“Dog Mother” Marianne Guillet has nursed thousands of creatures back to health in her makeshift vet clinic

© Nancy Peterson/HSUS Marianne Guillet communes with one of her non-canine patients outside the home-turned-veterinary hospital she established in Bhutan.

I’ve long been fascinated by the Kingdom of Bhutan, nestled in the eastern Himalayas and often described as the last Shangri-La. It is surrounded by India on three sides, with Tibet to the north. About 750,000 people live in Bhutan, and many walk hours or days just to get to a road. It wasn’t until 1999 that television and the Internet found their way into the country.

I’d long wanted to travel there, and when I finally decided to go, I invited some friends to join me on what I was sure would be a remarkable adventure. One friend responded by sending me an article she’d read in Bark magazine about the lives of street dogs in Bangkok and Bhutan. I now had a second compelling reason to travel to the country—to meet Marianne Guillet, a self-taught veterinarian and animal rescuer mentioned in the article. I tried to contact Guillet but was initially unsuccessful. After a month had passed, I wrote again.

This time she replied. “I am very sorry for the delay in responding to your mail,” she wrote. “Our e-mail server in Bhutan is sometimes overloaded and e-mails are just deleted or saved until they can be dispatched to users. We also just got electricity back at home after a very long cold wave from Tibet with snow like we have never seen before. No light, no hot water, just the chimney to keep us warm. Our sitting room turned into the main kennel with all the cats, the intensive care patients, the puppies and the baby monkeys keeping warm during the night. Fortunately, none of them tried to eat his neighbour, not even the newly rescued snake.”

I traveled to Bhutan in September 2005 with my sister and two friends—including the friend who’d sent me the article. Intrigued by the world I’d glimpsed through Guillet’s e-mail, I’d arranged to meet her at her home outside of Thimphu, the place often referred to as the only capital city in the world with no traffic lights. (One was installed several years ago, but it was removed within days after residents complained it was impersonal and ugly. Traffic continues to be directed by policemen stationed at two traffic circles on each end of the main street.)

Locally, Guillet is known as Rochi Ama, a term that means “Dog Mother” in Dzonghka, Bhutan’s national language. Guillet and her Dutch partner, Hendrik Visser, have lived in Bhutan for nine years, and during our visit, they shared their home (much of which serves as an animal hospital) with 103 dogs, 11 monkeys, and 5 cats.

© Nancy Peterson/HSUS Guillet and partner Hendrik Visser enjoy some puppy love at the center of their grateful pack. Not shown are the 11 monkeys and 5 cats who also shared their home at the time.

Guillet grew up in France and has been concerned about animals ever since she can remember. She started by saving drowning mosquitoes. For her, indifference to another’s suffering has always been incomprehensible. “I thought, Look: You can just do that and save him. You save a life,” she says. “And then people said, ‘Oh, that’s only a mosquito.’ ” Ultimately, it’s too easy to apply such rationalizations to other species—and other cultures, says Guillet: “ ‘That’s only’ for me is the beginning of apathy.”

Before coming to Bhutan, Guillet lived in Egypt for five years. She had lived in Cairo for only a short time when a homeless cat showed up near her house, and she took him to a veterinarian. Through her friendship with this doctor, Guillet learned about veterinary medicine. Guillet recalls those challenging days: “At the beginning, I would bring him the cat. Then he would come after work, and we would do the treatment at home. I would find a new dog or cat every day. So after a month, I knew how to give an injection and do the IV drip. We would do surgery, and he would ask me questions; he was a good teacher.”

But, Guillet says, it was completely different when she had her first patient on the kitchen table. The patient was a local dog who had been hit by a car and left to die by the side of the road; Guillet had no choice but to try and stitch the animal up by herself. She had no instruments and had to use sewing thread. “We had no choice,” Guillet says. “If I didn’t do anything, she would have died.” The dog survived and lived with Guillet for years afterward, and Guillet’s confidence grew.

© Hendrik Visser Guillet provides medical help and advice to Bhutanese farmers seeking care for their horses.

After they moved to Bhutan, Guillet and Visser spent their first three years in Zhemgang, a village of 250 inhabitants in central Bhutan. They arrived in Thimphu, the capital, six years ago and transformed their house into a small veterinary clinic with a surgery and intensive care room; it is now known as the Pilou Medical Center. Dogs sleep in boxes and baskets in the garage and in four outside kennels. “This is not perfect at all, but as there are no hospitals for animals in Bhutan—only day dispensaries with basic services—we are the only place offering an alternative to the street [for] wild or stray animals,” Guillet says. “We treat mostly dogs, cats, monkeys, and birds, but take any other animal in need, such as rats, mice, pigs, chickens, or snakes. We nurse the dogs back to health, sterilize and vaccinate them, and return them to their territory with continuous monitoring until they are independent again.”

This TNR program for dogs—and the Pilou Medical Center itself—might not exist if it weren’t for Visser’s job. He’s a civil engineer who introduced the concept of environmentally friendly road construction in Bhutan, and his income funds the couple’s animal care efforts. The monthly expenditures are roughly the same as his salary, and over the past nine years, the two have used that money to treat about 50,000 dogs for everything from heartworm and skin diseases to bone fractures and cancer. It’s a big job that keeps Guillet, Visser, and their staff of four very busy.

Shortly before I visited, Visser used some of his rare free time to extend the monkey quarters. In an e-mail, Guillet told me that seeing the monkeys less often was difficult. “We are trying to give them more space and have less contact with them,” she wrote. “It is tough for all of us (including them) because they are our babies and we cared for most of them since they were tiny. But they are so happy to jump around and socialize more with each other.”

During my visit, Guillet showed me around the center. Their guest bedroom is now the surgery area, and they wash about 25 dogs a week in the guest bathroom. The space is also used to store towels, therapeutic shampoos, and other supplies. Guillet does surgery on Tuesdays and Fridays for four to five hours, and the surgery room is cleaned at least three times a day. Once the dogs have recuperated, they sleep in the garage in boxes and baskets that serve as their beds.

On Monday mornings, Guillet usually goes downtown to check on dogs who’ve been brought back to their home territories and to pick up some more. At the medical center, the dogs are treated to pain relievers, a good meal, and a good night’s sleep. Guillet sees a lot of skin disease, but that is often the least of the dogs’ problems. Many of the animals have skin disease and cancer; they have skin disease and distemper; they have skin disease and something else. Every afternoon Guillet and her staff do treatments— checking wound dressings, administering ongoing chemotherapy, and so on.

Saturday is the big day for shopping at the weekly market. Guillet and Visser buy everything, including peanuts and rice, in 50 kilogram quantities. But because they are treating more and more animals, it’s become difficult to buy enough fruit. “They are expensive—especially since we went from one to 11 monkeys,” Guillet explains. “We want to give them fruits that they will find in the wild—mango, banana, roots and things—so we began to collect the rubbish.” Needless to say, when they first started collecting trash, they got some strange looks from the people who thought they were gathering the discards for themselves. But now that they know what’s going on, five or six of the market’s vendors collect the past-their-prime fruits in bags and boxes and save them for the group.

© Bea Barazza Inside the surgical suite, Guillet gives author Nancy Peterson the grand tour of the center; here, she explains the medical uses of a standard ruler.

Guillet and Visser proudly shared their album of before-and-after photos showing the many dogs they have treated. She explained a photo of a ruler placed next to a growth on an animal by showing me the ruler: They use it to measure the size of tumors.

“You put this ruler near the tumor and day by day you can really measure it shrinking,” said Guillet. “That’s why we have this very good instrument. The real one from the medical catalog costs you $150. This ruler costs 15 rupees, but it works the same as the real measuring instrument. This is the state when we find the dog before—with multiple tumors—and after treatment. This dog here is a big, fat, healthy girl now.”

Visser’s contract in Bhutan ended in December, but his new contract in nearby Nepal allows him and Guillet to see each other often. Guillet wants to create something permanent in Bhutan—where stray dogs can find refuge and food and rehabilitation—that she can hand over to the Bhutanese before she leaves. She told me that the Dalai Lama said, “Make a lot of good things in your life so when you’re old and crippled you relive them and are happy.” When Guillet looks back on her time in Bhutan, she will have many reasons to be happy—and so will the many dogs and other animals whose lives have been touched by Dog Mother.

Nancy Peterson is an issues specialist for the Companion Animals section of The HSUS.