A vet student walked into the clinic one morning and influenced my life forever. Peter Jerram had arrived to spend some time with us at the Graham Veterinary Club in Blenheim. It all came about after I had been talking to a classmate who mentioned that a good friend of his who had been at Lincoln University with him in a previous life was looking for somewhere to do some ‘prac’ work. Would it be OK if he came to us? ‘Prac’ work is what vet students do to gain some experience in veterinary practice before they graduate.
‘He’s a bit like you and me, Pete,’ Bruce Taylor explained. ‘He’s also done another degree, got a bit bored with his job, and then decided to do the vet degree. Now he’s in his final year. You’ll like him. He’s a hard case and a good bugger.’
Well I’m not too sure that PJ gained much useful experience from me but we hit it off immediately. He was a good bugger. While doing his ‘prac’ work he stayed with my wife Chick and me. It was hard not to like this mature (he is a year older than me) final year vet student with the twinkling eyes and ready laugh. He was exceptionally quick witted and had a delightful sense of humour. We seemed to enjoy similar things and to have similar interests. We soon became good friends.
So why and how did our partnership start the way it did? Well, chance and good luck and making good decisions all played their part. Shortly before graduating with my veterinary degree from Massey University in Palmerston North, I had the good fortune to be offered a job at the Graham Veterinary Club in Blenheim. By chance I had heard one day towards the end of my final year that two local Vet Club directors were in Palmerston North. I made myself known to them and I guess I must have got on well with them. Later I got a job interview and then in the middle of final exams heard I had been accepted. Jobs were not easy to come by at that time so you tended to take what you could get. So after graduating, Chick, whom I had married a couple of years earlier, and I moved to Blenheim. Marlborough would be great for two or three years, then we would get a bit of overseas experience, return to New Zealand somewhere and settle down — well, that was the plan.
If we had had the choice we certainly wouldn’t have chosen Blenheim. My earlier impressions were not that favourable. All my experiences with the place were associated with hitchhiking to catch the interisland ferry to or from Massey and home, in the Hundalees, south of Kaikoura. I had never found the place easy to hitch out of, although the image I presented probably didn’t help — oft en bearded, sometimes with longish hair, filthy duffel coat, battered pack, and really pretty scruffy. No doubt I smelt as bad as I looked. I got to know a few of the culverts between Blenheim and Seddon, a village south of Blenheim, which while uncomfortable did keep one dry at night.
Despite my initial reservations, though, it didn’t take long after arriving in Marlborough to realise the place was all we wanted. Over 35 years later we are still here! At the time the exciting emerging wine and mussel industries and a fairly buoyant farming community were driving the local economy. For my part I had the ability to fish in some of the district’s idyllic rivers and in the Marlborough Sounds and the East Coast. I quickly learnt to dive and I had the chance to finally learn to fly. Flying had been a life-time dream and getting my pilot’s licence was a promise I had made myself if I ever graduated. Meanwhile Chick pursued her passion for horse riding.
I was also blessed with having two more experienced and great vets to work with and learn from, Alan Stockley and Henk Brethouer. And finally but most importantly the clients, especially the rural ones, were a delight to work for and many were quickly becoming good friends.
However, nothing lasts, and within two years Henk returned with his family to Holland. Apart from David Sim, a very able horse vet who had just set up in the area, Alan and I were for a while the only vets in the northeast corner of the South Island, covering the Marlborough Sounds in the north, to Nelson Lakes and Rai Valley in the west, and as far south as Hanmer Springs. For a while we also had to cover for Kaikoura when they were without a vet.
After Henk and, shortly afterwards, Alan left, a few vets came and went but none lasted too long in Marlborough. What discouraged most from staying was the amount of driving they had to do to get to the farms. A full day might involve only a couple of calls but at least five hours’ driving, mostly on narrow, dusty gravel roads. Many roads are still unsealed in the area but at least we now have comfortable, air-conditioned cars.
Anyway, around the time I first met PJ, Chick’s and my lives were entering another era with the arrival of our first child, Caroline. Any thought of getting some overseas experience were now put on the back burner. We would have to stay a while. It was now the late 1970s and we were becoming very busy with an increased dairy and sheep and beef workload as well as an expanding small animal clientele. Blenheim was growing. So we were on the lookout for another vet to join the team of three youngish vets. I hoped PJ might be interested in being that person when he graduated at the end of the year. He was keen, and it wasn’t hard to convince the committee of the Graham Veterinary Club that Pete would make a great fourth vet. So shortly after he graduated, he and Ally and their young son, Tom, arrived in Blenheim.
Pete’s ability to make the best of any situation, to grab any opportunity, and to enjoy what Marlborough had to offer meant he very soon settled into the area. It didn’t take long before he and I developed a healthy working and social relationship. We respected each other’s strengths and weaknesses and utilised that knowledge in the best way possible. Together we planned how to improve the services the club provided, to get into farmer education and have workshops on animal health issues and to keep ‘upskilling’. We like to think we did, but working in a ‘Club’ environment where one is an employee and on a set salary, a lack of return for extra input soon dampens any enthusiasm for progress.
So three years later PJ, Ally, Chick and I set up shop down the road and took Jill, one of the nurses, with us. As to be expected it was not a popular move with the club committee, but at least a couple of them acknowledged and accepted our decision with good grace and we will always appreciate their attitude. Neither family, both with young children now, had any cash, so we borrowed and leased everything. In fact Ally gave birth to their third child, Pip, the day we opened as ‘Pete and Pete’s Pussy Parlour’. Having two Petes could create confusion at times, including in this book, so we became known as PA and PJ. Once, a very attractive German vet student doing work experience with us decided that as she couldn’t remember who was who and PJ was a little lighter, he would become Pete-Thin and I would be Pete-Thick. However, in the book we refer to each other by our initials — I prefer that!
In the early days cheap secondhand Datsun Sunny station wagons that bounced and blew all over the road kept us mobile for a couple of years, an old house was knocked into a sort of vet clinic shape over a couple of weekends, and basic surgical equipment was leased from an understanding insurance company. However, it did include the best X-ray machine and the best anaesthetic machine we could get our hands on. We could get by with secondhand cars and a cramped building but we were not prepared to compromise our skills and expertise with second-rate diagnostic and surgical equipment.
We survived more by good fortune than good management. The share market was in its boom days and there seemed to be money around. However, our accountant warned us that really things were not looking too good. We appreciated we were not that efficient, both of us trying to be everything to everyone, and both of us sometimes taking responsibility for everything, and at other times neither of us for anything. We bounced from day to day and then shared the after-hours and weekend duties. We worked long hours right at the time when we should have been spending more time with our young families. We were not oft en there to help our long-suffering and understanding wives, who were also working in the business, looking after the books and on many days manning the office and being receptionist and cleaner. Ally was also teaching while Chick had various other part-time jobs and eventually developed a very successful catering business.
The turning point came after a weekend retreat with a facilitator who helped us significantly and gave us some direction. A business plan (what the hell was one of those?) was written and responsibilities for different areas of the business were established. The need for staff changes was obvious: we needed another assistant/receptionist and we needed another vet. Despite the downturn in the economy and the share market crash and businesses elsewhere retrenching, we were going to expand. We employed a lovely and brilliant new graduate, Mandy Batchelor, and we shift ed to bigger premises. We were on the move again.
Throughout our partnership PJ and I have always strived to improve our knowledge and expertise in the areas we enjoyed the most and were best at. While we both enjoyed the small animal work, with production animals we both also had a preference for sheep and beef cattle. Dairy cows were not our favourite species. Eventually I became the large animal (LA) vet and Pete concentrated more on small animal (SA) work and the technically demanding and intricate work, and business management. His business acumen was far more likely to benefit the practice than mine. I also had the ability to fly to many of the LA jobs, which saved a significant amount of time.
While we could have both gone either way, once the decision was made that I would manage the large and production animal side of the business and PJ would look after the domestic animals and retail side, it was amazing how quickly I found it difficult to go back and work confidently in the clinic. I would sometimesfeel (fleetingly) sorry for PJ when I was enjoying a beautiful day out, working in good company and not being stressed by the day-to-day hassles more oft en experienced in small animal practice. On the other hand I occasionally envied him, especially when working long days in wet, cold weather well into the night, miles from home.
PJ became a very competent and popular small animal vet and developed his orthopaedic skills to a high degree, a definite requirement in a rural environment with many working dogs. However, his real claim to fame would be his skill as a dog reproductive expert. By the time he retired he was one of the country’s leading experts on reproductive problems in bitches, collecting and using frozen dog semen. This did not come without cost and required several trips to overseas conferences and to study alongside the world’s best. The development of expertise alongside natural ability requires study, time and money, a fact that many clients who go for the cheap option oft en fail to appreciate. He also became extremely competent at sheep artificial insemination (AI) and together we were among the first to get into embryo transfer in sheep, goats, and deer.
Although I have always enjoyed working with small animals and most of their owners, the veterinary field these days is just far too large and the expectation of the public so much greater, that to remain current and give a ‘good’ service, vets eventually have to specialise. We oft en have to give up some of the work that we enjoy, but one gets over that!
LA vets dealing with production animals — sheep, cattle and deer — are basic epidemiologists. We deal mostly with populations of animals rather than individuals. We handle epidemics — whether they be trace element or vitamin deficiencies, infectious disease outbreaks, or poor reproductive or growth rate performances. We don’t tend to do much curing of individual sick animals because, unless it is a valuable stud animal or a valuable bull or ram, economically it doesn’t usually stack up. However, sick animals are still an invaluable source of information and discovering why this animal is not well will oft en indicate why the rest of the flock or herd is not thriving. One becomes very good at post-mortems.
In fact one of the reasons why I had for some time felt that my future was not in the domestic pet field was because I kept finding my thoughts going down the wrong track when examining an unwell cat or dog. After a thorough physical examination I would sometimes find myself wondering what tests I should be taking. As a diagnostician I was not a patch on PJ or our more recent partners, Stuart Burrough and Mark Wiseman, the shareholders in the practice, but I do know how to do a post-mortem. When confronted with SA cases that stumped me, I kept finding myself thinking, ‘This would be an interesting post mortem.’
It was time to move away from small animals and let someone else save them.
So I have had the privilege of sharing a full and eventful working life with PJ. It really has been a great trip and I couldn’t have wished for a more stimulating and, at times, exciting business partner. Our friendship has strengthened over time and enhanced our working and social lives, together and with our families. It has also helped us through some difficult periods in both our lives.
Throughout our years in practice together, we would oft en end the day discussing interesting cases and laughing over some of the more amusing experiences. Whenever an event had us both in fits of laughter, we’d remark: ‘That’ll be one for the book’, never really thinking there would ever actually be a book. Well, here is a bit of a book, but as time has dimmed the memory I know we have forgotten much good material. No doubt some of our clients, if they ever read this, will ask us why we didn’t tell the story about ‘so and so’. To those people we apologise in advance.