SAEVA 2020 Speech | EQUINE
However, when I voiced these concerns to Terry, he was unconcerned. ln fact he surprised me. “l think you should
talk about Climate Change” he says and it is undoubtedly an important and timely topic and makes sense when you
think about the terrible Summer we have had in Australia this year. Just a quick reminder, we had uncontrolled fires
in South Australia, Victoria, NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, pretty much all at once starting from October and only
just controlled in February (the last fires in NSW were extinguished last week - when it flooded!!).
Over the last Summer period 7 firefighters lost their lives, including 3 volunteers from the US who came to fly one
of the aerial appliances. An area approximately the size of the UK burned, with hundreds of thousands of livestock
killed or injured and more than a billion native animals thought to have died in the fires. This was an unprecedented,
bordering on apocalyptic Summer, with the fires dominating the news media, large swathes of the country
blanketed in smoke and all of this coming on the heels of the worst drought in living memory that affected much of
Queensland and NSW with large numbers of towns running out of water for drinking, let alone having enough water
to fight fires.
Over the Christmas - New Year period Sydney and Melbourne had some of the worst air quality on the planet, to
the point where professional tennis players withdrew from matches and everyone was advised to stay indoors,
and if possible, keep the air conditioners off as they just pump the smoke inside. The problem with leaving the
air conditioners off, was that this was the same period that Australia recorded its hottest average temperature on
record.
The previous record from January 2013 was an average temperature across the country of 40.3C, but on the
15 th of December 2013 the average temperature was 40.9C, and that record was broken the very next day when
the average temperature was 41.7C (the maximum reported temperature on the 17 th of December was 49.9C at
Nullarbor in South Australia - that’s 121.8F for our North American colleagues).
The problem with talking about Climate Change is that it is not the most amusing or entertaining of topics - but
“what Terry wants - Terry gets!”, so climate change it is.... The nice thing about this after-dinner speaker gig though,
is that your audience has probably already had a few drinks, and they can keep drinking during your talk (unlike the
students who have to stop drinking when they get into the lecture theatre). So, take this opportunity now to fill up
your glass.... I will wait.
I told my wife (my partner of more than 30 years, the mother of my children, the person on the planet who knows
me best) that I was asked to be an after-dinner speaker at SAEVA congress and she asked:
- “Are you talking about Herpes?”.
- No
- “Strangles or Rhodococcus?”
- No
- “Arboviruses or antimicrobial resistance?”
• Volume 22 Issue 01 | March 2020 •
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