daktari, or, we change/we stay the same

Something this morning sent my memory skipping back to childhood when one of my favorite TV shows, Daktari, prompted several years of major play. I and several neighborhood friends played "daktari" for hours on end. My back yard was Africa, and we had assorted neighborhood dogs and cats, as well as a collection of stuffed animals, who were treated for various ailments, protected from poachers, and generally adored.

There were numerous cardboard boxes that contained all the Daktari "stuff." I remember things like pecans in the shell being used as big "pills" and there were empty syringes and various makeshift surgical instruments, along with many things I can't remember. But I remember each time we played, the boxes were pulled out of the outside closet in our carport, and we would proceed to set up the main play area. We took pretend jeeps all over the neighborhood, on safari in search of animals needing help.

For most of the years of my childhood I wanted to be a veterinarian. I applied to and was accepted into a pre-vet degree program in my junior year of high school. I had volunteered at our personal veterinarian's office during two summers, loved animals, and felt I knew exactly where I was headed career-wise. With much consultation with my father, I designed a home/office scenario where my living room and office waiting room were on either side of a huge built-in saltwater aquarium wall. In my mind I wanted the place where I worked to be right where I lived, because even back then, with no models to influence me, I realized I would never want to leave animals in cages in an office while I went home for the nights and weekends.

In my freshman year though, I became discouraged with the coursework, which was mostly conducted in huge classes and had no direct relation to animal care. I realized I loved my English classes and stood out in those, while in the science classes I was one of several hundred and the material was dry and generic. So I changed majors.

Sometimes I wonder if our educational system had been different, and veterinary school was more of a "trade" school, would I have gone on to become a "daktari?"

It occurred to me today that in many ways where and how I live now, as an adult, is the fulfillment of that childhood dream and play. Yesterday was spent mostly outdoors, with horses and donkeys, monitoring Salina's progress, interacting with the equines, and then dealing with a yucky cat ear and later two territorial male felines drawing boundaries. It wasn't Clarence the cross-eyed lion or Judy the chimp, but Keats-meow and Dickens, Salina and the donkeys, Kyra the Corgi and all the rest of the gang.

Throughout the days I'm handling various syringes, medicinal herbal mixtures, checking for wounds and injuries, and administering a feed routine that rivals a chemistry lab. While there are no surgical instruments, there are muck rakes, pitchforks, harrows, and grooming tools galore. The hoof pick is reminiscent of some of those early toys we used in our pretend play.

It's funny how much we grow and change from child- to adulthood, and yet if you look beneath the surface just a bit, some things are very much the same.

For a very long time, my career goal was to be the official veterinarian for the U.S. Olympic Equestrian team. The very idea that I would be doing that now, treating injuries resulting from using horses in sport, for medals, makes me laugh. It never occurred to me as a young girl that a job like that would entail monitoring horses for abuse. But it probably explains my fascination today with equine advocacy, and with issues like equine deaths on eventing courses and rollkur in warm-up arenas.