The Krabi Animal Welfare mobile sterilization clinic moves to the villages

I say it often: The most important thing that can be done for the homeless animal population is to get as many of them as possible sterilized. Hundreds of years ago, it was likely as evolutionary necessity for dogs and cats to replicate as much as possible in order to ensure the survival of the species. Those days are long behind us though but the habits have stayed the same. Because of this stray animals replicate like crazy and this simply results in a great deal of suffering for these animals because they no longer have a bunch of predators and the pack simply dies out slowly and painfully through disease, parasites, and starvation.

In an ideal world I suppose we would just provide them all with plenty of food and round-the-clock medical care but this is untenable because an extremely healthy pack of cats or dogs simply replicates even faster until whatever food and health care that is being provided is no longer sufficient. Just like they say in Jurassic Park, "life finds a way."

This particular mobile clinic took us to the village of Lampho,a place that does have access to veterinarian care, but the people tend to not do this as this is a relatively poor area.

We advertised the mobile clinic as being primarily for sterilization, but also would tend to other problems if someone turned up with a cat or dog with health issues. One major aspect of this project is not just to reduce the possibility of a population explosion down the line, but also to educate the locals about how important it is that dogs and cats get this sort of treatment. One only need go to a market in Lampho to see that they too have a ton of stray animals that are in terrible shape health-wise, and they are this way because there are far too many of them. Sterilization is the only way forward without doing some sort of culling, which I would prefer to not have happen and a majority of Buddhists that comprise the majority of this country feel the same way.

Here you can see a bunch of cats sleeping off the anesthesia, don't worry, they are all fine. We have never had an accidental death at any of these clinics.

A big part of this was our attempts to get the school children involved in the process because they are the ones that we want most to understand the importance of what it is that we are doing here. They readily accepted little jobs that we gave them and were all quite happy to be involved in what we were doing.

Other members of our staff and volunteers helped to make sure that there were escapees or mixup as to where the animals needed to be returned to after treatment. Everything went according to plan and it went very smoothly.

In the end we sterilized 90 cats and 33 dogs, most of which were female because if you have to choose which to sterilize, it is much more important to "fix" the females since they can produce up to 10 babies a year and those babies end up being capable of having their own babies after less than a year as well.

This was a big success and the community was curious and attentive about what we were doing there. The education side of things is perhaps more important than the actual sterilizations because with just a bit of knowledge, these kids will realize how important this action is in the future when they grow up and perhaps have pets of their own.

If you would like to see how you can help out or simply spread the word, please visit our website at

http://krabianimalwelfare.org