When Issy, a dog with severe burn wounds, was flown to Winnipeg one weekend from a remote First Nation community in Manitoba, Jonas Watson was the person to call.
The 40-year-old veterinarian arrived at the Tuxedo Animal Hospital in the middle of the night to check on Issy, who was barely responding. The next day, Dr. Watson returned to perform surgery and spent weeks nursing Issy back to health.
Dr. Watson says he believes it’s a “moral responsibility" to help animals that might not otherwise get care. “All of the animals that live share the world with us,” he says. "Animals are different than people, but they are as important as people.”
The full-time vet at the Tuxedo Animal Hospital has spent his spare time providing medical care to animals in places where access to care is scarce. He’s travelled to First Nations communities holding spay-and-neuter clinics to help address the dog overpopulation problem in Manitoba. His work has taken him to remote villages in Madagascar and Mexico. As a result of his dedication to the well-being of animals, he was one of six people to receive a Global Animal Welfare Award in Costa Rica in April.
Dr. Watson treats mostly dogs and cats at the hospital, but has also provided care to snakes, ferrets and goldfish. “If somebody comes in with a sick budgie, even if you’re a little bit outside your comfort zone, you should do what you can to help that person because otherwise they may not have anywhere else to go,” says Dr. Watson, who has two dogs and a cat of his own.
In 2015, he saw a post seeking volunteers for the Mad Dog Initiative, a wildlife protection and animal welfare group focusing on Madagascar, an island country off the coast of East Africa. That summer, he hopped on a plane with some students to lead a spay-and-neuter clinic there.
After Dr. Watson came home, he realized there was a need for his services locally, especially in isolated First Nations communities in Manitoba.
Dr. Watson says that dog overpopulation is a problem in the province and quality of life for some of the animals is worsened by the cold climate, where newborn puppies can freeze to death. He adds that unvaccinated dogs can spread diseases to humans, and that sometimes stray dogs can harm humans. Some First Nation band councils have resorted to what Dr. Watson calls “shoot days,” where stray dogs are killed to control the population.
“It’s become sort of a passion of mine and slowly, but surely, trying to chip away at the problem of animals not getting the care they need,” he says.
His passion took him to a small First Nation community in northern Manitoba called Wasagamack, where wildfires broke out in the summer of 2017, forcing residents to leave without their pets. Dr. Watson was one of the two veterinarians who travelled there to treat hundreds of dogs. Within two weeks of the evacuations, he was on the island with the air thick with smoke. Some animals had already died from starvation, but many of them roamed around hungry for food.
For four days, Mr. Watson along with a team from Save A Dog Network Canada (SADN) – an organization that provides veterinary services to First Nation communities in Manitoba – carried water in rubber bins and garbage bags to a local resident’s home set up as a base for providing medical care to animals.
In one case, “Jonas [was] on his knees and he [was] doing surgery on a dog on a woman’s kitchen table,” says Katie Powell, founder and president of SADN.
In some cases, Dr. Watson has helped to train vets in regions where care is hard to come by. In Madagascar, he worked with a local vet named Tsiky Rajaonarivelo. Dr. Watson saw that she was keen to learn, so the following year he arranged to have her fly to Winnipeg for more training, so she could take over the Mad Dog initiative’s clinic.
“As a young vet who didn’t have much experience, it was normal to be scared," Ms. Rajaonarivelo says in French, from Madagascar. “But after [Dr. Watson] came, he taught me how to perform surgery, which gave me confidence to do the best I could because I was going to be responsible the next year."
In July, Dr. Watson is returning to Churchill, Man., a community he’s visited twice a year with the Tuxedo Animal Hospital since 2013. He already has 74 patients lined up to see him, says Patricia Kandiurin, a municipal official in Churchill who helps to organize the visits. Appointments can be for anything from spays and neuters, to “general checkups, lumps, bumps, nail trims [and] grooming,” she says. “He’s a great asset here.”
There are fees for the services, but Dr. Watson says much of it is subsidized or is free. “Every time he comes up, the schedule is pretty much full,” Ms. Kandiurin adds.
For Dr. Watson, the work itself is the reward. “Looking at animals who’ve [endured] terrible hardships, but they’ve come out completely emotionally and physically well again, that’s as much success as one can ever hope for.”