BDS Newsletter: Ethiopia Update
Firstly, I’d like to say a massive thank you to Pat Calderbank and the generous
people who donated tack and brushes!
I finished the final part of my fieldwork in December and returned to the UK in time
for a family Christmas which was lovely. Here’s a brief update on the project and an
invitation to join us for a talk in June in aid of SPANA’s harness campaign in
Ethiopia:
There are approximately 112 million working horses in the world supporting
between 300-600 million people, although this is likely an underestimate. It’s
thought over half of the world’s equines are in developing countries and yet
there is little support or protection for these animals and the people relying on
them.
I have been in Ethiopia for 12months of the last two years to collect data for my
PhD research into the causes of respiratory disease, as this is a common
presentation at the clinic. During this work we noticed a lot of incorrectly
positioned and fitted harnesses: sometimes the harness was even the cause of
the breathing problems reported. As we have said in previous articles, the
harnesses are often made from strips of old tyres and plastic cut from cooking oil
containers. As you can imagine this leads to a lot of problems with harness
wounds especially across the chest, over the withers and under the girth. The
owners that drive these horses to earn their daily income are extremely poor.
Should a horse become sick, owners have no choice but to perform manual
labour jobs and earn a fraction of the wage. This means that they struggle to pay
for school or medical fees for their families but also have little money for
veterinary care or harnessing equipment, which leads to a endless cycle of
suffering for all concerned.
After my first trip I wanted to understand harnessing practice and went to spend
a day with Pat Calderbank. It was a great experience (if not a little rainy!), but Pat
was a fantastic teacher and her horses a pleasure to work with. Since then Pat
has been wonderfully supportive, offered advice and kindly collected donations
of tack for the Ethiopian horses. Using the girths and sleeves received we set
about trying to build a prototype harness. We wanted it to be comfortable, strong
and affordable. We also held an interactive training session in how to fit and
position harnessing and we bought our own SPANA pony. With tips and advice
from Pat I trained him to voice commands wandering up and down the paths on
the university campus. We called him Chocolate (as all of the local children know
that word in English!) and we taught him commands in Amharic, much to the
amusement of the vet students as I went around campus talking aloud. We hope
to use Chocolate as a demonstration animal for harness fitting and driving skills.
The Ethiopian team are also going to be launching a new campaign to train
harness makers later this year.
We would be thrilled if you would join us for an evening talk and to raise
awareness for the carriage horses of the developing world. For a quick
introduction (3minute video) to my research project please visit my University
of Liverpool page http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~glaing/
Thank you!