A Vet for Dragons?!

I think being a vet is easy; it’s something I have been desperate to do since I was five, and helping animals and their owners every day is the best job in the world! I love animals, always have, but dragons?! Now that’s another matter! When Lucy and her family brought their gorgeous cat to my surgery, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, just a simple case of fleas that I could cure pretty easily. The first step to removing fleas is to give the cat a good brush with a damp comb, which unsurprisingly they are never too happy about! You can also put Vaseline on the comb to help the fleas stick to it (ICK!), so as we were wrestling with the cat and getting water EVERYWHERE I got a chance to get a look at a couple of the fleas that had stuck to the comb. Little did I know that this moment would change everything, including my career! The fleas that I had managed to trap looked different to the types that I was used to. Fleas are absolutely tiny, about two millimetres big, but these looked a bit bigger than normal, and were completely black instead of a grubby greyish brown. Very weird! I gave Lucy and her Dad some treatments for their cat and sent them home, and then got the fleas under my microscope straight away! They didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before, with a hard smooth shell that was jet black and shiny. I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of an investigator, so I decided to get working and find out what these little things were! A friend of mine, Buckley, worked as a scientist at the IVM (Institute of Veterinary Medicine), and I knew that she’d be able to help me identify my mystery bugs! I very carefully packed the fleas up in tiny sealed dishes, and stored them in the little fridge at the back of the surgery where we keep medicines. Then I called Buckley straight away to arrange a trip to the IVM for some answers!

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