Last weekend I had the priviledge of being asked to help with the Alberta Spay/Neuter Task Force's Animal Wellness Clinic. In short, what they do is arrange with the government and the First Nation Tribes to go out and, for free, spay and/or neuter as many dogs in a weekend as they can.
So, on Friday, I was part of a 8 vehicle convoy that met out in Standoff and we went door to door to sign people up for the clinic, load the dogs, and transport them to the vet clinic in Cardston.
After walking, numbering and arranging the dogs into order for surgery, we bedded them down and headed home.
Saturday, we had SNOW, yes, snow. The closer Bobbi and I got to Cardston, the more snow we saw! The clinic was buzzing dispite the weather.
It was 8am and surgeries were about to start. I had been asked to help with recovery. My job was to get the dogs after the surgery, make sure they could breath and that they were warming up, wake them up, and move them back into their crates when they were ready. This proved to be a very physically demanding and stressful. We were borrowing the clinic, and doing a quantity of dogs that the building had never seen before. Usually, in a standard spay/neuter surgery, the dogs are placed back in kennels and a person will sit with that ONE dog and wake it up. The dogs in my 'ward' came out in threes and fours at a time sometimes, all still tubed (tracheal tubes for breathing during the surgery) and my 'ward' was located on the floor of the hallway in the clinic!
That first day, we think the count of spayed/neutered dogs reached 60 before we were all too tired to go on. I rolled back into Lethbridge around 9pm, ate supper, hit the shower and into bed.
Sunday was another 'great' weather day, feel the sarcasim?! Fog, everywhere, right in front of the vehicle and I couldn't see a thing. For the first half of the trip out to Cardston, I could only go 65 km/hr.
Sunday, we were all tired from the past two days, but the surgeries got underway and we were done by 2:30 in the afternoon. The final number of dogs and cats that were spay/neutered reached 104!! An additional 52 dogs were vaccinated and dewormed (this was if the owners of the dogs didn't want them spayed/neutered, or if they were under 4 months of age), and there were 66 dogs and cats that went into rescue groups by the end of Sunday. In total: we dealt with 222 dogs and cats in just over 60 hours! There were 46 volunteers, the picture is only of the last few that remained standing at the end! And, there were 12 rescue groups involved in taking the 66 dogs and cats that were surrendered. We, at PDCR, got Reese, Skip and the four little Flower Pups.
End picture: I saw these dogs hunting for gophers and thought it looked so cute. The white dog had her butt up in the air too, and of course moved down just as I was taking the picture. Notice the dog on the left, he is about 2 or 3 feet into the ground, only his butt up in the air.
