After about 50 years vet Grant Macpherson is retiring. Photo / Michael Cunningham
After about 50 years vet Grant Macpherson is retiring. Photo / Michael Cunningham
As he steps away from an industry he has been a part of professionally for about 50 years, Grant Macpherson shares an insight into life as a Northland rural vet with Jodi Bryant.
Discussing politics and the state of Northland roads with his arm up a cow’s rectum has been a common occurrence for retiring Kamo veterinarian Grant Macpherson, whose career spans nearly half a century.
After graduating from veterinary school in the 1970s and spending eight years working in-clinic with small animals, he gravitated towards the larger type, in particular dairy cattle, taking him to far-flung farms around Northland. As a result, many friendships were formed with the rural folk.
“It’s a funny thing in this job, even though our relationship has been a professional one, it does feel that many of (the clients) have become friends. When you have the long jobs on the farms, you naturally have to talk about things and so you do talk about the business side … you might talk about the usual animal health issues, pasture, drought on the farm, production ...
“Then you run out of things to say there so you might start talking about something else like the weather, government, local politics, state of the roads … Then it turns to family – the children growing up and what’s happening at the local school.
“Over the years, you almost follow the lives of the families and you naturally tell them about your life and it’s probably on those days when you have a long job on the farm.”
Long days on the farm could begin as early as 4am until mid-morning and include herds of up to 1000. Depending if the farm has an older herringbone milking shed or the modern rotary style, procedures, such as pregnancy testing are impacted.
The latter, with the cows standing in a circular formation, enables pregnancy testing to be carried out during milking, whereas the former – with the cows standing in a long line – means they are tested after. This makes the procedure slightly more difficult as the cows would rather return to their paddock than stand around for longer.
This is just one of the changes Macpherson has seen over the years since graduating in 1978. After working for one year in New Zealand, he worked in a number of countries and was based in the United Kingdom when he saw a job advert that would take him to Saudi Arabia.
“It was winter time and I saw a job advertising to ‘come to the warmth in the sun’ but they didn’t mention it wasn’t just warmth, it was like living in an oven,” he laughs.
He spent two years there at the only veterinary clinic in the city of Jeddah where there were only two veterinarians to a million people. There, he treated all manner of creatures, including snakes, falcons and animals he still couldn’t identify to this day.
“There were thousands of princes in Saudi Arabia – very wealthy ones who used to have their own private zoos. One morning I got a call at about five o’clock to go out to one of the prince’s palaces and I didn’t understand what the chap was telling me but I got there and they had a shipment of everything you could think of – large cats, lions, even an elephant in a big cage that needed injecting and quarantining.
“The only way to do it was to climb on top of the cage and reach down through a hole. Of course he didn’t like it and I think the elephant was trying to break the cage apart. I nearly fell through the hole in my haste to get away.”
Grant Macpherson kitted up for cow pregnancy testing.
He met Sally, a British theatre sister, there. They married six weeks later and moved to New Zealand in 1985 where they joined Jim and Lynne Mortimer at their single vet practice on the corner of Kamo Road and Carlton Crescent.
“We had a wonderful partnership for many years,” Macpherson says.
Back then, Macpherson recalls the racing industry being prominent with several studs in Whangārei and many farmers had broodmares so a large part of their work was with horses.
“A number of people had thoroughbred stallions and some of the memories that particularly stand out are the dangerous ones where you’re wondering if you’re going to survive,” he laughs.
“I remember, at times, going out in the middle of the night to suture up horses who had been out in a lightning storm and gone through a fence and some of those ones, you took your life into your hands – it was like those stallions wanted to kill you! It was pretty dangerous but they were just stallions being stallions, they have lots of testosterone.
“The racing industry was big in the ‘80s but I suppose Lotto came along and killed off the gambling through horses and lots of that work for us started to diminish.”
So too did performing surgeries, which Macpherson and his colleagues would carry out regularly, including extensive horse surgery. Nowadays, there are more referral clinics.
Macpherson steered towards dairy cattle and, for the remainder of his career, spent about 95 per cent of his time on farms covering areas such as Whangārei Heads, Pakotai and Kerikeri.
After Jim Mortimer retired, Macpherson and Sally took over ownership, with Sally managing the clinic, and fellow vets Luke (Lurch) Goodin and Ben Irwin later bought into the business, by then named Kamo Vets. In 2019, the practice moved to its current site at Springs Flat Rd and now has 11 vets and 11 nurses.
While clinic work hasn’t changed a lot with animal bites and routine vaccinations still common visits, these days there are more preventative procedures, with new vaccinations and information, rather than ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff work.
“The small animal work is similar but farm work has changed a lot over the years. Some jobs have disappeared. We used to do a lot of TB testing. Then there’s the equipment and devices that’s evolved making jobs easier, such as checking for uterine infection and helping with reproduction.”
Though 90 per cent of pregnancy testing is conducted with a scanner today, if visibility is poor, the old-fashioned manual way is carried out; the uterus is conveniently located an arm’s length inside the cow’s rectum.
That’s when those conversations take place, along with during mastitis investigations, or hoof inspections, among other tasks.
Welfare of the owners is just as significant as the health of their animals to a vet, Macpherson says. And this brings us to the subject of empathy.
“There’s been lots of tragic situations that don’t sit easily on your mind where we have to put animals down and the only thing you can do is put them out of their suffering as quick as you can.
Grant MacPherson working on a deer farm
“There’s been plenty of macabre ones over the years but the way I always dealt with it was that it wasn’t me who was suffering so whatever I felt, didn’t matter, it was for the animal or the owner. It’s very much about the owner too as the owner has such a close bond with their animal.
“You distance yourself and look to what’s best for the animal and the owner. They didn’t teach you that in our day but I think these days they are quite a bit more aware of the need to try and prepare people to have a technique to deal with it. Owners can feel very guilty about having to make a big decision so part of my role was to help show them they were choosing the best path for their animals.
“It’s been a privilege in life to have a job like this to work with animals and have that opportunity but also to have that contact and be a part of so many peoples’ lives because, when they’re dealing with their loved animals, it’s a bit like their children to a degree and you have that insight into their lives. It’s an emotional time for a lot of people.”
With many clients, their relationship goes back decades. Some have been customers since before Macpherson arrived at the practice, some are the children or grandchildren based on family farms, others are small animal clients.
“It’s almost like not working but going to see old friends, especially in the latter years,” Macpherson reflects, adding that he often gets invited in for a cuppa. “There have been many lovely people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside and I have much gratitude to them. It has been a privilege to have been associated with (clients) in these ways. Those things sort of build a bond over time.”
However, about to turn 70, Macpherson is stepping back from the profession he says has provided something new to learn almost every day.
“Kamo Vets has been my working life for the past 40 years and now it’s time to step away and give time to Sally and my family. In the end, it’s your family who pay the price and I wish to acknowledge and thank Sally for the huge contribution that she made to our lives and the vet clinic business, especially in the early years. The multitude of nights and weekends and vacations that she had to run our family single-handedly in those early years. Without her support it would not have been possible.”
In fact, their son Richie spent many nights in the early years at the clinic while Grant and Sally performed emergency surgeries. It was a place he grew up with.
Macpherson cites the impact on family life as the ‘low’ of the job. The highs, besides the people, are “as you just about expect – they really are when you have a case and you thought it was very grave and it turned out successful”.
Having spent the last few weeks winding down prior to his retirement at the end of this month, he admits it’s taking a bit of getting used to.
“It’s a funny thing when you’ve done a job for so long, and many people will be in the same boat, but you sort of become it in some ways.”
And Macpherson has been on the other side of the picture growing up on a farm in Dargaville. “I can remember as a young boy, when in a dire situation, it was a great relief lifted to see the vet come - that dreaded responsibility off the shoulders.”
But he knows he is leaving his clients and their animals in good hands. “I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the skill level of the new owners and younger vets and all the highly competent support staff who are the future of Kamo Vets.”
He plans to spend his retirement between family in the UK where they have a small farm with a restored 13th century farm house and with their New Zealand family – Richie, wife Hannah and their children, based at their home in Russell.
“We’re down to just one dog, a much-loved Labrador, Poppy, who I play the bagpipes to. The dog thinks I play quite well but that’s the only thing that thinks I play quite well,” he chuckles.
