It was nearly midnight in Kugluktuk, a fly-in community of about 1,500 on the Arctic coast, when Michelle Tuma’s four-year old patient started hemorrhaging post-operation. This dog would need a blood transfusion, and fast.
There was only one problem: the vet team didn’t have the equipment on hand to do it.
A member of the small crew that had travelled to the western Nunavut community to host a vet clinic, Tuma remembers how quickly adrenaline took over. She, like most experienced veterinarians, had done plenty of transfusions in her career. They were common—routine even—when you actually had the tools. Pressed for time, Tuma had to act quickly. So, ignoring the late hour, she called the local nurse-in-charge to see about the filtered IVs and phlebotomy bags she needed.
“She was a little bit like, ‘Do you know what time it is?’” Tuma says. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know, but this dog really needs a transfusion.’” Eventually, the nurse relented, lending the supplies crucial to the procedure.
With blood donated by another local canine just minutes before, the team was able to do the transfusion on the owner’s living room floor, bringing the dog back to stable condition. That dog is still running around the community to this day—happy, healthy, and none-the-wiser to his own near-death experience.
And so that was the time Tuma and her colleagues macgyvered a blood transfusion on the fly in Kugluktuk. With eight years in the field and hundreds of clinics in Nunavut and the NWT under her belt, Tuma’s got tales like this in spades: surgeries performed in fire halls around hoses and trucks, consultations held in classrooms with desks pushed to the side, exams conducted in wildlife dissection labs. Anywhere communities can host her, Tuma goes.
It’s all about adapting to the situation at hand, she says one sunny, late-summer morning as she drives her Chevy Silverado around Yellowknife. She’s dropping off prescriptions to clients of the house-call business she started two and a half years ago. “On my busiest day, I’ll probably see 10 to 12 patients,” Tuma says, hopping out of the truck with an armful of arthritis supplements and flea medications. “It’s at least six patients a day on a slow one. I mean, I was looking at my numbers the other day, and I’ve got over 1,000 clients right now.”
And that’s just in Yellowknife. Tuma also spends at least three months of each year travelling to remote communities across the North to provide care for dogs and cats.
Why? Because these services are desperately needed.
With its vast geography and perpetual lack of resources, the North has some serious healthcare shortcomings—and not just for people. Outside of clinics in Whitehorse, Yellowknife, and one in Dawson City, there are no veterinarians practicing in the North on a full-time basis. For residents outside these hubs, seeing the vet entails either a pricey flight or hours of driving. To many, that simply isn’t feasible. So, most pets make do without veterinary care.
As president of the Iqaluit Humane Society (recently renamed Nunavut Animal Rescue) for the past 11 years, Janelle Kennedy knows this all too well. “There’s no end to the sad stories I could tell you,” she says. “I could probably give you PTSD in about 15 minutes.”
Vet services in Iqaluit have always been “touch-and-go,” as Kennedy puts it. The city’s sole clinic relies entirely on the availability of loc*ms, which makes appointment access spotty and emergency care impossible. Without someone to call in a moment of panic, residents reach out to the next best thing: the rescue and its volunteers.
Kennedy isn’t a veterinarian, but she gets messages at all hours of the day—when someone’s dog gets hit by a car or eats a package of chocolate-covered raisins. Whatever the problem, Kennedy is usually the one responding. “I have a whole cupboard dedicated to pet first aid,” she says. There’s activated charcoal and hydrogen peroxide for poisoning. Olive oil and honey for burns. Saline solution for cleaning wounds and bandages for wrapping them. Kennedy refers to these as the basics.
Yet there’s only so much Kennedy can do as a non-medical professional. If a case is beyond her level of expertise, she’s scrambling to call emergency vets in Ottawa and helping the pet’s owners get their dog on the next plane south. Then, she says, you just pray they’ll get there in time and pull through. “It’s heartbreaking to watch and not be able to do anything,” Kennedy says somberly.
It’s a similar story at the NWT SPCA. Former vice-president Dana Martin can’t even count all the times she’s personally rushed an animal in crisis off a plane from the far North and into Yellowknife’s Great Slave Animal Hospital. In the decade she spent on the board, she says she must have fielded hundreds of calls from families throughout the NWT and Nunavut asking for help. Often, she admits, it felt like she "had the weight of the world on [her] shoulders."
These scenarios play out time and time again in communities all over the North. Even basic preventative care like spay-and-neuter surgeries and vaccinations can be hard to get, which ends up causing bigger problems—feral dogs, the rapid spread of disease—down the road.
Tuma recalls a particularly sobering experience during a trip to the NWT’s Beaufort Delta region in the winter of 2021. There had been a rabies outbreak amongst local dogs the year before and Tuma traveled to Tuktoyaktuk and Sachs Harbour with the NWT’s chief veterinary officer to administer vaccines. (The rabies virus is endemic to foxes in the region, making such outbreaks somewhat common.)
“I met a family that used sled dogs to go hunting,” she remembers, “and when I asked how old one of them was, they said, ‘Oh, he’s five. He’s the oldest dog we’ve ever had. Usually, our dogs will get bit by a fox, then we’ll have to put them down.’”
That stopped Tuma in her tracks. Anywhere else, the idea of losing a dog so young to a preventable disease such as rabies would be unthinkable. In the North, it was a fact of life. “It just really put things into perspective for me, in terms of what some communities who don’t have access to veterinary care have been dealing with,” Tuma says. “People just don’t even know that their animals can receive medical care.
“And it’s so much more rewarding—not even just to me personally, but to the profession—to be able to provide services in communities who otherwise wouldn’t have it.”
This has been the guiding passion throughout Tuma’s career. A born-and-raised Yellowknifer, she returned home after graduating from Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 2014, landing her first gig at Great Slave Animal Hospital. When the business partnered with the NWT SPCA that year to host spay-and-neuter clinics in communities outside Yellowknife, Tuma led the charge. It wasn’t long before Arctic Paws, an animal welfare charity in the Beaufort Delta, reached out to see if she would come to Inuvik and do the same there. The University of Calgary followed and, in 2016, she tagged along with vet students from the school on a two-week rotation through the Sahtu region’s five communities. (The school has been doing this for the past 15 years).
Now, these tours are a regular part of Tuma’s job. By the time Vets Without Borders asked her to pilot their own community clinic program in 2019, she had already been a traveling vet in the North for five years. Now its official Northern liaison, she helps the non-profit organize free annual clinics across Nunavut and the NWT.
These clinics require logistical savvy: from collaborating with the community to nail down a schedule and a venue, to assembling a team of southern vets and technicians willing to donate their time, and then packing up approximately 300 kilos of equipment such as IVs, oxygen machines, syringes, surgical packs, and kennels. This year, Tuma has already completed 14 travelling clinics.
But the clinics encompass much more than providing care for animals, she says. In areas that don’t have regular access to these services, each trip is a chance to spread the word about veterinary care. Volunteer Vets Without Borders teams have hopped on local radio stations and answered questions from people calling in (“Why does my dog have to wear a cone on its head?”). Tuma makes a point of going into schools and talking to students about her job. She always allows owners to be present for every procedure to watch what she’s doing.
“Since the beginning, the organizations that I’ve been working with only go to communities that we are invited to,” Tuma says. She’s finished her appointments in Yellowknife for the morning. Now, we’re chatting over tea at Birchwood Coffee Kǫ̀ downtown. “We don’t just show up, then spay and neuter all the dogs on the street. Instead, we’re doing absolutely everything with consent. We’re here to support people with whatever needs they want to have supported.
“We want to develop relationships that are going to be partnerships in the long-term, so communities that have concerns about animal health and welfare going forward will have sustainable solutions.”
On this point, Tuma is adamant. There’s no way a vet team could get any meaningful work done if residents weren’t one-hundred percent behind it—because no one would show up. People have to understand and believe in the importance of these services themselves. By necessity, vet care in the North is a community effort.
Tom Rutherdale agrees. It’s why he’s spent the last eight years as president of the community-led Northern Canine Rescue in Cambridge Bay. (That, and his immense love for his Border Collie/Husky mix, Marley.)
There’s currently a shortage of vets nationwide, Rutherdale points out, and the North is always one of the first places to feel the pain. “It’s now harder to find those types of professional services, so we have to put in the effort as a community,” he says.
The community rescue’s roots span all the way back to the 1970s, when a couple in town began feeding stray dogs and treating them for injuries. Though these efforts remained informal for decades, Rutherdale and five others took over the reins in 2015 and officially incorporated as a not-for-profit society. “When I saw the folks running the rescue, it made me want to join in and see what I can do to help,” says Rutherdale. Ever since, they’ve been running a variety of initiatives, including rehoming surrendered dogs and providing pet first aid when needed.
Rutherdale even acts as the community’s “lay vaccinator,” trained by a visiting vet five years ago to administer under-the-skin shots against parvo and distemper. To date, he says he’s probably done more than 150 vaccinations.
“It’s important to have that kind of capacity in the community,” he says. Otherwise, disease can spread much faster and create a public health concern that extends beyond animals—particularly when it comes to rabies. The NWT government launched its own lay vaccinator training program after the Beaufort Delta’s rabies outbreak.
The Northern Canine Rescue’s biggest project? The annual vet clinic it hosts with a volunteer team from the Alberta Helping Animals Society. Held for more than a decade now, turnout continues to improve with each event. At the most recent edition this past July, the team flew in and performed 137 checkups and vaccinations, along with 30 surgeries, over three and a half days.
It’s a whirlwind, Rutherdale says, but always incredibly rewarding. “What I love about it is that people from all walks of life come in with this universal love for their pets,” he says. “Regardless of what is going on in their life situation, they all have that same concern for their animals. It’s a common ground for people, and I always get a lot of satisfaction from seeing that.”
Dogs have always held important roles in the North, particularly to Inuit and Dene lifestyles, as sled dogs provide both protection and a means of transportation. Today, dogs remain close companions to Northerners, and the positive impact they have on mental health has been well-documented.
And Northern dogs are tough. “The resiliency of Northern dogs is unlike any other animal you’ll ever meet,” says Tuma. “I’ve seen some dogs who have endured some pretty hard injuries, and not even blink an eye. They’re just happy to be alive.”
Thankfully, the patchwork of veterinary care in the territories is growing. Last February, Vets Without Borders received $3 million through the Angel Gabriel Foundation to bolster its Northern program and continue expanding its network of community clinics. The organization is also exploring new initiatives, like training community members to provide basic animal care and act as liaisons between owners and vets, or establishing a broad telemedicine line.
“The challenge with a program is that there are only a handful of vets in the North,” Tuma says, “so it’s probably going to have to be through vets in the south.” But these vets, she adds, need to understand the local limitations and lack of services available to pet owners in remote communities. “You can’t just say, ‘Okay, go to a vet clinic,’ because it could be thousands of kilometres away.”
Needless to say, the North still has a long way to go when it comes to caring for animals. But Tuma’s not giving up any time soon. “If I have the knowledge and capabilities to help animals when they’re sick, or do preventative care and keep them healthy, I want to be able to give this to anybody who wants it.
“I love the North. This is my home. This is where I want to give back my skills and my knowledge. And I want to build more sustainable programs, so that animals across the North aren’t in distress.”
