Northern dog population curbed
Vets travel to remote northern villages, spay and neuter wild animals to reduce dog-bite attacks

Nicholas Read, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, October 06, 2006

NORTHWEST TERRITORIES - Thanks to three B.C. veterinarians and six veterinary technicians, there will be fewer dogs in the Northwest Territories next year, and, they hope, fewer dog bites.

Last month, representatives of the Vancouver-based Canadian Animal Assistance Team (CAAT) were invited by the NWT public health department to spay and neuter dogs in the small Dene communities of Rae-Edzo and Lutsel K'e after it was reported that the communities had the worrying distinction of having the highest dog-bite rates in the territory.

In Lutsel K'e, a child was killed by a dog recently.

"The children there love dogs, but they don't know how to behave around them," said Vancouver vet tech Donna Lasser, who founded CAAT in 2005 in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in Louisiana. CAAT now provides veterinary medicine and humane education to animals and people worldwide.

"The dogs hang around the schools there, wagging their tails, and the children are thrilled to see them. So they shriek and wave their arms, and the dogs get scared and bite them."

Now, thanks to the nine CAAT members who visited the communities, those children might know better next time, Lasser said.

In all, the team members spayed or neutered more than 100 dogs, and vaccinated and dewormed nearly 200. They had expected to be even busier, but the day before they arrived, the Dene chiefs ordered most of the stray dogs in the villages to be shot so visitors from the south would think better of them.

"One of the people in the village came to us in tears to tell us about it," Lasser said. "But it's important not to be critical because it is their tradition."

Nevertheless the team did their best to introduce villagers to a new, more humane way of dealing with surplus dogs, by setting up a temporary veterinary clinic in what was usually the village public works garage.

They moved the trucks out, cleaned up as much of the oil as they could, and brought in tarpaulins for the dogs to recover on. And the village children came to see what they were doing.

"They put gloves on and touched things," Lasser said. "They'd touch the uterus once it was out. So they learned from our example how to handle and talk to the dogs."

Because it is in changing the children's attitudes that hope lies, Lasser says.

"The adults were wary of us. Not too many came to see what we were doing. But the children were fascinated."

Next, CAAT representatives will be travelling to Trinidad to deal with what has been described to them as a horrendous stray-dog problem there.

nread@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2006