Veterinarian Rodrigo Solis thinks he's found the perfect job -- taking care of horses in the Mexican Army -- until a new commander takes over.

Rodrigo Solis received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree in Mexico in 2006 and spent one semester abroad studying at the University of California-Davis. He then went on to earn a Master’s of Sustainable Development at the Technological Institute of Higher Studies Monterrey. He’s currently a 5th year PhD candidate in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Canada where he studies monarch butterfly conservation. Since 2018, he has been a fellow at the ReNewZoo graduate training program. He recently started a part-time position with eButterfly, an online citizen science platform that tracks butterflies across North America.

This story originally aired on July 26, 2019 in an episode titled “

Story Transcript

So one thing that I was going to say, and I’m just going to give this introduction, is I am a veterinarian from Mexico.  I studied there.  I’m a specialist in horses.  So that was a side note. 

But anyway, I had my dream job.  Just as any other regular soldier in the Mexican army, I used a green camouflage uniform everyday with long, black cavalry boots.  But I was just not any regular soldier.  I was also a veterinarian.  I served as a veterinarian there.  I was just getting paid as a soldier but working as a vet.  It was great.  It was amazing.  It was my dream job.  But I guess, as any other dream, sooner or later you have to wake up.  That happened to me nine months later. 

What happened was that the commander in chief of the unit that I was in retired and the new commander that came in, he had this aversion against civilians, professional civilians joining the ranks and getting special treatment, just as was my case.  So what I remember even him telling once like, “Oh, these civilians, they have their life too easy and they just want to come here.  If they want to join the army, they're going to learn the army ways.” 

So the first order that he had when he got there was to take me out of the clinic that I was in charge of.  It was just an amazing clinic where I was taking care of more than 200 beautiful horses.  Anyway, he took me out, kicked me out of that clinic and sent me to the stables as a stall cleaner. 

On top of that, he kind of enjoyed every day or every time that he could arresting me.  An ‘arrest’ in the army means that you have to stay sometimes two weeks straight working 20 hours a day.  In my case that was an endless cycle of having my hands filled with thorns after unloading trucks and trucks of hay bales and getting them all bloody after loading trucks and trucks of horses manure. 

I remember while I was doing that I was just thinking to myself how come seven years of getting prepared on being a vet made me to end up there.  Regardless, I just kept shoveling trying to prove to everyone that I deserved to be put back in the clinic.  That never happened. 

Anyway, around that same time, the war on drugs in Mexico was at its worst.  I guess the drop that spilled the water was when my commander was asked to send some personnel to support.  Of course, guess whose name was on top of the list? 

Before I could even say goodbye to anyone, I was sent to Juarez, which is a city in the border between Mexico and the U.S. that was pretty much the epicenter of the drug problem back then.  When I got there, I could feel this mix of adrenaline and stress all over.  Our routine everyday was just to go out and patrol the city, trying to push the cartels outside the city limits.

After two weeks or so of doing that, this day came that we came out, we’re driving and suddenly two trucks just passed us by and closed the road.  Several guys just came down the trucks and without any apparent reason they started shooting at us.  Of course we fought back.  Maybe it was just a couple of minutes but felt like an eternity to me. 

But finally, we were able to repel fire and that was the moment when the person that was next to me, he told me, “Hey, are you okay?” 

And I realized, I felt my shirt it was wet.  I realized that actually a bullet hit on a light pole, rebounded and hit me in the back.  So yeah, I was shot. 

But luckily enough it was not that bad.  The bullet didn’t go through.  But at least it spilled enough blood that I was sent to the hospital and then sent back home. 

So while I was in the hospital and then on my way back home, I started thinking and putting into balance all the bad things that had happened against all the good things because, ironically, being in the army was a safe place to be.  I mean, I had a secure job for the rest of my life.  I had extended health coverage for me, my family and even my parents.  And, on top of that, in the army, at least the Mexican army, you cannot quit before five years of serving.  If you do so, you are deemed as a deserter and that is punished by jail.  So yeah, I was stuck. 

I remember that time going every night to bed almost crying, feeling that everything was going so wrong but not knowing what to do, how to fix it.  After a few weeks of deliberation I decided I have to quit.  I will quit.  And I had a plan. 

See, there is this law in the army that says that a soldier can resign at any time from the army if they are not able to provide him with enough support of fulfilling his full potential. Having that in mind, I did my quick research and applied for a Master of Sciences Program on Sustainable Development.  Luckily enough I was accepted. 

With that acceptance letter, I submitted a petition to my commander for getting support from the army to get enrolled.  Of course he said no.  With that rejection letter, I submitted my resignation arguing that they were not supporting me.  Amazingly, they accepted it and a few days later I was already out of the army. 

Great.  I was out of the army and now ready to get to a Master of Science Program on Sustainable Development.  Wow, I felt that it was my second chance.  But that is not the end of the story. 

See, when I was applying for this program, I was way more focused in getting out of the army than actually doing my deep research on what the program was actually offering.  I knew that I liked taking care of animals.  I liked wildlife conservation so sustainable development kind of rings a bell.  But it was up until I started classes that I realized that it was way more into ecological engineering.  And all the profs and the classes there had that kind of expertise.  Nobody within the university actually knew anything about animals. 

The supervisor that was assigned to me, he suggested me to look for that expertise elsewhere to get an external supervisor.  So that day, I get back home, sat on my computer and just started emailing every NGO that I could think of.  Amazingly, the next day, the first email that I received back was from the World Wildlife Fund, WWF.  This was the Director of the monarch butterfly conservation program in Mexico.  He was inviting me to go to the monarch butterfly colonies and to see what they were doing to help them and see if I was interested in. 

Honestly, since I read the email, I was not interested at all.  I mean, I was a specialist in horses.  And back then, I had actually never seen a monarch butterfly before.  I didn’t know how they looked.  To be honest, back then I was not even able to tell the difference from a butterfly and a moth.  But anyway I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, so I accepted. 

Now, a few weeks later, December the 12th 2012, that was the day that changed my life.  That was the first day that I visited the colonies.  Coincidentally enough, that day, December the 12th is for Mexican culture quite important because it’s the day when the Virgin Mary is celebrated.  I’m not religious or anything but it’s when it is celebrated. 

So we woke up around 2:00 a.m. in the morning, really early, and started driving up the mountain through this windy dirt road.  A few minutes later, maybe half an hour, we saw this congregation of people just in the middle of the road, maybe 50 or 100, I don't know, and they were all dressed with indigenous attires, some and most of them with orange colors just as the monarchs. 

Then as we were driving around, I noticed that they were praying and dancing and they were doing all that around a little Virgin altar that was just on the side of the road.  That really shocked me how this little insect that I had never heard of before was actually moving the culture of the indigenous populations there has that power.  That really shocked me. 

Anyhow, we just kept driving up for a few more minutes, maybe an hour, until we got to where the road ended.  Maybe it was two hours before dawn.  And why were we there so early?  So every year WWF measures the area of the colonies so they can give an estimation of the population.  We were going to be doing that, measuring the colonies.  And that is done early in the morning before dawn break so the butterflies don’t get too disturbed. 

So maybe two hours before dawn break we came down the truck and started walking inside the forest and it was super cold, super cold and super dark and it was really foggy.  It was actually kind of hard to see just the trees in front of you.  But we kept walking, got to where the colonies where and we started measuring the trees, the colony. 

Then it started dawning.  With a little bit more of light, I noticed that the trees that we were measuring were covered by this almost perfect tapestry of butterflies, so perfect that it was almost impossible to see the tree underneath.  That really amazed me.  But then as the sun kept coming up, some shy beams of light started penetrating the forest and it was really easy to see them because of the fog. 

Then it happened.  Those beams of light, when they touched where the monarchs were, just as if they were little brushes of color, they would just revive the monarchs that were asleep.  They would start fluttering a little bit and showing that orange bright color that they had.  As soon as the beam would move away from them they would just go back to their slumber. 

While I was looking at that, I found myself thinking of that amazing journey that that little insect had come through in order to be there.  I mean some of them came all the way from Ontario enduring rains, droughts, wind on top of their delicate wings just in order to get there and be able to rest. 

So suddenly I realized that my journey, my own journey had not been that different from theirs.  I had also endured so many things.  I had to overcome so many obstacles and perhaps I still had to overcome so many more to get to the place where I actually belonged to.  I suddenly felt that everything that had happened to me, everything was making sense now.  I realized that everything was part of this larger scheme, that those humiliations, those endless days of shoveling poop, even that shot in the back, they were all part of the larger scheme that gave me the opportunity of being there,  experiencing that unique moment. 

Then suddenly my life started to regain sense and I decided, I felt that I then wanted to dedicate my life to take care of that wonderful insect.  Eight years later, well that happened eight years ago.  So eight years later I am almost done with my PhD and I’m still working with monarchs.  Thank you.