The Vet from Down Under #2

by Sarah Ladd, B.V.Sc.

First of all, a warm Australian g'day to all of you pet owners in the land of hope and glory! I am an Australian veterinarian, in small animal practice in Sydney, which is situated on the southeast coast of Australia. Just like your country, we too have an abundance of natural wildlife like no other place on earth. We are especially blessed with many varieties of birdlife, including some of the most popular pet birds on earth, namely the budgerigar and the cockatoo. This is my passion, to be involved in the care and nurturing of these magnificent creatures!

The training of vets in Australia is a little different to the American system. We can enter vet school straight from high school and do not have to complete a "pre-vet" degree first. This means that our youngest graduates are about 22 years old when they are launched onto the unsuspecting public! Often, we have starry-eyed visions of what the job will be, but these are quickly dispelled when we have to face our first irate client wanting to know why their 25 year old cat cannot have a kidney transplant!

I look back now at my first year in practice with mixed feelings. There were some people who were convinced I could cure a rainy day, and others who would strangle me if I laid a finger on their animal again!! As vets we all know that when working with animals there is a fine line between glorious victory and total disaster!

Vets all have their favourite little area of clinical practice that they could spend all day with, and mine is birds! I fell in love when someone gave me a gift of a peachfaced lovebird with the unlikely name of "bird"! How could I have been so ignorant for all those years of the incredible beauty and personality of these creatures! I quickly bought every textbook on bird medicine I could find, and today am at the stage where I would like to specialise in them exclusively!

I guess the most common things we see are wild parrots who have come to grief with automobiles, and pet birds suffering disease as a result of improper feeding and care. Unfortunately, Australians still remain very ignorant about the needs of their pet birds. Because it is such a common sight to see flocks of wild parrots grazing by the roadside or in parkland around the suburbs, we take them for granted and I think we have lost a little of the awe that they must have inspired when white man first set foot on Australian shores a little over 2 hundred years ago.

Our clinic is situated in an area of Sydney where the birdlife is particularly abundant. We try to offer our clients a range of services such as regular health checks for their birds, educational material on feeding requirements and diagnostic services for some of the more common diseases such as chlamydiosis, Circovirus(Beak and Feather disease), heavy metal poisoning and other bacterial and protozoal diseases of caged birds.

One day, I would love to visit the U.S.A. and see for myself some of your wildlife that I have heard so much about. I can't even imagine what it's like to have big bears roaming around national parks! There is a real curiosity in Australia about what America is really like. If I had to guess though, I'd say we're all pretty much just trying to get on with life wherever we are in the world!

Kind Regards,

Sarah Ladd B.V.Sc.
sarahl@sydney.DIALix.oz.au