A Cowichan Valley veterinarian and her husband, a wildlife biologist, are leaving Thursday for Chile to help two communities that have gone to the dogs.
Elena Garde, 43, and 36-year-old Guillermo Perez will be in South America indefinitely working as volunteers for the non-profit group Veterinarians Without Borders. For Perez, this will be a homecoming: He was born in Chile and left for Canada 18 years ago.
But it will all be new for Garde, an Ontario native, who is ready to take on both the culture shock and the challenge of helping the towns of Valdivia and Chillán come to grips with their burgeoning populations of street dogs. Estimates suggest there's one free-roaming dog for every five people in some of these Chilean communities, raising concerns over the spread of diseases like rabies. There are also problems with dogs biting people and injuring livestock and other family assets.
"Being a vet in a clinic here is really fun and I love the people, but overall I think you're making a difference with just one family and one dog," said Garde. "Here, people can afford to pay for spays and neuters and if your dog gets hit by a car you can afford to fix it. [In Chile], people have a very different attitude toward pets."
Many Chileans, for instance, don't believe animals feel pain. But Garde, who is doing her masters degree on international animal health, says North Americans can't impose their views about animals on others. "It's like someone from another culture coming here and saying, 'It's totally fine to put cows in your living room. They're really, really mellow and they can learn to use a litter box,' " said Garde. "We try to keep that picture in our minds because that's how weird it is."
Garde and Perez will help communities learn how to control the population of dogs, which can also be a problem for wildlife. Garde said the animals spread distemper and parvovirus to susceptible species like foxes and small wild cats.
Yet male dogs can be sterilized with an injection. The Canadians plan to work with community members to build Chilean expertise and develop long-time canine population and disease-control programs.
The two are going to Chile indefinitely, and have sold their Cowichan Station home of three years. They will be taking their own three dogs with them, although Garde sees the irony of importing more dogs to a country that's already crawling with them.
The couple will have their expenses paid, but will have to find veterinary or other work to make ends meet. "I'm hoping to teach a little bit of English at the university and I'll finish my masters [degree]," Garde said.
Erin Fraser, the Victoria-based program director for Veterinarians Without Borders, said another team just returned from Guatemala, where it was dealing with similar dog issues.
Fraser said many small communities had to resort to mass killings to deal with street dogs. "They don't have a sustainable way of coming up with a solution. We're working with communities to bring up animal-welfare awareness -- the value of collaring your animals, the value of having them sterilized, the value of working in the schools.
"The ultimate goal is to figure out a way to work with local veterinarians who can then set up a clinic. If you start building in a value for caring for small animals, then there starts to be a market for a local vet that can make a go of having a private practice there."
Veterinarians Without Borders was formed four years ago in Guelph, Ont., and has 500 members, including veterinarians, and animal technicians.
