Welcome to the Veterinary Anthropology website. I am a veterinarian who has lived and worked in India and the Himalayas for the last decade. I have established and managed veterinary public health and animal welfare programs in India and South Asia for 15 years, mainly with Vets Beyond Borders, the organisation I co-founded.
My interest in anthropology began while working in South Asia on veterinary public health programs. It became evident that without a sensitive understanding and a knowledge of culture, society and religion– medical and veterinary programs and interventions will not flourish. Most of the obstacles I faced during those years were not scientific or concerning medicine and surgery. They were over local cultural misunderstandings, religious beliefs, politics and other aspects of society. This led me to study medical anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), and I immediately saw the far-reaching benefits of this discipline for the veterinary profession.
I studied and researched Tibetan medicine and am now investigating traditional Tibetan veterinary medicine through a Ph.D. program, initially at ANU but now at the University of Sydney. This has gradually morphed into a multi-disciplinary project about the veterinary anthropology of Bhutan. As time goes on and Ph.D. time commitments allow, I will continue to post more to this site and welcome input about the topic. Feel free to contact me or post comments below.
Regards,
Catherine Schuetze BVSc, BVBiol, BAPS (1st hons)
PhD Candidate
The University of Sydney
“Veterinary Anthropology of Bhutan”
veterinaryanthropology (at) gmail.com
Veterinary Anthropology 
Beautiful work, congratulations.
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I was just contemplating ethnography in the field since I studied anthropology but am now a veterinary technician in general practice. I decided to Google veterinary anthropology and found you. Please keep posting! I am in the US but I am so interested in being involved actively or passively in anything related to this endeavor.
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Hello there, I am currently doing a PhD which aims to take a social science perspective on parasite treatment by resource-poor smallholder farmers in southern Africa. It would be great to connect with you to talk more about this, there seems to have been very little research on the social science of veterinary health solutions in so-called developing countries!
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An amazing introduction to veterinary anthropology. I am a veterinarian as well and pursuing veterinary anthropology for my PhD from the University of Cambridge. I am currently working with Rabies in Nepal. Would love to hear more about your work in the coming days. Keep posting.
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Thank you for exploring all this material, covers so many things I’ve only ever processed on my own, alone. A relief to have it all so well described, published.
I can now just point disbelieving strangers to this material to explain my circumstances.
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