THE
P RTAL
August 2016
Page 21
Here am I Lord
Jackie Ottaway and Ronald Crane
talk with Michael Thrusfield
W
e had enjoyed the Ordinariate “Year of Mercy”
Pilgrimage to Saint Andrews and bumped into Michael
Thrusfield. He is an Ordinariate member in Scotland. We met
in Ronald’s hotel room, and asked, “Tell us a bit about yourself,
where you come from and how you ended up here.”
Michael answered, “I originally come from Stoke
on Trent and came to Scotland in 1965 when I did
a Veterinary degree at Glasgow. Then I joined the
Anglican Mission in Papua New Guinea for a year and
a half and taught at boarding schools there. In 1970,
there were just three vets in the whole of New Guinea!
I ended up doing some veterinary work as well looking
after the cattle of the Anglican Franciscan Friary.
population, so a good example of that would be the
study of epidemics. My interest isn’t just in animals
because there are some animal diseases that we get; so
for example in East Africa there has been an interest
in diseases which can infect people and kill them so
we’re just as much concerned with confirming human
“I’d begun to get an interest in tropical medicine diseases where they have animal ones that may be
so I came to Edinburgh as a post graduate and did caught by humans.
a diploma in tropical medicine. Then on to medical
school in Birmingham and did a Masters Degree
Jackie wanted to know if this was about domestic or
in Virology. This led to Staffordshire and a general wild animals. “Well, my interest is only with livestock,
veterinary practice for two and a half years. We dealt but sometimes you have to take an interest in wild
with all types of animals
animals. For example if you’re concerned with rabies
in South America you have to take an interest in
“I was still interested in tropical medicine and vampire bats, and rabies in South Africa is transmitted
also in a subject called Epidemiology, population by mongooses and so on, so you might have to take
medicine, which hadn’t really been developed in an interest in wild animals but my main interest is
veterinary medicine at that time. A job came up as a livestock.
lecturer in Edinburgh so I returned there in 1976 to
develop that discipline. There wasn’t a text book on
“I met my wife in a dog food factory! There I met
the subject anywhere in the world so I wrote one in a veterinary nurse, who was also a human nurse, and
1986, the second edition in 1996, third edition in 2005 we met then and that