Undergoing this kind of surgery, you’d want to be knocked out too

Credit: Erin Skillen

Doggone Good Deeds

Veterinarians Without Borders takes animal medicine abroad

In Todos Santos, Guatemala, they like their dogs manly. That’s what a team of animal health professionals from Veterinarians Without Borders discovered when they were invited to the Central American mountain community to initiate a program aiming to control the growing canine population and halt the spread of rabies. After preliminary discussions with community leaders, it was determined that surgical neutering was fine for the female dogs, but citizens didn’t want to see the males go under the knife.

“That was to do a lot with the sensibilities of the community, where they definitely don’t want the male dogs neutered or castrated—they want them to maintain some sort of macho characteristics,” says Victoria vet Tracy Cornish, who travelled to Todos Santos to participate in the second phase of the project. “Some of it is that they are there as guard dogs, guarding the household or the fields and livestock, so they want them still to have that characteristic.”

The ongoing effort in Todos Santos is just one of 20-odd projects currently overseen by members of Veterinarians Without Borders, a five-year-old non-profit which recently relocated its head office to Victoria. The organization’s list of initiatives spans the globe, from helping grandmother- or child-headed households in Uganda raise healthy and productive goats, to designing humane saddles for Thailand’s working elephants.

“We’re driven by the fact that we want to see the world in a healthier state, and often the relationship between humans and animals is so fundamental to so many livelihoods, whether through companionship, or also as nutrition and sources of income and all those sorts of things too,” says VWB’s managing director Erin Fraser.

Founded in 2004, Veterinarians Without Borders brings together animal doctors, technicians and researchers from across the country in the belief that their knowledge and skills can be applied in locations that lack homegrown expertise to manage certain productivity and public health issues where animals and humans coexist. Unlike the human-health focused Doctors Without Borders, which runs emergency medical clinics in many of the world’s conflict zones, VWB’s Fraser says her organization’s mandate is to build the capacity of communities to manage their animal challenges for the long term.

“We see our goal as trying to work ourselves out of a job,” she says. “We’re not in the business of flying in and trying to do quick fixes. It’s really trying to look at what are the training and capacity needs that we can support so that those communities can address the problems that they’re having on their own.”

Such is the case in Todos Santos, where it’s hoped that the sterilization effort will give way to education programs about responsible pet ownership and the nature of disease transmission.

Of course, practicing veterinary medicine in another country means understanding the lay of the cultural land. Take the “stray dogs” of Todos Santos, where, after a first trip to the region to gather data, the lead technician on the VWB project quickly found that many of the dogs weren’t feral, and actually had owners somewhere in the village. Guatemalan pet ownership just looked a little different than it did at home.

“What was a surprise to me was that the people really did have a strong attachment to their pets, even though they would wander around in such a way that you might think that they didn’t,” says Cornish.

She says the animals’ importance to the community’s families would be evident in the days following surgery. “They would go to a lot of effort to try to provide better nutrition for them after these procedures,” says Cornish. “And that is a struggle for them, because it is a poor community. Mostly the dogs eat tortillas and a little bit of scraps and don’t get a whole lot of meat or protein. So, when we would ask the owners to give the dog an egg or a bit of chicken, that was a big deal, and they would go to a lot of effort to try and provide that for their pets.”

As Veterinarians Without Borders grows, so too do the number of requests for the services of its volunteer experts. Fraser says the group limits its activities to areas where the community itself has identified the problem and expressed a willingness to address it, or has even tried and failed. In Todos Santos, dog culls using strychnine proved both ineffective and unpopular with the residents who weren’t keen to see the neighbours’ family pets poisoned.

“It also comes down to what we can afford to do,” says Fraser. “We’re a small organization and only five years old. We are really hoping this year that we can raise awareness about what we do so that we can do more of it, so that we can reach more communities. Because it’s hard saying no all the time. We get to say yes some of the time, but not as often as we’d like.” M

Visit vwb-vsf.ca to learn more about Veterinarians Without Borders