This week: exotic animals
The question 'How do you know how to heal all those many species of animals?' often comes up. My usual answer is: 'I don't know everything about all those millions of animal species, no one does, but as a general practitioner in the veterinary arts, I am a jack of all trades in pets. Some vets are jacks of all trades in large domesticated animals. Some lucky vets are wildlife vets and there are some vets that aren't jacks at all and are actually very specialised, such as cardiologists, orthopaedic specialists, ophthalmologic specialists. There is even a veterinary ultrasonographic machine programmer; now that's specialised.'
But here in Hong Kong most vets are small-animal general practitioners, with a smattering of horse vets, wildlife vets and epidemiologists. Due to the small overall market and the lack of local universities that provide higher education for veterinarians, there are not any specialists with fellowships here.
Nevertheless, there are many vets with special interests in particular areas. It doesn't make them a specialist by any stretch of the imagination, but it does mean there are different interests among even the small population of vets in Hong Kong. The bread and butter of most clinics here is no doubt the treatment of dogs and cats. I dare say most vets are proficient with dog and cat cases because they are the most commonly seen species in Hong Kong.
But there is also a substantial population of exotic animals here. In the context of small-animal clinics, an exotic animal is anything other than a dog or cat. There are not many really exotic animals, meaning we don't see many iguanas, vultures, falcons, ferrets, spiders and the like. Keepers of many of these really exotic species need licences from the government so they are not very common. More common are rabbits, chinchillas, hamsters, parrots, budgies and turtles. My special veterinary interests, apart from writing and dog and cat medicine, is exotic medicine and surgery. We see an assortment of exotics in the clinic on a day-to-day basis and I have a couple of examples today to share with you that we've seen recently.
Late one night in Tseung Kwan O, a client brought in a mysterious pet in a very large cardboard box. It was very heavy and the owners were sweating from the effort of bringing it in. It turned out to be a very large turtle. Turtles can live a long time and this one was 26. Some people are surprised that owners would pay so much money to heal a sick pet when the initial cost of buying it may have been only HK$10. That was the case with this turtle. Not surprisingly, having a pet for 26 years usually teaches a certain respect for life, not to mention developing an emotional attachment. These distraught owners were worried about their turtle when it stopped eating and started to gasp for breath. It was rather difficult to listen to a turtle's chest through its shell. And it was difficult to see any changes in the lung tissues through X-rays because the contrast was reduced by the shell.