A newborn leopard cub named “Bibi Kali” because of her aggressive nature was entrusted into Daktari Sue’s care. Abandoned by her mother, she had a nasty tear wound across her shoulders. “It was three days before we dared to give anything but superficial treatment to the cub’s shoulder wound. By then she was taking milk from a bottle and was making her presence felt. She seemed to gradually take shape, coming to life with an infant bawl rather than a feline cry, her body – now well nourished – taking on the supple rippling movement of the adult leopard.”

"Stinkie" was Daktari Sue's first wild patient in Kenya (1960s). This newborn rhino had already suffered the heartbreak of losing everything in her world that mattered most: her mother had been brutally killed by poachers who were after the horn which is prized in Asia for medicinal and other purposes. With masses of TLC (tender loving care), Stinkie went on to make a full recovery, all infections healed.

Daktari Sue and Alicat the genet 24 days after the operation. Poor Ali, he had been in a very bad way indeed. A savage attack by an adult male genet had resulted in a shattered lower jaw, torn gums and muscles as well as an injury to one back leg which was paralysed, along with the lower spine.

One mg of the M99 drug could stop a 4-ton rhino within some 10 minutes or even sooner. To show the world that a white rhinoceros can be made safe and still, Daktari Sue was asked if she would mind getting on a rhino’s back for a photograph. Apparently, the rhino was moving slightly giving Sue a sensation of sitting high aboard a huge battleship, heaving in the waves.

Life as a vet in Africa during the 1960s was never dull. Daktari Sue was part of the ground-breaking world of the immobilisation of large animals in the wild. In her first autobiography, “Too Short a Day”, she wrote “To witness the amazing procedure of immobilisation was the experience of a lifetime. Here she is seen examining the syringe puncture on a “sleeping” elephant in a Kenyan national park.