Scary inhabitants of Australia
The first lot of Gold Coast visitors with children have returned and soon those without children will start their holidays this month.
Others have enjoyed a holiday in beautiful New Zealand where there aren’t any dangerous critters.
Spiders, snakes and crocodiles are only a few of the scary inhabitants of Australia.
And if you’ve ever seen a Huntsman spider you’ll know what I mean.
These guys can be the size of a small dinner plate and grab the jandal off you if you try to swat them.
As for the snakes, there are plenty of varieties and almost all of them deadly.
Then there are the crocs, stingers and sharks.
I have lots of funny stories from my times working in Queensland, but some involved my stay with a vet friend in Townsville.
It was an experience every day.
He let all the little lizards inhabit the house to keep the insect and spider population down.
These lizards lived behind the paintings on the walls and crawled around the house at night – pretty unnerving when you want to get some sleep.
Then there was the bathroom cupboard.
Inside was a bright green tree frog that slept all day in there and crawled down the inside of the door, along the hall and out the open back door at night to feed off the moths.
Did that frog give me a fright the first time I opened that door.
Another particularly scary place was the aviary because the grass around it had to be kept short so snakes would be easily seen.
So, I reckon we should consider ourselves lucky in New Zealand.
But there are some other nasties in Australia that aren’t so visible, but are equally as bad.
One memorable vet moment was when Greg asked me to help him with surgery one day.
He showed me the X-ray of a large dog’s chest, with a lot of lung changes visible.
Poor old ‘‘Nudgee’’ was a large male brindle bull terrier cross with a bad case of the coughs.
A blood test confirmed what we thought, which was a massive infestation of heart worm. Yep, worms that live in the heart chambers.
Nudgee’s only chance of survival was to attempt surgery that I still can’t believe we did.
With a lot of tense moments we had Nudgee safely asleep and all prepared.
We blocked off the upper part of one of his large jugular veins in his neck to stop blood flow and then made a small incision in the vein below this point.
Greg then carefully threaded a long pair of forceps down the vein and to my amazement started pulling out huge long white worms of up to 10 centimetres in length.
These worms can live in the blood system and eventually block the flow through the heart.
They can be killed with drugs, but in Nudgee’s case, if we killed all the worms, the large number of dead worms in his blood stream could kill him as well.
So we had to try to remove as many as possible first and then kill the rest with drugs.
It was like some sort of alien life form coming out of that vein.
Amazingly, Nudgee recovered from this unconventional and risky surgery uneventfully and within days his cough disappeared.
A series of injections killed the rest of the worms and a month later he was as good as new.
It was pretty much outback surgery and unbelievable if I hadn’t been there myself.
Even Greg was an interesting character – he never wore shoes to work and the soles of his feet were like the soles of boots.
I’ll tell you about the dog that ate the mouldy coconut another time.
Luckily, we don’t have the mosquito in New Zealand that transmits heartworm.
Prevention is easy with monthly medication nowadays.
Cats have a lower incidence, but can also get heartworm and a range of monthly preventative medications are also available for the furry felines.
So if you are taking your fourlegged friend over the ditch remember to get heartworm medication as soon as you get there.