Partnership launched to bring veterinary care to rural Alaska

Alaska Federation of Natives and a nonprofit organization have formed a new program bringing veterinary care and public health service to villages in need

A dog team trots through the snow at the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 5, 2022, in Anchorage. Dogs are important to life in rural Alaska, but veterinary care to protect their health is in short supply. A new partnership has been launched to help fill the need. (Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

By Yereth Rosen

Alaska Beacon

For years, rural Alaska communities have struggled with out-of-control dog populations that pose dangers to children, and diseases circulating through wildlife that can spill over into pets and people. And for years, the Alaska Federation of Natives has asked policy makers to help address the situation by extending veterinary services that residents say are desperately needed.

Now AFN, the state’s largest Native organization, is taking its own action. The state’s largest Native organization has teamed with Alaska Native Rural Veterinary Inc. to launch a program to provide animal care directly to remote villages.

The partnership kicked off its rural work this week when a veterinarian team landed in Galena, a Yukon River village that is among the multitude of Alaska communities lacking regular animal-health service.

The Rural Veterinary Public Health Program is intended to serve villages on the North Slope, in Western Alaska, Interior Alaska and other remote areas where there are no resident veterinarians, said Dr. Arleigh Reynolds, a veterinarian serving as the program’s medical advisor.

The plan includes spay and neuter services to keep populations in check, as well as vaccines and other animal care that is considered routine in urban areas but is difficult to secure in rural villages.

The program is also intended to address zoonotic diseases, which are illnesses that can spread between animals and people, adhering to the One Health approach.

“The most important thing is we’re keeping people safe and their pets safe, and wildlife, too,” said Reynolds, who led the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Center for One Health Research for a decade. Since 2024, he has served as the executive director of the Sitka Sound Science Center.

Dogs are important to communities, and they are intertwined in Alaska Native culture and Alaska history. Dog mushing is the state’s official sport. But the shortage and, for some communities, complete lack of veterinarian care has caused serious problems, including high rates of dog bites suffered by children.

Reynolds said the new program intends to address a wide range of problems. While spay and neuter services and other routine animal care are common needs, communities have varying concerns that the program is designed to address, he said.

The most ominous threat is rabies. In Alaska, it is mostly found in Arctic foxes and red foxes, but wild animals can infect dogs, which in turn can infect people. The disease, if not treated right away, is always fatal to people. There are periodic spikes of rabies detected in wild animals in parts of rural Alaska, including this year in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Vaccines protect dogs and, in turn, protect people.

In some island or coastal communities, seals are at risk from dogs with distemper, Reynolds said. “When the distemper gets into the seal populations, it’s 100% fatal,” he said.

For afflicted dogs, there are treatment options, but the best step is vaccination to prevent the disease, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Tularemia, a tick-borne disease sometimes called “rabbit fever,” is a concern in other communities, Reynolds said. Numerous species of wildlife have been found to be infected — and people can be infected, falling seriously ill or even dying if not treated. Antibiotics are used to treat infections.

Interactions with wild animals increase people’s risks of contracting tularemia, and past research indicated that Alaska Native people were five times as likely as white Americans to be infected.

Another threat is a type of tapeworm that can be tolerated by dogs but, if ingested by people, can lead to deaths from cancer-like cysts in the liver or other organs. Called Echinococcus multilocularis, it has a strain that is endemic in parts of the North Slope and Western Alaska. It is found in Arctic foxes, red foxes and the small rodents that make up their prey. Detections are increasing in North America. Deworming can protect dogs.

Parvovirus, which can kill dogs, is another concern in certain areas, Reynolds said. And there are plans for participants in the program to help monitor avian influenza in wild populations, he said.

Stalled legislation

The partnership emerged after the Alaska legislature failed to pass a widely supported bill that would have established a statewide fund for spay and neuter services.

The bill, House Bill 258, would have set up a system with revenues collected from fees for specialized license plates, private donations and other sources.

Rep. Will Stapp, R- Fairbanks, the measure’s sponsor, said lawmakers ran out of time to fully consider the bill. “But it’s a great idea, and we’ll keep up the good fight next year,” he said.

The bill suffered from its relatively late introduction, he said. And disagreements emerged over a provision that would have allowed municipalities to sterilize and then release feral animals. The practice would run afoul of Alaska Department of Fish and Game rules, but the idea has been embraced by residents of Juneau, who are coping with large numbers of feral cats.

“They just have a real hard time with the current policy which is trap and kill, basically,” Stapp said. “Turns out Juneau urbanites don’t want to kill the cats.”

He said he hopes that disagreement can be addressed in the future.

Alaska Rural Veterinary Inc. was among the groups advocating for Stapp’s bill, though formation of the partnership with AFN was unrelated to that legislation.

Reynolds said that lack of spay and neuter services take a toll on people as well as dogs. In some villages where dog populations have become too large to manage, residents have resorted to killing out-of-control stray animals. It is a poor outcome, Reynolds said.

“The people who do the culling, it’s really hard on them,” he said. Some even need mental-health therapy, he said. “And it doesn’t solve the problem when you’ve got a whole new group of stray dogs,” he said.

The group continues to hope for a legislative solution: abill pending in Congressthat would add veterinary care to the duties of the Indian Health Service.

The bill, the Veterinary Services to Improve Public Health in Rural Communities Act, is sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and other senators from states with large numbers of tribal residents. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent in December. But it has yet to move in the U.S. House.

If approved, the new Indian Health Service veterinary care program and associated U.S. Department of Agriculture vaccine research would cost $14 million through 2030 and $47 million through 2035, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Funding sources for the Rural Veterinary Public Health Program will be announced later, Reynolds said.

Whatever the costs for prevention, he said, they will be lower than the costs of responses.

“Just the rabies prevention alone will pay for the program,” he said.

In the case of rabies, each exposed person in Alaska winds up bearing thousands of dollars in medical costs. The financial burden is described in a Colorado State University-led study published in October.

People exposed to rabies are treated with a series of shots administered over two weeks — human rabies immune globulin and rabies vaccine — along with other care. From 2012 to 2024, 182 rabies-exposed people in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta needed such care, according to the study.

While such care in the Lower 48 typically costs a few thousand dollars, in rural Alaska, the outlay is exponentially higher because of needed travel, lost work and other costs, Reynolds said. And there are ripple effects in communities, he said. In one Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta case, the local school had to be closed for two weeks because an exposed family that needed treatment included the village teacher, he said.

• Yereth Rosen came to Alaska in 1987 to work for the Anchorage Times. She has been reporting on Alaska news ever since, covering stories ranging from oil spills to sled-dog races. She has reported for Reuters, for the Alaska Dispatch News, for Arctic Today and for other organizations. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.