C4

By MARY MACKAY
The Canadian Press

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CHARLOTTETOWN - It's not often that one hears the post-operative suggestion of "no running, no licking and no swimming."

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The Canadian Press

canine patient: Karen Gormley, of Charlottetown, monitors the anesthetic and checks vital signs of a canine patient in Kimmirut.

But this is exactly what Rachel Lee prescribed for her canine patient, Balto, after his neutering surgery in the northern Nunavut community of Kimmirut on Baffin Island in 2006.

She even clothed him in a T-shirt as a precaution against licking, but Balto didn't take directions well. In fact, the very next day she spied him defying one of her specific recommendations.

"Sure enough, there, running at breakneck pace through town, was the tall, lean, dirty wire-haired mutt with the lopsided grin, still wearing his T-shirt promoting literacy," Lee wrote in a humorous summary of her brief summer adventure in Kimmirut.

Then a fourth-year student at the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown, she was part of a small team of clinicians and students who headed north to provide basic veterinary care to this north of 60 community.

Their patient list included sled dogs, companion dogs and the occasional cat. Their duty list ranged from vaccinations, parasite treatments, neuters and spays to tumour removal and laceration treatment.

This summer marked the third year for the vet college's Chinook project. In fact, after a long-distance run to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, in 2007, the AVC team, which includes new fourth-year students every year, returned to Kimmirut at the request of the community.

The concept for the Chinook project began during Jane Magrath's sabbatical to Kimmirut a few years ago. The University of Prince Edward Island English professor's initial goal was to find a way to make it easier for students in that remote community to pursue post-secondary studies at UPEI.

"But one of the things that they said they really desperately needed up there was veterinary care," she remembers. "They have dogs and dogs and dogs. The dogs breed. They have dogs running all over town, and the only way to control the population is to shoot them."

"They try to get people to adopt them out, but every northern community is dealing with the same issue, this massive population (of dogs). And then the dogs get dangerous and end up dying because of dog aggression."

Being that the vet college is just a short jaunt across the UPEI campus, when she returned home Magrath contacted Lisa Miller, associate dean of academic affairs at AVC. They came up with the AVC Chinook volunteer team idea and then applied for and received a two-year grant from the Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre at the university.

They have also received reductions on airfares by First Air and assistance from Pfizer, Iams, Cogsdale Corporation and Home Hardware in Charlottetown.

The first trip north to Kimmirut in July 2006 involved five students and a few volunteer veterinarians.

"We needed someone who could do the clinical work and the surgical work and could oversee the students in that aspect," Miller says.

Kimmirut has a population of about 400 people and about 200 dogs, some of which are sled dogs that are invaluable to the traditional lifestyle of the community.

"They are part of the economic survival of the community because the best way to hunt polar bears is with a dog team rather than with snowmobiles. So if they're taking sport hunters out, the dogs are really, really important," Magrath says.

"Then you've got the kind of nuisance dogs that were in town that nobody really owns or some people own but wish they didn't. And then you've got this small population of schnauzers, small poodle-like dogs and a corgi or two that have been imported that are pampered house dogs. So it's a very interesting hierarchy."

Last summer, the AVC team went to Cambridge Bay, a community of more than 1,400 on the southern coast of Victoria Island in Nunavut.

"The previous year that winter they had serious outbreaks of Arctic fox rabies, so a large number of their dogs were either lost to rabies or distemper," says Magrath. "Many (residents) were devastated. They lost teams of their dogs to diseases. So they welcomed us to come in and do the vaccination program."

This year's return to Kimmirut allowed the team to expand their reach to animals that had not been seen two years ago.

"We did all the surgeries in the kitchen of the local school in Kimmirut," says fourth-year student Beth Martin.

It helps to be inventive and adaptable when presenting a mobile vet clinic.

"They were dealing with lights suspended from bungee cords and regular tables raised up on blocks (for surgical tables)," Miller says with a smile.

"Heading up there we are very limited to what we can take. So a lot of the ways that the veterinary care and the surgeries are done is different than it would be if it were done at the AVC."

But the care the animals received was no less than what they would get in a super-stocked surgical room hundreds of kilometres in the south.

"We also spent two afternoons just going door to door and offering vaccinations and deworming and nobody refused us. So I think we got to pretty much all the population just by doing that," Martin adds.

Each year, vaccines and supplies are also left with newly trained community members so they can continue to improve the welfare of their animals.

The AVC team practised a pretty much open-door policy so members of the community could visit the clinic and watch the surgical procedures, which proved particularly fascinating to the children.

Youth in the community also volunteered to give a hand in the recovery room process, walking the dogs and with translation when elders did not speak English.