Lifeline for Animals and Families
LAS PALMITAS, Mexico — Pedro Parra stood by his horse’s side as the animal dropped to the ground under the weight of anesthesia. Its hooves flailed for a moment, then ceased, and a team of volunteer veterinarians rushed in. One placed a pillow under the patient’s neck; another tied a rope around a back foot and lifted it.
Their task was to castrate the stallion — a necessary surgery to keep the animal from becoming uncontrollable and a danger to its owner and to other animals. “He was getting a little bit restless around the mares,” said Mr. Parra, 34. Within the hour, seven more horses lay on the plot behind the town’s church, slowly waking from their surgeries.
As soon as Mr. Parra’s companion woke up, he would take the animal home, where it helps plow the milpa — rows of corn, beans and squash — on his family’s farm.
Mr. Parra’s stallion was one of the 813 patients, including donkeys, horses and mules, that were castrated, dewormed, vaccinated or otherwise treated during a weeklong, roving veterinary clinic in Guanajuato state in Mexico.
The campaign was organized by the Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service, or RVETS, a program that since 2010 has sent volunteer specialists and veterinary students to provide free care in remote areas of Mexico, Nicaragua and the United States where veterinarians are scarce.
“In the equine veterinary industry, nobody else cares about all the animals that are in the countryside,” said Dr. Víctor Urbiola, director of RVETS Mexico. “That’s why we focus on them.”
RVETS has also changed the way that people treat their horses, mules and donkeys they rely on to fetch water, plow fields, ride competitively or go to school.
At the clinic, Brenda Arias and Martín Cuevas Jr., both veterinary students, gently approached two mares and a colt. Syringes in hand, the students prepared to squirt the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin into the animals’ mouths. Some rural horses, unfamiliar with people other than their owners, “won’t even let themselves be touched,” Ms. Arias said.
What to do, then? “Seduce them,” Mr. Cuevas said. “Talk to them nicely, pet them” — an unfamiliar tactic to an earlier generation.
Juan Godínez, the elected delegate for the Las Palmitas community, said that before RVETS, some owners would lasso a horse’s legs and head and castrate it with a knife, without anesthesia. It was common for an animal to bleed to death or die of infection.
The RVETS clinic also fills a gap in veterinary training. At vet schools in Mexico and elsewhere, “there’s less and less emphasis on horses in favor of other things like companion animals, dogs and cats,” said Eric Davis, who founded RVETS with his wife, Cindy.
Many students graduate without ever having touched a horse. “What they teach you in school is one-third of what life in the countryside is really like,” said Dereck Alejandro Morín, 24, a veterinary student volunteering with RVETS.
Estefanía Alegría, 33, and her son, Bruno, traveled an hour from their house, which has no electricity or running water, to a clinic in Jalpa. Her husband, like most of their neighbors, had crossed the U.S. border to send money back from Texas. Now, she and her children rely on their donkey — a 13-year-old with a crooked ear — and a horse named Sombra for almost everything.
Her story, Dr. Urbiola said, resonated with one of his core missions: to care for animals “who are either worth very little or nothing at all economically but whose value to people’s lives is incalculable.”
It is no easy task. Securing funds for the yearly campaigns has proved difficult. “When I’ve gone knocking on government doors, they say, ‘What for? I mean, donkeys are worthless,’ ” Dr. Urbiola said.
Then there are security concerns. In 2019, RVETS Mexico stopped traveling to communities surrounding Xichú, Guanajuato, after local contacts warned them that homicides there had risen sharply.
Still, Dr. Urbiola said, “If we can help even one donkey that carries 80 kilos of water for an old woman, all the effort we make is totally worth it.”