When we launched The Trouble With Lions at the Literary Cocktails in Edmonton we had planned for it to take place on the same day the Jane Goodall was there to deliver one of her inspirational Roots and Shoots talks, and so we hoped that she and I would be able to meet again, so that I could thank her for writing the foreword, and of course give her a copy of the book. Sadly, fate intervened and it became utterly impossible, largely due to the bizarre machinations of the two airlines that fly out of Edmonton. I had to get home early the next day to present the semi-private launch at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, which had been planned months in advance. Neither airline could get me back home before 11.00 a.m. and even then I would have had to change planes in Calgary and cover two large sides of a triangle to get home.

The upshot was that I missed Jane’s talk, which, by all accounts, was as captivating as ever. That meant that although I had been able to sign of copy of the book for Jane, I did not organize myself well enough to get her to sign one for me! Duh! You might say. However, Peter Midgley and Jeff Carpenter of the University of Alberta Press had the presence of mind to get copies signed by her, so at least someone has copies with both names in them. It looks as if I shall have to send one to someone in her office and ask them to find her on her world-wide travels and sign it for me.

Meanwhile Linda Cameron, head of UAP has been in London and tells me that there has been interest in Australia, as well as the UK and USA. I have just sent off copies to Uganda, so let’s see what sort of reaction we get.

The Trouble With Lions in Uganda

On to the next phase. We have started to prepare for next year’s trip to Uganda. I have been taking students there for several years now as a part of the 4th year curriculum at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine. Our principal objective is to study the human x livestock x wildlife interface.

There are two archival blogs written by students that give a bit of the flavour of the work, as well as the good times & impressions that everyone garners. If you entered this blog through my web page you will find both of those entertainingn> accounts very easily under the blogs button. If you found me some other way you can go to the web page which is at and not only find the student’s impressions, but also see footage of rhino capture taken with a Super8 camera almost 40 years ago, or see a revolving series of pictures of battle of the giants where two bull hippo create mini tidal waves. You can also hear the first part of a radio interview that aired on the morning of the launch of The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa.

The ten students who will join Jo and me have already chosen their jobs and Leanne has been preparing minutes and agendas. The dates have been selected, with the crew leaving on Jan 31st from Saskatoon, arriving at Entebbe late at night on the 1st Feb. They are due leave Uganda on the 27th Feb, and several of them plan to stop over in Amsterdam on the way home.

I have sent each student a list of the things that will be needed as their “essentials” bits and pieces for travel to tropical Africa for a month.

Meanwhile The Trouble With Lions is available on line, and through several bookstores. Together with Cathie Crooks of the University of Alberta Press we are planning some readings in Manitoba as well Minnesota and South Dakota. No reviews yet, but kind words form those who picked up copies at the launch.

On to the next phase. We have started to prepare for next year’s trip to Uganda. I have been taking students there for several years now as a part of the 4th year curriculum at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine. Our principal objective is to study the human x livestock x wildlife interface.

There are two archival blogs written by students that give a bit of the flavour of the work, as well as the good times & impressions that everyone garners. If you entered this blog through my web page you will find both blogs easily under the blogs button. If you found me some other way you can go to the web page which is at and not only find the student’s impressions, but also see footage of rhino capture taken with a Super8 camera almost 40 years ago, or see a revolving series of pictures of battle of the giants where two bull hippo create mini tidal waves. You can also hear the first part of a radio interview that aired on the morning of the launch of The Trouble With Lions: A Glasgow Vet in Africa.

The ten students who will join Jo and me have already chosen their jobs and Leanne has been preparing minutes and agendas. The dates have been selected, with the crew leaving on Jan 31st from Saskatoon, arriving at Entebbe late at night on the 1st Feb. They are due to leave Uganda on the 27th Feb, and several of them plan to stop over in Amsterdam on the way home.

I have sent each student a list of the things that will be needed – take a look and see if you can spot anything that would be on your “essentials” list for travel to tropical Africa for a month.

Meanwhile The Trouble With Lions is available on line, and through several bookstores. Together with Cathie Crooks of the University of Alberta Press we are planning some readings in Manitoba as well Minnesota and South Dakota. No reviews yet, but kind words form those who picked up copies at the launch

The launch in Saskatoon

Refinery Launch of The Trouble With Lions

What a turnout! Thanks so much for everyone who came along, we had about ninety folks take a big slice out of their evenings and come to join Jo and me at Saskatoon’s Refinery for the public launch. The intimate space of the basement gave everyone a chance to mix and mingle and lots of folks purchased copies of the book. My hand got a bit tired signing and also making sure that every single copy had the typo on page 237 corrected. More of this below.

After a glass of what-you-fancy we headed upstairs to the theatre where Cynthia and Jim had laid out the chairs on three sides of the room and set up a couple of tables for my toys – a computer and projector, as well as the sound system for Brother Kurt, who would play some music in the “intermission”.

Jim McCrory, well known broadcaster in the Saskatchewan scene led the event of with an intro, and then I told a few stories about some of the work in the early days, when I was translocating rhino. I ran an old two minute movie clip, shot on Super 8, of the actual techniques of rhino capture and with the technical revolution this has been digitized for use on PowerPoint. I also related the account of how a San man (used to be called Bushman, but that is no longer appropriate) captured ostriches with a small snare and a piece of ostrich shell. Ostriches are fatally attracted to anything white, so Anton, which was the man’s Westernized name, gave us a dramatic demo of how a bird will dip its head into the trap and end up with the snare around its neck. As the snare, made of very strong natural fibre, is tied to a stout tree the ostrich is doomed and the man and his family have a nice pile of meat. Of course this is just one example of how humans have acquired their meat from wild animals since time immemorial. This leads into a discussion of the wider subject of what is now dubbed “Bushmeat”, an emotional subject that has become a high-profile issue in many forums.

From there we listened to Kurt, who is a member of my writers group, as he played a couple of well-known tunes for us – Wimoweh, and She’s Got Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Feet.

After that break I headed into the newer territory of our work in Uganda, and this occupies the last six chapters of the book, covering conservation, human tragedies, teaching, humour and the very complicated human x livestock x wildlife interface. One of the humorous events occurred when a female member of the party, standing in what passed for a shower, sluicing herself off with water from a cup repeatedly dipped into a plastic bowl, became convinced that a Peeping Tom was giving her the once over. It was a local member of a wildlife troop.

And the typo? The caption of the photo of the hyaena on page 237 has one crucial word missing. Here is the photo, and anyone not in the know would at once recognize it as being of the groin region of a male. It is not. The caption reads “External genitalia of a juvenile spotted hyaena.” One crucial word is missing. Between juvenile and spotted should come the word “female”. For a fuller explanation you can take a look at the text, or for the real detail buffs go to the actual science references in the bibliography. The ultra short version is that early in the life of the fetus the chemical events that lead to either testosterone or oestrogen being the major sex hormone are not the same in hyaenas as they are in other mammals.

It seems as if no book is ever published without a typo or two. Peter Midgley, the managing editor on this project, himself a published author, told me that Persian rug makers would always insert a deliberate error so that their work would not rival the perfection of Allah.

Launch minus 20 hours

The pressure is on. Last minute details to attend to, as the public launch of The Trouble With Lions in Saskatoon is less than 24 hours away. Food has been ordered for the post-storytelling social. Last week I went to the liquor store and picked out a couple of decent wines, an Australian Shiraz / Cabernet, and a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Of course they will sell at the cash bar before the event for a bit more than the “Chateau Box” that is normally available at such dos, but thems the breaks. I intend to try the red, but not until after the formal part of the evening.


It will not be a reading in the normal sense of the word. The plan is as follows. There will be about a half hour for folks to grab a drink and do some visiting. Jim McCrory, long-time friend and well-known radio and TV host will be the MC. Then will come the book event. This will consist of about 15 minutes of stories, accompanied by pictures. Storytellers in the Middle Ages used to use the double technique that was called Cantastoria. The equivalent in Japan is called Komishibai. This will be a 21st century update of those honourable traditions – using PowerPoint (who’d have guessed?)

We also have an unusual ”Intermission” lined up. Brother Kurt Van Kuren is a Benedictine monk at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan. He was once a professional rock musician in LA, but now he is the chief cantor at the abbey. He also happens to be a member of the writers group that I was lucky enough to join almost two years ago. They have been vital to the evolution of this book.

I did have one run at a “reading” when the students of the Western Canadian Veterinary Association let me have their noon-hour time slot at the WCVM in Saskatoon last Friday. This was a more-or-less private gathering, and also my very last formal session at the institution where I have worked for the last thirty-two and a half years.

As soon as I had finished the reading I was off to Banff where I met with like-minded authors from the world of creative non-fiction at the annual cn-fc convention. Some big-name authors were there, and for the fist time a small group of students who had been sponsored by the association joined us. It as great to have them along, as the majority of the regular members have grey hair, and the young always keep one on one’s toes. The Banff Centre is just a magical place to gather for any kind of artistic event. The food is amazing too – not to mention the scenery.

The Trouble With Lions - launch

Launch activities - 1

It all started with a trip to Edmonton on the 9th of April, where I finally met with the crew at the University of Alberta press. It was great to be able to put faces to names after over a year of email and letter exchanges, not to mention tens of thousands of manuscript words & masses of pictures. They had had a chance to take a look at my mug shot, but all I had was guess work, and a low res picture of the entire group, with names attached, but not from “left to right” or anything logical that I could figure out.

The gig was an event called Literary Cocktails, and two of us who have recently published with the press had a chance to tell stories and/or read from our work. Ken Hoeppner, of Calgary told us about the development of his biography of an important Alberta figure that he has chronicled in The Ordinary Genius: A Life of Arnold Platt.

The MC of the event was Ted Bishop of the U of A’s Department of English, and he introduced me by reading two very brief passages from my preface to The Trouble With Lions. He chose

“The Trouble With Lions might also read The Trouble With Rhinos, or Marmosets, or possibly even the improbably named Dromedary Jumping Slug (threatened in Canada’s British Columbia), not to mention the names of a host of other species. Of course a title such as The Trouble with Jumping Slugs or Codfish might not catch the potential reader’s eye in quite the same way, and it would certainly not have excited a publisher.”
-and-
“…there are four chapters about my experiences with rhinos (perhaps appropriately enough, as one of my earliest medical cases required me to spend an hour evacuating a constipated rhino and then administering a four-gallon enema, with spectacular results).”
This picture appears at the start of chapter 14 on page 153 of my first book Wrestling With Rhinos


Ted ended up with the last two sentences from Jane Goodall’s foreword. “In writing The Trouble With Lions as in choosing a career as a veterinarian and teacher, Dr. Haigh made a decision to make a difference. His book will make you want to do the same”

Then I had a chance to tell some stories about my own efforts. I gave the room full of folks at the faculty club a brief background about my own history, and mentioned that as a kindergarten kid I had wanted to be a zoo keeper when all the other boys wanted to be train drivers. Then ambition morphed into a wish to be a farmer, thence from about the age of ten the only goal was veterinary medicine. Considering where I ended up I seem to have melded all three.

Trying to condense a 488-page book into a fifteen-minute time slot is a bit like cramming a field of wheat into a box of cereal. It contains kernels of the original, and some of the flavour, but lacks breadth and depth. I tried to go for the flavour.

First I introduced my thought that the title The Trouble With Lions is a metaphor for wildlife in general, and that lions are in trouble from human activity, as well as causing humans all kinds of trouble, not least as a predator of livestock, and from time to time people themselves.

I then talked briefly about the symbolic place of lions in human society before reading two brief stories quotes direct from the text that illustrate the extreme poles of human attitudes to wildlife. They were both about cape hunting dogs, a.k.a. wild dogs. In 1914 one R. Maugham wrote, "Let us consider for a moment that abomination - that blot upon the many interesting wild things - the murderous Wild Dog. It will be an excellent day for African game and its preservation when means can be devised for its complete extermination.” In 1997 Oxford University researcher wrote "To nominate one sight as the most beautiful I have seen might, in a world filled with natural marvels, might be considered disingenuous. Yet, of images jostling for supremacy in my memory, it is hard to better the bounding forms of African wild dogs, skiffing like golden pebbles across a sea of sunburnt grass at dusk.”

Then I talked of hippos. Their keystone role in the fisheries of Africa’s waterways, the wonderful old folktale of their long-held desire to be allowed by Ngai, the god who lives in the mountains, to live in the water, and finally, back to today’s reality, the causes and effect of poaching on their populations. The obvious cause is to get meat, masses of it. A less well-known one is the belief among the Banyaguru people who live on the borders of Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National park, that a bride needs a feast of hippo meat on her wedding night.

A careful look at this picture will show that the hide has been cut with a sharp instrument, and that virtually no meat remains on the skeleton.

I ended up with a note of hope as I told the audience about the sea-change in attitudes to lion conservation among the Maasai who live on the Mbrikani Group Ranch at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. They have, after a long history of lion killing, turned to preservation, and Leelah Hazzah’s inspiring picture of a moran holding up a radio antenna as he tracks a collared lion is the last photo in the book.

The evening ended with a great get-together for curry, and wonder-of-wonders, a bottle of Tusker, my favourite among Kenya’s beers.

Bird photos from Africa

I finally figured out how to post pictures, so here are four new ones from our recent trip to Uganda and Kenya.
First, two pictures of a Klaas’a cuckoo (Chrysococcyx klaas) photographed near the Tembo (means elephant) canteen in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. These are a fairly common bird across the region, but they are normally very shy and secretive. If they see you they usually dive deep into the foliage of the densest bush around, and one can barely get a glimpse. The green and white are striking, but what I had not previously seen was the gorgeous bronzy look of the feathers of the back, As they caught the evening sun the glossy bits changed with the bird’s movements.


Next, a slice of luck. As we rounded a corner on Marania Farm in Timau we saw this augur buzzard (Buteo augur) sitting on a fence post making a thorough meal of a rat. He (or she?) was quite unconcerned with us, and sat there devouring the catch for a good ten minutes.


Then a golden-winged sunbird (Nectarinia reichenowi) male on an aloe flower. I had sat among the aloes for over an hour, hoping for a good opportunity, and nothing was happening. Then all of a sudden this little fellow decided I was not a danger and spent several minutes checking out all the sources of nectar within about eight metres of me. The 400 mm lens did the rest.


If you are interested in purchasing prints of any of these pictures, or downloading any of them at a higher resolution, please contact me at jerry.haigh@usask.ca and We can work out how to meet your needs

Book launch and 09 Uganda students

Only five days to go until the book launch at WCVM. Exciting!

I also have a mini-launch in Edmonton on the 9th, when I will attend a gathering at the University of Alberta’s faculty club. The event is called Literary Cocktails, and each author will get about 10 minutes to tell a few stories and so on. Cathie Crooks, the publicity & marketing director has asked me to tell the folks a bit about how I became a writer and how I wrote these particular stories. Then comes the big launch at the vet college. For this event I have pulled together some photos and film footage of African events, mostly to do with wildlife, from several countries. Each story is told in the book. For instance in the preface, when I talk of the symbolic importance of lions in so many cultures on earth I mention the very strange chimeric figure set into the gate posts of the children’s garden in Ulaanbaatar. I have attached it here. I have tried to find out its history from two or three different Mongolian acquaintances, but so far, no luck.



Have already met up with the student crew for next year’s trip to Uganda. Once again, a diverse group of folks, and this time an unusually high proportion of males –four of them. In previous years we have had anything from none to two. They have already decided upon the jobs that they will do during the preparation period over the next ten months, as well as the ones in Uganda. It will be busy times for them, and I’ll keep you posted as things unfold.

Time to make an early morning cuppa, so closing out for now.

Will be in touch.