First Days with MAWS

My first days at Maun Animal Welfare Society (MAWS) have been both interesting and fun!  I have met some really great people and the animals here are so trusting and forgiving.

http://www.maunanimalwelfare.com/aboutus/whoweare.html

The girls and I walk up to the clinic every morning around 8am.  The animals for the day’s surgeries are already at the clinic waiting for us.  There is an older gentleman named Nation who drives around the villages the evening before and picks up the dogs and then drops them at the clinic.  The truck he uses is on old Nissan truck with the back converted to be enclosed to keep the dogs inside. The dogs are just piled in there.  No cages.  I thought the dogs would fight but……no. They all just sit in there together.  No fighting at all.  It is super strange!  Since all the dogs are used to running the streets together I guess they don’t fight?  Nation is amazing because he knows exactly which dogs goes with which house.  All the dogs look the same.  Mostly tan and all about 20-35 pounds on average.  Very skinny.  Covered in fleas and ticks.  Many have extensive scars and wounds.  All the dogs are owned by someone and we have their consent to perform surgery. We do not just pick up stray dogs. That is frowned upon.  There is only one  private vet in Maun.

Nation's Truck

KC is our clinic assistant.  He walks an hour each morning just to get to work and then an hour home afterwards.  We feed and take care of any patients that have been kept overnight at the clinic and then we take to weighing the surgery patients so we can calculate drug dosages for them.  KC stands on the human scale and then stands on the scale holding the dog.  We subtract the difference to get the dog’s weight. Old school but it works!  Most of these dogs are scared to death but we really have had no issues with animals being aggressive towards us.  Their owners don’t pet them so they don’t get much love who could blame them.  Even with that they warm up to us quickly.  They are really sweet.  What’s funny is that the majority of the dogs are racist. They love the black people but they are super leary of white people.

KC

Once the first animal gets anesthetized the nurses get an IV catheter in them and then they are cleaned and prepped for surgery.  They get vaccines, deworming, a pain injection and flea/tick treatment.  They are moved to my surgery table and I perform the surgery.  The table is stationary and of course too high for me so I have to stand on a cinder block to be able to reach the animals.  My back is not going to be happy!  I’m going to need a series of spa days once I return and a visit to my chiropractor!

Dog ready for surgery

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After surgery the animals recover on a large blanket together.  Again, no fighting or problems.  They just lay there.  When they are able to walk, KC puts the dogs together in a large dog run so Nation can pick them up around 4pm.  Nation arrives and put the dogs for the next day’s surgeries in the dog kennels that the current day’s dogs were in (cleaned of course).  After all the dogs are out of his truck he cleans it and the surgery dogs are loaded and returned to their houses.  It’s a neat system.

I have done surgery there for 4 days.  The first day was a little rough since I didn’t know the system or where anything was.  I was not used to the anesthesia protocol or some of the other drugs they are using. The suture material is different and I have to thread my own needle which  isn’t easy to do with a wonky eye.  The surgery instruments are all donated and are not the best quality so they can be hard to work with as well.  After the first day I was good though.  I did a total of 64 surgeries for them so far. Mostly dogs.  Only 2 cats so far.  I may have said this in the last blog (I can’t remember) but the reason we don’t see many cats is because their feral population is kept in check by dogs and other wildlife eating the cats.  Cats really arent’ kept as house pets here.

We are now leaving for Nata to do community outreach spay/neuter.  It is a very small village about 300 km east from Maun.  We will be there for 5 days. Apparently I do surgery under a tree……. not sure how this is going to go!?