My youngest daughter, Janine, who resides in the United States and edits my blog, suggested as a blog subject, ‘Animal Encounters’. She must think my reminisces about farming and the Commercial Farmers Union are a bit boring, and she needs to be given a break. It is interesting that I get so many comments about the blog and its content, often direct rather than public, and the number of people who open the blog even if they do not read it. That is considering it is the ramblings of an ex-farmer with some health challenges. The latter is the original motivation to write a blog to fill my time whilst immobile. So, after some thought, I decided to recollect some animal encounters and write about them.
“Animals are like humans; even the most docile can become unpredictable and aggressive for reasons known or unknown. In regard to animals, this behaviour is often instigated by human complacency (stupidity) or action.” - Peter McSporran
Janine herself, being a farm girl, was one of those rare children who had no fear of animals and them of her. When taken to the cattle dip, if not carefully watched, you would turn to find her in the midst of cows with young calves, mostly Brahman and Hereford, which could be very protective of their calves, with the odd one being downright aggressive. Extricating her from their midst was more dangerous to the rescuer than to her. Her sister Storm also had no fear but showed animals more respect. Janine did not hesitate to confront aggressive dogs; stopping her from petting waif and stray animals on our travels was a real pain. Rabies was always a worry for us. In fact, once, when our dogs killed a rabid jackal in our garden, both the girls came in contact with the dogs and them subsequently with Diane and me, resulting in all of us receiving a course of rabies injections; that was in 1994, the year which I will revert to in my muses in the next week or so.
For myself, being a child brought up on a livestock farm, and whose main pastime was helping with the cattle and sheep, I had a number of encounters generally involving cows with calves. The Galloway, as a breed, is a very possessive mother, and being casual with them would bring a sharp reminder in the form of a charge. I received many a glancing blow, and my youthful fitness avoided anything more serious. Luckily, I always managed to wriggle out of these encounters, although one day, an irate Galloway mother had me cornered up against the shed wall for a couple of hours, hanging by my ever-growing painful arms. Just as well, most of our cows calved outside with plenty of room for manoeuvre. We sold Galloway and Aberdeen pedigrees with many of the purebred Galloway cows put to the Whitebreed Shorthorn to produce that magnificent mother, the ‘Blue Grey Coo.’ They had the hardiness of the Galloway along with the milk and temperament of the Whitebred, a separate breed to the Beef Shorthorn, the bulls purchased annually at Carlisle. Sadly, I believe they are now a rare breed, with the continental breeds having pushed them aside. The Angus were rarely aggressive. As for the Blue Greys, they are still a favourite hill breeding cow. There is even a song about them. My first boss in Rhodesia, Hamish Smith, originating from Kintyre, had a tape of it, which he played often when we went around the crops and cattle. MY BLUE GREY COO'S ALLAN TALYOR
I had three memorable encounters with cattle in my childhood and youth. The first, as I have previously recounted in one of my earlier blogs, in halter training an animal for showing. A cat fell from the washing line as we entered a paddock next to the house, scaring the animal, which benignly trampled me on the body and head in the process smashing out my emerging front second teeth requiring surgery in Oban Cottage Hospital for their removal. The second was one evening when my father decided we should move one of his Beef Shorthorn bulls to another pen, which he was prone to do when the herdsmen were not around. He had a small herd of Beef Shorthorns that had won him ribbons as far afield as Smithfield. Anyway, as was the case when he personally moved cattle or sheep, I became his sheepdog or, in this case, his cattle dog. As the bull decided to make an escape, my father sent me around the shed to stop it on the other side, which I failed to do, with it putting its head down and running right over me, luckily not stopping to do any serious damage. On returning to the house that evening, he saw I was shaking and surmised it was because of that incident; he rebuked me, saying my younger brother, Archie, who was probably four or five at the time, would have been able to stop the animal. No sympathy there; my father did not take prisoners. His words more painful than the encounter with the bull.
The next memorable incident was when I was doing my pre-college practical year on a dairy and sheep farm near Maybole, Ayrshire. One day, my boss, Robert Baird, said we were off to Ayr to buy a new Ayrshire bull. He used AI (Artificial Insemination) but always kept a bull for those cows that did not take with AI. We duly returned from the sale with a young bull, maybe two years old, just about ready to work, and placed it in a one-door high wall enclosed shed just behind my bothy, out of sight and sound of any other normal farm activities. It was my task to feed the bull and muck its shed out twice daily. That young bull made my life hell, with many an incident that just did not quite rank as a tragedy with me the victim in the script. From what I have seen, dairy bulls are the worst, not least the definitive Jersey.
Obviously, having cattle on the farm, encounters with cows during the calving season were commonplace. The whole time I farmed in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, I was never attacked by a bull; the same cannot be said of cows. Anything with a bad temperament would be culled as soon as the calf was weaned. The one cow incident stands out in my mind because of the amusement it caused for many. It must have been in the early eighties. I was as yet not judging at the Harare Show but rather found myself stewarding for a new breed to the country, that being the Limousin. All pedigrees had to be halter trained at the show, and those with bad temperaments were supposed to be left at home. As the judge was telling me how he had ranked the animals in the two-year-old heifer class, one of Peter Horsman’s, a novice exhibitor, took a dislike to me and not only bowled me over but proceeded to continue butting me through the show ring rails, smashing the rails on the way. It was over in seconds, with the animal taking off, scattering onlookers. After the relief of seeing me get up with nothing but my pride hurt, the concern from the onlookers and exhibitors changed from concern to mirth. I never bought a Limousin animal following that incident, but admit to placing one as the show's Grand Champion in future years.
I suppose that living in Africa, many will be more interested in wild animal encounters than domestic animals, despite the latter probably being more dangerous as their domesticity camouflages their unpredictability. Mind you, there were a couple of dogs in our area, Darwendale, that liked nothing better than to attack anyone stupid enough to come through their owners’ security fence gate. The security fence seemed to give the dogs the idea that trespass beyond the fence allowed them the freedom to attack. This included frequent visitors such as neighbours. Motorbikes had a special attraction to staffies and bull terriers, the latter better known as garden sharks.
One of my farming neighbours, John Gordon, had a cross-bull terrier named Suki who threatened me on every visit to his home. He loved the animal until it attacked him when he tried to discipline it. Wariness replaced his love of the animal.
Amazingly, in the army, serious encounters with wild animals were rare, although some soldiers lost their lives to them, one notably to a rhino. For myself, the elephants in Gonerazhou gave us a very hard time, often charging through our positions at night. We were told to urinate on any game paths close to our night position to ward off animals, which seemed to do the contrary and attract the elephants. Despite their size, elephants are extremely hard to hear approaching at night, so many close encounters occurred as we tried to sleep or lay in ambush. In daylight, you could see them and avoid them, but even then, coming across a single animal or a herd unexpectedly would inevitably lead to a charge with us scattering into cover. No point in climbing a tree with an angry elephant around; he will easily reach you or simply push your refuge over. It was said poaching had decimated the numbers there during the war, which was causing the aggression; some put it down to the Selous Scouts, true or not, I do not know. Han Derksen and I found the same thing in Gorongosa in Mozambique when the park was in the early stages of revival, and we were still able to drive around in our own vehicles. During the independence and then the civil wars, wildlife, including elephants, were heavily poached for their meat and ivory. On coming across a herd of elephants in the Ilala palms, they actively chased and constantly tried to ambush us until we reached the open savannah. Han took a picture of the charging elephant close behind our vehicle, which I think I have previously shown. Another incident comes to mind when, as a family in the eighties, we visited Bumi Hills, having often admired it from our boat on Kariba. One evening, on our return from a game-viewing drive, we suddenly came across an elephant under a Marula tree. He immediately charged the vehicle with our girls and some of the adults trying to make themselves scarce under the seats. It missed us by inches as we accelerated away. The guide surmised it was a male in musk intoxicated by the marulas, making it uncharacteristically aggressive.
My neighbour and friend, Henry Bezeduithout, had at least two close encounters on the Zambezi River, the first when an elephant charged us, stopping only when Henry, who seemed to be the elephants focus of interest, plunged into the crocodile-infested Zambezi River, the elephant now happy to look down at him from the edge which luckily happened to be a steep bank. The other incident, and knowing Henry, he probably would have had many beyond my knowledge, was when he took some English visitors on a canoe trip when suddenly a hippo appeared alongside and bit his canoe in half. The English lady, who was his fellow crew member and he both ended up with the crocodiles in the river, luckily unscathed by the hippos' tusks. The hippo lost interest after biting the canoe in half, which is very unusual as they are extremely grumpy beasts, causing more deaths by wildlife in Africa than any other. Anyone who has fished the Zambezi will have tales of close encounters with hippo, I certainly have.
I have always been fearful of lions, but despite all the years spent in the army sleeping in lion country or on the banks of the Zambezi on fishing and game-viewing trips where they were numerous, I have never had a face-to-face scary encounter. However, on fishing trips in later years, we would occasionally see their pugmarks in the morning, showing that they passed through our camp while we blissfully snored in our beer-induced slumber. Hyenas also, you could smell them before you saw them. I am happy to sit in an open vehicle next to a lion, but I was shit scared of them on the ground and gave them a wide berth when on foot.
As for snakes, yes, these were a problem. Strangely enough, the only person I knew who was killed by snakebite in all my years in the army was one who was administered the wrong anti-venom. With experience, the anti-venom snake bite kits were withdrawn as they were causing more harm than the actual snake bites. For myself, I never had a snake strike at me in all the years in the bush, unlike on the farm where cobras and puff adders were found everywhere, including around or in the house, not just in the fields. Kitchen drawers were a favourite hiding place for snakes. I was luckily missed a number of times by striking puff adders. I have had friends who have been bitten, and one that remains vividly in my mind was when Hamish and Nancy Black's middle daughter, Karen, was bitten on the foot by a baby puff adder. At first, she thought it was a thorn, but they soon realised it was a snake, which they had luckily found and identified. Karen recovered but only after hospital and a long time on crutches. My neighbour John Gordon admonished me for killing snakes in or around the house, but I am sorry the risk to young children, which we had, was too great for me, nor had I the inclination or knowledge to catch them for safe release. I can remember one cobra that was particularly aggressive in our garden potting shed, which I duly shot. We lost a number of dogs to snake bites as we did cattle. Our staff also were bitten, the most common bite caused by the small night adder normally occurring when they went to relieve themselves in the dark or collect eggs in their chicken coup.
I encountered many snakes in Zambia, where the black mamba and the Mozambican spitting cobra were much more prevalent than on the farm in Darwendale. There, I never encountered a mamba. My closest encounter with a black mamba was in Sesheke, on the Zambezi, when I was working on a forest project. While talking to the manager, Tony Cremer, he suddenly said, “Do not move.” We both watched a black mamba come from behind me and slither between my legs, luckily ignoring us in our fearful, static silence. This snake is very aggressive, and any movement could have caused a fatal strike.
Rozanne had a very close shave in Lusaka on coming home from one Wednesday's drinks, we both found ourselves desperate for a pee. She asked to use the toilet I used, closest to the front door in her desperation rather than going through the house to our ensuite toilet. I agreed and decided to relieve myself in the garden as men do at night in Africa. She was just about to sit on the toilet when she decided to retreat and put the light on only to notice movement quickly identified as a snake, which we thought at first was a mamba. It stretched from the bath behind the toilet bowl with its head up by the sink. If she had sat in the dark, she could have triggered a defensive strike and been bitten, as the snake would have felt cornered. Unable to raise a snake catcher, our landlord, returning from motocross in his leathers, was happy to enter the bathroom and blow its head off. We lost one of our dogs there to the same species of snake; it died within an hour of being bitten. Rozanne was lucky.
After snakes, the scariest animal to come across with children for me was the crocodile. In the early eighties when fishing on Kariba, we would happily go a few hundred metres from the shore and swim from the boat with the children. However, with the release of a percentage of crocodiles from crocodile farms, there was a huge surge of these reptiles in the lake. They also seemed to grow very fast, I am not sure this is true; maybe only in my mind. Along with the increased human activity and the evening ritual of cleaning the day's catch on the back platform of the boats, they soon learned to follow the boats for an easy snack. They would not mind if it were human, if you were careless, so we had to be on constant watch when the children came with us to Kariba. Most of us would prefer the outside shower on the platform in the hot balmy evenings to the ones inside. It was not too long before guard rails were all improved. Luckily, neither I nor my family were ever attacked by a crocodile, although sadly, I know some who have lost their lives to crocodiles.
There is little dangerous wildlife here in Portugal unless you count wild pigs as dangerous, which I personally would not, although Rozanne is very wary as they visit our neighbours' plots at night. As for the wolves, they are in the north and rare, I should not imagine I will ever see one let alone encounter one on foot. Wolf attacks are very rare unlike the reported leopard attack on Guy Whittle in Zimbabwe this week.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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