Scoop

LARGE ANIMALS

Imagine you’re a vet who has to perform surgery on a cat. Except it’s not a pet cat. It’s the biggest of the big cats – a Siberian tiger! So, a three-metre-long tiger is lying there, needing a fang removed. You’ve pumped enough drugs into it to send it to sleep. Now you have to put your hand inside its massive jaws to start work. All the time you’re terrified it’ll wake up. If it does, it might leap up and kill you!

Well, some vets do focus on large animals. Vets like my Uncle Roy. He’d fixed tigers, rhinos and bears, my mum said. He got called out to zoos and wildlife parks. Once he had to treat a huge alligator with an upset stomach. If you’re not careful, you could end up looking at that problem from the inside.

‘Oh, he has lots of great stories to tell,’ Mum said. It was one of the two

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