“La parte alta”

Last week we drove by 20 of the 40 farms that are up in the highlands, there were lots of dogs and cats that owners wanted to have sterilized. And even more dogs that needed deworming and defleaing. In the highlands lots of owners have dogs that they use for hunting, they don’t want to sterilize them since they believe the dogs will be less agressive and less willing to hunt. We tried to explain that they won’t change if they are older then 1,5 – 2 years old and that they will only hunt less females in heat. Unfortunately many owners just won’t believe us.

Monday we started in the highlands with a mobile clinic in a school, all the kids thought it was really exciting!
The first morning we received 12 patients, 3 sterilizations and further treatments. The afternoon was a bit slow since the farmer could not bring his 5 dogs that he wanted to sterilize. Tuesday and wednesday were busy. In total we sterilized 14 dogs, 1 cat and we treated over 25 dogs!

Still there were a lot of people that didn’t show up, because of work or not owning a car to be able to bring the dogs. Therefore we have decided to return with a car, and drive from farm to farm to treat and sterilize the animals. We will be going next week! So now we have a few days in Puerto Villamil, to treat animals that need treatment here and to sterilize a few animals and then we will go up to “la parte alta”.

(Taken from Tjarda Reints Bok and Jochem Lastdrager’s blog, Travelling Animal Doctors)