24/02/23- Care for Paws Sterilisation Camp

A few weeks ago, my service Care for Paws, which aims to care for the street animal population of our area, hosted a mobile sterilization and care camp in a local area. This has been a tradition amoung the service for many years now, but being new to the service, it was my first time attending one and I was really excited to see what was in store. We had teamed up with a mobile vet clinic that had all the staff and recources needed, and essentially our role was to fund and provide any  assistance that was needed. Our main aim was mainly to treat street dogs and cats via sterlization, in order to maintain population control of stray animals in the area, however, we found that many strays in the area had already been sterilised, so most of the treatments ended up being vaccinations and varios treatments (i.e, skin diseases), from local people bringing their own animals. 

The first few treatments of the day were female cat sterilizations, where there were about 3. I took the opportunity to watch part of one of the procedures, and it was definitely an interesting experience to see the vet do his job. Although it was a really squemish procedure, I did learn lots about anatomy in the process, including the different layers lining the stomach, how stitches are performed, what medicines are used to keep the wound safe, and mostly that I definitely do not want to be a vet in the future!

The rest of the assisatance that I did was giving some cats their rabies vaccines, where I learned how and where to properly inject the animal from the vet, and monitoring the animals after their operations, waiting for them to wake up, and comforting them as it’s a very scary thing for animals to endure. We also helped with the admisitration of animals, taking down contact details along with owner adresses and phone numbers when people borught their own pets in so they could be contactable if anything happened. For each pet that also came in, we gave them their own vet book that they could continue using in the future.

Overall, this camp in terms of sterilization was not anywhere near as successful as we had hoped. In the past there had been close to an average of 50 sterilizations performed on strays and pets, however this time we only had 9. This outcome helped us reflect during our following service session on maybe changing the location to somewhere different next time we do this, to increase the outcome to be more sucessfull next time. This was a compleatly new experience for me, but at the end of the day, seeing everything we had acheived, and all the animals we helped treat was so rewarding, and I had a new found respect for the mobile vet clinic for helping these animals the way that they did.