FALL 2022 Dr. José Antonio Guerra leads Treasure, one of his equine patients. Christina Weese
PRACTICAL VETERINARIAN Coming to Canada for an equine residency meant starting over for Dr. José Antonio Guerra. Guerra had already become a professor at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México outside of Mexico City after earning a master’s degree at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He oversaw a new equine hospital — and he finally owned the horses he had so badly wanted to ride as a young boy growing up outside of Mexico City. Still, he wanted to learn more. Advancing his skills as an equine surgeon meant giving up the life he’d built and moving to Canada.
“It wasn’t enough just to be a general equine vet,” says Guerra, who had no further options for specialized training in Mexico. “I wanted to keep growing, going to school.” Driven to becoming a board-certified equine surgeon, Guerra began a rotating internship at the Ontario Veterinary College before being matched to the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) for a large animal surgical residency program. “I wanted to get top knowledge and that’s why I decided to leave my comfort zone, [to] move to another country and leave everything behind,” he says.
Guerra had never heard of Saskatchewan before coming to the WCVM in 2019. Since then, he and his wife Abril have built a life in Canada with their two-year-old son Mateo, who was born in Saskatoon. While Guerra loves Canada and can see himself pursuing a career here, his experience working in a rural practice in Mexico continues to influence him as he works on his primary research project at the WCVM. Guerra is testing a combination of easily accessible local block and sedative drugs, lidocaine and xylazine, to provide longer acting pain control during nerve