Meet the roving vets who care for the horses in rural Mexico

LAS PALMITAS, Mexico — Pedro Parra was standing next to his horse when the animal fell to the ground under the weight of the anesthesia. His four hooves chattered for a moment, then stopped and a team of volunteer vets rushed in. One of them put a pillow under the patient’s neck; another tied a rope around a back foot and lifted it.

Their job was to castrate the stallion – a necessary operation to prevent the animal from becoming uncontrollable and posing a danger to the owner and other animals. “He got a little fidgety around the mares,” said Mr. Parra. “He didn’t feel comfortable anymore.” Within an hour, seven more horses were lying on the piece of land behind the town’s church, slowly awakening from their operations.

Mr. Parra turned 34 that day. As soon as his companion woke up, he took the animal home, where it helped plow the milpa – rows of corn, beans and squash – on his family’s farm.

Mr. Parra’s stallion was one of 813 patients, including donkeys, horses and mules, who were neutered, dewormed, vaccinated or otherwise treated during a weeks-long itinerant veterinary clinic in Mexico’s Guanajuato state.

The campaign was organized by the Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service, or RVETS, a program that since 2010 has sent volunteer specialists and veterinary students to provide free care in remote areas of Mexico, Nicaragua and the United States where veterinarians are scarce.

“In the equine veterinary industry, no one else cares about all the rural animals,” says Dr. Victor Urbiola, Director of RVETS Mexico. “That’s why we focus on them.”

But RVETS does more than vaccinate animals or fix their teeth. The group has also changed the way people interact with the horses, mules and donkeys they rely on to fetch water, plow fields, compete or go to school.

At the clinic, Brenda Arias and Martín Cuevas Jr., both veterinary students, cautiously approached two mares and a foal. Syringes in hand, the students prepared to squirt a pale yellow liquid — the antiparasitic drug ivermectin — into the animals’ mouths. Some country horses, unfamiliar with people other than their owners, “don’t even let themselves be touched,” Ms. Arias said.

What to do then? “Seduce them,” Mr. Cuevas said. “Talk to them nicely, pet them” – an unfamiliar tactic for an earlier generation.

Raised in a family of Mexican horsemen, or charros, Dr. Urbiola that inflicting pain and fear was the way to dominate or break a horse. If he had seen a horse being petted, Dr. Urbiola, he would have laughed. José Estrada, the deputy vet at the clinic, blamed “our macho culture” for that negative attitude.

Juan Godínez, the elected deputy for the Las Palmitas community, said before RVETS, some owners would weld a horse’s legs and head and castrate the animal with a knife. “So, à la ‘Viva México’, without anesthesia,” Mr. Godínez said. It was not uncommon for an animal to bleed to death or die of infection.

The RVETS clinic also fills a gap in veterinary training. In vet schools in Mexico and elsewhere, “there is less and less emphasis on horses in favor of other things like companion animals, dogs and cats,” said Eric Davis, who founded RVETS with his wife, Cindy Davis, in a telephone interview.

“What they teach you in school is a third of what rural life is really like,” says Dereck Alejandro Morín, 24, a veterinary student who volunteers with RVETS. Many students graduate without ever touching a horse. In the clinic it’s all hands-on.

Mr. Morín retired from a career in medicine last year after training at RVETS Mexico. “I do it for them, for the horses,” he said. But a conversation with Estefanía Alegría that week convinced him that he also does it for owners like her.

Ms. Alegría, 33, and her son, Bruno, traveled an hour from their home in the hills, which has no electricity or running water, to visit the clinic in Jalpa. Her husband, like most of their neighbors, had crossed the border to send money back from Texas. “Everyone’s gone,” she said. Now she and her children depend on their donkey – a 13-year-old animal with a crooked ear – and a horse named Sombra for almost everything.

Her story, said Dr. Urbiola, resonated with one of its core missions: to care for animals “who are either worth very little or nothing at all, but whose value to human life is inestimable.”

It’s not an easy task. Obtaining funds for the annual campaigns has proved difficult. “When I approach the government, they say: ‘What for? I mean, donkeys are worthless,” said Dr. Urbiola.

Then there are safety concerns. In 2019, RVETS Mexico decided to stop traveling to communities around Xichú, Guanajuato, on the advice of local contacts who warned them that homicides had risen sharply there.

Yet, said Dr. Urbiola, “if we can help even one donkey carrying 80 kilos of water for an old woman, all our effort will be totally worth it.”

Victor J. Blue reporting contributed.