Nicaragua

I am now spending a week in Granada, Nicaragua on a World-vets trip. We arrived last night around 8pm - our team is comprsied of 4 vets and 4 pre-vet students. Today was a mostly relaxing first day, we had a tasty brunch (donated by a hotel) and then went to the clinic to drop off supplies we brought and set up shop. Upon entering the gates we were immediatly greeted by 5 or so excited dogs, wagging and jumping up on us. I started petting one of them on the head, which he seemed to like, then I ran my hand down his back feeling how skinny he was (very skinny) when suddenly he bit me! While he didn't really puncture my skin, he left quite a few teeth marks and chomped down hard. Interesting start to the day :) This dog it turns out, has a hole in his neck. As a puppy his owners had put a collar on him, and then he grew, and the collar didn't, cutting his trachea open. The hole is about a quarters width, right into his trachea.. He is one of the patients we will be trying to help this week.


While we weren't supposed to do any vet work today, we got in call about a horse with a broken leg someone had noticed in a field. We all piled into a pickup truck and drove out to find him, hoping that things were exagerrated, and he would just have a cut. But when we found him his front right leg was very broken, and the whole leg was swollen, and useless. He was well mannered and nice and probably only a yearling, but we had to put him down. It was a sad start to the trip. After putting him to sleep one of the vets shot him in the head - if you use euthanasia solution like in the states, it will kill any animals that may feast on the meat (ex: raptors).

We ended the day in a tour of the city by horse drawn carriage - we will be working on the carriage horses two of the days this week. Then we took a boat to some of the little islands created by a now dormant volcano.
It was a pretty full day for a day off, but I'm excited to get started tomorrow in the clinic.