Wild, wild vet

Dr Phulmoni Gogoi belongs to a rare species of doctors — she tends to wildlife in the dense jungles of Assam.


Teresa Rehman

The passion in her eyes was unmistakable as she sat in the incubation room, dotingly nursing a wreathed hornbill that had fallen from its nest due to heavy rain and broken a wing. But she was fighting a losing battle. Despite the necessary care and medication, she could not save the bird, which succumbed to its injuries.

Any such casualty is agonising for Phulmoni Gogoi, 29, one of the few women who are wildlife vets in India. Phulmoni works at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), run by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), in Borjuri village near Assam's Kaziranga National Park.

The CWRC, set up in 2002, is the country's first rescue and rehabilitation centre near a protected area and caters to wildlife emergencies occurring out of natural or anthropogenic causes. The veterinary infrastructure here includes an examination clinic, surgery theatre and an evolving preliminary disease investigation laboratory. It also has spacious shelters for birds, reptiles, ungulates and primates, enclosures for big cats, and nurseries for mega-herbivores.

Veterinary surgeon Phulmoni treats all species of animals in distress — from a rare black panther or an endangered Hoolock Gibbon to a rhino calf or captive elephant.

She owes her love for animals to a childhood spent in the lap of nature at Roing, Arunachal Pradesh. As a little girl, she often went to the forest to see wild birds and, sometimes, monkeys and elephants. “I used to relish the early-morning sounds made by the gibbons as they jumped and played around the forest. I had always loved this natural music. I was not very sure whether I loved wild animals during my childhood, but I always loved dogs, cows and the poultry birds raised by my parents. Although my mother never allowed us to keep dogs as pets, we raised many batches of ducklings,” she says with childlike ardour.

Later she chose to study Veterinary Science, and her husband, also a vet, guided her towards the unconventional career of a wildlife vet. Her parents, however, were initially appalled. “It was very tough for my parents to allow me to stay in the forest and work alone as a lady vet,” she says.

But there has been no looking back. Phulmoni is thoroughly enjoying her three-year tenure at the CWRC. “We provide treatment and care to all the displaced, injured, sick animals and try to release them back into the wild,” she says. While she loves all animals, elephants and bears are her favourite. “Once I went to rescue an abandoned rhino calf and we were chased by many rhinos. It made me think about how lonely a wild animal would feel near a human habitat if it sensed a threat to its life,” she says.

At times she tends to abandoned rhinos and elephant calves. “First-time mothers, who don't have the experience of calving, are often seen to abandon their young ones. We have to deal with the traumatised young animal, whose stress level increases because of the separation from its mother.”

Phulmoni and her team bottle-feed the calf with skimmed milk fortified with vitamin, carbohydrate and calcium supplements. According to the rehabilitation protocol, when hand-raising a calf aged below three months, the caregiver has to keep it company constantly, even at night.

“Being a surrogate mother to a rhino calf is easier as they adapt easily. But as elephants are social animals, an elephant calf is more sensitive. Often the keeper sleeps on a shed above the calf and keeps a blanket hanging.” The calf is comforted when it feels the blanket with its trunk and believes it to be its mother, she explains.

Phulmoni's happiest moment is when an animal or bird is released back into its home in the wild. She finds birds the most sensitive among all creatures. “Most of them are very expressive, even through their anatomical structure. It is very tough, almost impossible, to heal traumatised birds after they lose the potential to survive in the wild. My work at the CWRC has helped me develop a keen interest in avian surgery and I am looking forward to a good opportunity to learn more about Aves,” she says.

She has never felt that being a woman could be a deterrent in her unusual profession. However, she concedes that it may not be easy to live with animals in the wild — it would depend on individual interest and passion.

“I have met many women from countries like Spain, Germany, England, France, Portugal and the US who come to work at the CWRC. I don't see any reason why Indian girls can't work in this sector. It all depends on one's interest and love towards animals,” she says. In fact, she has met another enthusiastic woman vet, Korobi Boro, at the Manickdoh Leopard Rescue Centre in Pune, who is an expert in treating small carnivores.

Of course, there are occupational hazards such as attacks by animals, or zoonosis (a deadly disease transmitted from animals to humans) during rescue. Phulmoni also has to constantly update herself with specialised training methods. She has attended necropsy training in crocodiles at Chennai's Crocodile Bank, and workshops on rhino translocation and emerging zoonotic diseases.

She is experienced in handling both small and large carnivores. “It's not so difficult to hand-raise carnivores. But conflict cases are difficult and require long-term treatment in captivity. For dressing external injuries, we place the animals in a squeeze cage and roll the cage to make it smaller to prevent the animal from moving its limbs,” she says.

In spite of working through sleepless nights, especially during the monsoons when casualty rates are high, Phulmoni takes pleasure in her work. She never switches off her mobile phone and is ready for any emergency.

A committed vet, she stands by the creatures of the wild in their hour of need.

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