DR HAL Thompson, dressed for the postmortem in white overalls, nods as his colleague Richard Irvine cuts open a cow which hangs by a hind-leg from a hook. "Richard's bloody good at this," says Thompson. "Best in the business."
Irvine, 56, is chief technician in the postmortem room of Glasgow University Vet School. It's his job to kill animals that need put down, open them up and remove their innards. Thompson, as pathologist, will then examine the organs and assess what wa
s wrong with the creature.
Thompson is 64 with a Northern Irish accent and an amused air. Both he and Irvine have been in the business for 40 years and so this scene, for them, is routine. To me, it's startling. The colours are stark and strong – the cow's black and white hide, the scarlet frothing from its slit throat. The animal appears much larger than it would in a field, jutting and poking at surprising angles. Its pink muzzle touches the floor and is reflected in the water put down to slosh away the blood. Half an hour ago the cow was alive and its body is still hot. Steam rises from its mouth like breath, like something slipping away.
After breaking through the sternum with a large cleaver, as if smashing a macabre piñata, Irvine takes less than ten minutes to hollow the animal out, the now visible ribs resembling the vault of a gothic cathedral. The stomachs lie in white glistening piles like large veiny scatter cushions. A brief examination of the heart, lungs and lavender liver do not reveal the expected abnormalities. "We're going to have to work a bit harder," says Thompson. "But let's go and get lunch now."
Over coffee, in the small office he calls "the howff", Thompson talks about his work. "It's like the old Hank Williams song, Lost Highway," he says. "You know the one. 'A deck of cards and a jug of wine and a woman's lies make a life like mine ... Rolling down the lost highway'. Well, pathology is the lost highway and a pathologist is a kind of tour guide. We're the guys you meet when you're on the road to sin and ruin."
It's no surprise that Thompson has developed a philosophy. After all, he has been doing the job for so long and has post-mortemed a huge variety of species. Lions to linnets, mice to elephants, they've all been beneath his knife. Once, years ago, he helped save corgis belonging to the Queen.
These days, animals come in from a variety of sources – farmers, zoos, private individuals, insurers, even the police. Thompson has given evidence at many court cases concerning cruelty and neglect. "In the west of Scotland we live in a violent, aggressive society," he says, "and so, naturally, animals get tied into that."
Badger-baiting, dog-fighting, cattle left to starve; Thompson sees the aftermath of human cruelty. An animal-lover himself, he keeps greyhounds and ponies, and feels more sadness than anger for people so messed up in the head that they can, for instance, sexually abuse then kill a pet.
He has been honoured by the SSPCA for his work, but is keen to stress his impartiality. "The danger is that you think you are on the side of the angels. If you do that, you are lost. You have to look at these cases professionally and honestly and let someone else make the judgment."
On occasion, Thompson has helped police investigate violent crimes against humans. Typically, an animal and its owner will both have been hurt, and police hope forensics from the animal support their evidence against the suspect. Thompson once performed a postmortem on a pit bull killed during a fight between rival drug gangs. The police hoped the bullet could be recovered from the dog, but it had passed straight through. "A day later, the owners turned up here asking for the body back so they could bury it," Thompson recalls. "They were nice enough but not the sort of people you say no to. We parted on excellent terms, but I had a feeling that somebody was going to pay for the dog's death, and sure enough someone was shot dead."
Around half of Thompson's work involves live animals, for instance performing biopsies to determine the extent of disease. "A pathologist is a sort of bookie. We give the odds of survival." On that judgment rests the decision of whether an animal should be put down, or is worth with the cost of treatment. And there is the question of the animal's welfare – if allowed to live, how bad will its future suffering be?
These factors, which veterinary pathologists consider each day, are similar to those doctors will have to juggle if assisted suicide becomes legal. Thompson believes that doctors and patients talk about such things all the time. His own late brother John, suffering from renal failure, decided to go off dialysis rather than face losing another leg, even though he knew he would live for only another few days.
We tend to think of ourselves as different from animals, but is Thompson, in his under-skin world of meat and bone, more appreciative of our similarities? "Once something is dead, it's a shell, and so it doesn't matter what it is," he says. "That's why the work doesn't disturb me. Have you ever seen the dead body of a relative? The soul is gone. The same applies here."
Thompson is not religious, but with every postmortem he becomes "more aware of the mysteries". In between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of cases he will have no idea how the animal came to die. Death is not something you can always label and explain. It's elusive, intangible, like that steam rising from the cow.
He once hoped to become so expert that he would have seen and understood all the pathologies – the menagerie of viruses, the herds of bacteria, the wolf-packs of cancer cells. With age has come the realisation that he will never make it. "But that's not a sad thing," he says. "In a sense, it can make you more content. I'm down this lost highway and I know there isn't an end."
