Wednesday, August 16, 2006

World of Good Blogburst, Vetcharity Style

Since I haven't catblogged in a while I thought I would do a post on some charity work done by veterinarians. It took about 10 seconds to find a whole host of worthy groups. There's one right near where I live in San Diego that will be the subject of a future post. Today, however, we focus on an Australian group called Vetcharity that unites volunteer veterinarians to provide expert animal care to the disadvantaged. They have an outstanding website. It's worth a visit.

Becoming a vet requires significant effort. The amount of schoolwork and hours spent as an intern is on the order of that to become a doctor. At the end of this education and training lies what could be a very profitable career. When the people of vetcharity donate their time it's a very serious donation indeed. They're not just donating the time they spend in surgery with the animals, they're donating all of the long nights studying and sacrifices they made to get to that point.

I wish I had the photos so I could superimpose pictures of this lady studying, taking tests and going to classes to give a feeling for the stream of her life that led to giving her time to others like this.

Vetcharity works across Southeast Asia and India. One of their major efforts is to control the populations of street dogs. Many of these dogs have rabies, a disease which is often fatal to humans. The volunteers from vetcharity capture, examine and desex these animals. It's a humane way to prevent the spread of disease and control the population of feral dogs.

Mr. Fido? The doctor will see you now.

From their website, here's a description of their Bali Street Dog Field Clinic.

The field clinic is a mobile field hospital that travels out to pre-arranged locations in the areas surrounding Denpasar. They work with the local banjar (community) and catch neuter and release both owned village dogs and captured true strays. Dogs are also treated for skin parasites and other problems.

Two lads in Sri Lanka bring a patient to the clinic.


The vets from Vetcharity treat more than dogs. Here, they are providing care for a goat.

They manage clinics in India as well.
Run in conjunction with Tibet Charity Denmark, this will be the first Animal Welfare project in this large state of North India. While starting this year with a small house based clinic, expansion over the next couple of years to a dedicated hospital, rescue facility and wildilfe centre is predicted. Dharamsala is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile, along with many Tibetan refugees and a large Indian community. The clinic will service outlying villages and Tibetan communities throughout this area of the Himalayas.

Man's best friend.


Does this really need a caption?

In addition to treating the animals, the vets are providing strong examples of Australian kindness and goodwill to the people they visit. They're helping spread a world of good across Southeast Asia.

Somehow, I'm not surprised.

As an aside, their website is an absolute joy to surf around. ScreenSaviour is a company that provides website design services and did an absolutely outstanding job on that site.

Photos from the vetcharity.org website reused without permission.

For a description of our World of Good posts and list of previous ones, please visit this post.

Be sure to visit this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Dogs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When I first clicked on this post, I thought, HEY! These photos look like they are in INDIA!! God bless these vets, helping to care for some of God's creatures.

There is another organization called Blue Cross which picks up animals in Hyderabad.
Lots and lots of strays on the streets. Unfortunately, the way they deal with most of the animals is to put them down. I won't tell you how they do that.

But, one interesting and happy thing I saw in teh paper just today was a big article encouraging folks to adopt a community dog. It encouraged folks in neighborhoods to take one of the strays as a shared pet, so everyone would feed it and look after it. And, I think for the most part that is what folks just kinda naturally do with the goats and cows and dogs and cats running the streets However when their populations get too big and when the packs of dogs start getting too agressive and violent, the city comes and "cleans" up.