It just got a little bit easier to be a pet owner in Nunavut.
Nunavut Animal Rescue, based in Apex, recently purchased $30,000 worth of diagnostic equipment designed to test animal blood.
“We’ve got two different machines. One is the IDEXX Catalyst One and the other is the ProCyte One,” said executive director Samantha Oldham. “They are both used for different analysis on blood samples. They can also do some on urine samples, different things like that. They’re mostly just to help vets, when they come up, to diagnose illnesses in dogs, or if something’s off with the dog’s health at all.
“It can do things like tell us if the dog is suffering from diabetes or has anemia, if there’s just anything wrong with the sample. So, if they have high white blood cell count, or a low blood cell count.”
Currently, any blood samples taken have to be sent south with the visiting vets and analyzed once the sample is no longer fresh, which can alter the results.
“That blood has to go through travel to get there, and it’s best if blood can be tested within five hours [of being extracted], and that just isn’t possible when we don’t have that equipment here, so this is going to help us a lot," Oldham said.
“Right now, when we send blood samples down south, it can come back with odd numbers which could just be from the decay in travelling, so having it done here on property is going to help a lot... and just help us with the dogs we have here in Iqaluit, and in Nunavut in general — care for them, manage their symptoms, different things like that.”
Typically, the most common things tested for at the animal clinic are conditions related to aging and general health checks, including liver tests, “to make sure everything’s just looking good, because quite often as dogs and cats get older, they have different health issues that come up... a big [issue] we see here as well that’s come up quite a lot in the past few clinics we’ve had is testing for heart disease in dogs,” said Oldham.
Like people, dogs are prone to heart disease as they age, and being able to test the blood on site “to see what factors are in the blood, can tell the vet a lot about what’s going on with the dog’s health,” according to Oldham.
Blood tests lead to the diagnoses that allow vets to prescribe necessary medications. A vet visit usually resulted in 15-20 blood tests, “but that number will most likely go up now that we have it on site, and we can adjust our prices accordingly,” Oldham explained.
In addition to accessibility, having the testing equipment on site will result in cost savings for pet owners since the cost of transportation in shipping and using other vet clinic services will be eliminated.
“Now we can lower our prices a little bit,” says Oldham, “which will make it more accessible to more people — and because it’s owned and operated by Nunavut Animal Rescue, and we already do a lot of outreach into the communities. So people who can’t necessarily afford it, we offer discounts and low-income services, so we’ll hopefully be able to reach a number of more people now that we have [the testing equipment] here in Iqaluit and we can operate it for ourselves.”
The funding for the machines came mostly through donations to Nunavut Animal Rescue, as well as the modest profits the organization makes from the Iqaluit Animal Hospital, bought on lease.