Animal Welfare Crisis caused by limited veterinary access in Lapland.

Veterinary access in northern Finland is becoming increasingly limited, and the consequences for animal welfare are serious.

Recent media coverage has focused heavily on welfare failures in northern kennels and sleddog farms. Welfare matters, and poor standards should obviously be addressed. But these conversations always ignore one of the most significant structural barriers to maintaining animal welfare in remote regions: the lack of veterinary access.

The reality is simple: when veterinary care is distant, unavailable, or impossible to secure in a reasonable timeframe, animals suffer.

Here, both emergency veterinary care and routine treatments can require hundreds of kilometres of travel. This creates delays in treatment, (sometimes months — or even years — for non-’critical’ but needed sterilisations that are frequently ‘bounced’ by more urgent cases). It raises the cost of treatment for the owner and effectively forces owners to make impossible decisions when urgent care is needed.

For example

A few months ago, for instance, I rushed a dog with an urgent case of pyometra all of the way to Kittila where the on-call vet was located that Sunday only to find an inexperienced vet who said she wasn’t sure if it was pyometra or not (which I basically understood to mean that she wasn’t competent to do the needed operation for it) and so I had no choice but to drive the dog home, cross my fingers that it would survive the night and drive her to a different vet the following day….400 useless but costly kilometers, 1 day of my time, and 1 unnecessary day of suffering including an unnecessary and painful car journey for the dog that luckily still survived.

Little Houdini (pictured here) was not so lucky. When I diagnosed pyometra from England (I was on holiday but was hoping that a 5th year vet student working for us that summer — who was in the same year of veterinary school as the vet who has been our official vet much of this past year in Hetta — would hold the dogs in good care whilst I was away but she was unfortunately too inexperienced to see the signs of the pyometra until it was really late), she was rushed to the nearest available vet — a temporary summer locum based c.100km south, who was seldom in Hetta.

Unfortunately, the time needed to reach the vet, agree a timeslot and then make the journey proved to be the tipping point for Houdini. She died 10 minutes before they reached the surgery.

Had there been a functional vet in Hetta at that time, she would have survived.

And, had there been better diagnostic tools in Hetta, the cat of our neighbour, which died again 10 mins prior to arrival at the veterinary practice she was sent to, c.400km away, might also have survived.

A year later, when I realised that Solfrid had pyometra and that it was super urgent, there wasn’t a single vet within 300km, either within or without the municipality, who could / would help.

Kittilä said that they were too busy and no-one else answered. As we called around desperately all I could practically have done for her in the absence of a vet to operate would have been to set up a drip and whack her full of antibiotics to buy her some time — (both of which actions would clearly be illegal even if they would be in her best interest morally) …before setting off with her in the car to drive.…

….South….

To Somewhere…

100km later, having struggled massively with getting my phone to charge all the way, I stopped to pee and try one vet after another again and again. One finally answered (100km further south in Kolari) but they were too busy to take her even though it was a critical emergency until late that night (by which time she would probably have been dead). Kittilä still said no even though they had two vets at work and ditto Sodankylä. The only private vet within c.100km (Markus) didn’t answer — so I drove towards the ‘no’ in case I needed to continue yet further south from there, with the intention to beg.

Just after I had passed the next junction to Ylläs and Markus, 50km or so later, Markus finally called back and said he could take her. I turned around and drove there. We just about made it in time but she has never run since and it took literally weeks of handfeeding porridge spoonfulls at a time (and mountains of gelatinous vomit should she eat more than a spoonful at a time), weeks of alternating iv antibiotics and high dose iv and sub cut corticosteroids, anti-emitics etc etc to survive.

The two hours of driving around pushed her so close to her grave that the post op recovery process was so challenging and time consuming that our vet once or twice suggested just giving up.

She now sleeps on my bed every night.

This probably sounds dramatic (and certainly felt it at the time). Unfortunately, these are not unusual circumstances. They are the normal reality of trying to access veterinary treatment in our remote area.

Reading this, it must sound as if the most common emergency is pyometra…and for those of you who do not know what this is, if you have a female dog, please look it up because it is literally known as the silent killer of female dogs.

But of course, we have many other things to deal with, too. Part 2 in this conversation will look at the challenges of ongoing wound care and how further learning is barred to us unless we want to start effectively from scratch.

Routine care is also increasingly difficult to secure. We have planned but non-critical (until they become so) operations that get bounced by more critical emergencies on a very regular basis. Right now, we have been waiting for weeks to schedule mammary tumours, sarcomas and sterilisations and castrations that we know are needed. Unfortunately for the animals, we know there will not be time for them all to be operated before the summer ‘vets’ arrive who are often not competent to do so.

The delays for some dogs last not days or weeks, but sometimes months or even years. For example, little Miri, who was identified as being at high risk of pyometra by heat cycle tracking and was scheduled to be spayed many many times, kept getting bounced out of her optimal hormonal window by higher priority dogs (either ours or other village dogs) and then there was never an alternative time available for her within her window. Her sterilisation was delayed as a result for nearly 2 years.

When dogs with mammary tumours are bounced out of their cycle window by production animal emergencies (which happens frequently due to the legacy classification of sleddogs being less commercially important than other economically important animals) or by more critical emergencies (which happens frequently because the resource allocation of vets to the northern clinics does not match demand), their tumours obviously grow and this not only reduces their overall lifespan but also their economic value. Whilst this is unacceptable from a welfare perspective, it is also financially unacceptable for the northern businesses who rely on the dogs to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible because even old but healthy dogs have a vital role to play in the pack in teaching youngsters.

Animals lost early or treated late because of restricted or remote veterinary access, therefore, not only costs animal lives and compromises the welfare of the animals in terms of quality and length of life but it also has both an obvious time and money cost — in terms of the thousands of extra kilometers driven per year — and a more hidden cost in terms of the loss of the time and money investment that goes into developing every sleddog.

Even last week when we happened to have a local vet at work, she refused to take a critical dog with a blockage who was vomiting up any water she drank (despite me having an ultrasound appointment already scheduled which I asked to switch to this case since it was obviously more crucial but she couldn’t because she was ‘too busy’).

I got the first time slot available in the next closest clinic (which happened to be later that afternoon, 200km away…which should have given me time to do both) and put the dog on fluids and parafin oil from both ends in the meantime, hoping to move the blockage ASAP. (Again, I am only legally able to give sub-cut fluids even if I am technically allowed to give IV fluids to humans in a far-from-help scenario — which I was obviously in with the dog, in this instance).

I was kept waiting 45 minutes for the ultrasound and by the time it was over the in-house treatment for the blockage had started to work in that the dog (Willow) was no longer vomiting. However, to be responsible, particularly going into a weekend with even less access to veterinary care, I felt like I had no choice but to still drive 200km to get a second opion that she would now be OK. Given that I had been kept waiting, I basically had to speed 200km on icy roads to make the appointment. I was still shakey from the whole experience on the journey home when I was stopped by police on a random check. Thankfully they had missed me on the way south.

Another day of my life (on the anniversary of my mother’s death) basically stolen by having to drive 400km and waiting at vets in two locations rather than looking after the welfare of my c.200 other dogs or, god forbid, spending even a tiny amount of time remembering my mother’s life with my child.

Today, over 2 weeks later, the final part of the blockage came out…ironically a whole glove that our in-house vet had ‘lost’. She had been consistently leaving booties, gloves etc within reach of the dogs despite our constant reminders that that was totally unsafe (and despite numerous conversations about how proactive steps and diligence in many daily aspects of dog care are the most critical thing in avoiding the need for medical intervention).

I guess what I am saying is that when it comes to animal welfare in the north….I have a hard time swallowing all of the press hatred targeted at the farms when no-one seems to be willing to recognise the skills and knowledge of those working on the farms and the constraints the farms are operating under, within a system that frequently fails to support them.

We just called the vet again this week (April 29th 2026) to try to schedule in the operations that we tried to start to schedule already for the previous week but there had been no availability. But on calling we discovered that our vet isn’t working at all this week, and the nearest vet (a 5th year student working for two days only in the week — so basically for one more day) is 100km away. The next nearest vet is c.200km away. She may or may not be back in Hetta next week but no-one can tell us that for certain and there is no way in the system to check. So for the 20+ dogs that we would want to schedule for operations before the vet disappears for the summer months, things are looking bleak.

The article quoting Eva argued that the only reason why farms are even contemplating the need for higher welfare standards is because of all of the bad press…but as you can see, from the date on this screenshot, we have had welfare systems in place right from the beginning of our operation.

So what can be done?

I think that there are two potential things that we can do, given the increasing amount of targeted and negative press towards farms and the situation which has us hand-tied when it comes to using our skills to optimise the welfare of the dogs at a time and in a location in which the official system is failing.

One is to start speaking up about how the current system and the lack of access to vets causes suffering to the dogs. (I actually sent a complaint about dogs dying and suffering avoidably, maybe 7 years ago, but it took about 8 months and a change of supervisory vet to get a response…(which was effectively, do I still want to complain?) — by which time my husband said to not make a fuss because it was culturally inappropriate. :()

Another option is to devise a wilderness first aid certificate targeted at sleddog companies through which we can receive more training / highlight the skills that we already have and with which we could potentially argue that when vet access is, to all intents and purposes, absent, we should be allowed to take action (within our skills remit) to treat a dog when inaction could lead to worse suffering or death.

And in terms of the dialogue about sleddog welfare in the north, there needs to be an acknowledgement that it is not determined solely by whether owners care enough. It is also determined in part by whether veterinary care is physically available when it is needed.

That reality must be part of the conversation.

If animal welfare standards are to be meaningful, the infrastructure needed to support those standards must exist. Without accessible veterinary services, expectations become disconnected from reality, and the burden of systemic failure falls entirely on individual owners and animals.

The lack of veterinary access in the north is not an inconvenience. It is an animal welfare issue in its own right.

Until that is recognised, the discussion around welfare in remote areas will remain incomplete.