This month Amigos began showing new messages on the back of two Guanajuato city buses. One of them describes our vision: a community that respects animals and treats them with compassion.
The other urges people to protect their pets from fatal diseases by treating them for parasites. These messages will be seen by thousands of Guanajuatenses over the course of three months. We have also been posting them on Amigos’s social media feeds.
We chose the message about parasite prevention because some of the dogs brought to our sterilization campaigns have shown symptoms of blood-borne diseases that are transmitted by tick and fleas. These diseases cause excessive bleeding during surgery.
Coincidentally, the Secretariat of Health for the state of Guanajuato has just mounted a billboard blitz to encourage people to vaccinate their pets against life-threatening diseases. Rabies has been largely controlled in recent decades through a national vaccination program. But other highly contagious and deadly diseases, such as canine parvovirus and distemper, are endemic here.
We are very pleased that the Secretariat of Health is drawing the public’s attention to the importance of vaccinating their pets. And we thank Joslyn Lewis and Andrea Martín de Coté for creating our bus messages and social media posts.