162: Street Dogs, Brave Vetting, and the Double Life of Dr Janey Lowes

Twelve years ago, Dr Janey Lowes went to Sri Lanka on a holiday, and never really came home. Today she runs WECare Worldwide, a hospital that treats the island’s three million street dogs to a standard that you’d like your pet treated - from the worst trauma cases you can image do a highly efficient desexing service.  And then, a few times a year, she flies back to locum in clinics that look a lot like yours.

This one's about what it's like to live on both sides of that line that separates the reason we became vets, and the job most of us ended up with.

We get into:

• Do-or-die medicine in a place where you're the only option
• How being the last line changes your perspectives, and what that does to your goalposts when you go back to first-world practice
• The bits of ‘normal’ practice that Janey misses the most (no, it’s not the fancy equipment)
• Charity vetting as a viable career option, not just a gap year - the good and the bad 

Support WECare Worldwide:This work runs on donations, and Janey's currently raising for a new hospital by running six hundred kilometres, the length of Sri Lanka. (She’s not actually a runner…)

• Website and donations: https://wecareworldwide.org.uk

The charity takes volunteers and offers longer-term work 

• Volunteer and work with WECare: https://wecareworldwide.org.uk/volunteer/
• WECare on Instagram: @wecare_srilanka

Find Janey:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janeythevet
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@janeythevet
• Her book, Janey the Vet: Saving Sri Lanka's Street Dogs, is on Amazon, Waterstones and WH Smith

More from The Vet Vault:

• Everything we do lives at https://www.thevetvault.com , including our clinical CE podcasts and resources
• Come learn with us in person at Vets on Tour: https://vetsontour.com

Topics and Time Stamps

03:20 Going Viral, and the Unexpected Backlash

08:24 The Love-Hate of Social Media

10:17 The Birth of WeCare

13:24 75% of Dogs Are Unowned

13:53 Courage or Naivety?

16:35 Mid-Roll Break

18:31 Regrets? & Life in Sri Lanka

21:30 Two Lives: Sri Lanka vs UK

36:15 Are We Too Quick to Euthanise?

39:55 What We Underestimate and Undervalue in ‘normal’ Vet Life

43:22 Volunteering at WeCare

49:03 Charity Vetting as a Career

55:10 Rapid Fire Questions

59:21 Advice for New Grads