Imagine it’s 1965, and you’ve just fulfilled a boyhood ambition and graduated from the vet college in Glasgow, Scotland. The very next week you find yourself in Kenya, treating wild animals. This is what happened to Dr. Jerry Haigh, who in Wrestling with Rhinos takes us deep into the post-independence Kenya of 1965, and shows us what things were like until he left ten years later for a teaching post in Canada. Dealing with a 17 foot tall lame giraffe was an early challenge, as there had not been many giraffes in the teaching pool at Glasgow. A fall back on common sense, with the help of the owner and a knowledge of cattle medicine helped to create a cure. Along the way, he encountered traditional domestic animal patients as well as rhinos, elephants, wildebeest, lemurs and pelicans. Among them was Joy Adamson’s cheetah, and we get a first-hand glimpse of their Born Free experiences. While living in a country just making the transition from colonial status to independence, Jerry also met President Jomo Kenyatta and treated his cattle.

Threaded through the text are observations — sometimes hilarious, sometimes scurrilous, sometimes poignant — on the social scene in Kenya, peppered with reminiscences about his soldier father, for whom the Kenya of World War II was a very different place.

In the final chapters, Jerry documents his perspective on human/wildlife conflicts, and looks ahead hopefully into the future.

Dr. Jerry Haigh was born in Kenya and educated in Glasgow as a veterinarian. Upon graduation in Scotland, he moved back to Africa, where he lived and worked for over ten years. During his time in Africa he met his wife, Dr. Joanne van de Riet, with whom he has two children, Karen and Charles. In 1975 Jerry and his family moved from Kenya to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where he took up a post as a wildlife veterinarian at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine. Jerry’s career-long experience with wildlife has spanned over five decades and four continents. He has worked on species ranging from elephants, to wild dogs and polar bears, to moose. He is the author of Of Moose and Men: A Wildlife Vet’s Pursuit of the World’s Largest Deer, The Trouble with Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa, Porcupines to Polar Bears: Adventures of a Wildlife Veterinarian, and Wrestling With Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya. He and Joanne, together for over 50 years now, live near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

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