Bramble, the doggy blood donor who’s saved 100 lives
And just like humans, he insists on getting a biccy afterwards!
TaiL wagging as he chases a ball in the park, Bramble may look like any black labrador — but don’t be fooled. This floppy-eared, glossy-coated superhero has helped to save the lives of 104 dogs in the past eight years. This week Bramble gave blood for the 26th time, making him Pet Blood Bank UK’s most prolific donor. as usual, he gave 450ml — j ust under a pint ( the same as humans), and enough to treat four dogs anywhere in Britain.
‘i’m so proud of Bramble,’ says owner Maria Craddock, from Durham. ‘i’d be distraught if anything happened to him, so knowing he’s helped save the lives of other people’s equally precious pets makes me love him all the more.
‘He wears a little Blood Bank UK tag on his collar and if people spot it when i’m out walking him, they’ll say: “He’s a blood donor? That’s amazing!”
‘ Not many people, even dog owners, seem to know about the blood bank but it provides a vital service.’
Maria, 24, got Bramble eight years ago when he was a few months old. She signed him up to give blood after seeing a notice appealing for donors i n her l ocal Vets 4 Pets surgery when she took him for his first inoculations.
Bramble had to wait until after his first birthday, as only dogs aged between one and nine (in human years) are allowed to donate. For younger and older dogs, l ess l i kely to be i n peak health, it may be unsafe.
However, chihuahuas and cocker spaniels need not apply, as only canines weighing 55lb or more — ie, at least as big as an average labrador — are sizeable enough to make the grade. Provided they are, almost any breed or crossbreed is fine.
Bramble, who weighs 77lb, has been doing his bit for his fellow canines three or four times a year since his first birthday but will be hanging up his tourniquet in six months’ time, when he turns nine.
Maria says: ‘i think he’ll really miss it. One reason why i’ve taken him so often is that he genuinely seems to love the experience.
‘He lies on the vet’s table having his tummy rubbed while the blood is being extracted, and it’s obvious that he’s enjoying himself.’
afterwards a small bandage is applied. Then Bramble is rewarded with wet food and dog biscuits and gets to choose a squeaky toy to take home, and a red Pet Blood Bank bandana is tied around his neck to honour his contribution.
Like all donor dogs, Bramble is thoroughly checked over by a vet before he donates. Once he has been given a clean bill of health, a small piece of his coat is clipped from around the jugular vein, then numbing cream is rubbed on the area and given a few minutes to work before a needle is inserted.
The jugular is used because it is larger than veins in the legs. That makes it easier to access and the blood flows quicker, limiting the amount of time a dog has to lie still on the examination table.
Bramble’s heart rate is monitored throughout, to ensure that he’s not showing signs of distress.
His collected blood runs through a tube into a bag of the same type used to collect blood from human donors. Each bag contains an anticoagulant to stop the blood clotting in transit to its recipients.
The reason why smaller dogs can’t donate is that the bags come readyfilled with enough anticoagulant for 450ml of blood. That’s about 20 per cent of a larger dog’s total supply, and too much for smaller breeds to spare without feeling faint.
Bramble’s will i ngness even inspired Maria, who works for the pet supplies chain Pets at Home, to start giving blood herself a few years ago — though she has some way to go to catch him up, having donated only 11 times so far. ‘i thought if Bramble can do it, so should i,’ she says, ‘ though he seems to enjoy the experience more than i do.’
Wendy Barnett, who founded Pet Blood Bank UK in 2007, is grateful to Bramble and the other 6,500 dogs on her books, as the charity is running short on supplies.
She is appealing for more owners to register their dogs to ensure the bank can keep meeting the needs of the tens of thousands of canines that rely on it in their hour of need.
Last year alone the dogs donated 4,000 times, providing enough blood to treat 16,000 pets, and demand is growing all the time as technological advances allow vets to perform increasingly tricky canine surgery.
There are at least eight dog blood types and the bank needs stocks of them all, so it would like a large cross-section of breeds to donate as much blood as possible.
as with human blood donation, there are some rules. Dog donors must not have travelled overseas, where they might have been exposed to foreign viruses, and must have had all their vaccinations.
if they are accepted as donors, their blood is used to treat victims of road accidents and those with serious cuts or conditions including cancer, Von Willebrand disease and haemophilia. it is also needed for dogs that require blood transfusions during emergency surgery.
Donor blood i s usually taken away by courier just hours after being extracted, and is often transfused into recipients within 48 hours. ‘People don’t realise animals need blood to recover, just like humans, until their pet becomes dangerously ill — that’s usually when they find out about us,’ says Wendy.
‘We have never had to turn down an emergency request but when stocks are running low, as they are at the moment, we can’t meet all the demands of vets who ask for blood to keep in their fridges, or plasma [a colourless fluid extracted f rom blood and used to help clotting] for their freezers, just in case one of their patients needs it.’
Before Blood Bank UK was set up, vets relied on the kindness of t hei r dog- owning staff a nd patients, whom they would ask to bring in their pets at short notice to donate blood.
Wendy, a veterinary nurse, was concerned about how many dogs’ l i ves were being put at r i sk t hr o ugh lack of e mergency supplies when she heard about animal blood banks in america and australia.
after visiting some to find out how they worked, Wendy secured funding from Vets Now, which provides out-of-hours veterinary care in the UK, to launch the charity.
Her blood bank is in the Midlands, close to the M1 in Loughborough, so supplies can be moved as fast as possible to where they are needed.
‘We can have a motorbike courier on their way within an hour of receiving a call requesting blood, any time of day or night, any day of the year,’ says Wendy. ‘Vets pay between £50 and £200 for the service we provide. They pass that cost on to the pet owners, although as we are a charity and the blood is given free, no one makes a profit from it.’ Four teams — covering Scotland, North-East England, the Midlands and the South — are employed part-time to extract blood. Between them they do three to four sessions each week, taking blood from about 22 dogs at a time. Each team is made up of a vet, a veterinary nurse and three others who make a fuss of the dogs.
Blood extraction takes between five and ten minutes and the whole process lasts about half an hour.
a network of vets give up space in their practices when the team visits their area, so no costs are incurred in hiring venues.
DOgS are currently the only pets with their own blood transfusion service. if a cat or other domestic animal needs blood, they are still reliant on the old system of a vet tracking down on-the-spot volunteer donors.
However, Wendy says that eventually they hope to expand the service to other animals.
‘getting cats to donate blood will be more of a challenge because, unlike dogs, they’re not used to travelling in cars,’ says Wendy.
‘But blood collection equipment does exist that’s suitable f or smaller pets, including rabbits and birds, and hopefully one day we’ll roll out our service to them, too.’
Once Bramble retires from donor duties, Maria plans to sign him up with the Pets as Therapy charity so he can visit hospitals, hospices, nursing homes, care homes and special needs schools to cheer up patients and pupils.
‘Now i think he might enjoy improving the lives of a few humans too,’ says Maria.
‘i’m not sure how much dogs can take pride in their achievements but i’m proud enough of Bramble for the both of us.’
‘I don’t like hard work — I’m better if I make it up as I go along’ ‘My fans weren’t knicker-throwing Tom Jones types’
BEFORE he’ll even consider sitting down to chat, sir Terry Wogan, f resh and fragrant in white slacks, crisp shirt and naked ankles, whisks me away on an extensive tour of Wogan Towers. We take in his vast drawing room — a lilyfestooned magnificence of cut glass, shiny piano, silver photo frames and candleholders made of giant sea shells. His green-walled study, every wall containing pictures — mostly of Terry.
‘ I hold the record of most covers of the Radio Times!’
Then it’s outside to admire the endless sloping lawns, spectacular wisteria, swimming pool, billowing borders and an arboretum he and wife Helen planted after they moved here in 1975. And then, as is customary with all visitors to his Berkshire home, he points out Windsor Castle on the horizon and gives Her Majesty a jaunty wave.
‘I always wave. Hello, hello! How are you? Hello. HELLO!’ he shouts over the sound of a plane roaring over.
‘she can identify every plane by the sound. Yes, she can. Really!’ he says. ‘They go over Windsor Castle, turn immediately right and straight over my house . . . ’
On and on he chats in his brilliantly familiar, utterly self-assured and surprisingly quiet voice. About everything and anything. But mostly how lazy he is. ‘I’ve never done anything I’ve found difficult. I’ve never bothered.’ so, he tells me, he never in all the 27 years it was on prepared for his Radio 2 show — ‘I just said the first thing that came into my head.’
Or for the thousands of episodes, all live, of TV’s Wogan show. ‘I’m not overly fond of research,’ he says. ‘I’ve always thought you ought to have enough general knowledge from books and papers and life in general to be able to conduct an interview with anyone.’
There was certainly no in-depth research for the umpteen Eurovision song Contests he covered between 1971 and 2008. Oh yes, and he certainly didn’t ever bother writing down the countless speeches he’s given over the years.
‘I’ve learned that I work better if I make it up as I go along. I’ve never had much appetite for hard work.
‘If you can’t sit there and just make it up in front of a camera, then you should be doing something else, because it’s not brain surgery. It’s not digging a road or putting down railway tracks.
‘But then I’ve always done things that come easily, nothing arduous or uncomfortable. I do like to be comfortable.’
so he’s never slept in a tent or caravan (he wouldn’t go on I’m a Celebrity . . . get Me Out Of Here! if they paid him £20 million); he has never packed his own suitcase or even changed a plug.
‘Helen does the plugs and she’s a wonder with a skillet, but I can replace a light bulb.’ But somehow, despite all that l uxuriating sloth, he has been astonishingly, enduringly successful. And is still busy.
Aged 76, he has just finished writing a book of short stories, Those Were The Days, and filming a 20-part travelling food programme with London cabbie Mason McQueen called Terry & Mason’s great Food Trip.
‘The great British public will rise as one and say: “Why are we paying licence fees to watch Wogan eat his head off?” ’
He was accosted everywhere they filmed. ‘The selfie has become the curse of the world,’ he says. ‘Though often they thought I was Tony Blackburn and were always disappointed.’
In Winchester, one woman burst into tears when she met him. ‘What is this strange power I have?’ Maybe she had the hots for him? ‘ There’s no need to put i t so crudely.’ He gives me a reproachful look. ‘Honestly!’
Well, she wouldn’t be the only one. The singer susan Boyle is reportedly in love with him, along with singer paolo Nutini and the French DJ David guetta.
‘I’m in eclectic company,’ he says. ‘My fans weren’t the knicker types, like Tom Jones’s. But I had my TOgs, Terry’s old geezers and girls, who f or med a r ound me in their thousands.’
His appeal hasn’t dimmed. TOgs still hold an annual convention. At the f i rst l i ve broadcast of his Weekend Wogan BBC 2 Radio programme in 2010, more than 30,000 TOgs applied for 400 tickets. The Queen is also a fan, perhaps even a TOg, as well as a friend.
‘she’s good company, good fun. It’s not just polite chit- chat. Last time she was off to Northern Ireland, I gave her a lesson in northern Irish accents over lunch.’
princess Anne and Camilla (‘very nice’) are also fans. But not Charles. ‘He never understood his wife’s fascination with listening to me.’
surprisingly, Wogan does not consider himself a BBC man. In the seventies, he raced up the BBC career ladder fresh from Irish Radio and a career as a bank clerk in Limerick (‘I was a kindly bank teller’). But he was always a freelance and happy to puncture egos, ‘gently’.
When he took over the breakfast slot from John Dunn, he was described as ‘abrasive, irreverent and too talkative’. They could have been describing Chris Evans, who replaced Wogan on Radio 2’s breakfast show in 2010.
‘I’ve never worried about speaking out of turn,’ he says. Which meant he was constantly receiving tart little memos from the then BBC directorgeneral. He regularly upset the Eurovision organisers by being so brilliantly damning of the acts on air. ‘A triumph of television and a feast of terrible foreign music,’ he says today. ‘They’ve got to lighten up a bit about the music, because it’s rubbish.’
More recently he ruffled newsreaders’ feathers when he dismissed their craft as ‘a piece of cake’. ‘I used to be a newsreader. I know. It is a piece of cake,’ he says. ‘They read the autocue! It’s just gentle joshing.’
And, today, after touching on the recent furore over the future of the BBC and ‘that’ celebrity protest letter to David Cameron — ‘I wasn’t asked! I wasn’t invited to join the eclectic group! Bruce Forsyth wasn’t on the list either, and neither was Mary Berry!’ — he gives both barrels Going strong: Terry Wogan todayy and (inset) with wife Helen and sons Alan, four, and baby Mark to breakfast television. ‘America does it so much better. The way the BBC do it in their BBC way, there’s no sexual chemistry, that’s the problem — no intimacy and warmth.
‘Even Eamonn Holmes — a great pal of mine — he sits in the centre and the girls are there and there.’ He gesticulates left and right. ‘They look so ill at ease you wouldn’t think that any of them would ever go to bed with each other.’
Which somehow, goodness knows how, doesn’t sound remotely crude coming from Wogan. perhaps that’s why the Queen likes him so much and Terry and the lovely Helen (once a famous model) are regulars at Royal Ascot. Maybe he reminds her of prince philip. With a softer charm.
‘He’s a funny old boy,’ says Terry. ‘Last year, over lunch at the castle he made it manifestly clear he hadn’t the slightest interest in horses.
‘so after lunch we all got in the horse and trap, philip included, and went off to Ascot, and then he vanished. He arrived in the Royal Enclosure, and promptly disappeared.
‘I don’t know how he did it. He obviously went straight back to Windsor to watch cricket. It was one of the greatest sleight of hand tricks I’ve seen!’
Baroness Thatcher and husband Denis became pals after she appeared on his chat show. ‘The BBC opened up the spirits safe especially for Denis while we all drank cheap red wine.
‘I could hear him in the corner, talking loudly about pinkoes and pouring his fourth g&T. He was a real club man. Margaret loved a club man. Cecil parkinson [the Tory minister] was a club man and she adored him, too.’
And with that he launches into a brilliant impression of the Tory grandee grabbing Mrs Thatcher in a bear hug and growling: ‘My god Margaret! If you weren’t married to Denis . . . My god!’ Did he ever drink
before a show? ‘Oh yes! I’m not a believer that you can’t have a drink before you do television. It relaxes you nicely.’
Not that Terry looks as if he needs any more relaxing. He has that wonderful sheen of a life well lived, an overflowing bank account and a career that never stalled. As he reminds me, it was he who chose when to leave from his various shows. ‘I’ve always left parties early, always.’
Other than Children In Need, which he has presented since it started in 1980. ‘They’ll have to shoot me to get me off,’ he says. ‘So, instead, they just prop me up with more young ladies.’
Which makes it easier to be generous about his successors; Graham Norton on Eurovision (‘We love watching him’) and Chris Evans on Radio 2 (‘I love Chris — I’ve known him hundreds of years’). Terry and Chris once reportedly went on a 12-hour drinking session, from which Wogan emerged without the slightest hangover.
Top Gear crops up, and he recounts driving the second- slowest lap ever for the show in its ‘reasonably priced car’ category, narrowly beating a blind man.
‘With the greatest respect, I never see a car as an extension of my penis. I have never driven 140 miles an hour.’
Back in the Seventies, Wogan was officially the second most famous Brit, behind only the Queen. ‘I didn’t seek to be famous. Nobody talks about Julius Caesar these days, do they? Napoleon doesn’t come in for much of a mention, does he?’
Apart from lately, what with it being the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. ‘Well, yes, I forgot about that. But anyway, people think you can get a table at any restaurant. Well, no, you can’t, because most of the receptionists are from Croatia and have never heard of you. “Hello, it’s Wogan here,” ’ he picks up a pretend phone.
‘Hello, hello, can you spell your name, please,’ he replies in a strangled Croatian accent.
What if he says ‘Sir’ Terry Wogan? He’s proud of his knighthood. ‘Still no!’
He chats about how the BBC should be more proactive and how TV cook Fanny Craddock was ‘ a dangerous old woman’! It’s all very lilting and lovely, but after 50 years, does Helen ever say: ‘ Oh darling Terry, do put a sock in it?’
‘Never! She knows better than that,’ he says. ‘I don’t talk much at home. I often can’t think of anything to say so I just sit quietly.’
He also rarely listens to music and is running out of friends as one funeral follows another.
‘I’m standing too often in churches singing the praises of people who used to be my friends. I’m not lonely, but a bit alone — poor old Terryno-mates,’ he says. ‘But family is what really counts. Family and being kind.’
He and Helen have three children (they lost their firstborn, Vanessa, to a congenital heart defect at three weeks) and five grandchildren. They’ve just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary — she gave him a shiny gold Rolex. ‘I gave her a frying pan.’
When he’s not working, they flit between Berkshire and the south-west of France, watching dark Danish dramas on telly and occasionally taking the Bentley out for a spin — but mostly relying on their driver ‘so I don’t get arrested for drunk-driving’.
They never knowingly miss their early evening sharpener. ‘We’ve become cocktaily people! I make a lovely dry martini. That way, we always sit down to dinner with a warm glow, then add to it with wine.’
Gosh, how lovely — like a sort of rich pensioner fantasy of thick carpets, strong drinks and gastronomic delights (Wogan loves food), all in the shadow of the magnificent wisteria.
In fact, it’s all so calm and mellifluous, it’s hard to imagine a shouty rant. Does he ever?
‘Only if I can’t find my drink. And I eff and blind on the golf course. But I don’t allow myself to get stressed. It’s no good losing your temper.’
And with that, he offers me a ham sandwich for the journey and then, suddenly earnest, clasps my hand tightly and says: ‘Family and being kind — that’s all that matters. You have to be kind. Do the best you can and be kind along the way.’
‘We’ve become cocktaily people — I make a lovely martini’