Tales from a Wild Vet: Paws, claws and furry encounters. Jo Hardy

does vital work.

      The day after my wildebeest adventure with Thys I went in to meet the employees there and to find out more about the kind of work they were doing. As I drove into the compound I could see dozens of dog kennels, most of them full, and a couple of cat cages, which looked more like aviaries.

      Inside the small office I met the staff of three: Maloli, Yasmin and Liz. Maloli told me he came from a Xhosa family and he lived in one of the local townships with his girlfriend and their son. Short, with a round face and a big smile, Maloli was probably in his mid-thirties. He explained that he spent every day travelling round the townships helping people with their animals – most of them dogs.

      Yasmin was a very tall, blonde Afrikaner in her forties. She explained that she went out collecting stray dogs, investigating welfare cases and helping to set up temporary clinics. Liz, also an Afrikaner, remained in the office, dealing with people coming in off the street and with phone calls. All three of them were friendly and welcoming and they showed me around the offices, the examining room, the kennels and the field at the back where the rescued donkeys were kept.

      It was good to meet them and I could see that they had their hands full. I was excited – and nervous, too – about joining them in December and keen to do what I could to help.

      A couple of days later Jacques and I headed to Johannesburg for the wedding. Jacques and his best friend Eugene, known as Snap, had been friends since they played on the same chess team as teenagers at school. Both of them were talented players – at one point Jacques was extremely high-ranked in South Africa, able to plan 30 to 40 moves ahead during a game. He still plays and he can still see 10 to 15 moves ahead. I do play with him, but as I can just about manage to plan two moves ahead there are no prizes for guessing who wins. It’s more a case of guessing how long I can stay in the game.

      As a team Jacques and Snap would surprise their opponents. While the geeky kids plotted and planned, Jacques and Snap would go out and party and then get up the next day and wipe the floor with the opposition, who almost always underestimated them.

      Snap’s wedding to his fiancée Yolandi was in a pretty, rustic, wood-beamed chapel at the bottom of a steep hill on an estate just outside the city. Further up the hill was a lodge that had a lovely garden with a fountain at its centre, which was where the reception was held. We all stood around the fountain as the photos were taken, enjoying strawberry daiquiris and canapés. It was beautiful, but cold! August is one of the chilliest months in South Africa, so I was glad when we headed into the lodge for the meal.

      It’s the custom with Afrikaner weddings for the groom to be heckled by his friends during his speech, so poor Snap had to put up with the jeers and catcalls of his mates, but Jacques, as best man, had an easier time.

      After the speeches everyone danced the traditional Afrikaner sokkie dance – a mixture of jive, boogie, swing and foxtrot, which is energetic and lively and a lot of fun. Jacques is a good dancer, but he has size 13 feet so he sometimes finds it hard to avoid my toes and we end up teasing one another about whose fault it is.

      Being in Johannesburg was a lovely opportunity to spend a couple of days with Jacques’s parents, Elna and Johan, who live in one of the suburbs. I’ve known them since I first came to South Africa; they treat me like one of the family and I’m really fond of them. Elna is an interior designer, while Johan works for an engineering company. Jacques’s younger sister Sonia came round to say hello, too. She works in the law, and like Elna she’s warm, chatty and outgoing. Sonia always looks glamorous. As a vet that’s pretty hard to do – we spend our lives in practical clothes, with hair scraped back, short nails and no make-up, so I love it when Sonia brings out my girly side and we talk fashion and hair.

      It was a short visit for me this time, all too soon I was kissing Jacques goodbye and I couldn’t hold back my tears. It would be almost three months before I saw him again, but at least we would be able to look forward to Christmas together.

      Mum had warned me that when I got home I would meet the newest member of the family. She and Dad couldn’t cope for more than a few days without a springer spaniel in the house, so they’d gone to a rescue charity and found a six-year-old liver-and-white springer called Roxy. She’d belonged to a family that loved her, but they’d had to give her up when they had a baby – maybe on account of her particularly ear-splitting bark, which my parents only discovered after adopting her!

      Still missing Tosca, I wasn’t sure I felt ready for another dog, but when I met Roxy my heart melted. She was very different to Tosca, in looks and in disposition. Unlike the independent Tosca, Roxy stuck like glue, a little shadow following us around, seemingly constantly anxious. One evening we watched One Born Every Minute – the television programme about childbirth – and as soon as a baby started crying, Roxy would get up and start pacing the room. She fussed around Paddy, our Yorkie, too. Paddy was prone to reverse-sneezing attacks, a spasm of the soft palate a bit like a very sudden bout of hiccups. It’s fairly common in small breeds with long, soft palates and not dangerous, but every time he started sneezing Roxy would go over and sniff around him like an over-attentive mother.

      Unlike Tosca, Roxy was obedient and attentive, desperately trying to please. That is until she went for a walk, and then her spaniel switch flicked on and seemed to short-circuit her ability to hear. On walks she lost her fretful demeanour and became a typical springer, leaping and throwing herself about without a care in the world.

      When I started taking her to agility classes she excelled, and we had a lot of fun. She’d fly over the jumps and scuttle through the tunnels. She’d even race over the dog-walk and A-frame. But the seesaw was her nemesis; as soon as it started to tip she panicked, suddenly not quite so brave.

      There was big excitement in the Hardy household for another reason, too, because the week I got home both Mum and Ross were graduating. First Ross graduated from Canterbury Christ Church University. His degree was in music, and the ceremony was held in Canterbury Cathedral. Ross is two years younger than me, but his degree was two years shorter, which is why we ended up graduating in the same year. As his big sister I was grateful that at least my ceremony had come first. His was lovely, although unfortunately Mum, Dad and I were stuck behind a pillar inconveniently placed there by the Normans when they rebuilt the cathedral some 1,000 years ago, so we spent a lot of time craning to try to spot him.

      Mum’s graduation ceremony came five days later in London at the Barbican. Her parents, Grandma and Grandpa Nevison, were there with us, beaming with pride. Mum had gone to art college after leaving school and was working full-time as a graphic designer when she began her studies with the Open University in 1998. After three years she deferred the remainder of her degree to research and write a book, only taking up her studies again in 2011 once she’d wound down her design business. Now she had qualified in humanities with creative writing and we were all hugely proud of her.

      Feeling a little left out, Dad joked that his degree was in fatherhood, from the School of Hard Knocks. He hadn’t liked school and hadn’t done well and when he left he’d gone to work in construction. A few years later he got a job in the City, starting at the very bottom of a large financial institution. Now he’s one of a handful of people running the company, though I still don’t know exactly what he does!

      Before my next locum job I had a couple of days in which to begin planning my trip to Uganda with World in Need. I had met David Shamiri, the director of WIN, through our local church. He came to England from Yemen, and he and his Polish wife Magda do a huge amount of work to help others. In my last year at vet school I decided I’d like to travel and do some voluntary work before settling into a permanent job, so I went to David and asked whether he could use the services of a vet.

      World in Need works to transform the world through aid and education, and David suggested I might go to Uganda to help remote communities without access to a vet to care for their animals – especially goats. WIN had arranged to give goats to many of the villagers, but its aim was to give one to every household as part of the drive to help them become self-sufficient. However, many of the goats’ new owners had little idea how to look after them.

      So I agreed to go to Uganda for four weeks to help out and we arranged the trip for