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LAS PALMITAS, Mexico – Pedro Parra stood by his horse as the animal fell to the ground under the weight of the anesthetic. Its four hooves flailed for a moment, then stopped, and a team of volunteer veterinarians rushed in. One is a pillow around the patient’s neck; others tied a rope around the hind legs and lifted.
His job was to cast the stallion – an operation necessary to prevent the animal from becoming uncontrollable and dangerous to the owner and other animals. “He gets a little nervous around horses,” Mr Parra said. “He’s not comfortable anymore.” Within an hour, seven more horses were in the area behind the town church, slowly waking up from surgery.
Mr. Parra was 34 years old that day. As soon as his friend woke up, he would take the animal home, where he would help plow the milpa — rows of corn, beans and squash — on his family’s farm.
Mr. Parra’s stallion was one of 813 patients, including donkeys, horses and mules, who were castrated, spayed, vaccinated or treated during the week, a mobile veterinary clinic in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico.
This campaign is organized by Rural Veterinary Teaching and Experience Services, or RVETS, a program that since 2010 has sent volunteer specialists and veterinary students to provide free treatment in remote areas of Mexico, Nicaragua and the United States where veterinarians are scarce.
“In the equine industry, no one else cares about all the animals in the countryside,” said Dr. Víctor Urbiola, director of RVETS Mexico. “That’s why we focus on them.”
But RVETS does more than vaccinate animals or fix teeth. This group has also changed the way people treat the horses, mules and donkeys they rely on to fetch water, plow the fields, ride to competitions or go to school.
At the clinic, Brenda Arias and Martín Cuevas Jr., two veterinary students, slowly approach two horses and a colt. Syringes in hand, students prepared to squirt a pale yellow liquid – the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin – into the animal’s mouth. Some rural horses, who don’t know other owners, “won’t even be touched,” Ms. Arias said.
What to do? “Seduce them,” Mr. Cuevas said. “Talk to them nicely, pet them” – a tactic unfamiliar to previous generations.
Having grown up in a family of Mexican horsemen, or charros, Dr. Urbiola was taught that pain and fear were the means to master, or destroy a horse. If he is seen petting a horse, Dr. Urbiola said, he was always ridiculed. José Estrada, the clinic’s representative veterinarian, blamed “our macho culture” for the negative attitude.
Juan Godínez, elected delegate for the community of Las Palmitas, said that before RVETS, some owners would break off the legs and heads of horses and mutilate the animals with knives. “It’s like that, à la ‘Viva México,’ without anesthesia,” Mr. Godínez said. It is not uncommon for animals to bleed to death or die from infection.
RVETS clinics also fill gaps in veterinary training. In vet schools in Mexico and elsewhere, “less and less emphasis is placed on horses in favor of others like companion animals, dogs and cats,” Eric Davis, who founded RVETS with his wife, Cindy Davis, said in a telephone interview.
“What they teach you in school is a third of life in the countryside,” said Dereck Alejandro Morín, 24, a veterinary student who volunteers with RVETS. Many students who graduate have never touched a horse. In the clinic, it’s all hands-on.
Mr. Morín left his career in medicine after training with RVETS Mexico last year. “I did it for him, for the horse,” he said. But talking to Estefanía Alegría that week convinced her that she does the same for owners like her.
Ms. Alegría, 33, and her son, Bruno, travel an hour from their home in the hills, where there is no electricity or running water, to visit a clinic in Jalpa. Her husband, like most of her neighbors, had crossed the border to send money from Texas. “Everybody’s gone,” he said. Now, she and her children rely on a donkey — a 13-year-old animal with crooked ears — and a horse named Sombra for almost everything.
The story, said Dr. Urbiola, in line with one of its core missions: to care for animals “that have little or no economic value, but whose value for human life is incalculable.”
It is not an easy task. Securing funds for the annual campaign has been very difficult. “When I knocked on the government’s door, they said, ‘What? I mean, donkeys are worthless,'” said Dr. Urbiola.
Then there is the issue of security. In 2019, RVETS Mexico decided to stop traveling to communities around Xichú, Guanajuato, on the advice of local contacts who warned that murders there were on the rise.
However, D. Urbiola said, “If we can help one donkey carrying 80 kilos of water for an old woman, all the efforts we make are worth it.”
Victor J. Blue contribute reports.
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