VN April 2022

Vetnuus | April 2022 22 DR BRIAN RIPPON 04 FEBRUARY 1938 - 15 FEBRUARY 2022 One of the Eastern Cape’s best known and most loved veterinarians, Dr Brian Rippon, passed away on 15 February 2022 after a short illness. Brian farmed with livestock on, and practised from his farm Proctorsfontein in the Grahamstown district of the Eastern Cape for more than four decades. Due to Brian’s legendary hospitality, Proctorsfontein was for decades a special place to the veterinary fraternity; especially those in the Eastern Cape, but also to many veterinarians from other provinces and from overseas. Brian’s fluency in isiXhosa and his sense of humour enabled him to build and maintain a special rapport with the staff on his farm and on the farms of his clients. Brian and his wife, Jenny, moved to Knysna in 2007. Brian was a very special person, always humble, loved by his colleagues and his clients. He had a puckish sense of humour and was the first to tell a joke against himself, such as the following which caused him great amusement: he was seeing a sick Afghan hound in his surgery and commented to the longhaired, long-faced owner (a legal friend); “funny how dogs and owners look alike”, to which the quick-witted attorney parried:“have you not just acquired a bulldog?” Always a great conversationist and raconteur and a great character, the stories about Brian himself are numerous and legendary. In his younger days he was renowned for the speed at which he roared up and down country roads. - farm labourers compared the sound of his passing bakkie to that of a Boeing passing overhead. He once hit an ox at night at such speed that it flew over the cab and landed in the load body of his bakkie. TB testing in his early days in practice involved accreditation schemes where every bovine on the farm had to be accounted for from test to test. This involved hours of office work and on one occasion Brian worked till 3am balancing the TB registers, realized that he had an early TB test near Port Alfred and drove straight there instead of going to bed. The farmer was rather surprised to find the veterinarian sleeping in his bakkie at the cattle crush in time for the test the next morning! He would spend hours giving free advice to farmers, not a few of whom abused his kindness without making use of his professional services. This advice was given freely telephonically at all hours, in the cattle crush, and possibly most characteristically while he was seated in his bakkie, engine running and arm out of the window. The latter habit was endearing and simultaneously infuriating – endearing to those who were getting a free consultation and infuriating to those who were waiting for him to keep an appointment! Because Brian kept Eastern Cape time, not Greenwich time, he became universally known (in the Albany, Alexandria and Bathurst districts at any rate) as the lateDr Rippon. Because of this reputation, a competition developed amongst his many farmer clients as to who could delay Brian in characteristic pose with his bakkie engine running and his right arm out of the window for the longest. The record is said to be 20 minutes! (Brian of course denied this - he claimed it was 10 minutes!!) A colleague told the story of visiting Brian and accompanying him on his rounds. Brian suddenly jammed on the brakes, jumped out of his bakkie, jumped over the fence and proceeded to inject a sick cow he had spotted next to the road. When the colleague queried the financial wisdom of such actions, he reportedly said – “it’s old Jack’s cow and both cow and owner are poorly - I won’t charge him”. Such was the man who served his clients and local community in the Albany district for 46 years.