When most of your work is with your laptop in the office; writing reports, going through accounts, planning projects and budgets and addressing staff recruitment needs, there is nothing better than a little adventure in the form of a field work trip.

Over the last couple of years with the WVS India team, I have been focusing on developing the concept of owned dog spay/neuter campaign clinics as way of complementing the traditional, shelter-based and stray-dog focused ABC program approach. The reasons why we have taken this approach are multiple and some of them have been explored in my previous posts.

However, one that has not received much attention yet is how such campaign clinics can provide an excellent way for veterinarians who spend their days mostly doing non-clinical work (like me), to keep up their surgery skills. Some might benefit of this simply as a refreshing change while some might be having ideas of perhaps setting up a small private practice later on and some might want to do that for earning little extra income while same time helping their community to keep the roaming dog population under control. Whatever the reason might be, just keep doing it. There is such a huge need to keep spaying dogs in India!

However, such campaign clinics of course will require some preparation and preparedness from the veterinarian’s part. You don’t need lot of fancy and expensive equipment but you do need of course instrument sets, surgical drapes and an autoclave. The idea of our Access to vet care – online shop is to make these basic instruments and equipment easily available for also those vets who might not be working in an established clinic but who would like to start with a small scale private practice with simple and minimal investment.

When it comes to surgery tables, you can do lot with just hired catering tables, adjusting their height with bricks to fit your own requirements (trust me – I have done lot of surgeries on hired catering tables and I am 185cm tall!), but if you are ready to take the next step in ensuring that you get to operate from a comfortable height, then our adjustable height, FOLDABLE surgery table, designed by my colleque Dr Ganesh, who is very experienced in setting up owned dog campaign clinics in a variety of facilities,  is the right thing for you. Yes, indeed it is FOLDABLE. Why is that important, you might ask? Well, exactly so that vets who want to do spay/neuter once in a while on such campaign clinics, could easily transport and store the table. The tables I made of stainless steel and it has a stand for your IV fluid bag as well. This is a product that we have received some requests for and have now made a small stock available.

And indeed, this month I was able to have a refreshing one week in Puttur, Karnataka, operating owned dogs on a campaign clinic by WVS India, Mact and Holy Cow Foundation.  Having three vets operating on three tables at a time, we operated 131 dogs, 128 of them females in 6 days. Not quite able to beat my record from 10 years ago with Mission Rabies campaign in Goa where I operated 18 dogs a day (and this was of course far from the superhero vets of that time who went up to even 40 per day). Getting bit rusty it seems. That is why it is good to go about and keep spaying. To not to get rusty.