Care Pet Wellness News about Pets and Vets

From Province Newspaper

Vets Without Borders provides animal care to improve human welfare

Victoria veterinarian Tracy Cornish volunteered treating street dogs in Todos Santos, Guatemala.

A group of dedicated Canadian veterinarians — many from B.C. – are working to prevent poor communities in the Americas from going to the dogs.

Two Vancouver Island women were among a team of Veterinarians Without Borders volunteers in Guatemala this spring providing medical care, vaccinations and spaying and neutering for street dogs in the impoverished community of Todos Santos with the aim of

also improving the lives of their owners in the process.

“The nearest community to Todos Santos with a vet is about two hours away through winding mountain trails,” explained Tracy Cornish, Victoria-based veterinarian who has travelled to Guatemala three times since 2009 as a volunteer with the registered charity. “The main reason why they were interested in us coming down was because of human safety concerns about rabies from dogs biting livestock or people.”

One of the tenets of Veterinarians Without Borders is that humanitarian work doesn’t always have to focus exclusively on humans. In fact, in many developing countries the welfare of animals and people are so interdependent that improving the health of their livestock or companion aninmals can have a dramatic effect on entire communities.

“A lot of things that involve the welfare of animals also involve the human population in terms of health or hygiene,” explained Cornish, who returned from her latest trip in April.

According to VWB, “free-roaming and un-owned dogs had become a serious issue in Todos Santos, to the point where the fear of being physically attacked was preventing people from conducting their everyday activities. Transmission of rabies and other zoonotic diseases was also a serious health concern.” One volunteer heard stories of an NGO worker having to carry a nail-studded club to keep street dogs away.

While there, Cornish and Victoria animal health technologist Stacey Ness helped treat roughly 200 dogs in free clinics in the remote Mayan indigenous community in the mountains of northwestern Guatemala. One of the goals of VWB is to help the region move toward sterilzation as the main method of population control, rather than extermination, as often practiced.

Case in point? On Cornish’s previous visit in 2010, she rescued a female street dog who was nearly drowned in a sink, and took her home, dubbing her “Pila” which means “big stone sink.” 

“She turned out to be a really great dog,” said Cornish, who has worked as a veterinarian for 27 years, and at the Central Victoria Veterinarian Hospital since 1988. “She’s very healthy and she is very good with kids and other dogs, very calm. She’s just a really good dog.”

Part of VWB’s work is educating owners on proper animal care – not only the need to spay and neuter, but to provide animals with a bit of protein rather than scraps of tortillas – a challenge in households that can struggle to put food in their own mouths. But Cornish said they did see fewer emaciated animals on their recent trip. Even so, where the average lifespan for a dog ranges from 12 to 15 years or more in North America, in Guatemala and developing nations, dogs are lucky to make it to age six.

Ness explained that a big part of improving and lengthening dogs’ lives is reducing their numbers.

“There are only so many people out there who can care for an animal. Every time we spayed a dog, I thought, yes, that’s that many more puppies not being born and potentially not having homes,” Ness said.

“One of the main things we wanted to do was promote responsible health care for their animals, but its intertwined with the health of people. When you vaccinate a dog against rabies, you are helping humans, and teaching people to be responsible pet owners helps enrich the owners’ own lives,” the technician said.

The project in Guatemala is supervised by another B.C. native, Elena Garde, the VWB’s program leader for Latin America. Garde, a veterinarian and animal health researcher, was a long-time volunteer with VWB before she sold her home in Duncan and moved to Chile permanently with her Chilean-born husband Guillermo Perez, taking up a post in Valdivia and joining VWB staff in 2009.

“They are huge issues in all these [Latin American] countries,” Garde said of the street dog issue.

“In Chile, the issue with dogs is so depressing. Santiago is this huge cosmopolitan city, but you see free roaming dogs in the streets. There are at least a million dogs in Santiago, about one dog per every four people. And they cause all these other public health issues too, simply spreading garbage in the streets, kids get bitten all the time and people do get attacked, a pack of dogs can launch themselves at people,” said Garde, a former provincial wildlife vet.

According to Garde, in most developing countries, especially in major cities, free-roaming dogs are a pressing public health and safety menace. But few non-profits are engaged in addressing it, feeling it on the periphery of their humanitarian mandate.

“In these countries you can have millions of dogs running free, and they need to eat and have illnesses and diseases and they are all living in a similar area as people, but they are still animals and they are aggressive and a lot of these countries have rabies. It’s a fatal disease and dogs are the number one carriers in the world.”

Veterinarians Without Borders was founded in 2005 by Canadian vets concerned about the health of people and animals in developing countries. The group formed against the backdrop of worldwide epidemics of zoonotic diseases like SARS, H1N1 avian flu and foot and mouth disease that threatened public health on a global scale. The Victoria-based charity now works in more than a dozen countries in Southeast Asia, Africa and Central and South America. In addition toimmunization and sterilization programs, VWB also offers medical care to livestock, and education and training for farmers on how to keep their animals disease-free. In some countries, they have programs to provide livestock, like chickens, to farmers to help them in their quest for self-sufficiency. VWB also provides badly-needed veterinary services in countries with few or no trained vets, reducing the incidence of diseases like rabies.

“Todos Santos is like so many other villages around the world where free‐roaming dogs are part of community life; yet, without accessible and affordable veterinary care, these dogs reproduce uncontrollably and spread deadly diseases like rabies,” explained VWB spokeswoman Sheila Taylor. 

“Killing approximately 55,000 people a year – one person every ten minutes – rabies continues threaten the world’s most vulnerable communities.”

Working in Chile’s vulnerable communities, Garde has helped run vaccination and sterilization clinics for animals, as well as public workshops, surveys and data collection, and school education outreach. Now, she’s working on a project in Patagonia, researching the success of neutering and chemically sterilizing male dogs. Another B.C.-born volunteer, veterinary student Andrea Pellegrino, is headed to Chile in May as part of the VWB’s Student Program to assist in research.

“All the VWB projects, we try to do them with an ecohealth slant, not just looking at animals, not just looking at humans or the environment, but all three,” Garde stressed.

“It’s one of the things that we struggle with quite a bit people assume right away that we are only treating animals, but in any of these types of projects, if you don’t look at the entire ecosystem its really difficult to see lasting change. The reality is, if we spend a lot of time treating these dogs, but don’t spend time with the kids in schools educating people and allowing them to understand the impact of a dog on the street, it biting people or the impact on health and the economy … until they see that bigger picture, it’s really hard to change.”

The same logic works in reverse, that animal health can’t improve until people also see improvements in their living standards.

“It’s difficult to send that message out that someone should take better care of their dog or cow or goat when they can’t put food on their own table. We aren’t going to see any change for animals if we don’t have a healthy human population as well.”

Learn more Veterinarians Without Borders, and like them on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.

If you have any tips on B.C. residents’ work in or for the developing world, email them to eoconnor@theprovince.com.

To be alerted to the latest B.C. Without Borders features and other related news, follow www.twitter.com/elainereporting.

 May 9, 2012

Animal Hall of Fame recognizes pet heroes from across Canada

By Tori Floyd via Yahoo News

Animals heroes inducted into the Purina Hall Of Fame for their heroic efforts.

They may appear to be your average dogs and cat, but these family pets and police dogs are lifesavers in the eyes of their owners.

Monty (Ginger tabby from Camrose, Alberta)

Monty's owner, Patricia Peters is a diabetic, and while sleeping one night, her blood sugar dropped to dangerously low levels. Monty seemed to sense something was wrong, and began nibbling on his owner's fingers — specifically, the fingers where she usually tests her blood sugar. When she woke up to send Monty away, Peters realized she was incredibly dizzy, and got up to test her levels. Monty ran ahead, and Peters found him sitting beside her testing kit in the kitchen. Without Monty's persistence, Peters would have fallen into a diabetic coma or had a diabetic seizure.

Are you curious about whether you are brushing your dog's teeth properly? How about their ears? Do they smell?

Two videos, starring Nicole and Bogey, show how easy it is to clean your dog's ears and clean their teeth and trim their nails.  

Or check out the links for these videos in our Pet Health Library.

 Refer a friend to our hospitals and you'll BOTH receive $25 credit for your next visit.