Scrubs, Stethoscopes, and Scalpels- The Life of a Vet Student: Sable, Sable Everywhere

One of the most commonly worked on animals in South Africa, at least for us, was sable. Apparently sable, which are in the antelope family, were almost extinct in South Africa, and they are now being bred back on the private game reserves. There was a huge sable sale in August, and since we were there in June, we had a lot of sable calls.

Working on the sable reminded me a lot of working on cattle here in the states, except we don't have to chase cattle around in trucks and dart them in order to work on them. But sable in South Africa are usually kept fenced off in sections of the reserves to protect them from other animals, and a lot of the same type of care goes into them. They even get ear tags like cattle do.

All in all, the sable are relatively easy to dart. They are so used to people that they really don't start running until the dart gun has been fired. And even then they don't always run far. In fact, sometimes we had to chase the rest of the herd away from the sable that was darted and went down.

When dealing with a darted sable, you always want to put pipes on their horns. Sable tend to swing their heads around a lot as they're being carried, and if you're working on them on the ground they can't hold their head up by themselves. And we had one member of our group take a pipe right in the neck, and you can bet he was grateful it wasn't the actual horn.

Once the sable have been darted and the horns taken care off, there is a pretty set routine. Each sable was given anti-parasitic (doramectin) and a vitamin complex IM, and each sable also has blood taken from their cephalic vein (on the front leg) and has hair pulled from the tail for DNA testing. Each sable also gets a shot of penicillin to help prevent infection, as the dart entry sites and other injection sites can't easily be cleaned or monitored.

Testing the DNA in the sable was of particular interest to the reserve managers, and on some sable that was all we did. We used a special dart that had a little claw on the end of it, which would stick to the sable, grab a tuft of hair, and then fall back to the ground for us to collect. The breeders are trying to breed bigger horns on the sable, so as well as DNA testing, the horns are always measured as well. And the horns are measured by not only their entire length; the tip lengths, the number of rings, the tip to tip and the base length are all important as well.

Sable that are going to be going to sale are moved into bhomas, which are like pens without the reserve, so that the sable can get used to being fenced in more before the stress of the sale. This is not easy. Sable are heavy. In one day we moved 14 sable, and believe me, you feel that by the end of the day. And you have to watch them; one sable ninja kicked me in the back of the knee while we were driving it to the bhoma, and then one of the reserve workers had to sit on it for the rest of the ride to keep from kicking. I learned a very important lesson that day- always volunteer to hold the head of the sable. It's much better to be slobbered on than kicked. And then all you have to do is hold their head up and make sure they keep breathing.

The trickiest part is actually moving the sable into the bhomas, because sometimes it involves carrying sable down long narrow corridors. And it takes usually about 7 people to carry a sable- 3 per side and then one person holding the horns- and usually it's hard to fit everyone into the corridor and be able to move effectively. And as I said earlier, sable are heavy. But after some experimenting, I think it was easier to just carry them down rather than reverse them and hope the sable will walk down themselves, because sometimes they just don't feel like doing what you want them to do. But when you're ready to reverse them, wherever that may be, sable have very nice ear veins that are used for the reversal. And then you just remove the pipes from their horns and leave them alone. It's much easier doing all of this with them being left in the field than transporting them to a bhoma, but sometimes that's just what you have to do.

That kind of procedure is what we did the most off, but like I said, the sable are treated a lot like cattle. So we were called out to look at some for lameness and abscesses as well, which usually just involves more antibiotics or antibiotic wound spray. And for one sable with a lung infection, all we had to do was fill the dart with antibiotic instead of our regular sedatives, and that was the administration of the drug. Then all we had to do was collect the dart. We also did some pregnancy checks on our very last day. Only one sable required an actual ultrasound, and the rest were done by rectal palpation. By palpation you are able to feel a thicker uterine horn on one side. It's easiest to feel pregnancy around 4 months, which is also when an ultrasound is able to pick up a pregnancy.

The first day we worked on sable, I wasn't overly impressed. I wanted to work on the exotic wildlife, and sable really didn't seem all that exotic. By the end though, I thought they were super cute, and if they weren't endangered I would have loved to bring a sable home with me. Preferably the tame orphan.