When Communities Finally Get the Tools

Victory Vetmobiles emerged from a simple lesson learned through experience rather than planning documents: services can and do operate in the absence of infrastructure, but rarely in ways that are effective, efficient, or sustainable. In many rural and remote Indigenous communities, animal management has been shaped not by a lack of care or concern, but by the long absence of the physical spaces, systems, and tools required to act safely and consistently.

In towns and cities, animal management infrastructure is largely invisible because it is assumed. Kennels exist. Equipment is available or attainable. Animal bylaws are in place. Veterinary clinics are present, even if access is not always affordable or equitable. In many Indigenous communities, those baseline conditions were never established. What exists instead is a long history of being expected to manage real public health and safety risks without the infrastructure required to do so.

When community animal management has been absent, under-resourced, or systematically undermined over generations, the problem is often described narrowly as a lack of services. Too few veterinarians, inconsistent bylaw authority or enforcement, limited local capacity to manage animals safely, and long distances between communities and the external systems that influence funding, regulation, and public safety are treated as isolated gaps rather than as features of a broader structural failure. The proposed solutions tend to follow that framing, emphasizing more clinics, more outreach, or more trips in and out, without addressing the conditions that make those interventions fragile and short-lived.

After more than a decade of working alongside Indigenous communities facing chronic animal-related public health and safety risks, it has become clear that increased access to care and services alone is not enough.

The core issue is the absence of infrastructure and stable systems that allow safe, consistent, and sustained responses over time. Without appropriate physical space to host care, manage animals in crisis, support enforcement, or store essential equipment, even well-designed services struggle to move beyond episodic response. Communities are left dependent on outside visits, often shaped by volunteer availability or philanthropy, to meet needs that should be supported through stable, predictable systems.

In recent years, education has often been layered onto this same service-based model. Humane education, awareness campaigns, and training workshops are asked to compensate for the absence of physical space, equipment, systems, and reliable access to care services. Without infrastructure, education becomes explanatory rather than preventive, describing problems that communities lack the tools to address. Responsibility is shifted onto people instead of being carried by systems.

This is the gap that the Victory Vetmobiles concept is meant to address.

The roots of the Victory Vetmobiles approach lie in Mission Pawsible, British Columbia’s first non-profit mobile veterinary clinic, which itself grew out of CARE Network’s work on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations territory. CARE Network began as neighbours supporting neighbours, responding to longstanding gaps in veterinary access, animal bylaw development and enforcement, sheltering, and rehoming that had gone unaddressed in the region. CARE Network and Mission Pawsible operate quite literally at the end of the road, serving communities beyond it.

Mission Pawsible did not begin with a polished unit or a capital plan. It began with a used moving truck, a small team, and a pressing need to reach communities by logging roads and boats. Early builds revealed hard limits. Vehicles designed for highways failed under rural conditions. Mechanical strain, access challenges, and daily improvisation forced rapid redesigns. Each iteration stripped away what looked good on paper and reinforced what worked in practice: durability, simplicity, repairability, and cost discipline.

Over time, this hands-on experience demonstrated something important. Effective animal management infrastructure in rural and remote contexts does not need to be expensive or complex. It needs to be adaptable, locally serviceable, and designed around real conditions rather than urban assumptions. That lesson now informs both mobile veterinary units and the development of multi-use community animal management buildings that can support visiting vet teams, provide secure kenneling, store equipment, and support crisis response, often at costs measured in tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Communities are often managing dogs that have spent little time indoors, animals that are under-socialized and therefore fearful, reactive, and more likely to bite, alongside feral and semi-feral cat colonies and emergency intakes during crises. These realities are compounded by long transport routes involving boats, unpaved roads, or planes, frequent weather delays, and limited veterinary availability. Together, these conditions shape what infrastructure must be able to do if it is going to function safely and effectively in practice rather than on paper.

CARE Network’s experience is not theoretical. It is operational. Over time, that experience made clear that many existing animal facilities and mobile units were poorly suited to rural and remote contexts. They were too expensive, too specialized, too fragile, or too rigid to meet the needs of communities managing real risk with limited resources.

Designing Mission Pawsible under tight budget constraints forced further clarity about what actually mattered in practice: what could be simplified, what could be modular, and what could be repaired locally or fixed by the veterinary team on site.

The result was not a single product, but a set of design principles grounded in use. Victory Vetmobiles reflect a different understanding of responsibility. They reflect a shift away from episodic charity and toward infrastructure as a shared public responsibility that supports continuity, local control, and safer decision-making over time.

It is important to be precise about what Victory Vetmobiles are, and what they are not. Victory Vetmobiles is not a manufacturer. It does not sell units. It does not build infrastructure for communities. Instead, it represents a design and systems approach developed through CARE Network’s frontline experience and Mission Pawsible’s operational realities.

The actual construction of mobile units and prefabricated structures is carried out by a manufacturing company based in Delta, British Columbia. Communities and organizations contract directly with the manufacturer, retaining ownership and control over the infrastructure.

Without this clarity, well-intentioned initiatives risk recreating dependency rather than supporting local control.

In many rural and remote communities, there is no single-purpose solution. What is needed instead is multi-use infrastructure that can adapt over time and across scenarios. The same structure may host visiting vet teams, provide secure kenneling during bite-risk or crisis situations, hold dogs during spay and neuter clinics, create space for quarantine or recovery, store animal-related equipment and supplies, and support community-led animal bylaws and enforcement.

Flat-packed, prefabricated structures matter because they can be shipped to places without road access, assembled locally, repaired without specialized contractors, and scaled according to community priorities. Just as importantly, they can be community-owned.

Ownership changes the relationship, but infrastructure alone does not guarantee legitimacy. New systems require more than physical presence. They require social uptake. Communities must be supported to interpret, adapt, and embed new rules, spaces, and responsibilities in ways that make sense locally. When that work is absent, bylaws exist without enforcement, facilities sit unused, and compliance erodes over time. These outcomes are not signs of apathy or resistance. They reflect systems that were introduced without sufficient attention to how responsibility, legitimacy, and collective obligation are established, reinforced, and sustained within communities.

When animal infrastructure is absent, communities are forced into reactive decision-making. When roaming dogs begin to affect public health and safety, risks escalate. Children are exposed. Trauma accumulates. Emergency measures become normalized. When appropriate infrastructure exists, the entire system shifts. Visiting services become more effective and can occur more consistently because logistics are simplified and basic infrastructure is already in place. Prevention becomes possible. Enforcement becomes safer.

Outcomes improve not because communities suddenly care more, but because they finally have access to tools they were historically denied.

This is why infrastructure should be understood as a public health intervention rather than an animal welfare amenity. It is also why one-off charitable capital gifts are not enough. Infrastructure must be planned, funded, and governed as part of a broader system that recognizes community animal management as a determinant of human health and safety.

This is also where Increased ACCESS’s role sits. Increased ACCESS is an Indigenous-led non-profit working alongside Indigenous Nations at the intersection of community animal management, public health, and systems change. In some contexts, including through our Indigenous SPCA initiative, we provide direct supports such as planning assistance, education programs, and help with animal removal or rehoming when requested by Nations. Our broader role is to support community-led decision-making by helping align infrastructure, policy, and funding with health and safety priorities defined by communities themselves.

Victory Vetmobiles, Mission Pawsible, and CARE Network’s design experience provide practical proof that solutions are possible. Increased ACCESS works to ensure that these solutions are understood, supported, and scaled in ways that respect Indigenous leadership, jurisdiction, and ownership.

For decades, the dominant response to animal-related safety challenges in Indigenous communities has been inconsistent at best. In some cases, help has been sent in. In others, communities have been left to manage risks on their own. When interventions do occur, they are often temporary. A clinic. A rescue team. Support to draft an animal bylaw, without the enforcement systems or infrastructure required to sustain it.

Victory Vetmobiles are not about mobility for its own sake. They are about durability. About building systems that remain when trucks, planes, or visiting teams leave.

Addressing animal-related public health inequities does not hinge on a single starting point. What matters is that responses are community-led and comprehensive. Infrastructure must be part of the conversation, not as a prescription imposed from outside, but as a tool communities choose to support their own priorities.

Until infrastructure is treated as a foundational element of community safety and wellbeing, rather than an optional add-on, communities will continue to be asked to manage systemic risk without tools long withheld through federal and provincial policy and funding decisions.