Animals & Us
Dr Ian Douglas
A vet who left a profitable practice to prevent rabies deaths shows how one person's clarity, combined with others who feel the same, can remake a community.
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At 13, Ian Douglas watched his father wound a hare instead of killing it. That moment stayed with him. Years later, after building a successful neurology and neurosurgery practice, he felt something was missing. He started volunteering with animal welfare groups and realised the suffering he saw overseas was preventable. When a group of vets met over too much coffee at a conference in Sydney, they decided to stop working alone. In 2005, Vets Beyond Borders was born.
Ian and his team chose Sikkim, a small state in northeast India, to test whether one place could become a model for rabies prevention. They found a community where two sisters had died of rabies, locked in their room and fed under the door. The scale of the problem was clear, but so was the solution: vaccinate dogs, sterilise them to reduce the population, and work with government to make it stick. Over nearly 20 years, they sterilised more than 100,000 dogs and vaccinated 400,000. Sikkim became the first Indian state to declare rabies a notifiable disease. There have been no human rabies deaths since 2016.
What matters most to Ian is not the numbers themselves, but that local vets and the government now run the program without him. That is how you know it works. He focuses on one dog at a time, surrounded by other people who feel the same way. Without that, he says, you would curl up and become overwhelmed. Today he is taking that model to Vanuatu, and when he is not planning the next deployment, he composes music based on what he has learned around the world.
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