseases like anthrax, brucellosis and TB. As part of my job, I go out and visit them, partly to check they have suitable equipment, but also for outreach. They are routinely out on many more farms than I am, and if they see anything that we could help with, I hope that they would feel that reaching out was possible. Vets used to work for the ministry for years, but now there’s a constant churning of staff and that continuity has been lost. Changing that will require the political will to improve and invest, so I’m not holding my breath, but in the meantime, I try to present a friendly face.

I also stopped off at ReadingLasses in Wigtown for a lunch of coffee and cake, with a good book to read. The cake was delicious, and this time I bought the book too.

And now, it’s the last weekend before Christmas and I’m going to spend some of it painting. The work on my house is progressing and, having painted the new shower room, the joiner came yesterday to fit the waterproof boards behind the shower. I made a start on one of the bedrooms last night. It still astonishes me how much of the paint sinks into the new plaster. It’s much harder work than normal painting, but also important to do a good job. Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be ready for visitors.

Anyway, I wish you all a peaceful and happy Christmas. Thanks for reading.

From Swimming Horses to Marauding Pigs

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This week has felt so long, and has been so full, that it was almost a surprise when I looked back at my photos and realised that it was only last weekend I went to the Northern Canine and Equine Therapy Centre in Rathmell, where they do hydrotherapy for horses and dogs. They had advertised it as a coffee morning and we did indeed purchase a lovely coffee from a van outside the centre, but the real attraction lay inside.

The horse hydrotherapy session was due first, so we walked into the part of the centre where the horses were kept. I wish that I had taken more photos, but it was a lovely place and I instantly felt at home. The centrepiece of the covered yard was obviously the pool (pictured at the top of the page) but around two edges there were stables for the hospitalised horses. Some were there for lameness, some for weight loss and conditioning. Others were there, not so much for treatment, but for pampering. Imagine sending your horse away for a spa weekend!

Text in image: The pool is 12 feet deep and contains 30,000 gallons of water. It is untested to discourage unhealthy bacteria and is chlorinated to the same degree as a human pool. It takes one week to refill the pool every time we need to change the water and carry out any maintenance work. We therefore only completely emptyit annually

Having swum round, the pony in the picture was taken out, towelled down, then treated with oils to replace the natural oils that would have been removed from his coat. He then was walked into a solarium to dry out a bit.

Pony standing in the solarium. A bag of hay is being tied in front of him.

After we’d seen the horse swimming, we moved through to the dog pool. There. We watched as a dog physio put her labrador through his paces in the pool.

She told us about the different conditions they helped with. Her own dog doesn’t need any therapy, but he does love swimming. It’s also possible to book a half hour fun session with your dog and I immediately decided I’d like to take Triar to see if he would like indoor swimming. I also found myself wishing I worked there, or perhaps was a vet who could refer animals to them. It felt like a very positive place.

We had rather a bombshell last Friday afternoon, which I couldn’t bring myself to mention last week. My lovely boss, Kirsty, unexpectedly sent out a message to say she was leaving and her last day would be early in August. I will be very sad to see her go, and by the outpouring of shock, so will many of my colleagues. Both Lindsay (my Veterinary advisor – one step up from me) and Sue, who has just taken on a year long post after locumming on and off, called me up, mainly to express their sadness. Though it feels very sudden, it’s good for Kirsty and I hope she gets some much deserved time to relax.

Back at work on Monday, I visited a chicken farm with my colleague, Aleks. I have to do three visits with other vets before I can go solo, and this was my third. Because everyone is so busy, it’s difficult to find dates when two of us can go out together, so I’m glad my third accompanied visit is done. I have three of my own to do, so now I can more easily fit them into my timetable.

I can’t even remember what I did on Tuesday. It all feels so long ago! I was due to revisit a welfare case on Wednesday with David, who works for the local authority with animal health and welfare. We often work together and the revisit was to a farm where we witnessed some serious welfare issues before. But when he arrived, he asked me if we could divert to a more pressing issue. A group of pigs had escaped from their field and had turned up in someone else’s farmyard. It wasn’t the first time they’d escaped, but the farmer, quite correctly, now had them coralled in a barn.

Other authorities, including the police and the SSPCA had been called out when the pigs had escaped before, but nothing had been done. These situations are complicated to deal with. Animals do escape from time to time, and unless they’re on a road or causing risk, it’s really the farmer’s responsibility to get them back and secure them in the field or barn. For David and me, it was essentially a welfare issue. It’s not safe for the pigs to be marauding round the countryside. All farmers have a responsibility to keep their animals safe and keeping them enclosed within a safe area is key to that.

After the big foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, various laws were brought in to try to reduce the risks of another big outbreak. These included standstill laws on animal movements. If cloven hoofed animals (mainly cattle, sheep and pigs) are moved onto a farm, then the farm comes under a standstill order and for thirteen days, no animals can be moved off the farm without special permission.

So pigs landing unexpectedly on someone else’s farm presents quite an issue to that farmer, especially if they were planning on selling some animals, which our farmer was, and imminently. Our first action was to find out if the sale could go ahead. The pigs had not, to anyone’s knowledge, been near the animals that were to be sold, but equally, they had been loose, so where they had been was anyone’s guess. The movement ban applies to all animals on the farm, so the sale had to be stopped. That was done before we left the office.

Our next action was to visit the farm. It was an hour’s drive, but when we got there, I was able to examine the pigs. They were healthy and being well looked after. The main issue that had to be dealt with (or so we thought) was that they were not where they were meant to be.

Having looked at the entrapped pigs, we then went to visit the pig owner. The remainder of the herd were in a separate field from the ones who had escaped. To get to them, we had to walk through the field where the escapee pigs had been. There were some green boxes that looked like the boxes supermarkets use to deliver produce, but I had walked past them, keen to see if the pigs were okay. David had gone to get something from his van and I expected him to follow immediately, but when I turned to see where he was, he was standing at the gate, looking round.

He joined us eventually and we went and looked at the pigs. They looked well and the field they were in was (in my opinion) the perfect environment, with a small shelter, long grass and rushes to hide in and mud in which to wallow when the weather was warm.

It was only when we turned and walked back, that David told me what he had seen at the gate. Across from the supermarket boxes, there was litter, lying about. And in that rubbish, which was mostly food packaging, he had found empty packages for sausage rolls, ham and bacon, along with bags for bread and hot dog rolls.

I mentioned foot and mouth and the rules created after the big 2001 outbreak earlier. In addition to new rules on animal movements, strict rules were brought in about feeding pigs. Feeding them any kind of human food or kitchen waste is banned. We asked the farmer about the packages. It wasn’t impossible they had been left by someone having a picnic, but he didn’t know where they’d come from and said he thought people sometimes came and fed the pigs.

So now we had a situation, where there were empty packages for pork products that the escaped pigs had access to, and worse, that it was possible the produce, including raw bacon, might have been fed to the pigs.

These are the kinds of situations that have immediately to be sent up the food chain. Even if I had dealt with such a situation before, I would still have to call it in, without delay. The upshot of my phone call, and the work I have been doing for the last three days, is that both farms have to be locked down, with no movements of live or dead animals onto or off the premises, except under special licence. All the animals have to be inspected every 72 hours for signs of disease for a week, then probably weekly thereafter, for another two weeks. There was also the matter of the pigs being on the wrong farm, which was resolved yesterday, after lots of negotiation and paperwork.

So a vist which I thought might be a little complicated to resolve has turned into a behemoth case. One thing I will say is that we have an enormous amount to be grateful for with the farmer who took in the marauding pigs. She did everything right from start to finish, including calling us in. Chances are, the pigs don’t have foot and mouth, but now we have everything under supervision, so if the worst happens, we are already on top of it.

Had she chosen not to trap the pigs and call us, but had shoo’d them away and sent her animals to the sale, the potential for us being faced with another 2001 was there. That was started by pigs being fed improperly processed food and the disease wasn’t spotted until it had been sent all over the country. I may now be faced with three weeks of visits and a ton of paperwork, but this is the kind of work that can prevent a world of pain for farmers and a devastating cull that costs the country billions.

So this is what I am here for. I’m only a tiny cog in a very important chain, and kudos to both the wonderful farmer who called it in and for David for his observational skills. Next time, I won’t be so quick to pass by litter to look at animals.

But if I have one final thought, it is that I wish the government could see what we are here to do and how important vets and animal health and welfare officers are to this process. There should be more of us on the ground and the pay for those of us who choose to do this should be much better. Staff come and go, or work quickly to get promotion as there is no pay progression in our part of the civil service any more.

We need experienced people on the front line, but there is zero financial incentive to come and stay. Maybe saying this publically could get me into trouble, but if so, so be it. The people responsible for removing progressive pay bands for these roles have put the health and welfare of the nation’s animals at risk.

I work alongside a few, faithful staff, who have years of experience, a network of connections, a load of invaluable local knowledge, who are asked to train new entrants on the same wage as them. That is both plain wrong and absolute insanity. We should be making sure those people have an incentive to stay, that they know they are valued and that they don’t have to move to a different job to be properly rewarded.

And on that cheery note (sarcasm alert for non Brits) I shall leave you to your weekend! Have a good week all, and see you next week.

A few “after the rain” photographs for those who love Blackbird Lane.

Here and There, This and That

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One of the things I enjoy about working as a government vet is travelling to different places. It hasn’t happened yet, but at some point, I will be sent to do detached duty, where I can be sent anywhere in the UK to deal with any emerging notifiable disease. Even in my region though, I get around a bit. On Monday, I am going to Ayr to accompany a colleague on a welfare inspection. She has only been out to one such inspection so far and I’ve already done my three, so hopefully I can help her to do a good job.

I’m also going to be one of APHA’s vets at the Royal Highland Show next weekend, which is exciting. If nothing happens, it’ll be a lovely day out. It’s a long time since I’ve been, but it was always an enjoyable day out. If something happens that I have to deal with, it will be… interesting. Imagine how the day would change if we discover one of the animals is showing signs of foot and mouth. There are contingency plans, which I should get next week. I will make myself familiar with them and keep my fingers crossed that the most exciting thing to happen will be visiting the freshly cooked doughnut stand.

Not that I will be doing that. As I mentioned last week, I have been signed up to a weight loss program called Second Nature by the NHS. So far, it’s been very good. Its focus is on changing habits and not on counting calories, which is appealing to me. I can’t get on board with weighing out food for the rest of my life. It relies on encouraging exercise, eating more vegetables and cutting down on carbs, without cutting them out altogether.

I was meant to do lots of meal planning this past week, but bought pick and mix salad every day from my local supermarket, which handily is a ten minute walk from my office. In the evenings, Andrew and I have been using a delivery service called Hello Fresh. Both Anna and Donna recommended it, so we decided to give it a go. Each week, we select four meal plans, they deliver ready prepared ingredients, and we cook the food together when I get home from work. It’s been quite easy to modify the Hello Fresh meals to fit the Second Nature recommendations, so it’s all been very easy and I love not having to decide what to eat while standing in the supermarket.

I also signed up to an online service called Borrow My Doggy and this week, for the first time, someone new took Triar out for a walk. It did make me realise that he’s not the easiest dog to handle. He’s never been placid – quite the opposite. Also, I’ve not taught him very good manners on the lead.

It went off fine though. I’m hoping to find someone who would be able to take him at short notice if I have to go away unexpectedly for work, but I’m going to have to engage more to do that. I’ve just booked a holiday in November, so perhaps I need to concentrate my efforts more. Triar has never been in a kennel and I’m not sure I really want him to start now.

These are some photos from the bottom of my garden, which is running absolutely wild. The garden is full of insects and birds, which I love watching from my kitchen window. I made my way down the broken steps this week and was pleased to find that the overgrown roses have the same, wonderful scent that I remember from the roses in the garden when I was a child. So many these days seem not to have any aroma. “Stop and small the roses” is a good principle in life, I think. We’re down in Yorkshire for the weekend, so I’m going to start with a cup of coffee and take it from there. See you next week!

TB, Cairn Holy and a Tasty Tart

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Andrew and I were in Yorkshire last weekend, which feels like a lifetime ago, but it was a lovely warm day on Saturday and we went on an ice cream hunt, which on the face of it wasn’t very successful. The firstly place we went to was styled like an American Diner, but it was so noisy and there were so many children leaping about that we turned and walked back out. The next place we tried, after consulting the Oracle of Google Maps was a small, village shop, but the only parking we found was in a field, which some canny farmer had mown and was charging £10 per day to enter.

We ended up doing a big circle back to Grassington, where fortunately, we bought a cone, but it wasn’t quite the ice-cream parlour experience we’d been searching for! Grassington is very pretty though and the drive back was too.

On Tuesday afternoon, I met up with some women I met on social media. We’d been chatting online and they were part of a women’s group I wanted to join, so we met for a coffee. I’ve been worried about Andrew being here for the summer with nothing to do, and to my delight, it turns out one of the women owns a small media company in the area. She does some work with young people, so later this morning, Andrew has been invited to a scriptwriting workshop in a cafe in town. He’s read the script they’ll be working on and has some ideas, so hopefully he will enjoy it. If Andrew wants to work in film, the most difficult part might well be finding a way in, so any experience and contacts he can form are a good thing.

I was through in Stranraer again this week, on one of my TB farm cases. We’re still waiting to see if TB is confirmed, but it’s looking more likely and so my Veterinary Advisor and I went to the farm to assess the boundaries and history of animal movements on and off the farm. If TB is confirmed, we will need to move quickly to start tracing where it might have come from and where it could have spread to, so now we are prepared to move to that stage without delay.

I was driving back to Dumfries, when I found myself in a queue of traffic. It’s a fairly difficult road for overtaking long queues, and this one was particularly frustrating as it was going slowly round the bends and speeding up for the straight parts. Seeing a sign for “Holy Cairn” I made a snap decision that this might be a good moment to go and explore one of the historic monuments that are scattered along the A75.

This is a hit and miss activity. Sometimes you can follow side roads for miles and find nothing, or you do arrive, only to find you’re looking at two stones on a hillside. This time, however, I found a good parking space and went through a small gate to find what looked initially like a circle of standing stones…

… but which on closer inspection, had been the spectacular entrance to a chambered cairn.

There was an information block in the corner of the enclosure, which told me a little bit about the cairn and its excavation, but the best thing it told me was that there was another cairn, further up the hill. I followed the track up, to find another, rather different cairn. The entrance to this one was a little less spectacular, but it was sited in such a beautiful place that I could only stand and gaze.

I read the information here too. Long-time readers might remember my trip to Stonehenge where I was amazed to discover that animal herders came down from Scotland to celebrate the winter solstice. I found myself wondering whether the people who used these cairns were among those who made that trip.

The plaque told me the cairns dated from 4000 BC. When I looked up Stonehenge later, it is thought to have been started in 3000BC, so these beautiful cairns were in use a thousand years before Stonehenge was begun. As ever, I felt the wonderful calm feeling that I always get when viewing something ancient or ageless. It’s always a wonderful reminder of how short and insignificant my life is in the grand scheme of things.

And finally, I had been gradually gaining weight, ever since I moved to Arctic Norway. Winter hibernation is all very well, but when winter lasts from October to May, it’s a large chunk of the year to take a break from walking, which was something I had done to keep myself healthy for years. I had hoped to break the bad habits when I came back to Scotland, but there is far too much temptation and I haven’t lost anything at all.

I asked at my GP clinic for help and they have signed me up for six months on an app called Second Nature. It tells me it’s going to help me break my bad habits and form some new and healthier ones, so I will be starting that on Monday. My main hope is to lose enough weight so I can start to go up hills again without creaking to a standstill within a few yards. There’s no weighing and measuring foods or calorie counting, which is good as I can never be bothered with all that. I’m also glad they didn’t offer me drugs. I want to improve my lifestyle, so hopefully this will help. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Of course, I am back in Scotland, and true to form, my colleagues in Stranraer, on hearing this, convinced me that it was essential that I should make the most of the last few days before I began, so this was the result. Have a good week all!

Surviving Duty Vet

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I wrote, last week, about my frustrations around the non payment of relocation expenses. They haven’t yet been paid, but K, my line manager, has told me that the big boss I sent my complaint to is now trying to get it paid from the local budget, rather than continuing to fight with DEFRA HR. I will try to keep you updated. Another colleague has suggested I contact the union I joined when I arrived, so that’s another step to consider, though I am hoping it will all be resolved soon and I won’t need to.

For most of this week, including last weekend and the (Scottish) Monday bank holiday, I have been working as duty vet. During the weekend, that meant the APHA national phone line went through to my work phone, or at least any and all calls from the north of Scotland came through to me. In the north, a second vet was taking phone calls for the south. Not many people call the emergency line (thank goodness). I had only a few calls on the Monday, most of which were easily dealt with. The counter to that is that, if something does come in that actually requires me to go out, it is likely to be something serious. Possible reasons would include a suspected outbreak of a notifiable disease (think bird flu or foot and mouth) or a welfare case that’s so bad it can’t wait.

Anyway at least, with mobile phones, being on call no longer requires me to stay in the house, glued to a landline, so Andrew and I decided on Saturday that it was time to go and explore our local ice cream emporium. There are a couple locally. Farmers in the UK have been encouraged to diversify and so we took a short drive out to Drummuir Farm where they make their own ice cream. There were loads of choices of flavour, from biscotti to battenberg, and Andrew and I ended up ordering two glorious fruity sundaes.

We went for a drive afterwards, including through Dalton, where I stopped to take a photo of this lovely pastoral scene.

Andrew’s eye was caught at Drummuir by the full Scottish breakfast on the menu, so we returned on Sunday for an early lunch, which I can also recommend!

I don’t know if I’ve written much about being duty vet through the week before, but it’s not an enjoyable part of my job. Part of it is dealing with any queries that come in, either in emails or by phone. We don’t actually have to answer the phone during the day, but the calls are logged with a summary of the question, so then we have to look at what’s being asked and decide what action to take.

Some of these are quite straightforward. If a cow dies suddenly, the local private vet should go out and check whether it died of anthrax. An APHA vet has to okay that, then give them a reference number. This mostly involves form filling and it happens often enough that I already know the ropes.

But APHA covers a lot of ground on the animal front, so I might find myself with a query about an imported horse whose health certificate wasn’t filled in properly, or a farmer who failed to update his online records properly and has now found his farm is under TB restrictions as his test couldn’t be verified. These can take a lot of sorting out and require solid understanding of all the different computer systems we use. The main problem for me there, is that I don’t have a solid understanding of those systems yet.

Fortunately I have lovely colleagues, so I managed to get through, but ex policeman Tommy, who shares an office with me, saw that I was so stressed on Tuesday , Wednesday and Thursday that he arrived on Friday with a bottle of Malbec for me! Next week should be better, I think, My ongoing cases were mostly put on hold while I was on duty, so there’s a bit of catching up to do, but at least I have a better grasp of where I’m going with those.

In the meantime, I’ll finish with some pictures from my daily walks down Blackbird Lane. We’re into summertime now and my little green lane is full of colour and birdsong: a daily oasis to sooth my soul.

From Nostalgia to Duty

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My son John and his girlfriend Yoana visited me last weekend. Though it was raining most of the time (in true, southwest Scotland style) John suggested we could go to New Lanark for a visit, so that’s what we did.

New Lanark holds a special place in my heart. For those who don’t know, it is a former 18th century cotton spinning mill village located on the banks of the Falls of Clyde, where social reform became very important. The lives of those who worked in the mill and their families were improved through schools, education, reasonably priced food and medical support. It’s a living village too – there are still tennants living there, and apparently very long waiting lists to get an apartment.

New Lanark

I think I might have visited with my parents, a very long time ago, but my fondest memories are from when John and Anna were young and we went there every year at Christmas time. There’s a ride you go through, where you sit on moving chairs and are taken on a trip back through the darkness of time. At Christmas, it gets set up like a kind of magical grotto and the filmed clips of a child that grew up in New Lanark, are replaced with an elf-like girl called Holly. At least that’s how it was back then, though that is twenty years ago now.

Millworkers’ apartment block.

The site has been undergoing improvement for a long time and it was lovely to visit again. Some things struck me, now that hadn’t really done so before. One was that the classroom, where the millworkers children were taught was a very large, airy room, with a high ceiling and lots of natural light. The contrast between that and the small, low ceilinged apartments, where large families occupied one or two rooms, must have seemed incredible to the children when they began to attend school.

Robert Owen’s house is on the left.

The other was a comment in the film, where the mill workers’ working day was described. They “only” worked ten hours per day, potentially from ten years old, but there were evening classes so that they could be educated if they wanted. I only work eight hour days and am struggling to motivate myself to write in the evenings. It’s incredible to imagine a world where working ten hour days, six days a week, was considered humane, but there it is.

A beautiful roof-garden has been set up on one of the old mills.

Robert Owen, the social reformer, who brought in the improvements for workers in New Lanark, eventually left to set up a new project in America called New Harmony. This project fell apart within a few years. Reading between the lines, a lot of the people they attracted had lofty ideals, but weren’t necessarily hard working.

View from the rooftops.

It’s easy to see with hindsight, but it’s obviously much easier to improve the lives of those who started out with very little and were used to hard labour than it is to form a new community of truly equal people. If Owen had really wanted a socialist paradise, he could have considered whether it was possible to make all those in New Lanark equal. I think then, he might have realised he couldn’t achieve that without reducing his own circumstances to close to those of his workers, and I imagine that was why he set off on an unrealistic vanity project, rather than really setting out to achieve equality.

Back to work and I am unexpectedly working this weekend as the duty vet for Southern Scotland. This means that if there are any reports of suspected notifiable diseases, such as foot and mouth or bird flu reported, I’m the vet who will be sent out. Equally, if there’s an urgent welfare issue that’s so bad it can’t wait, that will be my job to tackle as well. My car is currently loaded up with boxes full of all the kit that I might need, which is quite eye opening as there’s so much of it. I know that in an outbreak situation, I would have to arrange clean and dirty areas in my car and, as I didn’t have much warning, everything has just been thrown in. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for now. Complicated routines take time to organize and I had less than a day to find everything, without anyone local to help me out. Roll on Monday!

The steam engine that drove the mill when the water in the Clyde was low was housed in the building on the right. The ropes that drove the machinery would have been inside the glass bridge. The mill race goes underneath the building on the right,