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Beauty and the Beast: A story of a post-80s veterinarian

(People's Daily Online)    08:44, October 24, 2014
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Chen Rong with a red-shouldered macaw in Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo - Sept. 28, 2014. (Xinhua/Li Xiang)

Sporting a ponytail and wearing a green sports suit, few people would be able to link this beautiful girl with her current career from her appearance alone. She is Chen Rong, 28, a veterinarian in Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo in east China's Jiangsu province, and the first employee in the zoo to hold a masters degree.

As an animal lover, Chen always dreamt of working in a zoo. After graduating from Anhui Agricultural University with a majoring in veterinary studies, Chen started her career at Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo, trimming the nails of adult elephants, collecting blood samples from orangutans, spreading anti-inflammatory drugs on Siberian cranes suffering from bumble foot, and taking care of newly born rhesus macaques. Chen loves every minute of her daily routine.

Chen arrives at the zoo at 8 in the morning everyday. After checking out the animals in every corner, Chen conducts a series of experiments on animal bacteria and viruses in her laboratory. Her routine rarely changes.

The zoo is built on a hillside, and heavily infested by mosquitoes. Chen is constantly being bitten on the arms and the face as she tours around the zoo. She also has to put up with all sorts of powerful odors. "How do I put up with all of this?" she asks. "It's easy – they fade into oblivion because I am so enthusiatic about my animals."

When she first worked at the zoo she familiarized herself with the habits of different animals by working as a breeder, by feeding animals in different locations, by observing their habits, and by writing those observations in her diary. Meanwhile, the animals had the chance to get used to her presence, and are no longer likely to become frightened or aggressive when Chen gets close. She is now able to figure out the mental state of an animal at the first glance.

A year passed. Now well acquainted with the habits of the animals in the zoo, Chen became a veterinarian and established her own bacteria and molecular analysis laboratory. Small as it is, the laboratory is fully equipped, and Chen has the facilities to conduct bacterial isolation and identification, and molecular and blood analysis.

"Baby animals don't understand that I'm trying to help them, so they tend to be a little aggressive towards me. But I am just happy to see that they are healthy," says Chen.

Chen will never forget the time that she spent more than 10 nights kneading the abdomen of a gibbon suffering from tetanus and quadriplegia. "I felt that all my efforts had been rewarded when I saw the gibbon back together with his friends after he recovered," she says.

Chen explains that in-depth scientific research on animal breeding and vaccines is indispensable to good animal feeding and protection. Apart from her daily work, she spends most of her spare time in the library. In order to expand her knowledge, she devotes herself to literature and foreign reports on the latest animal medical research.

While Chen is happy to simply work with her animals, she is not satisfied with this alone. She is always dreaming of making a real difference at some point.

"As a young girl, it seemed like a real challenge to survive in what is not a hugely popular field," she says. "But a person should shout out their dream as loud as they can, and ignore those who mock or doubt. I am determined to be an expert in the field of animals." 


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(Editor:Yuan Can、Liang Jun)
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