LAS PALMITAS, Mexico — Pedro Parra stood by his horse as the animal fell to the ground under the weight of the anesthesia. His hooves fluttered for a moment, then ceased and a team of volunteer vets rushed to surround him. One placed a pillow under the patient’s neck; another tied a rope around a hind leg and lifted it up.
His task was to castrate the stallion—a necessary surgery to prevent the animal from becoming uncontrollable and a danger to its owner and other animals. “He was getting a little restless with the mares,” said Parra, 34. In less than an hour, seven more horses were lying in the field behind the town church, slowly waking up from their surgeries.
As soon as Parra’s horse woke up, he would take the animal home, where he helps plow the milpa—rows of corn, beans, and squash—on his family’s farm.
Parra’s stallion was one of 813 patients, including donkeys, horses and mules, who were neutered, dewormed, vaccinated or otherwise cared for during a week-long traveling veterinary clinic in Mexico’s Guanajuato State. The campaign was organized by the Rural Veterinary Experience Service and Teaching, or RVETS, a program that since 2010 has sent volunteer specialists and veterinary students to provide free care in remote areas of Mexico, Nicaragua and the United States where veterinarians are scarce.
“In the equine veterinary industry, nobody else cares about all the animals that are in the field,” said Víctor Urbiola, director of RVETS Mexico. “That’s why we focus on them.”
RVETS has also changed the way people treat their horses, mules and donkeys.
At the clinic, Brenda Arias and Martín Cuevas Jr., both veterinary students, calmly approached two mares and a foal. Syringes in hand, students prepared to inject the deworming drug ivermectin into the animals’ snouts. Some rural horses, unfamiliar with anyone other than their owners, “won’t even let themselves be touched,” Arias said.
What to do then? “Seduce them,” Cuevas said. “You talk to them nicely and you pet them”, a tactic unknown to a previous generation.
Juan Godínez, delegate-elect from the community of Las Palmitas, said that before RVETS, some owners tied the legs and head of a horse and castrated it with a knife, without anesthesia. It was common for an animal to bleed to death or from an infection.
The RVETS clinic also fills a gap in veterinary training. In vet schools in Mexico and elsewhere, “there is less and less emphasis on horses and more on companion animals like dogs and cats,” said Eric Davis, who founded RVETS with his wife, Cindy Davis.
Many students graduate never having touched a horse. “What they teach you in school is a third of what life in the countryside is really like,” said Dereck Alejandro Morín, 24, a veterinary student who volunteers with RVETS.
Estefanía Alegría, 33, and her son Bruno, traveled an hour from their house, which has no electricity or running water, to a clinic in Jalpa. Her husband, like most of her neighbors, had crossed the US border to send money from Texas. Now, she and her children depend on her donkey and a horse named Shadow for almost everything.
Her story, Urbiola said, resonated with one of her main missions: caring for animals “who are worth very little or nothing economically, but whose value to people’s lives is incalculable.”
It is not an easy task. Funding for annual campaigns has proven difficult. “When I have gone to knock on doors in the Government, they say: ‘What for? I mean, the donkeys are worthless,’” Urbiola said.
“If we can help a single donkey that carries 80 kilos of water for an old woman, all the effort we make is worth it,” he said.
Victor J. Blue contributed reporting to this article.
By: Emiliano Rodríguez Mega
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6714525, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-15 20:30:06
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