Cambodia is in the early stages of recovering from the Khmer Rouge genocide which wiped the country clean of skilled workers, intellectuals and artists. The recent obliteration of accumulated knowledge is still massively impacting the training of young people and future generations. A mixture of traditional cultural tendencies (such as saving face, a social value that stems from ideas of dignity, honor and reputation), lack of resources, and crippling social poverty make it difficult for Khmer people to affect change on the ground.
In Phnom Penh there is a for profit French veterinary office that imports skilled doctors. Outside of Phnom Penh you are lucky to find a vet with enough equipment or skills to set a broken bone. Due to lack of training, the Khmer vets even within Phnom Penh have been known to kill animals during routine surgeries. There are also stories of cats being given dog vaccines and other deadly mistakes being made with basic treatments.
The following is part of a video interview with two young Khmer PPAWS volunteers, Meang and Lida, who occasionally accompanied Nicky on pagoda visits during the summer of 2012. Meang discusses one of PPAWS's goals: spreading information on basic animal care at a local level. The sound quality of the video is poor so their words are transcribed below.
"Well, I think about PPAWS. PPAWS likes to help the animals at the Pagodas. Especially Nicky, she really likes to help animals. She likes to help a lot of pagodas. All of the monks are really happy about it because they really trust us and they can be sure the animals will be safe.
"About the future, I think as people get to know more about PPAWS it will help them to know about neutering and spaying because now they don't understand it but, in the future, if PPAWS becomes bigger and more people try to go around and explain to Khmer people and they understand it we will do the same [spaying and neutering]. I'm sure they're happy to do this, now they try to do some of that [birth control] that never really works."
"And we love PPAWS."
At one pagoda we visited the head monk was adamant that his dogs (Nicky mentioned this pagoda in a video, he told us there were 100 living at the pagoda) did not need to be spayed or neutered because the females were given human birth control. In Cambodia it is a widespread belief (held by many foreigners in addition to most Khmer people) that human or farm animal birth control prevents pregnancy in cats and dogs. The evidence against these assertions came in litters as thick as nine puppies all winter and spring.
In attempting to document some financial and cultural hurdles that Chamnan (the young veterinarian Nicky employed) had previously discussed openly with me, I encountered unexpected resistance.
For example, I had been told multiple times by different Cambodians that black animals are considered unlucky - they are often thought to be bad people re-incarnated - and end up at the pagodas for this reason. When I asked Chamnan to talk about this on camera she denied it. When she asked a crowd of students that had formed around us at the pagoda about it they too all denied having knowledge of such a belief (note: though I asked her about black cats and dogs she only asks the group about cats).
The following week, when my camera was away, Chamnan told me she had "forgot" that black animals are thought to be unlucky by many people, including her own mother, who had been angry with her (Chamnan) for months because Chamnan brought home a black dog.
Then Chamnan told me the following story (paraphrased here):
My mother went to a party in her village. All the people were in the cooking tent waiting for the meat and other foods to cook when there was suddenly a large explosion. A string of fireworks that rested near the cooking fire had been ignited. No one was injured but everyone was frightened. My mother thinks this happened because of my black, unlucky dog.
Another example of conflicting responses happened when discussing the inadequacy of Cambodian veterinary training. One week Chamnan told Nicky and me that every thing she knew about animal care she had learned after university, while working as a vet tech at the French veterinary office in Phnom Penh. She said that she and her classmates never had the chance to practice injections and the only hands-on experience they gained at school was dissecting pigs. This left her with no practical knowledge of how to be a vet for cats and dogs.
When I asked her to explain this on film she froze up. Later she asked me to turn on the camera again and said:
TRANSCRIPT: "The other thing, when I was studying at university, we didn't have equipment to practice at school. That's why, when I finished to study, I don't have enough experience and, that's all."
She later explained that she did not want to say anything that might offend her teachers.
Chamnan studied to be a veterinarian for a total of four years. In Cambodia, no graduate school is required for this occupation. She estimates that there are about 200 veterinary students who graduate each year.