Castration Station

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate in a ‘campana’ for animal sterilization in Sumpango (near AWARE).

They work with vets from a program called the McKee Project (http://www.mckeeproject.org/newsletters.html#) which trains vets in a less invasive method of sterilization specialized for trap-neuter-release protocols. In exchange, the vets agree to participate in these low cost or free clinics for sterilization, consult, and vaccination of animals in Latin American countries. This is they sort of project that I would like to make a career out of so I was happy to see that there was an organization already working on it.

There were two vets and about 6 assistants who were all vet students in Guatemala City. Vet school is 6 years here but you go straight to vet school from ‘carerra’ which is like high school where you get your bachelors.

Dogs and cats were anesthetized by the assistants and prepared for surgery. Then the doctor performed the sterilization and the dogs were taken to a recuperating area until they woke up. When they started to wake up, the assistants would give them their post-op, vaccines, and antibiotics and/or antiparasitics.

They sterilized about 20 dogs and cats yesterday. A few were from the shelter, a few more were captured on the street, and some were brought in by people who live in Sumpango. They are really clear about the sterilization process and do their best to educate visitors and children about the importance of sterilizing dogs. While it’s what I always wanted to do, I kind of felt weird about stalking dogs on the street to sterilize with the intent of releasing them again. We had pretty bad luck with the dogs we grabbed: the first was really slow to wake up after surgery so she couldn’t be released; the second was pregnant so she had a pretty traumatizing surgery that involved aborting her puppies;

and the third had an undescended testicle making for a slightly more invasive surgery and recovery process (he is my favorite, very well mannered and brindle with shepherd ears).

I asked about Neutersol (http://www.caribbeananimalwelfare.org/images/Neutersol_FAQ_CAWC08.pdf, a newer method of sterilization that had a rocky start and has undergone much criticism that involves injection of a zinc compound directly into the testicles causing them to scar and sterilize the male dog). It wasn’t until I started to defend the idea of an alternative contraception that I realized he was probably the Guatemalan equivalent of a PETA person and may have had me lynched for suggesting that I was interested in this new technology that required some animal testing.

I was put at ease though when he said he didn’t have a problem with the testing of animals but, he said that the Neutersol company (Addison Labs and Pet Health, now taken over by Abbott) came to Guatemala last year to do some sterilization clinics. They were really still testing the product and conducting experiments on the stray dogs and dogs of low-income families. Sure, I think it would be a great idea to use these populations who would not otherwise be neutered anyway to test the product. However, their approach was terribly immoral. They paid off the government to give them permission to test the product without having to go through the steps of registering it and advertising it as research. Thus, they were able to tell community members that they had a full functioning product and people had their dogs sterilized with this technique thinking everything would go smoothly. Rather, many people noticed the secondary effects of the drug including a really bad odor. This is bad for two reasons: 1) the company lied to get people, who are already hesitant to neuter, to sterilize their dogs and 2) this made people think that sterilization was a bad thing because it would make their dogs have these side-effect…thus reversing the work of the other organizations that promote animal sterilization using education and the old-fashioned safe, surgical method of castration.

(More to come on the past two weeks in Samox later...it will take a while to write all that up.)