Leaving Southeast Asia

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Our Global Vets summer is almost to a close! For the past 3 weeks, we've been busy tackling elephant feedings, large animal surgeries and everything in between!

First, we spent a week at the Kamphaengsaeng campus of Kasetsart University where we were lucky enough to shadow some large animal vets for a week. During that time we got to witness a surgery on a cow with an extreme abdominal hernia, piglets with an E. Coli infection, an orthopedic equine surgery, and two bovine dystochia cases - one ending in a caesarian and one with a fetotomy! First experiences for all of us! We also travelled around with a vet to local farms and saw numerous interesting cases: a cow with Bovine Leukemia Virus, an artificial insemination procedure of a cow and a cow with a babesiosis infection. We were also fortunate enough to spend some time with some visiting veterinary students from Vienna and learned all about veterinary medicine from their part of the world.

Finally we spent our last two weeks at the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre, a famous tourist attraction in the northern part of Thailand, about an hour away from Chiang Mai. The centre is home to AI - the first Asian Elephant in Southeast Asia to be successfully born from artificial insemination. While at the centre we learned a lot about conservation issues affecting the Asian Elephant in Thailand. The role of the Asian Elephant in Thai society is a complex one with implications on animal welfare, elephant conservation, local tradition as well as local industries such as logging and ecotourism.
During our stay we performed daily chores with three elephants assigned to us (and their regular mahouts) - Nammei, Sobmei and Sripri. We learned a lot just watching the interactions of the mahouts and the elephants under their care - a truly remarkable tradition that we were very lucky to see first-hand. We also helped the staff veterinarians with the daily treatments of their elephants - we cleaned out giant purulent abscesses, treated skin, eye and nail infections, tended to wounds, and also watched a tusk-molding procedure!
Towards the end, we also did presentations for the TECC staff about elephant nutrition and GIS/Remote Sensing and its applications in elephant conservation.


After a long 2 months, we are finally coming home - sore, exhausted and probably a little smelly. But still the experience was inspiring, amazing, fulfilling and absolutely worth it..

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