Spay Neuter Swap Clinic

People in our area have set up a clinic to get strays and animals belonging to people too poor to pay spayed or neutered. I am not entirely sure how the financing works, but basically it depends on donations to operate. Business people offer their services free, and people using the clinic pay if they can and get a chit for one of the free services. The money is used to provide free services for those who need them.

I have offered a three day stay for a dog with all the same conditions that apply if I were doing it for money except that the spay-neuter clinic gets the $75.

When I stayed on the out island of Eleuthera (one of the Bahamian family islands ... and as different from places like Freeport and Nassau as it is possible to be) I adopted a stray dog that I called Chance. She was a golden colour and looked a lot like a coyote.

Chance loved, and I mean loved, puppies. She had just finished whelping when she came to us. Her dugs were still swollen and she was thin from feeding a litter. But it was her habit of stealing them and bringing them home with her that convinced me completely.

She would arrive at the house with a puppy alongside. They'd play for as long as it took for me to set off on yet another return-the-puppy trip. I'd call around to see which family had lost its puppy this time. There were only a couple of them so it didn't take long, but then we'd all three walk back along the coral roads till we arrived at the scene of the kidnapping. It usually took a fair bit of time traveling by road keeping the two dogs with me, and I often had to carry the exhausted but still wriggling puppy half way. (Chance had probably taken shortcuts unknown to me when she got him in the first place.)

Chance would cry and hang around the puppy until I attached a rope to her new collar and led her away. It was never more than a week before I'd look out and see the puppy playing on the front lawn with Chance.

When I returned to Canada I found a new owner for Chance and took her up island to Harbour Island where there was a free spay-neuter clinic. It ran on the donations and energy of a group of committed women.

Getting her there was an adventure involving a truck, a boat and a walk through streets busy with golf cart traffic that terrified Chance. Getting home involved a motorcycle ride with a prone dog sprawled across my lap as well as the boat trip and the truck ride back home to Rainbow Bay.

I helped the vet perform that spaying as well as the one that preceded it. During the first spaying, the pit bull came out of the anaesthetic and had to be re-anaesthetized. This caused some consternation around the table. I hadn't thought to worry till the vet's voice cut through the confusion, "Get her drugged now. This is the dog from hell."


During Chance's operation blood spurted everywhere, and I wiped the vet's glasses clean for her. Chance had gone into heat in the waiting room making the surgery more difficult and messier.

I am one of those people who stops to watch at an accident. I want to see for myself. I really wanted to see what happened when a dog is spayed.

I didn't expect it to be pleasant, but I was surprised by the mess of internal organs inside Chance's belly. I had grown up thinking that my reproductive system looked like those neat tidy diagrams. You know ... the ones that look like flowers on stems ... the ones the school nurse used to show the girls in health class. Chance's looked far more like a nest of writhing snakes. The vet tugged and pulled them apart as if she were untangling yarn that she didn't expect to use again.

Before she sewed up the incision she stood upright and stretched her back. This was her tenth surgery today, and the waiting room was still full. One of the women put a peppermint in her mouth.

I must have looked surprised because she said to me, "Sometimes we eat lunch while we are operating. You can get used to anything."

My reaction to all this? Not disgust. Not horror. I was just very interested. But I came away from the experience thinking that a surgeon's job was not only backbreaking, but ultimately a very boring one. How different can one dog's reproductive system be from the next? I was glad I had not fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a vet; that I had become a teacher instead.