Featured Image: Nanjing Agricultural University Experimental Buffalo
On Wednesday 29th September 2004 the ‘cluster’ was very warmly welcomed at the Department of Clinical Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the Nanjing Agricultural University. This is the second most prestigious such campus in modern China after its Beijing equivalent. We were greeted by seven Professors and five Academic Associates including Dr. Rong Rui DVM PhD and Dr. Kehe Huang DVM PhD. One elderly faculty member had spent two happy years in Sydney with Professor Cliff Gallagher. The physiology department was especially impressive with its leader an extremely erudite lady boasting esoteric credentials including time spent in Melbourne in human health research and many years in Germany. We enjoyed a fully escorted tour of the whole campus and shared morning tea with the faculty elite which included a power point presentation in English by a young and extremely enthusiastic academic with a passion for horses called Dr. Sun Junling.
Both he and Professor Kehe Huang went to great pains to explain the ‘marriage’ and incorporation of both traditional ‘Eastern’ and modern ‘Western’ veterinary medicine and surgery into the Nanjing clinical training curriculum. The author proposed a vote of thanks to the host faculty – fortuitously translated into Mandarin! – and presented an AEVA tie to the young academic. At this stage the facilities for clinical teaching in Western methods for both companion and production-animal streams is limited but improving. Mr. James Sun points out that due to exceptional historical circumstances there are as few as 10 ‘dedicated’ expert equine veterinarians in China. Most of them are ‘ageing’ and come from the State or Provincial-level agricultural colleges and combine both eastern and western disciplines. ‘Foreign’ veterinary expertise is being imported by the emerging race clubs [Beijing JC] and in 2002 the first international equine veterinary workshop was held in Beijing.