Viva el Vet!: From "Animal Hospital" to a Colombian Practice

by David Grant (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $13.46

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $25.90

  Following the hugely popular JUST PRACTISING and STILL PRACTISING, TV vet David Grant continues his adventures in the wilds of Colombia, a land of salsa, beautiful women and exotic animals. It's 1973 and the three-day week turns everyday life at the RSPCA Animal Hospital at Harmsworth upside down as the team of vets face everything from power failing mid-operation to setting bones by candlelight. When a Colombian girlfriend suggests a spell as a vet in South America might prove instructive, David jumps at the chance. However, the lessons he learns in Medellin, Colombia's second city in the Andes, are not those he expects: how to deal with the mafia, avoid being mugged, to flee student riots and how to avoid guerilla raids. But perhaps the most important lesson for a young vet having to pay his own way and the wages of his nurse is how to make himself indispensible to the rich clients whose pets lead considerably better lives than the starving street children and beggars. When David saves the life of a local drugs baron's German Shepherd shot as the result of gang warfare, his future seems secure, but his refusal to carry out unnecessary but lucrative treatment on pampered pooches - ear cropping and tail docking - leads to a cash crisis which he solves by becoming a part-time English teacher. Meanwhile, back at the practice, David comes up against a stallion lacking in libido, a dog with an unhealthy obsession with corn on the cob, and the senior partner's wife with an unhealthy interest in a dangerous drug dealer, not to mention a Boxer with nothing wrong with him, but a lonely female American owner who feeds him caviar for breakfast.