Worldwide Veterinary Service

9 O’Clock in Gran Canaria

In 2002 I carried out my first trip for the Kismet Account as “Team Leader”, to the resort of Puerto Rico in Gran Canaria. On that visit I accidentally met Muriel Alberta Mae and Brian Baptist, an American couple with a local yacht chandlery and brokerage business on the island.

I suppose this meeting truly was “Kismet” because Brian and Muriel (or B & M) were to play a big part in the work of our group in this island over the next few years. Both of them had worked – privately – to help neuter stray and feral cats around their homes for a number of years – using borrowed traps and paying for the surgery themselves at the clinic run by local veterinarian Dr Javier Castellano Vergara.

At the end of this first visit, B & M saw the potential that a group like ours had for GC. We jointly organised a further three teams over the next couple of years, but always found that it was difficult to be sure of getting the accommodation space and operating venue until very last minute, in the block-booked tourist south of the island. This in turn meant that the cost of air fares was extremely high as we had to wait till last minute to book, and we lost several keen volunteers who couldn’t wait till last minute to book. However as each project progressed we gained more and more local support – town hall approval and facilities on each trip, local Canarian volunteers, town hall staff helping trap cats. This was a major achievement and one that many groups similar to ours still do not entertain because of the misguided – and somewhat racist – view that Spanish people don’t care.

This became the major factor in deciding to turn our attention to working on a different part of the island. The other factor was Adelheid Groos – “The Frau” – and her friend Jose Luis Alvarez, who had almost single-handedly “cleaned up” large parts of Maspalomas in the south of feral cat colonies by systematic trapping and neutering and were now beginning to turn their attentions to Puerto Rico. In October last year Muriel contacted me to raise the possibility of carrying out a sterilisation programme around the town of San Nicolas de Tolentino. This is a small town sitting near the west coast of the circular island – almost at 9 O’Clock on the clock face, hence the title of this article.

To cut a very long story short we managed to get together a superb team mostly comprised of Canarian residents with some help from the UK, and funding from the Fundacion Canaria de Proteccion des Animales. Four local vets – Javier, his assistant Ancor, and Guillermo and Camino, volunteered their services free of charge for between 4 and 6 days each, with Javier and Ancor having to face 3 hours of travelling to get to the clinic each day from their respective homes, while Camino clocked in for work around 5 am each morning to spay for 4 hours before going on to open her clinic at 9am. From the UK came Sonia Ferre Jorda and Jose Fernandez Pena, Spanish qualified vets working in the south of the UK, and Jane Butler VN. My co-trapper was a Kismet veteran, my former work colleague Geoff Hancock, who luckily for me shares my warped sense of humour and also speaks several European languages. No other similar group from Britain has managed to get this kind of project going – local vets working for free – and we are very pleased to have been the pioneers in this, as we have been in so many other things in this field previously.

The local Town Hall at San Nicolas provided a disused school for us to work in – which was ideal as it met all the requirements we look for in a venue – including rooms for storing the cats pre and postoperatively behind double doors and a small room to operate in. B & M’s staff from the yachting company had helped clean up the joint and provided lights and wiring in the op room. Dolores (Loli) – the local government vet – had helped co-ordinate and liase with feeders and introduced all the trappers to each site to be covered. The Town Hall also found us somewhere to stay – a youth hostel in town where we looked after superbly and made many friends.

This was the first trip for me in a long while where I wasn’t the effective team leader and only had responsibility for some of the organising. It meant that I could get on and do what I enjoy most, and to some extent do best – trapping cats. Over the next few days myself and Geoff, with a local long-term volunteer Alejandro Dis, trapped pretty much every cat in the 5 sites we were covering – I think for the 110 cats trapped there were only about 5 we couldn’t get. Frustratingly I was personally 3 cats short of my trapping “century” – rumours of me trawling the streets of San Nicolas late on the last trapping night for just 3 cats were grossly exaggerated.

Meanwhile Adelheid – “The Frau” – and Jose Luis were also trapping in the neighbourhood and Jose Luis was almost on fire trying to pull in as many cats as he could. We’ve never been that competitive (honest) but at the end of each project we’ve always pulled in similar numbers of cats so I suppose there might be a tiny bit of rivalry there!

At then end of the week 231 cats were sterilised with no major disasters – every cat going back to the right spot, no escapes, and the four wound breakdowns we saw all being caught again and restitched. The project was very challenging because San Nicolas is not a cosmopolitan tourist community like the areas we and other groups work in in GC, Tenerife and Fuerte, but an agrarian community based on small livestock and fruit growing. Neutering of stray cats has never been carried out in this town before and there remains strong cultural resistance to the work in some quarters – barriers which are beginning to tumble when the health of the cats following surgery is seen.

I would like to thank all those who took part, there were so many that naming them would take forever, but they know who they are and most gave up a week of their lives, and most of their sleep time, to help us. Kismet Account has become one of the most productive cat neutering charities from the UK in recent years, carrying out 6 trips in 4 sites last year, with a further four scheduled for 2005. We have achieved this by controlling our expenditure and focusing it on essential costs – which we figure is what the people who donated the money want us to spend it on. This means that if you volunteer with us you won’t get your flight paid for – but what you will get is plenty of down time, a reasonable number of animals to treat, the equipment to do a proper job, and at least one full day to take in the sites where we stay. As our next trip is booked with 100% return volunteers (several WVS members), we figure we must be doing something right – but we always welcome new volunteers who can contact me through WVS or visit the website at http://kismetaccount.tripod.com.