Vets Beyond Borders Australia

Published 28 Mar 2011

Large animal program investigative project and non-surgical sterilization of male street dogs

February –March 2011

Report by Peter Howe, VBB President

Two of us, John Hyland and Peter Howe, travelled to Bihar India and based ourselves at a major Leprosy and Tuberculosis Hospice at Bodhgaya in the Gaya District. The centre provides government licensed leprosy, tuberculosis, reproductive health, AIDS awareness and vaccination programs to over 3000 Bihar villages, as well as providing village school education for children in some remote villages and an animal care program. The total population of people assisted by the MAITRI Charitable Trust that runs the Centre is approximately 22 million; with the majority of the people coming from the lowest of castes.

Our first mission on this trip was to further investigate ways that VBB might further become involved in assisting the improvement in large animal and working animal welfare in developing countries.

Photo: Peter Howe in the villages

The large animals differ significantly from our street dogs in that they have owners, and represent the sum total of the wealth of most families. As volunteer veterinarians we need to be invited to examine and treat these animals. By necessity we have to have a liaison person who not only establishes the leads to the large and working animals that need assistance, but also who can accompany the veterinarian at the time of the examination for the purpose of translation and as accurately as possible delivering the treatment plans and instructions to the animal owners. There is therefore no escaping the need to work in close association with an established organisation that is working with village people and delivering services at the grass roots level.

There is no end to the work that can be done in the villages. We treated goats, cows and water buffalo for every condition from diarrhoea to coughing and anoestrus. Many of the disease states seen were a direct result of poor nutrition. If there was to be any program introduced to lift the welfare of these animals it would be one that shows the villagers how to grow green nutritious grasses to supplement the poor rice straw based diets that they currently use. We know that legumes and the equivalent to our lucerne (alfalfa) can be grown in Bihar as we saw the production of such crops at a large-scale dairy farm that supplies bulk milk to the town of Bodhgaya.

Whilst a program aimed at improving nutrition in the large animals would have enormous benefit, the program that we feel would have major benefit to public health would be tuberculosis control in cattle and water buffalo. Of the people presenting to the MAITRI hospice, with symptoms of weight loss and coughing, 5-6% returned positive sputum tests for Mycoplasma tuberculosis. We saw numerous cases like this and confirmed their positive sputum tests.

History tells us that in Australia the control of TB did not occur until the disease in dairy cattle was addressed and a national testing campaign was carried out. The disease in cattle is caused by M.bovis, but they can also harbour the human strain of the bacterium. Pasteurisation of milk also helped in the control of this and other diseases in man in Australia.

There are over 4000 active cases of Leprosy being managed by the MAITRI Charitable Trust. Many of these cases are being controlled with multi-antibiotic treatment. Often it is necessary to minimise the neuritis in these cases with corticosteroids. The immune suppression induced by such treatment invariably leads to the patients contracting TB when they return to their villages. TB thus has impacts other than the immediately obvious ones.

Just how many of the cattle and water buffalo are affected in Bihar is unknown. With over 3000 villages with milking animals supplying raw unpasteurised milk to villagers, testing all buffalo and cows would be a mammoth task. A viable alternative would be to conduct a case control study using the human patients presenting to the MAITRI hospice, in order to focus on the more highly suspect animals. TB testing of the cattle and buffalo in these better defined areas could then be carried out with trained field workers carrying out the testing under veterinary supervision.

The major issue facing any program like this is what to do with the positive reactor animals given that euthanasia is out of the question. Some paid substitution scheme of healthy for diseased animals might be developed. In the worst case scenario where such animals are retained in the milk supply chain, at the least, education of the owner(s) could become the focus of the effort to ensure that the milk from such animals is boiled prior to consumption. This at least would serve to reduce the Effective Reproductive Number for the disease and perhaps turn things towards an endemic rather than an epidemic.

Getting to start such a project is a very slow process but once started the project could be carried out at very little cost to VBB (animal substitution schemes excluded). At this last visit we were able to move one step closer to being able to carry out the case control study.

Our other major exercise regarding large animals was to survey the working ponies in the area. Most of these are located in town and are employed pulling carts for carrying people and commercial goods. We were able to examine a representative number of these animals by offering free dental examination and treatment if necessary. To our surprise the ponies were in remarkably good condition especially for their ages. Many
ponies were said to be 4 or 5 years old when in fact they were well over 20 years old. (Horse trading practices are obviously alive and well in Bihar as in other parts of the world!) Their dental health was good and they were relatively parasite free. We were also surprised by the large proportion of these ponies that were stallions.

 Photo: John Hyland in the field.

The second major mission for the trip was to introduce non-surgical sterilization of male dogs into a large-scale ABC-AR program. Our trip was scheduled so as to coincide with an ABC-AR program that ran for 2 weeks. During this time 251 street dogs were sterilized and vaccinated against rabies. 45.8% of the dogs were females, most of whom had produced puppies. This contrasts significantly with the 20% females incidence in previous programs run in this area at the same time of year.

It could be well argued that the increase in the proportion of females is a direct result of the several previous ABC-AR programs run in the area. There is a noticeable reduction in the numbers of street dogs in the town area, and those that are there are generally in good body condition with minimal skin diseases. With a greater availability of food sources, more females are able to withstand the stresses and rigors of producing and rearing litters of pups.

The ABC-AR program was run by an Indian government veterinarian and we were astounded to see the lack of sterile technique, etc employed, yet no deaths occurred. Perhaps this was due to the vigorous antibiotic therapy post-operatively for up to 7 days. Our surgical sterilizations of females performed with the best possible methods for the prevailing conditions did not seem to fare any better than those sterilized by the “less ideal” method, although there were certainly no wound breakdowns with our technique in contrast to numerous wound breakdowns with the alternative. The experience further highlighted the great need for our Vet-Train programs.

Non-surgical sterilization of the males using an intra-testicular injection of a buffered zinc chloride solution under strict administration protocol proved to be a quick, relatively painless and certainly atraumatic method. 24 hours post-sterilization there was minimal pain and swelling of the genitals and the dogs without exception were able to be released; although most were observed for a full 3 days. The technique lends itself to treatment and immediate release.

We were unable to convince the local workers to accept ear tattooing as a means of identifying the non-surgically treated dogs for reasons associated with the difficulty in recognising already sterilized dogs from a distance. Instead, we had to use the traditional ear notching method which necessitated deeper sedation than would otherwise be necessary. Making the ear notch is arguably the most painful part of the whole process whether it is for surgical or non-surgical methods.

The non-surgical intra-testicular injection method of sterilization can be carried out under veterinary supervision by trained veterinary nurses. We trained one such nurse this year and he was then able to very efficiently carry out the procedure. Large-scale male sterilization programs can be carried out at very little expense. Such programs will certainly have their place in many areas.

It was our initial intention to screen a number of the street dogs involved in the ABC-AR program for Ehrliciosis and Theileriosis, both of which are known zoonoses.  Unfortunately our reagents to enable the screening did not arrive in time for this to occur. During our stay we examined and treated numerous dogs for a variety of illnesses, including pyometron, otitis externa, salivary sialocoele (surgically corrected) and a myriad of external parasite induced skin conditions. One dog presented with collapse and cardiomyopathy. We were able to confirm that the dog was suffering from Trypanosomiasis, a protozoan Tsetse fly (but many biting insects) borne parasite that is known to cause African Sleeping Sickness in man. This disease is the second greatest killer of humans in Africa and apparently causes more deaths than the AIDS virus. We were able to screen a number of dogs for the trypanosomes with Leishman stained blood smears but found no other cases. This finding further confirms the great importance of the street dogs as a source of zoonotic infections.

Our work was made more productive by very generous donations of drugs and medicines for large animal use by Jurox Laboratories. Small animal drugs and supplies were donated by West Gosford and Leslie Street Veterinary Clinics. Equine Veterinary Dental Supplies of Grafton, NSW made an unbelievably generous donation of state-of-the art dental instruments, lights and mouth gags for use in the ponies and Thai Airways generously gave us 40kg excess baggage allowance. We are indebted to these businesses and companies.

Peter Howe
VBB President.