She shares her home with 103 dogs, 11 monkeys and five cats. Since her coming to Bhutan in 1997, she has nursed more than 30,000 stray animals, suffering the gamut of ailments from heart infection to skin diseases and bone fractures to cancer. Her patients are mostly dogs, but she also takes care of injured birds, monkeys, barking deer, snakes, rats, pigs, horses, cows and sometimes even mosquitoes and flies.
Meet Marianne Guillet - a French woman in her early forties, who lives in Hejo, Thimphu. Known to residents as the “Rochi Ama” (dog mother), she was recently (November 22) recognised for her services to society and awarded the Coronation gold medal by Lyonchhen Jigmi Y Thinley.
“It’s great to know that people acknowledge in what I believe in and what I do and that they don’t see it as a thing of madness,” Marianne Guillet told Kuensel.
Marianne can’t stand animals suffering. It’s been that way ever since she was a child. Whenever she saw a sick dog by the curbside, she took it home and treated them back to health. Whenever she had cash, she used it to buy dogs from the pounds. Her parents never really approved of her over-fondness for dogs but accommodated her ways. “I had these feelings, I still do, that I’m the best person to care for them.”
Marianne is a Buddhist, a geographer and an architect with a medical background. She came to Thimphu in 1997 with her husband, who works in SNV. Caring for the capital’s plentiful stray dogs became just the occupation she was looking for. She saw that the dogs were a hated lot by locals as well as tourists for disturbing sleep. Her heart went out to them. The first dog she cared for had been run over by a car and left to die on the road. It was breathing and she immediately took it home and operated on her kitchen table. From then on, there was no looking back.
“It makes me happy and gives me inner peace, doing what I do.”
Although Marianne had some medical background, she was not a veterinarian. So she pored through the Internet and learned things herself.
“Compassion without knowledge was painful as we suffer but can’t act. So I learned though the Internet and educated myself to act positively.”
The journey was not smooth. Officials berated her for doing things (taking care of dogs) illegally. She was not a trained veterinarian, they told her. But there were many residents who admired her work. As time passed, things cooled down. People eventually called her the “mother of dogs”. “There were a lot of resistance but I did not mean harm. I just wanted to take care of the animals,” she said.
Her typical day starts with bathing stray dogs in the guest bathroom. She washes about 25 a week. The space is also used to store towels, therapeutic shampoos, and other supplies. She operates on dogs on Tuesdays and Fridays for four to five hours. Once the dogs have recuperated, they sleep in her garage in boxes and baskets, which serve as their beds.
She usually goes to town to check on dogs on Monday mornings and brings sick ones to her medical centre. Marianne always carries a first-aid box in her car for quick treatment such as de-worming. Every afternoon, she and her staff of four dress wound and administer chemotherapy on the animals.
She does not receive funds from any organisations. They are mostly from her husband’s salary. Some residents contribute in the form of food and clothes for the dogs. Sometimes, she also looks for dog food in the trash bins. Some residents thought she was a foreigner gone crazy.
Marianne likes caring for all animals. Once she had to stitch a snake hurt by an excavator. As usual, she took the snake to her house and, though frightened, she treated the snake and after keeping it near her radiator till it recovered, she set it free.
Marianne’s view on the dog problem in Thimphu is that there were only short-term solutions on offer. Impounding of dogs, she says, is one such solution, because it is extremely expensive and, when the numbers are more, there is a security problem as the dogs fight each other. “The money runs out and the quality of the pound is not as good as it should be.”
“No one ever could get a solution to it and everyone avoided the best, which was to pet them.” Marianne says that what needs to be done is a sustainable campaign all year long. “Dogs have emotions.”
“My goal, before I leave, is to create something permanent in Bhutan, where stray dogs can find refuge and food and rehabilitation.”
Source: Kuenselonline
