She's already packed her limit of three suitcases' worth of kids' books. But there's one book Natalie Carter plans to carry in her hand luggage to peruse during this month's flight to Africa: a Swahili-English dictionary. A master's student in population medicine, she figures the volume will be useful for her planned six-week stay in a remote village in eastern Kenya.

During her second trip to the East African country in as many years, she will divide her time between research and development work.

Carter began graduate studies last fall with Prof. Cate Dewey, chair of Population Medicine. Working with smallholder farmers in Kenya, they are formulating pig rations using locally grown foodstuffs. Many farmers raising up to three pigs on less than two hectares of land need help finding cheap, nutritious feed for their livestock.

That work will see Carter visiting farmers – along with an interpreter – to discuss their lives and livelihoods. She'll be based in a village called Kikule. That's the hometown of her Kenyan collaborator, Florence Mutua, who completed a PhD in Population Medicine last year and now teaches at the University of Nairobi. Together, they will also work with women's groups to help develop small businesses.

Carter plans to stay with Mutua's family during the trip, from mid-June to mid-July.

For more, read the profile in At Guelph.

You've probably heard that to get good behaviour from your dog or puppy, you need to establish yourself as the leader. That doesn't mean being forceful and stern, says veterinarian Susan Simmons.

"That's being a tyrant. Good leadership is like being a good parent. You should be fair, consistent, meeting needs and providing safety. That gives you the foundation to teach self-control, manners and deference," she explains.

She'll be sharing ways to improve the behaviour of dogs and cats at the May 28 Come, Sit, Learn event at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC). Simmons is an OVC graduate who works at the Heartland Pet Hospital in Mississauga, Ont. Her talk, "It's Not the Impossible Dream: The Well-Behaved Pet," will focus on understanding the body language and needs of our companion animals, and how to make the relationship more positive.

She's one of three speakers presenting in the morning and will be followed in the afternoon by well-known veterinarian Marty Becker, who appears regularly on Good Morning America and The Dr. Oz Show, as well as a series of shorter sessions.

Simmons says that animal behaviour has always been her passion. "I think that by helping people understand their animals, so that the animals thrive and are well-behaved, the animal-human bond is strengthened and people are more committed to providing good care." For more, read the article in At Guelph.

"Every day in my clinic is like a visit to the zoo," says David Eshar, a new veterinarian at the Ontario Veterinary College Health Sciences Centre. While cats, dogs and livestock make up the majority of most veterinary practices, Eshar specializes in birds, reptiles and other exotic pets.

On this particular afternoon, he's just finished overseeing work on a guinea pig's overgrown molars; next he will be treating a gecko and later a hawk. On other days, Eshar has provided care for a serval cat, a baby lion, lizards, snakes, tortoises and many birds. "Parrots are a significant percentage of our clients," he adds.

Eshar, who was born and raised in Israel, has always been interested in these less-common animals. "As a child I had all kinds of animals as pets. When I started vet school, I would go to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo on weekends to help out and learn more about the different animals."

For more, read the feature in At Guelph.

If you knew that your smoking was harming your pet, would you quit? Yes, said more than one-quarter of pet owners in a 2009 American study. Give them information on the dangers of exposing pets to second-hand smoke, they said, and it would motivate them to try to butt out.

Here in Guelph, those findings were all the motivation needed for grad students to develop stop-smoking slogans and posters for last semester's master of public health course assignment in health communication.

Now Prof. Karen Morrison, Population Medicine, hopes to interest governments in a pilot campaign to see whether those materials might spur behavioural changes that protect both animal and human health.

"Studies show that, for some people, health messages aimed around pets will resonate. They're more likely to quit smoking to protect their pets than their kids," says Morrison, who joined the Ontario Veterinary College last spring. After her undergrad at the University of Toronto, she came to Guelph for a master's degree in environmental engineering and, ultimately, a PhD in rural studies.

Smoker or not, you might not call your home an ecosystem. But it's the varied connections among people, animals and their environment ─ and how those ecological webs affect human health ─ that interest Morrison. Ecosystem approaches to health, or ecohealth, underlie her studies, which have taken her from Canadian watershed management to fish poisoning in Cuba to capacity-building projects in Southeast Asia. For more, read the feature in At Guelph.

Although he didn't ride horses when he was growing up, Lance Bassage always admired them. "They are gorgeous animals ─ powerful yet fragile at the same time."

When he spent some time during summer breaks volunteering with a large-animal vet, he knew quickly that equine medicine would be his goal. "I found that I understood horses and got along with them," Bassage says. He now brings that understanding of horses and nearly two decades of veterinary experience to the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC), where he will be working in the Large Animal Clinic providing both elective and emergency surgical care, as well as teaching OVC students.

For more, see the profile in At Guelph.

There are plenty of veterinarians in Ottawa but few with clients like Michelle Lem's. For the past seven years, the Guelph DVM grad has provided vet services for the pets of people living on the streets and in homeless shelters.

Now, besides running a busy veterinary outreach program in Canada's capital, she's midway through a master's degree at her alma mater intended to improve lives for homeless and at-risk youths and their pets. Along with population medicine professor and former DVM classmate Jason Coe, Lem is studying the effects of pet ownership on young people who are homeless or at risk. She says this special case of the human-animal bond may affect pet owners' prospects for surviving life on the streets or perhaps finding a way into more stable lives.

An estimated 20 per cent of homeless people, including people moving between the street and shelters, have pets, according to one recent study in Toronto.

Not that you'd learn that by observing people in shelters or visiting food banks or other mission services, says Lem. Those institutions often ban animals, compounding problems for their owners, who often would rather forgo services than abandon their pets. "It's a hidden problem," she says.

For more, see the story in At Guelph.

Psychology professor Barbara Morrongiello has teamed up with researchers in Belgium to develop a software program called The Blue Dog, which helps children understand a dog's behaviour and recognize when it's friendly and wants to play or when it wants to be left alone.

Many dog bites happen in the home and are triggered by an interaction initiated by the child, said Morrongiello, who is director of U of G's Child Development Research Unit.

"Dog bites are considered a major issue because when they do happen to children, they tend to be severe. Young children are similar in size to dogs, so when a dog bites, it often bites on the face or neck. Despite this, there is little out there in terms of effective educational tools to prevent dog bites."

The video game teaches children how to behave around dogs by giving them different scenarios such as a dog eating, playing with its favourite toy or hiding under a table. The child is then asked to choose how to respond to the dog's behaviour. If the child makes an unsafe decision, the dog shows its teeth and growls.

"We're trying to make the child aware of the dog's behaviour and, based on that, whether it's a good time to interact with the dog," said Morrongiello. "Children assume their own dog won't hurt them, but a dog is still an animal. They need to know how to read their dog because a dog can communicate only through its behaviour."

For more information, see the U of G news release.

New online manual from OVC will help small-animal veterinarians stem disease spread among pets, people.

More than two out of three medical doctors fail to wash their hands between patients, according to an Ontario study released last year. Ask veterinarians about their hygiene and infection control practices, and you might get an even worse response, says Prof. Scott Weese, Pathobiology.

Helping small-animal veterinarians improve their practices and prevent infectious diseases from spreading among pets and people is the purpose of a new online manual developed at OVC.

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Singing secretary helps United Way campaign end on a high note.

The campus community may remember Jennifer Beehler's performance in the University Idol competition held as a fundraiser for the 2008 United Way campaign. She represented OVC, where she is secretary to the chair of the Department of Clinical Studies.

Besides singing for charity, she spoke on behalf of the United Way to hundreds of people on campus while serving as co-chair of the University's 2008 fundraising drive. Working with Prof. Jim Atkinson, Animal and Poultry Science, business student Suba Naganathan and more than a thousand other volunteers, she cheered the campus community on to an all-time high of $490,300. That was more than $50,000 above the goal.

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OVC students trade scalpels and stethoscopes for stories and poems about being, and becoming, veterinarians.

James Herriot is here. So are Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Rudyard Kipling, Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam and Prof. David Waltner-Toews, Population Medicine. They're among numerous authors whose works are helping DVM students use the written word to explore some of the most deeply felt parts of being, and becoming, a veterinarian.

Offered at Guelph this winter for the third time by Ontario Veterinary College dean Elizabeth Stone, the second-year elective “Veterinary Medicine and Literature” allows up to 15 students to view veterinary practice through poems, plays, stories, essays and novels.

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