"He's a good-sized fellow," Porter tells them. "He'll probably be all right. Why don't you come back with us. I'll show you where he'll be staying."
George leaves for his office, a couple of blocks away. The others pile into the Porters' old station wagon and set out for a metal building a few miles away, hidden from the road by dense forest. The building houses the hospital and living quarters of Wolf Hollow Wildlfe Rehabilitation Centre, which Jessica Porter and Judy Carter, her veterinary assistant, founded in 1982. The rescuers carry Andy into the building in his make-shift carrier. Porter, a slight red-haired woman dressed in tank top, jeans, and Reeboks, extracts the slippery baby form his plastic cocoon and places him in the pan of a white metal baby scale.
"Twenty-three pounds," she says with a smile. "That's not too bad. By the time we get these little fellows, they're often so dehydrated that they're down to fourteen pounds. Normally they weigh about twenty-five pounds at birth and can gain up to seventy-five pounds by the time they are three weeks old."
She is working while she talks, and every movement is like choreographed dance--place baby on stainless steel table, attach red rubber stomach tube to sixty-milliliter syringe, fill tube and syringe with formula, pass tube into baby's mouth and over the tongue until he swallows, push syringe plunger with chin and thumb, reload syringe, and repeat the process of propelling life-giving fluids into the orphan.
"We can't simulate a formula to match a seal mother's milk," Porter says. "Seal milk is about eighty percent fat. We can't even get that much fat in emulsion, so I try to hydrate them with fluids and electrolytes and a suspension of ground fish."
What Porter is really doing is caring for and saving at least a small part of our living planet. Her mission seems almost spiritual but certainly not conventionally religious. In fact, knocking convention seems to be what Jessica Porter is all about.
Porter attended Colorado State University in the 1970s, when agriculture was in its heyday. She explains, "In preveterinary classes, I stood out because I was a liberal hippie when most everyone else seemed to be a conservative cowboy. I enrolled in elective psychology and anthropology courses when most of my classmates opted for 'Feeds and Feeding' and 'Horse Production." I wanted to doctor reticulated pythons and wolves when others wanted to learn how to get rich in a poodle practice or an equine breeding farm."
With a salary of one-hundred dollars a month, Porter is not the richest veterinarian in the world, but she has obviously found her niche in wildlife rehabilitation. Surrounded by eagles, hawks, nesting birds, raccoons, brown-and-white-spotted fawns, harbor seal pups, and various other creatures, Porter expresses her feeling of innate kinship by healing these animals and then setting them free.
This is the introduction to a first-person narrative about Dr. Jessica Porter as it appears in Women in Veterinary Medicine: Profiles of Success. |
