CCF staff spotlight: Dr. Mercelin Gawanis, Veterinarian, CCF Namibia

We’ve got a diverse array of staff at CCF – we need so many different skill sets to help our two centres in Namibia and Somaliland function effectively. We recently spoke to Dr. Mercelin Gawanis, a recently qualified Veterinarian who works at our centre in Namibia, about what her day-to-day tasks involve. We hope you enjoy reading her interview!

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Dr. Mercelin Gawanis. I am a recent graduate from the University of Namibia. I actually graduated in May this year, and this is my first job as a veterinarian. At CCF, we have quite a large number of different species of animal that whose health we have to take care of.

What does a usual day look like for you?

So some of the fixed things we have to do in a day is to go and do checks in the morning. Every morning we go into the goat enclosures before the herd heads out, and we do a visual examination where we look at all the animals that are not well and that we feel are unfit to go out with the herd due to predators. That is the fixed part of the morning and then we do whatever we then have scheduled in, such as blood draws that we have to do on different animals.If an animal was not feeling well the previous day, we have to examine it.

Another fixed part of our day happens around 3PM in the afternoon, when the goats come back. We have to do a second goat check to make sure that everybody came back, and then we attend to any health problems that they may have.

What kind of health care do the animals get?

We do do a lot of preventative healthcare, so we have things in our monthly schedule, including vaccinations, blood draws from the cheetahs, and we have to de-worm everyone. And then of course we also have times where we do livestock breeding.

We do evaluations of all the male dogs before we can start with our breeding. Depending on the time of the year, we either have kidding season or lambing season. And then we also have seasons where we have a lot of puppies.

I’m quite excited that I get to be part of such a project and I am making a tiny impact in the world of conservation.

Learn more about CCF’s work here.