If there is one thing I noticed as a veterinary student during my internships in French vet clinics, it was that we spent as much time driving in the car as doing actual medical work. Farm animals are often too big or difficult to contain and be taken to clinics and, in rural areas, people live far away from each other which means vets must be mobile. The same is true of Ghanaian district veterinary practice. For Ghana’s district vets, owning a car is unanimously perceived as the best way of getting around. Indeed, it is optimal for going anywhere at any time and for transporting the necessary medical material. Because vets can be called at late hours and to remote places, they argued that they should not have to depend on public transport which rarely operates at night and does not circulate everywhere. Further, they expressed concerns about safety. Afia was, for example, concerned about women vets needing to walk back to tro-tro 97 stations and wait there alone at night after house visits.
She reported personally trying to avoid this kind of situation, as she was scared of getting lost or being assaulted by men.#59
Dr B had had a car in the past, but after he stopped receiving funding for fuel from MoFA, he left it in Accra with his wife. He had since been using tro-tros and, more rarely, taxis. For him, motorbikes were too dangerous. A technician at the District Two clinic also shared this reasoning as he had heard about a vet colleague who was killed on the road while doing his rounds on his motorbike.#60
However, vets’ reliance on public transport options like tro-tros and taxis is also problematic because it limits their reactivity in cases of an outbreak. One of Afia’s colleagues gave me an example of how the lack of an immediately available vehicle could impact early outbreak interventions:
‘Because of the shortage of staff and no vehicle, we might [only] be able to go to the farm the next day. And, if we have to stamp out [a disease], the farmer would sell the animals before we could do it’.#56
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Not being able to get to farms before sick livestock were sold was worrisome for vets as this could lead to transmission of disease to other animals and to people – both on and off the farm.
The map in Figure 9 offers an idea of the distances that vets of the District One clinic must travel in order to cover all 246 square miles of their district. Note the limited presence of roads (beige lines) where cars can circulate relatively easily. This is why, in reality, the vets rarely travel further than a few miles away from their clinic.
In more rural places like District Three, veterinary practice seemed virtually impossible without owning a vehicle. Tro-tros were relatively frequent, but they did not usually serve remote areas where most livestock are located. This is in keeping with Turkson who had shown that the greatest constraint to veterinary work in Ghana was the lack of transport means (Turkson, 2003).
Figure 9. Map situating District One and its veterinary clinic.
This remoteness is why Bernard had always kept a motorbike (see Figure 10). Indeed, his motorbike was the primary tool by which all of his work was possible as Bernard did not use the office made available in his allocated district – a decision he made for two primary reasons.
Firstly, the office was too far from people’s homes, so no one went there for consultations. A government-based webpage indicates that in this region, ‘the nearest [public] facility is located more
than 10 kilometres away’ from most households.98 Secondly, Bernard had been living in a house in an
isolated village with his family for a long time, and had developed a clientele around the village (far from his allocated office), where it was convenient for him to circulate. Although travelling by motorbike meant not being restricted by the availability of public transport, it did not imply that Bernard could go anywhere. He paid for fuel out of his salary, and when he was asked to go too far, he tried to arrange for the requesting farmers to pick him up half way.
98www.ghana.gov.gh
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To sum up, all these district vets had to make choices about how much time they spent in urban offices and how much they engaged in rural operations. These choices were informed by a wide range of contextual (office space, location, type of animals in the area) and personal (salaries, gender) factors and by the vets’ own sense of duty and prioritisation. Each choice included trade-offs which ultimately shaped and continue to shape the vets’ potential to move across space and monitor livestock and other animals for zoonotic diseases. Individual discretion is also, as shown in the next section, an important part of vets’ exchanges with clients.