Day 8 - TUC - Across the finish line

Which turned out to be the 2nd last dog!

Elated that our final day at TUC has come to an end. Finding the absolute limits of our endurance individually and working as an amazing streamlined team. Just a huge thank you to my team members for this trip: Leesa, Helen P, Helen B and Annaliese. We are a pretty awesome team!! Our final tally stands at 320 dogs, with another 57 surgeries completed today. So we averaged 40 surgeries per day across 3 vets over the 8 surgical days. We couldn’t keep going at this pace for much longer, 4 days was really all we could humanly manage! To put these numbers in perspective, over the previous 4 years we have desexed a total of 736 animals.

Uniforms a bit worse for
wear after a long day

The day was pretty much a blur of 2 truckloads of caged dogs, so many walk ins, dogs arriving in cars, one dog on a bicycle, a dog from the previous day revisiting with a happy owner, plenty of cats early in the day, owners dropping in to seek worming or flea medication, a pig owner getting a recheck on his piglet which had been attacked by a dog 2 days earlier, more masses of school children watching on in shifts, being surrounded by huge amounts of noise from surrounding children and machinery nearby, goodbyes with our council staff members and MELAD staff members, a very late afternoon tea/supper with the Australian High Commissioner and his wife, then our drive home to pack, clean, sort and store all our gear in preparation for next year.

My favourite dog for the day!

Cooling off

Our overall highlight for this trip has been the positive uptake for veterinary services by the local people. The demand has been high, and from questioning owners, it appears that radio advertising has been a big positive factor. And collaboration with the two councils and the Department of Agriculture equivalent (MELAD) was at its strongest ever. And owners appear to be understanding the need for population control for the dogs, and that desexing their dogs reduces roaming and improves the health of their pets. We hope they will learn more about the links between dogs and human health.

Supper at the high comm

So, we still aim to one day successfully obtain grant funding for this project, but there will be a need to link the dog programme to other human education and health objectives and outcomes. However, we are always very grateful for Dr Jude Mulholland for her vision, commitment to and support for the programme. We are already starting to plan for 2019, and hoping we have enough funding to do so, pending sufficient donations.

Last morning #1

Last morning #2

Exhaustion, elation, teamwork, good, hard work, beautiful place, complicated, lovely people, feeling real and alive, crowded, needed, common problems, stakeholder engagement and cooperation, privilege, multiple skills…just some of the words to describe our time this trip.