3/5/06 Start of a new week

This past week got back to normal, sort of, once the Puppy Angels took off. I was more involved with the groups of students coming to the GSPCA, was back to seeing clients and performing just a few spays and neuters for the week. But this week also brought in several animals that had been hit by cars. These cases are particularly hard for me because I can’t do any orthopedics at the clinic so many of these cases have to be referred to the University. Much of the time the owner cannot afford treatment at the University so some of these animals get euthanized depending on the specific problems. One non-orthopedic case was a cat with a ruptured urinary bladder, left inguinal hernia, and a right side body wall hernia with several loops of intestine exposed; I’ll save you the gory photos. We took that cat into surgery and spent a while trying to repair the damage. As I was finishing up, unfortunately the cat’s heart stopped which we couldn’t get started again.









So to start the new week, I went with some friends to Mt. Carmel water falls just south of Grenville early this morning. These are the best waterfalls that I’ve been to yet on Grenada. Since it was so early in the day, we were the only people around for at least an hour and then some local kids showed up. Under the big falls was a nice pool where we relaxed for a while and enjoyed the sun. Then we hiked down to the lower falls. On the way home we stopped at Grand Etang Lake for a small picnic.

This would have been a really great day except for a phone call that I received from a student earlier in the trip. Apparently, that morning some students found that one of the dogs that hung around the beach at Grand Anse campus had been hit by a car. So once we reached home I got to go over to the dorm and see this dog. Well as it appeared, the dog had not been hit by a car but had been mauled by another dog (or three). Poor guy was in bad shape so the students elected to put him down. Again, I’ll save you the gory photos.

So with this dog, this new week did not have a very auspicious beginning.

2/27/06 Bye-bye Puppy Angels

I took the group to the airport this morning to send them back to snowy New Hampshire. From the left are Sherry, Linda, Dean (the veterinarian), Kim, and myself. They worked incredibly hard during the four days in the clinic and then got too much sun on their two down days but I think that they had a good time in Grenada.

They also took two hitchhikers back with them. Smiley has a fractured acetabulum which has already started to heal incorrectly so he will require a femoral head and neck ostectomy (removal of the head of the femur) in order to be comfortable for the rest of his life. Asha is pretty healthy but her mange seems to be coming back and will require more treatment. These two dogs, as well as many others from Antigua, will be treated at Dean’s veterinary hospital and then go on to the good life in a loving home in New Hampshire!

2/25/06 The Last Day of Puppy Angels

Look at that board! That is a list of all the animals that were sterilized today; 36 animals spayed or neutered today for a grand total of 124 in just 4 days! That was a gigantic effort and, thanks to the well oiled machine of Puppy Angels, it was a monumental success. Every single animal that walked in walked out to their appreciative owners. Educating the people on this island about how to take good care of their animals is a slow process (like a glacier at times) but the fact that so many animals were brought into this clinic is a testament that some people are getting the message. By sterilizing so many animals this week, we have helped to alleviate the suffering of not only these animals but also many unwanted litters of puppies and kittens in the future.

And if that wasn’t enough to make me feel good, look who came back! He doesn’t have his eyelid sutured shut as I had predicted back on 9 December but the eye is still in the socket.

To refresh your memory see the photo to your left. This pompek was attacked but his larger house mate causing his left eye to pop out of the orbit (proptosis). I placed the globe back into the orbit and sutured the lids together. He came in for a one week recheck but never came back the following week to have the sutures removed but I presume that the owner did that himself. There is a large area of pigment and scarring on the center of the cornea so I’m not sure how visual he is out the eye but it still moves in synch with the right eye. Best of all though, he is comfortable and cosmetically he is still a good looking dog!

2/23/06 Puppy Angels

Well, they’re slowly killing me. The Puppy Angels group is great and they are working incredibly hard but it has been a ton of work. In two days we have spayed and neutered almost 50 dogs (a few cats were mixed in there too)! Today is a down day for the team but someone still has to mind the store so here I am.










This group was started several years ago by Sherry (the woman in the first photo) when she took a trip to island of Antigua to visit her in-laws. The group started by bringing a couple of dogs a month from the Antigua to New Hampshire where they worked to get the dogs healthy and then adopted. This has gone on for several years and has now gotten to the point where they adopt a couple hundred dogs from Antigua every year. Last year was the first time that they took a team to the island to perform a spay/neuter clinic which was hugely successful. This year they decided to come to Grenada and as you may have gleaned from reading this blog, the animals of Grenada are in need of a large amount of help!

2/20/06 Another Trip Home

When the Pegasus Foundation bought my original plane ticket to Grenada, the latest date for which we could buy a return ticket was in February. That turned out to be perfect because one of my best friends from vet school, Jen, had set a date for her wedding in early February.

Jen and Paul, another vet school classmate, got hitched on 11 February 2006 at the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington Delaware. It was a great ceremony, I gave a reading during the ceremony (but that’s not all that made it great), and it was so much fun to get together with so many classmates.



Additionally, I was lucky to get about 2 feet of snowfall to enjoy while I was in Baltimore. You know, it just gets so boring here in Grenada when it is sunny and hot all the time and you have to go to the beach for a swim in the beautiful, clear, turquoise water to cool off!!

I arrived back in Grenada earlier today but I’ll be heading back to the airport tonight to pick up a group called Puppy Angels. This is a group of one vet and several vet nurses from New Hampshire who will be here this week to spay and neuter as many dogs as humanly possible! I only hope that I can survive the week.

1/29/06 My Red Cap

This weekend I participated in the La Source Grenada Sailing Festival. Peter asked me to be a crew member on his boat Gans again (I guess this means I didn’t royally screw up during the last regatta). We had several races on Friday, Saturday, and today. There is more racing tomorrow but even though I am volunteering, I still feel that I can’t take off too much time from the GSPCA so I will be working (damn work ethic) :-(

We did as well as could be expected with Gans; we finished low on the list most of the time but we did take a third place in one race. Most importantly, however, I was given a coveted Mount Gay Rum Red Cap!! Unless you are part of or around a sailing community you have no idea what these red caps mean. One can only get a cap if you were a crew member during a Mount Gay Rum Racing Series and they only give out a few per boat. I have heard of heated arguments, fights, divorces, and loss of teeth and limbs due to the possession (or lack thereof) of these hats! Well, perhaps I exaggerate a bit but I have been looking forward to getting a red cap all the same.










In addition to the cruising and racer regatta there is the Grenada Workboat Regatta. This was similar to the one that I attended in Carriacou last July. Everyone seems to put so much work into these wooden boats and the entire crowd went crazy when each race came close to the finish. This was a really awesome part of Grenada to see!

1/25/06 Billfish Tournament

This week the 37th Annual Spice Island Billfish Tournament got underway. There wasn't too much luck until today. Word spread quickly up the hill to the GSPCA that there was a record setting Marlin coming in to the Grenada Yacht Club so we took a quick fieldtrip! It took the guy over an hour to reel the fish in and it was so big that they had to tie it to the boat to tow it into the harbor. Here is a photo of this Billfish Tournament record setting 669 lb. Marlin.

1/21/06 Time to Relax

I was invited to take a Saturday off to go for a little cruise. Geoff met this guy, Arthur, who owns a couple of boats that he is fixing up to sell over at the Prickley Bay Marina. Arthur is currently broke so he was looking to make a bit of money and we were looking to have some fun. We took off around 9 am with such a good wind that we only put up the jib and had a comfortable sail around Point Saline to Flamingo Bay.

Several of us brought our fishing rods so Geoff and I trolled some lines behind the boat. We parked the boat in Flamingo Bay for about 6 hours, lounge around, went swimming, and drank several Caribs.

During that time I finally caught my first fish worth anything; a small jack! On the way back while trolling I also caught a small Barracuda that I sent back. We finally returned to the marina at about 9:30pm. We all had a great time and you just couldn’t beat the price!

1/15/06 The Professor

All of my visitors have left me and now I have been presented with a whole new challenge at the GSPCA. Since I arrived, I have been fortunate to have several students come over and volunteer once or twice a week, which has been a tremendous help to me. But towards the end of last year, the University approached the GSPCA and me about having students come over to our clinic on an official basis.

When the University started the vet school back in 1999 they approached the GSPCA to join in a partnership. The GSPCA was the only clinic on the island at the time and the Veterinary Teaching Hospital (VTH) came in to renovate the building where they remained until Hurricane Ivan seriously damaged the building in September 2004. The VTH took that opportunity to leave the GSPCA which is located in St. George’s and move to True Blue which is right next to the University campus.

Since then, the relationship with the SGU/VTH and the GSPCA has been…how can I put this delicately?…Not good! There were some issues with the method in which the VTH moved out of the building and with exactly how the insurance money was spent (one clue - not on fixing the GSPCA) among other things. But the University did originally put a large amount of money into this building so it only makes sense that the students should continue to get something out of that investment.

This semester the vet school has hired me to be a part-time instructor/clinician! The best part about this new partnership is that I will now be getting part-time pay…err…I mean…that we will now have first and second term veterinary students come over several times a week. I’ve found that I’ve enjoyed teaching the volunteer vet students (calculating drug doses, giving vaccines, etc.) so this will give me an even better opportunity to teach at least some basics.

I think that this new relationship is going to work out only for the best for everyone involved. Even though I’m now getting paid by the University I’m still over at the GSPCA full-time, the students get to see another clinic/shelter in operation, and the vet school will start a new shelter medicine course. This also means that once I leave in July, the GSPCA will not have to rely solely on volunteer vets coming for a week or so at a time. I’d like to think that this means that all my work trying to get this place reorganized and turned back into a fully operational clinic will continue indefinitely!

I will now require everyone to address me as “Professor”!

1/5/06 A 3 Hour Tour

Melanie decided that she needed to hit the beach today to work on her tan to make everyone back home jealous. Doug, Carrie, and I, however, decided to rent a truck and check out a bit of the island (I didn’t really trust the Mecca-mobile to get us back). We drove up over the Grand Etang Road to head up the east coast to our first stop, The Grenada Chocolate Factory. We got a more extensive explanation of the whole chocolate making process than when I visited with my parents and then bought a ton of chocolate bars. Gene, the lady whose apartment I’m renting, also owns a shop in town and told me to let Edmund know she was out. As it turns out the delivery guy is off the island for a few weeks and because delivering chocolate is so very complicated, none was being delivered during this period. Even though Edmund didn’t know me from Adam, he sent me along with a couple dozen bars for Gene. Thank God they didn’t melt or I would have bought one huge amount of Grenadian Dark Chocolate!

On the road we stopped by a guy selling fresh coconuts for directions and a refreshing drink.

The next stop was the Rivers Rum Distillery. Too bad that most of the working had stopped for the holidays but we did see them bottling the 83% rum; “Slightly Overproof Rum” is on the label. I’m surprised that the stuff doesn’t eat right through the bottle!

We started back over the Grand Etang and made one more stop at the Seven Sister’s Waterfall. I had been wanting go to these falls for a while and really enjoyed the hike. Of course you can’t go anywhere around here without being hit up for some kind of donation to support the cause, whatever it may be. On the way in it was to help support the guys who lived up at the entrance to the trail and down at the falls it was to support the Grenadian Divers’ Association; just a group of guys who would jump off the falls and then try to sell you some touristy crap! Despite that, hiking through the forest was beautiful and the falls and surrounding pools were refreshing.

We finished the day with dinner back at Gene’s house. We had Doug and Melanie, Louw and Marta, and Gene with her dog Freckles over. We (and when I say “we” I mostly mean Carrie) made blackened Scarlett Snapper with some local vegetables which we all enjoyed tremendously.

After dinner we loaded up in the Mecca-mobile for the short trip back to the hotel. As I went to start the car, the clutch went right down to the floor as the clutch cable snapped. Good thing we didn’t take her out for the tour!!