1st September 2005
Leading British equine welfare charity, the Brooke, along with the World Society for Protection of Animals, is launching one of its biggest ever projects to relieve the misery of tens of thousands of working animals and their impoverished owners in Afghanistan.
The £1 million project aims to dramatically improve the health and welfare of the working horses, donkeys and mules that are the backbone of the country’s desperate struggle to rebuild itself.
Afghanistan has few vets and ignorance of equine care is rife. This means preventable suffering, especially lameness and dehydration, is widespread. Vitally, the project aims to train animal owners so that they can care for their animals properly themselves.
Brooke and WSPA plan to establish mobile veterinary teams that will cover one third of Afghanistan over the next five years, including the provinces of Nangharar and Kabul. Mobile vets will also reach Torkham, east of Jalalabad, where 50,000 working equine animals alone face hardship providing cross-border transport in brutal, road-less terrain near Pakistan.
The Brooke has a history of helping the Afghan people and their working animals - in 2002 its Pakistan-based vets tended to stricken animals of Afghan refugees in camps on the Pakistan border. By 2003, when people were flooding back to their homes in Afghanistan, the Brooke, with support from WSPA, were invited by Afghan aid agency Committee for Rehabilitation Aid to Afghanistan to continue its free veterinary care and education programmes for the animal-owning communities of Jalalabad*.
The new project includes plans to build roadside shelters and watering facilities for use by both animals and people. Community clinics, farriery and saddlery training programmes will also be established and local people will be trained to care for animals and to provide essential first aid. The Brooke has already raised £270,000 towards the cost of the project but now needs to find a further £730,000 to run this programme of vital support for the next five years.
"We now urgently need to raise the remaining funds if we're to improve the increasingly hard lives of this country's working animals", says Brooke International Director, Bill Swann. "These animals are helping rebuild a nation - we owe it to them to make their lives worth living."
View photos of the project click here
Editors Notes
*This project was also supported by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.
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