It can be tough to take care of a pet when you live in a community without a resident veterinarian. by Liz Crompton
It happened early one afternoon about 10 years ago. I was preparing to go back to work after lunch when I heard a sound that chilled my blood: my cat’s cry of pain. In the five years I’d had Mesto, I’d never heard him make such a distressing sound. I found him crouched over the litter box. It became clear he was having great pain relieving himself.
And there was nowhere in town to take him to relieve his pain. I was living in Fort Simpson, NWT. The closest vet was in Yellowknife — 600 kilometres, eight hours by road, one hour by plane. What’s a panic-struck pet owner to do in a pet emergency in a community without a vet?
I grabbed the territorial phone book and had the Great Slave Veterinary Hospital in Yellowknife on the line within the minute. The reassuring voice patched me through to the vet, Dr. Tom Pisz. Some of the details are hazy now, but I recall describing Mesto’s symptoms and answering some questions. Pisz soon declared the probable cause: crystals in the urine, a common ailment in neutered male cats. And a fatal one, if the crystals completely block the urinary tract. If Mesto didn’t get treatment, he could be dead within 24 hours. The lone flight of the day to Yellowknife had left about an hour earlier.
I was instructed to go to the local health centre and get some medication. It was intended for humans, of course, but a little dose would tide the cat over until he got the proper veterinary attention. It felt a little strange going to the people hospital and asking the nurse for the medicine, but he didn’t seem surprised. The mixture was pink and thick and Mesto complained bitterly, but it worked. The next day he flew to Yellowknife, where the vet hospital staff met him at the airport and whisked him into surgery. Five days later he returned, scared and grumpy but okay.
I like to tell people I had Mesto cat-evacced. It’s a play on medevac, the shorthand term for medical evacuation that every newcomer to the North soon learns. But it’s my cautionary tale (if you’ll pardon the pun) to pet owners who live in most towns North of 60 not to take their pet’s health and well being for granted. Yellowknife, Whitehorse and Dawson City are the only communities with resident veterinarians, while Iqaluit has intermittent service.
But other towns are hardly forsaken. Several vets make regular rounds in the North, including Dr. John Overell, who moved to Dawson after graduating in 1998 expecting to establish “a nice, quiet practice.” At first it was quiet. Then, a couple of years ago, his practice took off like wildfire.
“My philosophy is I’m part of the community and it’s part of my role to do everything I can,” he says. And now his ‘community’ has grown far beyond Dawson to include everywhere from Tuktoyaktuk, NWT in the north to Mayo in the central Yukon. He packs his whole clinic into his truck and drives in summer, switching to airplanes in winter.
The road trips are tough, with long days packed tight with procedures. Like other vets who make the rounds of communities by road or by air (places such as Iqaluit and Rankin Inlet are only served by air), appointments usually consist of examinations, vaccinations, spays and neuters, and dental work.
These are perfect opportunities for pet owners to have their animals checked over from the ease of their home communities. Prevention plays an even more critical role in safeguarding an animal’s health in a place with no immediate access to a vet. Dr. Dewey Stickney, a northern Alberta-based vet who spends about a week each month travelling the South Slave region of the NWT in his 20-metre-long mobile vet clinic, says about half the cases he sees could have been prevented: diseases that could have been avoided by a simple vaccination, dogs injured because they weren’t restrained while riding in moving vehicles.
Preventable or not, when things do go wrong, a lot of owners stop at nothing to get their animal companions help. “They’ll track us down and drive to us. People will drive from Hay River to High Level (300 kilometres) without blinking,” he says. “We seem to be in the right place at the right time a lot of the time.”
When Kerri Bianic’s dog Chilkoot lost a fight with another canine a few years ago, her neck swelled up overnight. It turned out to be filled with blood. “So I packed her up and drove to Whitehorse,” recalls Bianic, who lives in Mayo. It was a four-hour drive each way and it was the dead of winter.
“It is kind of a nuisance, to have to drive (so far) in an emergency, but you’d do anything for your pet,” she says, adding Chilkoot made a full recovery. “It’s part of life up here...you just get on with it.”
It’s not always possible to get to a vet quickly enough, especially for owners in isolated communities who have to wait on scheduled flights. In these cases, the telephone is a vital link between life and death, as I had discovered. Vets who see patients from the North can expect a lot of long-distance consultations, from the routine, such as answering questions about a cat recently diagnosed with diabetes, to the more complicated. Stickney says he’s had to coach owners through whelpings and the aftermath of accidents, among other difficult cases. Owners have to be pretty tough themselves sometimes.
We’ll tell them what to do to stabilize the animal, control hemorrhaging,” he says. “I’ve instructed people to take a small bore needle and put the needle into the bladder (of a cat suffering from urine crystals) to relieve the pressure.
“The owners go as far as they can.”
Unfortunately, that also sometimes means having to euthanize a pet. In cases where it’s clear that an animal won’t survive long enough to get the proper care and is in a great deal of pain, the only compassionate thing to do is to end its suffering. Stickney says there are several humane options available, and suggests an owner might want to enlist the help of others to do this.
Northern veterinary hospitals that don’t tour are still, of course, open to business from pet owners from out-of-town. “We call on the resources available (in the owner’s town), including nurses, who could draw blood, if they’re comfortable with it, or give needles,” says Dr. Greg Pottie of the Copper Road Veterinary Clinic in Whitehorse. Clinics will ship medical supplies to communities and go to airports to meet pets shipped from around the territories.
While vets in urban centres may shudder at the thought of making a diagnosis over the phone, it sometimes just has to be done if a pet is to live. “The reality of the North is there are a lot of remote communities, and we all do what we can over the phone,” Pottie says.
Pet health care in the North is about more than veterinarians, however. Community members pull together to provide a support network to help fill the void of not having a resident animal doctor. Human health professionals, such as nurses and doctors, are often willing to help an animal in distress. Wildlife biologists and sled dog owners are good resources too. Other cat and dog owners can share the knowledge gleaned from their experiences.
Indeed, the first place Kerri Bianic turned to for help with her injured dog Chilkoot was the local nursing station. The nurses patched up the bite marks and flushed out a big hole in Chilkoot’s chest. The next morning, when the young dog’s neck was swollen like a balloon, Bianic called a local dogteam owner who’d had some experience dealing with canine health matters. The musher thought it may be a build-up of fluid, but when they tried to lance it, they discovered it wasn’t an abscess but a hematoma. That’s when Bianic bundled her dog into her vehicle and high-tailed it to the vet clinic in Whitehorse.
Some communities have strong animal support networks. The Fort Smith Animal Society, founded 30 years ago, currently enjoys a healthy volunteer base of three dozen locals. The mandate of the society, which operates a shelter, is to protect stray and abandoned animals and to find them homes, but they will help direct pet owners to local resources.
“If they contact the shelter, we’ll give them a list of names of volunteers who could help,” says Dixie Penner, the society’s past president. “All we can do is assess the situation and see if the pet needs (immediate) attention.”
Penner, who with her husband Larry has a personal menagerie of two cats, three dogs, one turtle and five goldfish, says the society can count on several health care professionals and technicians for help. Two local mushers, for example, are ready to assist with dog shots, clippings, and minor ailments, and a couple of biologists don’t mind being called on to stitch up wounds or microchip pets for an identification program.
The community at large supports their initiatives as well. “I’ll be shopping in the grocery store and people will give me money and ask me to give it to the animal shelter,” she says. In 2003, the society collected almost $2000 from donation jars around Fort Smith. “That’s almost one dollar for every resident.”
It’s good that there are caring people with some knowledge who can help out, but vets caution there are some things they might not know that could be lethal for non-human patients: for instance, the fact that Tylenol kills cats. (For that reason, Overell holds lectures on animal health care — and their important differences from human care — in the communities he serves.)
People who like animals also act as community liaisons for visiting vets. They’ll book appointments, look after accommodations and meals, and help with reception at the clinic, among other tasks. In Iqaluit, the Rotary Club has been acting as a broker and coordinator for such visits for the last 20 years. While resident vets have come and gone, a vet clinic from Montreal has been coming up every spring and fall for years. Bruce Rigby, who’s been involved in the club’s vet program for the past decade, guesses there are more people with pets than without in the growing territorial capital, and believes the biannual arrangement might not be enough anymore.
“The volume is quite substantial. I think we may be reaching a critical point,” says Rigby, noting recent visits have lasted seven to 10 days (longer in spring). At the last clinic alone, the vets saw between 130 to 140 animals.
As in Fort Smith, a community-wide willingness to help animals exists in Iqaluit, Rigby says. Local businesses chip in to make the service affordable for owners and vets alike, with hotels and airlines easing the heavy cost of transportation and accommodation. The Iqaluit Research Centre lends its facilities for the clinics, where everything from general check-ups to surgery takes place. (Sometimes it gets hairy if there happens to be a lot of research going on at the same time, Rigby adds, but mostly no one minds such a place doing double-duty.)
The lack of a resident veterinarian still makes some people nervous. Deb Bisson weighed her options very carefully when she decided she wanted a dog. She had had dogs and horses before moving to Inuvik from Vancouver, but she wasn’t sure she was prepared to shoulder the responsibility of a pet again if she couldn’t care for it as well as she felt she ought to.
The network of dog-savvy people in Inuvik, including a biologist who serves as a vet’s assistant, the regular visits from Overell and his availability for phone consultations, and the plethora of information available to her on the World Wide Web eventually convinced Bisson.
“All that (support) offered me the comfort I needed,” she says. Jessie came into her life in August 2003, and she adopted a second dog, Willow, last Easter.
Jen and Allen Hayward had also wanted to take their time finding a dog, but fate had different plans.
Early one cold morning two years ago, a colleague of Jen’s found a freezing three-week-old puppy. Soon the Haywards found themselves with a new dog, Rudy, who was fine after he warmed up. A few months later they had a frightening experience. They were outside playing when Rudy caught a ball in the eye.
They couldn’t see an injury and he appeared to be fine, but a few hours later the eye started rolling back in his head, his balance was off, and he seemed a little out of it.
“It was a real wake-up call that there was no vet in town,” Jen Hayward recalls. They called a vet clinic in Ottawa, arranged for pick-up, and then shipped Rudy off on the three-hour- flight. “You just want reassurance he’s okay.” Hayward’s still nervous because the dog is somewhat accident-prone and likes to do things like lick metal in wintertime.
“It’s the way you’d feel if there was no pediatrician or doctor in town,” she says. “You want the best care.”
Veterinarians’ top tips for vet-less communities
The mantra of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is especially true for pet health care North of 60. Here’s what vets say are key to maintaining a healthy pet.
1. Ensure regular check-ups and vaccinations
2. Spay or neuter your pet. Fewer unwanted animals mean fewer problems
3. Feed your pet good-quality food — you are what you eat, no matter your species
4. Make sure your pet gets regular exercise
5. Stay calm in an emergency. A vet somewhere is available by telephone around the clock (keep the number handy)
6. Keep rudimentary first-aid supplies on hand. (Consult a vet for specifics.)
7. Watch for wildlife, and train your pet to stay away from wild animals
8. If you sense something’s wrong with your pet, describe the symptoms to a professional sooner rather than later
