Veterinary: Ticks, ticks and more ticks

Back in my early days as a vet one of the most frequent emergency calls we had to do was to an animal with “redwater”.

We would invariably rush out the road to the stricken animal and give a blood transfusion to replace the red blood cells lost to the infection.

My memory tells me that not all of these animals survived and often I think that deaths were due to the shock of receiving the blood as much as to anything else.