The Last Vet

We arrive late. It is nine o’clock. Outside the school building people and dogs wait beneath a steady drizzle. The dogs are collarless, held on lengths of electric cable, nylon rope or string. A woman in pink holds on to a brown-and-white dog. A boy cradles a furious pup. A man arrives with a large black-and-white dog, which leaps and twists at the end of a long rope. Another man leads his dog on its hind legs, holding on to the front paws, like a dancing bear. Inside the schoolroom a line of people and dogs wait upon on a bench and impassively watch a technician gently shave the balls of a sedated dog.

This is a street clinic. Bring a dog here and you can have it sterilized for free. On other days Jalloh’s team rounds up dogs from the streets, puts them in a wagon and takes them to the clinic to be vaccinated and neutered. The first time they tried to remove dogs local people chased them, demanding to know why the dogs were being taken and allowing them to leave only after the team promised the dogs’ return.

‘In Thailand,’ Dr Jalloh told me from the wheel of his Land Cruiser on the drive across town, ‘the authorities have a “keep your dog at homeday”. Everybody has to bring their dogs inside. Afterwards they go through the streets and shoot any dog they see.’ A few years ago the Freetown municipal authorities decided upon a similar cull of the street dogs. Dr Jalloh elected himself the dogs’ representative and spoke during a public meeting. Though the odds were stacked against him, he argued that most of the dogs weren’t stray but belonged to the community, that they – the dogs – performed a function and a service by offering security and protection. The mayoral dignitaries told Jalloh the dogs were dirty. Jalloh retorted that the opposite was true; their scavenging kept the streets clear of rotting rubbish. He had a point. There had been no systemized rubbish collection in the city for decades. The authorities backed down; the dogs were reprieved. ‘They say we are crazy...’he paused to answer his phone. The ring tone was a puppy’s whine. They said he was crazy. And that was just the beginning.

In 1952 Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring in which he set out the terms of ‘the Covenant’. The Covenant describes the relationship between human and canine, its beginnings and the stone upon which it is founded. A pack of jackals followed Stone-Age man’s hunting expeditions and surrounded his settlements, were tolerated, accepted and ultimately encouraged. Firstly for the warning note they sounded at the advance of predators, secondly for their ability to track game. The jackals, who initially followed the hunters in the hope of scraps and entrails, began to take the initiative, running before instead of behind the hunter, bringing to bay larger animals than they would be able to hunt without assistance. And so the covenant was created, an interdependent exchange of services.

This is how, fifty years earlier, Rudyard Kipling described the origin of the Covenant in ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’: ‘When the Man waked up he said, “What is Wild Dog doing here?” And the Woman said, “His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always. Take him with you when you go hunting.”’

For Lorenz, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, the contract between human and animal was: ‘signed...without obligation.’ Jalloh, closer to Kipling than to Lorenz, would disagree. There is an obligation, it is unequivocal and one-sided. Having brought the jackal into his sphere, having bred the wildness from him – man owes dog.

Four, then five, then six freshly neutered and comatose dogs lie in a neat row, the paw of one lies across another, strange babies sharing a bed. An assistant tattoos the ear of each dog. There is a general air of understated chaos. Dogs roam the room. Outside a circle of children gather to watch as recently anaesthetized dogs stagger, circle and crash to the ground. The technician with the tattoo machine clips the ear of a reclining dog which, far from being sedated, is merely sleeping. The astounded animal jumps to its feet and stalks huffily away. Elsewhere a technician attempts to inject a dog. It tries to bite him. The owner’s efforts to hold onto his dog are so ineffective that the technician suggests the dog doesn’t belong to him. The man insists otherwise. The waiting crowd wades in. He’s afraid of you,’ the woman in the pink top points out. A small boy steps forward and takes the animal. To me Jalloh says: ‘Some people think they are the owners, but they are only the proxy owner. Usually the children are the true owners of the dog.’

Sitting on the plane halfway across the Sahara two days before, I had suddenly remembered my rabies vaccination. I pulled out my yellow international health certificate, relieved to find there was month left before it expired. ‘Ah,’ says Jalloh, cheerfully, ‘but it is an inexact science.’ He tries to keep himself inoculated, but the vaccine is rarely available in the Sierra Leone. The staff wear doubled gloves. They have two or three muzzles in the surgery. That’s the sum of it.

On our way back to the surgery we stop at the government veterinarian offices, which Jalloh is keen to show me. He jumps from the vehicle and leads me inside, introduces me to three men dressed in overalls and wellington boots. The room is virtually empty of furniture and equipment. Dusty glass cabinets house aging texts. The sole piece of equipment appears to be an old freezer. In one of the cabinets I find an elegant wooden box.

‘Post-mortem kit,’ says Jalloh. ‘It will be empty.’ I open it. Nothing, save the abandoned chrysalis of a moth.

As a child I’d owned a dog that overnight turned suddenly affectionate. Soon afterwards his hips locked. I carried him to the vet, walked him up and down to demonstrate the strange gait. The vet instructed me to bring him back if anything changed. The dog wandered and late one evening returned, his hind quarters split open to the bone by an axe wound. Through the night I tended him, feeding him raw egg with my fingers and following him around with a bowl of water, from which the wretched animal heaved itself away time and time again. I remember the episode now and recount it for Jalloh. The dog was rabid. I worked it out for myself later. The vet had refused to admit it.

‘“Craze dog” they call it,” says Jalloh. And tells an everyday story of his own. Some months ago, a woman brought three dogs to him for a regular check up. In one Jalloh saw the telltale paralysis of the lower jaw. By the time the owner returned Jalloh had destroyed all three. He had no choice. It happens sometimes. In the slums the cry goes up at the sight of a drooling dog. Occasionally somebody will call him, but often by the time he gets there the dog is dead. Now that frustrates him, for diagnosis on a dead animal requires a post-mortem of the brain. If the dog were alive he could gather a sample of blood. Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.

Gudush Jalloh was born in Kono, Yengema, in the Camara Chiefdom. His parents were Fula Muslims, the nomadic cattle owners of West Africa who drive their herds through Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Nigeria. By the time Gudush was born in 1959, the first son of the first wife and eldest of twenty-two, the family had abandoned their pastoralist ways. Still, the knowledge of his heritage interested the young Jalloh. His early ambition was to own a herd. His mother reared chickens and the occasional goat, dogs played an early role in his life. When Gudush was fifteen his father arranged a marriage to a local girl, told his son it was time to leave school and join the family business as petty traders of gasoline. Gudush refused either to marry or to leave school, finished his education with the help of a scholarship and a former teacher who employed him as a part-time lab assistant. He began to apply for government scholarships to read engineering overseas. In 1978, he was one of a dozen who won scholarships to Hungary, but then, on the eve of travel, the scholarships were withdrawn and awarded to candidates with government connections. A year later he won a scholarship to Moscow. The African students arrived in Rostov in late September, without a word of Russian between them. They worried about how to make their stipends last, how to cook potatoes. Some time during the year-long induction, Jalloh was persuaded by a colleague to switch courses and join him at the Moscow Veterinary Academy. He returned to Sierra Leone in the mid-1980s, the rift with his father healed by the prestige of having been chosen to study abroad. Jalloh tells me his father didn’t mind that he had become a vet; he didn’t know what a vet was. Later people said: ‘So your son spent six years in Russia just to treat dogs?’

That year, the same year Jalloh returned, his younger brother, the second son of his father’s third wife, was bitten by a dog. By the time Jalloh heard the news in Freetown, the boy had died of rabies.