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Doctor Hugh: My Life with Animals
Doctor Hugh: My Life with Animals
Doctor Hugh: My Life with Animals
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Doctor Hugh: My Life with Animals

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Dr Hugh Wirth AM KSJ, high-profile vet and long-standing RSPCA president, has spent a lifetime as an animal welfare advocate. Doctor Hugh is packed with engaging anecdotes about pets he has treated and owners he has told off from his days practicing as a young country vet and then in his busy suburban practice in Balwyn. Doctor Hugh has taught three generations of Australians how to care for their pets (no creature too great or small) through his weekly ABC radio show. Doctor Hugh has been the indomitable national chief of the RSPCA and on the world stage, president of the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and he has taken on everyone from people perpetrating cruelty, to animal rights activists, public service mandarins, and his own profession. His memoirs, written in his unmistakable tell-it-as-it-is voice, will delight, enrage, inform, entertain, and teach every one of us how to care and understand the rights of animals in our modern world.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAllen Unwin
Release dateDec 1, 2012
ISBN9781742699707
Doctor Hugh: My Life with Animals
Author

Hugh Wirth

Dr Hugh Wirth was the honorary national president of the RSPCA until 2006, and is currently the president of RSPCA Victoria. He has been a vet for over forty years and is a passionate advocate for responsible pet ownership. He lives in Melbourne with two Border Terriers, Lachlan and Lexie.

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    Doctor Hugh - Hugh Wirth

    Dr Hugh Wirth AM is both a vet and an animal welfarist. He has appeared on a weekly talkback segment on the ABC since the early 1980s and is the author of three guidebooks on pets. Hugh has held a number of professional and government appointments, and has a string of accomplishments and awards, both Australian and international. He has been an Australia Day Ambassador since 1997. He is currently the President of RSPCA Victoria.

    Anne Crawford is a journalist and writer. She worked at The Age and The Sunday Age as a feature writer for many years, among other publications. Anne has previously co-authored two books. Words come first but she is also a published and exhibited photographer. She worked too as a researcher on a documentary about the historic post-apartheid South African elections in 1994. Anne now writes from a seaside idyll in South Gippsland that she shares, in part, with Poppy, aged twelve, Indi, six, and Jason, four. (Horse, dog and sheep.)

    DOCTOR

    HUGH

    MY LIFE WITH ANIMALS

    DR HUGH WIRTH

    WITH ANNE CRAWFORD

    First published in 2012

    Copyright © Doctor Hugh Wirth with Anne Crawford 2012

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

    Fairfax Books, an imprint of

    Allen & Unwin

    Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

    83 Alexander Street

    Crows Nest NSW 2065

    Australia

    Phone:    (61 2) 8425 0100

    Email:     info@allenandunwin.com

    Web:       www.allenandunwin.com

    Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

    from the National Library of Australia

    www.trove.nla.gov.au

    ISBN 978 1 74331 104 2

    Set in 12.5/17 pt Sabon by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

    Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    For my parents, Erich and Josephine Wirth

    Contents

    Acknowledgements

    Prologue

    Part 1 Growing up my way

    1 A charmed childhood

    2 The mystery of Grandfather George

    3 Taking on the Jesuits

    4 The land of long white socks

    5 A city boy in a country town

    Part 2 A passionate career

    6 My first and last surgery

    7 An honorary career

    8 The national stage

    9 ‘Aren’t you Hugh Wirth?’

    10 People and their pets

    11 Showtime

    12 Politicians, causes and campaigns

    Part 3 Looking back, striving on

    13 Going global

    14 Triumphs and troughs

    15 The home front

    Acknowledgements

    Many people have helped in the writing of this memoir. Anne Crawford not only convinced me that there was value in recording my experiences as an Australian veterinarian and long-term president of the RSPCA, but proved expert in translating my verbal memories to print.

    My niece, Emma Keeler, spent much time in researching the family history, finally resolving issues that perhaps I should have tackled years previously.

    Publisher Tracy O’Shaughnessy expressed enthusiasm and encouragement for the project from the moment she read the first draft chapters. I thank her for her professionalism. Penny Mansley is a meticulous editor. Lawyer Mark Williams gave valuable early advice. Rosemary Pollock, my supportive sister and custodian of accumulated family photographs, helped with the selection of these and with childhood recollections. Jennifer Davis released RSPCA campaign posters from the archives.

    Dr John Auty enthusiastically recalled his involvement in the horse export campaign, as did members of the Maritime Union of Australia, Jack Dwyer, and also Jim Beggs, who loaned material from his forthcoming book on the waterfront.

    Peter Barber, former CEO of RSPCA (Victoria), assisted with his recollections and the minutiae of his time in office.

    Esther Martin and Rosemary Blackley and others in the Drouin Historical Society helped recall the life and times of Drouin, circa 1964. Hilary Harper from 774 ABC local radio prompted memories from her time presenting the pets and animal welfare program on Saturday morning.

    Finally, For all Creatures: A History of RSPCA (Victoria) by Barbara Pertzel was an invaluable source.

    H J Wirth

    October 2012

    Prologue

    It could have been a leisurely English breakfast in the ornate dining room of London’s Hotel Russell were it not for the small but explosive article in The Times newspaper. It was 1 June 2011. I was in London for a five-day board meeting of the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), which was starting that day. It was a brief visit. I don’t stay away from my home in Melbourne for longer than is necessary, because I miss my animals, particularly my border terriers Lachlan and Miss Lexie (a real daddy’s girl), and because of my work for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). I had thumbed my way through The Times between mouthfuls of egg and black pudding, and found what I was looking for. The UK media isn’t known for its coverage of Australian events, but it could not overlook this: ‘Cattle torture video prompts Australian call for ban on animal exports’. As president of RSPCA Victoria, I’d known it was coming. I’d been sworn to secrecy about the ABC’s Four Corners program that had aired two days earlier, which showed footage of Australian cattle being killed inhumanely in Indonesian abattoirs. The RSPCA nationally was gearing up for a massive campaign over it, supporting Animals Australia, which had shot the video.

    I’ve been railing against live animal exports for slaughter since the late 1960s. As head of WSPA, several years ago I saw for myself abattoirs handling Australian livestock in the Middle East; the Basateen abattoir, in Cairo, was an absolute charnel-house. Surely this time the cruel trade would finally be banned?

    All hell had broken loose by the time I arrived home after the WSPA meeting. The Australian government had suspended the cattle export trade, and the industry that supported the trade was in uproar. The story was in all the papers: great long analyses and all the rest of it. It had a huge political impact on a totally inept minister and a totally inept government—they just didn’t know what to do.

    Eventually, the suspension was lifted and the trade resumed—for the time being. But we will win. The battles I’ve seen since becoming head of RSPCA Victoria, in 1972, and when I was RSPCA Australia’s president—whether against jumps racing, tail docking in dogs or the existence of puppy farms—have often taken decades to wage. But I’m stubborn and I don’t give in. (I’ve been likened to a bull terrier.) We’ve gained incremental improvements to animal welfare along the way, and there have been some resounding triumphs. The end to live horse exports was one of the best victories of all.

    It was a horse-loving wharfie who drew our attention to what was going on at the Melbourne docks towards the end of 1979. A foreman stevedore called Jack Dwyer had noticed a Clydesdale horse with a crook eye and, as he put it, ‘real bad feet’ awaiting export in a terminal at Melbourne’s Swanson Dock West. Dwyer saw other horses being loaded, for slaughter in Japan, with feet in terrible condition. He asked one of the delegates from the Waterside Workers Federation to contact the RSPCA about them. At the time there were no regulatory standards for the export of any live animals, including horses, sheep and cattle. The only requirement for an export licence was that state government vets, acting on behalf of the Commonwealth, checked each shipload to certify that the animals were ‘fit to travel’—often just by looking at them.

    The ‘horses for slaughter’ trade, as it became known, had started only the year before, but already hundreds of horses were being shipped from Australian ports for consumption overseas. They departed for France from Sydney. The main exporter in Melbourne was sourcing his horses from sales at Echuca and Dandenong, buying animals that no one else wanted for about $100 and sending them to Japan, where they were fattened and sold for $40 to $60 a kilogram. The journey could take anything up to seventeen days, with the horses standing the whole way.

    The RSPCA inspectors who visited the wharves found broken-down, aged horses that were definitely not fit to travel, due to injury, illness or being unsound. My colleague Onn Ben-David and I, volunteering as vets for the RSPCA, examined the next shipment and confirmed the inspectors’ views. We sent a report to Bryan Rushford, the state Agriculture Department’s chief veterinary officer. Rushford took strong exception to the report—his departmental vets kept saying they were quite happy to allow the horses to be exported. Appalling! A major row broke out between him and the RSPCA. The RSPCA and the department held a series of meetings, but nothing was resolved as neither side was prepared to compromise.

    The waterside workers summoned Peter Barber, RSPCA Victoria’s state administrator, and me to a meeting. We found Comrade Geoff Swayn, the federation’s secretary, in an office on the dock. It was like going into a dungeon: the lights were on but it was still murky. We wondered whether we’d get out alive from such an event! The workers were all friendly, but we got the impression that it was an impregnable meeting room that only the ‘comrades’ could enter. It was a bit exciting.

    The workers said they were 100 per cent behind the horses. The older men had worked with horses until the 1960s—hauling cargo from ships to the sheds on the piers—and had developed a fondness for them. In the early fifties, they’d refused to work with unscrupulous owners who were sneaking their horses in to work double shifts, and had made sure the horses had rested by marking their hoofs with paint at the end of each shift. At our meeting the workers declared that they would refuse to load any horses unless an RSPCA vet gave the okay, regardless of what the government vet said. We agreed. The RSPCA wanted—and still wants—a total ban on live exports, but the wharfies had made up their minds on this particular action. They informed both the owner and the Agriculture Department about the agreement.

    Rushford was apoplectic, and the battle was suddenly in full swing. It went public when some camera crews were snuck in by the wharfies through a side gate of the dock and filmed the state of the horses. The story appeared on television and radio, and in the newspapers. The public was incensed at the state of the animals. In Australia, horses are high on the public’s ‘totem pole’ of animals. The RSPCA itself was formed, in 1871, by people wanting to protect the welfare of working horses. I’d long had a connection with horses—my first childhood pet was a pony called Jinks. As a boy I visited dairies after school, looking at the big, noble Clydesdales that pulled the milk carts. Later, as a young vet, I was sat upon by a Clydesdale I was treating for a sore hind leg—its owner had warned me that it sat on people but I hadn’t believed her. Well, you wouldn’t!

    In early 1980, the wharfies and RSPCA vets stalled several loads of horses, which then had to be returned to various farms. We kept saying there were too many horses unfit for export, and the wharfies kept refusing to load them. It reached the stage that they’d blacklist whole truckloads. One owner in particular attempted all kinds of little tricks to get around this—he tried to load horses on public holidays or suddenly appeared on a Sunday morning with semitrailers full of horses, hoping to catch the wharfies out.

    In mid January, a row erupted after Ben-David and I were due to inspect several truckloads of horses but were kept waiting for them for four hours and departed the scene as they arrived, without examining them. We had our own practices to run—I needed to get back to my Balwyn surgery—and had other commitments that day. Heated words were exchanged with the shipping agent, truck drivers and a representative of the owner, all of which was witnessed by a group of placard-bearing protesters. The state Agriculture minister, Ian Winton Smith, soon heard about it and was furious. He’d just had his wisdom teeth extracted and he rang Peter Barber at the RSPCA office from his hospital bed, abusing him over the incident despite his swollen mouth. Barber reported that the conversation was acrimonious and that he simply put the telephone receiver down on his desk with Smith in full flight and left his office for the day.

    Rushford was also enraged. He called a meeting of as many people involved in the live horse trade as the state Agriculture Department could muster, including representatives from the Australian Veterinary Association (AVA), the RSPCA, government vets, waterside workers, exporters and the shipping company. The then prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, weighed in, sending John Auty, a vet working in what was then the Bureau of Animal Health, to represent his department in Canberra; it was hoped that Auty would assist in sorting out the problem.

    The meeting was hostile to the RSPCA and the waterside workers right from the start. Not one speaker supported the RSPCA’s report on the state of health of the export horses or the deficiencies of the law, though Auty told a Victorian government vet (not Rushford) that his clinical judgement was so bad that he considered him a disgrace to the profession. Much scorn was poured on the RSPCA inspectorate and its vets, until the meeting decided, after several hours, that the RSPCA vets were wrong. However, the last word went to the wharfies. Geoff Swayn stood up and said he and his comrades had heard enough; they had listened to all the speakers’ comments and supported only those of the RSPCA. The waterside workers would stand by their decision not to load horses unless the RSPCA vets had examined them. This resulted in uproar. The wharfies then left the meeting.

    The issue came to a head in a highly public debacle early in April. On Easter Monday, the wharfies refused to load a group of unexamined horses, as usual. After hours of talks with the horses’ owner and as dusk set in, the RSPCA vets present agreed to a compromise: some of the horses would be loaded for shipment to Sydney, where a full inspection of the animals involving Commonwealth officers and the RSPCA would occur. The owner’s vet would travel with them. This vet was asked to display the veterinary gear and medicines he was carrying and wasn’t the slightest bit embarrassed that all he had with him was a bucket, a twitch, a humane killer and some eye ointment. The RSPCA provided him with a range of drugs in case he needed to administer them during the trip.

    The next day, Ben-David and I flew to Sydney to join the assembled vets, who included Auty from Canberra, the New South Wales government vet, the owner’s vet and several others from the RSPCA. A huge crowd had gathered on the Sydney dock. The media smelled a stoush—just about every television station was there. Helicopters circled overhead, trying to film us examining the horses on the deck of the Australian Searoader. Most of the vets declared the horses unfit to travel.

    One horse stood out among the group that we inspected—a broken-down Clydesdale, bigger than most, with pus-filled eyes and various wounds. That huge old horse became the symbol for me of all that was wrong with the live export trade and of what the RSPCA was saying: that these horses were not fit for any transport, let alone transport to another country.

    The horses were all unloaded from the ship the following day. One horse was so unwell that it was euthanased on the wharf. The rest were taken to RSPCA New South Wales at Yagoona, where they were treated by an equine vet. Regrettably, not all of them responded and a number had to be put down, including the old Clydesdale. The Commonwealth paid for the veterinary care, and the horses that survived were given away to be looked after by horse people.

    Recriminations started almost immediately. Rushford made an official complaint that Auty had gone ‘too far’. But the public was horrified at the state of the horses and let the politicians know its views. The deaths of forty thousand sheep and one crew member in a fire on a rust-bucket ship bound for the Middle East late in March had also made animal exports an issue that the government couldn’t ignore. The minister for Primary Industry, Peter Nixon, announced soon after the horses scandal that the federal government would take action. It introduced new export regulations, with particularly strict standards for horses. How the government vets whinged about this change! They now had to examine individually the animals for export and to verify that they were all fit. For the first time a large number of sheep and cattle presented for export were rejected. The RSPCA’s attention turned to stopping the live sheep trade and, much later, the cattle trade, and it has been focused there ever since.

    The events of April 1980 galvanised people into protesting about other animal welfare issues, including the farming of animals. Put Animals into Politics was the theme of a rally we held in Melbourne’s City Square later that month—a first for the RSPCA. Other groups and prominent individuals, including philosopher and activist Peter Singer, spoke about a range of animal welfare issues. A couple of hundred people turned up. RSPCA Victoria has been part of two mass rallies since then—the latest in August 2011, over the cattle issue, when thousands marched nationally. Of course, now we have emails and Twitter to call our supporters to arms; in 1980 we had the phone, and telegrams were still around.

    Exporters found that they could never meet the stringent standards introduced in April 1980 for live horse transportation. The trade became totally uneconomic for those who relied on buying cheap, broken-down horses. It stopped, never to be revived. I’d grown up believing that animals, like humans, can feel pain and therefore suffer, and that it is our moral responsibility to safeguard them from this. This victory proved to me—and anyone else interested in animal welfare—that it can be done. It was one of many battles in a lifetime devoted to this cause.

    If ever there is a memorial made to celebrate the end of live horse exports, it should be a statue of that big old Clydesdale: a symbol of what can be achieved with the Australian community and a few horse-loving wharfies behind you.

    PART 1

    Growing up my way

    Chapter One

    A charmed childhood

    I was born stubborn; the gruffness came later. I arrived in a private hospital in East Melbourne on 9 September 1939, six days after World War II broke out—some would say a fitting start to the combative life that was to follow!

    My childhood was an idyllic time. I was the eldest, followed by my brothers, David and Paul, then my sisters, Elizabeth (who died aged eight) and Rosemary. We grew up in Warncliffe Road, East Ivanhoe, in a clinker-brick house named Mapledene (my parents were keen gardeners), a typical prewar home except that it was double brick rather than brick veneer, and on a double block. In those days East Ivanhoe was a pioneer suburb, next door to being rural. We were surrounded by dairies, cows, horses, riding schools and agistment farms—perfect for a young animal lover. Acres of long grass sloped down to the Yarra River, with the occasional street of new houses rising out of the paddocks. There weren’t many fences, meaning there was plenty of room to ride a pony or scream about on your bike.

    We had a huge amount of freedom as children to roam around—I knew every little track on the northern side of the Yarra, and it was nothing to go by train into the city, about 10 kilometres away, by myself at the tender age of seven or eight. My parents thought it was perfectly safe for us to go down to the Yarra to play or walk the dogs in the bush along its banks. Half a dozen swagmen lived along the riverbank—homeless people, all single and male, living in tents or scrap-iron humpies. My mother told me not to talk to them, but they weren’t really considered a threat. It wasn’t until an event years later that we had any suspicions about the swaggies.

    Animals were a normal part of my life. My maternal grandparents kept chooks, like everybody else of their era, and they also had a cocker spaniel and a cat. We didn’t have chooks at home or a cow for milking, though plenty of people did, but I had an opportunity to look after these animals at school. I was always interested in the animals around me, even though it took a while for the first pet to be introduced into our home. I was keen to know what animals’ needs were and how they should be looked after. I was fortunate that my parents and grandparents had a background in raising animals and could teach me the basics.

    One day when I was about five, a pony suddenly appeared in the paddock next door to us: a present from our parents. Jinks was a typical Shetland—she had a will of iron and did her own thing. We all learned to ride her. There wasn’t much traffic around, so we could ride on the road or along the footpath without anyone thinking anything of it. Jinks was a cunning little devil, and as soon as she thought we weren’t in control she’d race for home in a mad gallop. She wasn’t a nasty pony, but she did exactly what she wanted to do. If she didn’t like something she’d stamp her hoof on your foot—I still carry a scar from one such occasion. Little monster! For years now I’ve been a steward for the ponies at the Royal Agricultural Society’s summer horse show, and those ponies are wicked, too. Five or six years later, Jinks suddenly died. I don’t know what of; she was just found dead in the paddock one morning. She was never replaced, but by that time we didn’t really need another horse as we were at school and doing other things.

    Despite enjoying games with my younger brothers, I was a bit of a loner. When I was about nine, I reached the stage where I badly needed my own dog. My parents had owned a Scottish terrier called Angus when I was born, but he’d had severe dermatitis and had been put down when I was two. Vets didn’t have the armoury of medicines and treatments that they have now. Angus must have made an impression on me, though. I had also attended dog shows with my father at the show-grounds once or twice: Dad had shown English setters and dachshunds before he married and had children.

    The sighting of some puppies in a pet shop window in the city one day did it. I used to go into the city to my father’s work sometimes. Melbourne was a quiet place then; everyone in certain social circles knew each other, and it was easy to run into people you knew in the street. I’d go into town, dressed in my school uniform, meeting all sorts of people who somehow or other knew my father, and therefore knew me, and would say hello. Arthur Calwell, then a minister in Ben Chifley’s government, would always say ‘Hello, Hugh’ to me walking up Collins Street. Calwell had a birth defect on the roof of his mouth, and my old man, who was a manufacturer of dental equipment, had made an appliance that enabled him to talk properly. Well, he was a politician!

    There was a pet shop in Regent Place, not far from where my father worked. I discovered a litter of black-and-white fox terrier puppies in its window one day, went home and started pestering. I nagged and nagged and drove my parents to distraction until I got one. (I did say I’d been born stubborn.) I didn’t get a pup from that pet shop litter, but soon afterwards a six-month-old black-and-white foxie appeared at home. I presume my father found it through one of his contacts in the dog-showing world. He was

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