Quick Fix

Fellow guest at a dinner party the other night was a man who works with buffalo. That is buffalo in the plural. Hard to top a subject like that. Everyone else's job seemed terminally unglamorous by comparison. Problems relating to troubled youth (that is also youth in the plural) are not half as rivetting as real-live buffalo around the dinner table.

It seems that the buffalo guest had recently been faced with a really tricky task “an aggressive and unpredictable male had gone “rogue" and caused considerable damage in his herd and had to be eliminated “or at least moved out of his own herd and relocated to another farm or reserve. All earlier talk about how cute buffalo calves were, and what amenable personalities they had, paled before the images of this snorting, deadly male, all horns, hooves and froth, kicking up a storm.

But the buffalo man had a plan.

Of course, the rest of us must rely on our own analogies. One could see the accountant two plates to the left, thrilling at the thought of a former conquest, tracking down a large cash shortage in his company and heroically squaring off the books; or the engineer who completed the new road bridge just days before the summer rains torrented down in earnest. I paged through my own mental scrapbook “there was that kid making savage threats with a broken bottle, and the one who threatened to shoot us all (but he only had a hockey stick in his hand, which he held like an electric guitar anyway), and there was that deadline in winning over the juvenile court judge ... we all had our buffaloes and our plans. But we could learn something from each other.

The room became quiet. In the narrative the cash value of the buffalo had just fallen from tens of thousands to zero: “You can have the animal “just solve our problem, get it out of here" ... a disturbingly familiar ring there. But how? There are methods, we are told. In my mind, images of Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer making magical connections with the mind of an animal, even of MacGyver scraping together resources and methods from the most unpromising situations ... we have to calm down the raging buffalo and prepare it for a journey of several hundred miles and then integrate it into another group ... again some recognisable elements from Child and Youth Care work in there ... tell us how you did it!

“Tranquilliser darts.”

Tranquilliser darts! My mind shifts back to a team meeting when we were struggling with one of the raging buffalo of our profession. How to establish contact with the terrified person inside this big body, to find alternatives for the lashing out and the destruction, for the hurting others to save being hurt himself, how to bring him to know that he was not surrounded by threat and attack, how to get him back on to his life's journey, already so interrupted and complicated and delayed, so that he could be reintegrated into family and community ...

And someone round the table had suggested: “Increase his dosages."