Feature- Peru Amazon Cares

Good Dog August 19, 2011

“Come here,” beckoned my friend and fellow veterinarian Patrick Mahaney as he held a middle-aged black dog in his arms. “I think he has a botfly in his eyelid.”

Paco, the mutt in question, looked up at us quizzically as we gently prodded his orbit and concluded he probably did have one of those marble-sized fly larvae burrowed below his left eye. “He needs to be neutered anyway,” Patrick declared. “Let’s bring him with us to tomorrow’s clinic.”

We were halfway into a two-week visit to the Peruvian Amazon with the Amazon CARES animal welfare organization. In 2004, Atlanta resident Molly Mednikow traveled to the area on a humanitarian mission but found herself overwhelmed by the condition of the street animals there. With no background in animal welfare or medicine, she sold her jewelry business, moved to Peru, and founded the non-profit Amazon CARES to provide shelter and veterinary attention to those dogs and cats.

In addition to running a full-time vet clinic that serves local residents in the large port city of Iquitos, Amazon CARES organizes a team of international volunteers four times a year to provide the stray population with medical care and sterilizations. The benefits are widespread; in addition to the primary purpose of providing much needed medical care, the organization sends teams to educate the village residents about humane treatment of animals. In recent years, a grant from a human medical relief organization also allows Amazon CARES to provide parasite treatment for the people.

The organization relies on donations and sponsorships to fund its work; volunteers pay for their own transportation and costs. After meeting Molly at a pet conference in Denver the year before, I made the commitment to join a two-week trip in April this year.

Our diverse group of volunteers clicked immediately. Joining myself and fellow vet Dr. Mahaney were June Allison, a technician from Australia; Kat Mock, a technician from Wales and her boyfriend, Luke Marriott; and Nikka Harvey, a dog trainer from Nashville. Rounding out the team were local veterinarian Dr. Ester Pena and three staff members from the permanent clinic in Peru. The staff take turns accompanying the volunteers on mobile missions while the rest remain to man the clinic; this group of four remained with the volunteers the entire two weeks.

During our first week in Iquitos we set up mobile clinics in the town’s dusty buildings. There we had seen plenty of mange, fleas, ticks, and malnutrition, but it wasn’t until we headed deep into the small villages along the country’s famous river that we were treated to the delights of the botfly. This nasty insect burrows painfully deep into the skin of its host as it develops into an adult fly.

Paco was one of the lucky ones. He lived at a lodge that catered to tourists, with access to food and shelter that so many dogs in Peru lack. His caretakers agreed to let us bring the pup to our mobile clinic the following day for treatment.

Just after sunrise the next morning, the Amazon CARES team loaded our medications, surgical supplies, and an unsuspecting Paco into a boat and motored down the Amazon to the small village of Tamanco. As we pulled up to dock, a small group of barefoot, giggling children scurried down to the water to greet us.

“It’s a smaller group than we normally have here,” observed Mednikow. One of the villagers chuckled. “When we told the children that the doctors were coming today, they thought we meant human doctors, who were coming to give them shots. They’re hiding, but they’ll come out in a little bit.”

In the remote settlements here at the mouth of the mighty Amazon, medical care for the people is just beginning to become routine; care for the animals is basically nonexistent.

We lugged our plastic bins of supplies over the muddy field towards the village, dodging indignant cows and ankle-deep puddles along the way. Already at 9 a.m., the equatorial heat was beating down on us, and I could feel the sweat working its way along my spine.

After a short hike, we arrived at our clinic for the day: an open-air building that had most recently served as a schoolhouse. We didn’t have time to miss our shiny x-ray machines or access to blood work because we were so overwhelmed by the lack of basics, such as deworming and parasite medications, vaccines, and primary equipment. Over the course of the previous week, we had perfected a technique to prepare our makeshift operating rooms, stacking whatever flat surfaces were available to us like Jenga blocks until we had a workable surgical table.

In the days leading up to our arrival, the Amazon CARES staff posted bulletins in the villages announcing the clinic so residents were ready and waiting with their pets as we set up. Dogs arrived in makeshift rope leashes, plastic bags made into carriers, and lacking that, lugged in by their armpits. While the volunteers set up the tables, the Amazon CARES staffers checked in the animals. All were weighed, sprayed with Frontline for fleas and ticks, and put in cages to wait their turn for surgery.

Each pet was given its injectable premedication, and when he or she was sleepy, an IV catheter was placed in the front leg. It was through this catheter that the technician administered all the anesthetic drugs. The dogs were placed on our table, tied in place with sandbags and ropes, then shaved the old-fashioned way: with a flat rectangular razor blade and some soap. Battery powered clippers were just one of the many small luxuries I came to miss.

The surgery itself was rather straightforward, with a few twists unique to the jungle. For starters, I had never done surgery in front of an audience before. The open walls three feet from our table provided a natural viewing area for the curious locals to observe our surgical technique. They seemed to mind the spays less than the neuters; at least, the men did.

I’ve also never performed surgery while struggling mightily to suppress the itchiness of a hundred chigger bites covering my forearms. Despite generous – nay, probably dangerous – levels of 100 percent DEET sprayed all over, those ironclad bugs seemed impervious to all chemicals and were happily feasting on every bit of exposed skin they could find. Of course, touching anything other than the surgical field would negate one’s sterility, so we’d finish as quickly as we could, rip off our bloody gloves, scratch ourselves silly, then start all over. Fortunately for the animals, the Frontline we sprayed on them at admission seemed to keep their surgical sites bug-free, and it soon became a running joke that I should have just used that on myself.

The third challenge was learning to adapt to the barebones circumstances of being in a mobile clinic, far away from home and its fully stocked medicine cabinets and crash carts filled with emergency resuscitation equipment . Here, we had one bottle of antibiotic that had to solve 15 problems; unfamiliar suture materials and odd surgical instruments that felt foreign in my hands; and no bandaging material to create a pressure wrap when the surgical sites started to ooze. We managed, improvising bandages from paper towels and tape.

Despite the language barrier with the Spanish-speaking clients and staff, we were able to efficiently and safely usher 25 pets through anesthetic induction, surgery, and recovery that hot and humid day. Among the 25 was Paco, who had not one but two botflies in his eyelid, as well as another in his nether regions. In addition to the surgeries, another 30 pets received medical treatment such as deworming medication and vaccinations.

At day’s end, we wiped the pools of sweat from our faces, loaded the piles of dirty instruments back into the bins, and carried them across the field to the waiting boat. Paco sat quietly towards the boat’s bow, letting the rushing wind ruffle his fur while I looked out the window hoping in vain for a glimpse of an anaconda or pink dolphin.

Back at the lodge, Paco slunk off to hide and recover while the Amazon Cares staff undertook the gargantuan task of sterilizing the instruments for the next day by using a portable plug-in pot. As for the volunteers, we took our exhausted and sweaty bodies down to the cold-water showers for a much-needed cleaning. Not even the tarantula molts staring eyeless in the corner could dissuade us from this task. After all, we still had the rest of the week to get through.

Good Dog

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