We started the morning with a few dogs showing up for deworming, a goat which had aborted, and 2 dogs shot with huge, metal, barbed arrows by ‘would be’ raiders during the night. One arrow was retrieved; the other went all the way through the dog. Incredibly they were just flesh wounds in the backs and did not enter the chest or abdomen. They were already infested with maggots (knew you’d want that detail) but we expect them to recover with our treatments (antiseptic flush, antibiotics, and something to kill the maggots).
We were approached by some boys on the street who had been hunting birds with a sling shot. They eat them as a protein source to supplement their starchy diet. They wanted to sell this one to us Muzungo’s (Ugandan for ‘white people’). It was a beautiful green and blue bird called a Rufous Crowned Roller (Liz always has her bird book with her). We hated to see such a gorgeous bird get eaten and it only had a broken wing so we paid the requested 2000 shillings (a little less than $1US) and took it home. We made a nice wire cage for it and named it Corey. It seems quite happy being fed crickets, geckos and sugar water.
In the afternoon we made the trek back to Iriiri to treat more TVT dogs – about 7 I think. One female dog, who should have weighed about 30 lbs. instead of the 20, was in very sorry shape with a HUGE vulvar mass. Liz was not sure it was worth trying to treat her but they don’t euthanize their dogs here and wanted us to try. When we spayed her she had a mass on one uterine horn about the size of a large lemon. Another male had a ‘debulking’ surgery done and the rest were just treated with Vincristine. We always spayed and castrated the TVT dogs so they would not continue spreading the disease. Iriiri seems to have many cases of TVT and we were told about many dogs that had died of it. Julia and Heidi were doing so well at their tasks we let them each perform a castration under careful supervision. This was a highlight for them and they did a great job. Julia did her surgery last thing and got to finish the second half in the rain. Our host was again Alfred, from 2 days ago. He served us lunch before we started and dinner when we were done. It is considered very rude not to eat at someone’s home when it is offered and the food was good but was enough for about 10 people, not 4. Val insisted we had to finish most of it or they would think we did not like it. So part of our ‘work’ was stuffing ourselves with as much cassava as we could without exploding!
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