WINdia

Despite my busy schedule I have been able to spend some time getting to enjoy India. On the second day of my being here my friend Anjolie (who I am staying with) took me shopping
...and I got everyone some nice treats! We also got our palms read by a bonafide Indian psychic who was eerily correct about pretty much everything he said. The skeptic in me claims generalizations were made, but I cannot deny that what he said interested me. Evidently I will have one baby when I am 29, so there ya go mom. He also said that I am really good at one thing and I should stick with it, and expect to open a business one day. I will make a big decision in 2012, maybe marriage (I'm guessing not) and I spend too much time worrying about other people and not enough about myself (this is true). Overall a very fun experience!!

Can you see the amazement on my face?

Anjolie's parents have generously taken me to dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant called Mamagoto, a chic, hip restaurant that you would expect to find in San Francisco or New York. It is owned by 5 people, one is Chinese, one is Japanese, one is Indonesian, one is Thai, and the last one is from a 5th Asian country I can't remember. In any case the food is a blend of all these different places, and so much care is put into what they serve. The tastes are unique but work perfectly with one another.

Tofu with miso sauce on a bed of crunchy spinach mmmmmm

I hope they expand to the US or at least Europe, because it is a great restaurant.

Soon I will get a real Indian henna that I can show off on the beaches in the Philippines, if it lasts that long. While I'm here I would like to go to a garden and maybe see a temple or two. I don't think I will have time to visit the Taj Mahal, but it is about a 5 hour drive away so not easily accessible. I also want to eat Indian food while I am here!! Evidently the masala spice will not be kind to my digestive system, so I have to be careful.

I am really enjoying my trip here and I will be sad to leave in 10 days, but the amount that we are doing with animals makes the days last very long, so I am definitely getting a good amount of time here. Sorry for the crumby picture quality but I am sending my photos from my computer to Anjolie's computer (mine doesnt get internet for some reason) then expanding them on here. We can do a proper slideshow with the good quality pictures when I return!!

Day Two

While out giving biscuits to my friend’s dogs, we noticed there was a stray she hadn’t seen in the neighborhood before that was suffering from a large maggot wound. It is recognizably a maggot wound because it is a hole in the skin that goes pretty deep. There is a good deal of swelling and sensitivity, and is very painful for the dog. These kinds of wounds need to be given a great deal of attention because the dogs live outside where they roll in the filthy mud, get bitten by other dogs, and are the target of more and more flies. Without care this wound was likely to get worse until it ended the dog’s life.

You wouldn’t believe it, but someone owns this dog. She (the dog) lives outside of a big house where people from a nearby embassy live. A few other dogs also live out there, including 4 new puppies. Since the owners were clearly not taking care of their animals (maggot wounds, no spaying), we asked them if we could do all the work free of charge. They said no. They did not want the maggot wounds to be cleaned and they did not want Shona, the female with puppies, to be spayed. This sounds like a job for the Vigilante Veterinarians! In this sense, we truly are vigilantes, because we disobey rules to achieve justice. Watching an animal in need, knowing you can help, and being denied the opportunity to do so is one of the most painful feelings in the world, so in cases like this it is necessary to assume the role of a vigilante.

I am the non-violent Dexter of the veterinary world.

Day One

I arrived in Delhi at three in the morning after roughly 24 hours of travel from San Francisco, with one stop in Hong Kong. Upon inhalation I could feel my lungs urging me to turn around and get back on the plane, because even though it was the early morning and the sun was long gone, it was more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. But like any determined traveler, I ignored the cajoling and continued on my way.

The car ride back to my friend’s house gave me time to observe the city I would occupy for the next 16 days. The roadway was riddled with trucks and traffic was thick for so early in the morning. When we made it back to the house I worried that jet lag would keep me from sleeping, but once my head hit the pillow I was out.

I woke up ready to get started. This trip had been in the works for the last 6 months, and after everything I had heard about Delhi strays made me excited to see them. The friend who brought me here began working with strays when she was younger. She would find strays in need and provide them with what they needed to live healthy lives on the streets. She spay/neutered, clean, and vaccinated them, about 40 so far. The relaxed laws and blind eyes of the citizens provide an ample opportunity to get a lot of hands-on clinical experience without the hassle of having a clinic.

We left the house carrying a box of “Happi Dog” biscuits that smelled like graham crackers. We circled around her house only once, shaking the biscuit box and whistling for the animals. Sure enough, about seven mutts appeared, their mouths open and tongues out. Each of the animals looked very similar, because evidently most came from the same matrilineal line. Their relation was not the only defining factor in their similar appearance, because as we have driven around and seen stray dogs throughout the cities, it seems there is a general look to the strays. They are short-haired, medium size dogs, and I have yet to meet one that isn’t friendly.

Their good personalities do not seem to be enough to protect them from the abuses of the Indian people. A veterinarian here told me that about 2% of the Indian population cares about the well-being of animals, if even that much. Cars often hit dogs and the drivers don’t even look back. Young people will beat the animals with sticks, pour boiling water and acid all over them, and intentionally hurt them in other ways. Limping is so common here you would think that all dogs are born this way. Small cuts and lacerations become festering wounds full of maggots that thrive in the stagnant heat of the city. Some people “own” the strays, but only in the sense that they throw a chicken bone outside once in a while. Veterinary care is reserved for the purebred dogs that live inside (or else they would die in the heat), so strays are neglected and left to live a miserable, painful life where they desperately seek sanctuary from the weather and the people.

The condition to which these animals are subjected and the degree to which they need help make it necessary for people like my friend and me to become what I have dubbed “Vigilante veterinarians.”

Fresca

This is Fresca, a puppy from the Sanjay Gandhi animal shelter in Delhi. As you can see her back legs are atrophied, and she has no movement in them. She is paralyzed probably from a car accident. They generally put down dogs with this kind of injury, but I am hoping that they don't with her because she is full of so much love and sweetness. She sits in the shade all day because she can't move anywhere, but you can see her eyes light up when someone comes to pet her. She is so sweet and precious and I want to build her a wheelchair, but unfortunately she would need to live in a home and not on the streets for a wheelchair to be of any use. She is very cute.

at first I named her Delano (after FDR because he was in a wheelchair!) but that was too masculine. She is too cute.

An Observation of India

Right now I am doing charity work in New Delhi, India because the stray populations have become a nuisance to the people living here, which adversely affects the health of the dogs, which further annoys the citizens.
Before I delve into what I have done with the animals so far, a description of this city. “Chaotic” is the one and only word that can be used to describe this place. The roads are the most prominent example of this chaos, with cars, trucks, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, bicycles, and people moving every which way, each person feeling entitled to the space on the road. The road lines, including the ones separating your side from oncoming traffic, appear to be for decorative purposes only. Seatbelts cannot be found in any car, but the Indian people wouldn’t wear them anyway. They’re just for white tourists like me, who you can see clutching their seats as their drivers cut people off with barely an inch to spare.
The whole city seems to be either in a state of disrepair or a state of having never been completed. This goes for anything you see, from buildings to cars to people. The city itself was clearly never planned out in an organized way, another nod to the chaotic nature of the place. Streets go in unfathomable directions and connect to roads that would make even the most hardened traveler’s head spin. Trash and litter are the vegetation of choice, and there is no such thing as a recycling program. When cars inevitably collide with a median or a sign, the time it takes to fix something like that would make American bureaucracy seem like an F1 racer.
India is not without its charms, though. There is a rich cultural heritage here unlike any other in the world. There is a great respect for older people, a respect long ago lost in many European cultures. The stereotype one hears about in movies where Indian families want their children to maintain chastity and marry other Indians is still very true. Ideas of luck and superstition are present, with almost every car having some kind of Hindu god posing on the desktop, and dogs going in for medical care are covered in an orange paint that is supposed to bring good luck.
Overall I am greatly enjoying my time in this country. Even though I have to close my eyes and pretend I am somewhere pleasant while I endure car rides through Delhi, I am enjoying learning about this other culture. India is the exotic place I have read about in history books about trading and ships and tiger hunting, and now I am actually here. And how could I not want to be here, after all, this is where Christopher Columbus meant to come.

Day Three

Stuff doesn’t gross me out anymore. Well, veterinary stuff specifically. Rotting food will make me gag and babies’ snot will make me go sterile. But animals with their skin pulled off or their bone sticking out doesn’t do anything for me. Even emotionally I have a huge disconnect. Of course I get sad when I see a little puppy that is barely making it, but in this field you can either sit there and cry for the fate of the dog, or move on and do something about it. The way I am is that I have moved on before even meeting these animals.

The point of all this is that the dog with the maggot wound did not gross me out or make me sad, so chasing down this resistant dog so I could stick my fingers in her maggot hole was not a problem for me. The only problem is that the medical history of this dog is unknown, and given her status, probably nonexistent anyway. The guards of the house where this dog lives, plus the guards from my friend’s house helped us chase her down and tackle her while I jammed her full of 3 mL of Xylosin, a short-acting anesthetic. After 10 minutes she was down, but still lazily snapping at the flies that buzzed around her nose.

There was not a lot of time to perform our healing magic, and we didn’t know if the owners would be coming home soon, or if they were watching from the windows. In retrospect it was probably not the wisest decision to do this from where they could see it, but in the heat of the moment you do what you have to do. First we applied an antiseptic to the wound site, cleaning it all the way in and around. Next we filled the hole with turpentine oil, which brings the maggots out from the wound. After a few minutes no maggots appeared, so I used forceps to dig inside of the leg. Even though the wound was deep, no maggots remained, so we cleaned, sterilized, and wrapped it up. There was a smaller maggot wound on the other back leg, and it to was free of the tiny beasts. The dog woke up, hot and dazed, and crawled under a car to recover.

We packed up the tools we bought on Ebay and went on to the next case.