Fat-bottomed sheep and veterinary services - a foreigner’s perspective

If the land surface of Afghanistan is a huge naan bread, about one eighth is suitable for cultivation, and about three eighths can be used as summer pasture for grazing animals. Vastly the most common of these animals are sheep, but there are also domestic goats, cattle, backyard poultry, and for transport and fun, horses, mules, donkeys, camels and dogs.

The work of the Afghan veterinary services is to keep all these animals healthy. A herder with confidence that his/her animals will not die until their date with the slaughter man’s knife, is a herder better able to plan other husbandry interventions. I also believe that if we are going to keep animals, they deserve the best care we can give them.

In the 1980s, as government veterinary services waned, NGOs with new, ‘community-based’, approaches moved in to fill the gaps. There are now nearly 600 animal health service centres across Afghanistan. Besides the vets, communities have selected trusted and respected local men, known to be good with animals, to become paravets. They are trained for six months in carefully planned, practical training courses, tailored to local animal health problems. In the remotest places, a service might be provided by a basic veterinary worker (BVW) whose training is just one month, but who will know which drug goes with which locally recognised disease syndrome, how to check the quality of a drug, and the correct dosages for the different sized animals.

Rory Stewart, in his walk across Afghanistan described in ‘The Places In Between’, mentions staying with three ‘doctors’, as these veterinary workers tend to be known locally. It is clear they are people with local status, and it is also reassuring how casually they mention the work they are doing as if it in part defines their life.

Although exact roles vary across the country, women, of course, play an important part in animal husbandry. They are often first to spot ill health and may have responsibility for treating and nursing sick animals. In some places women have now also been trained. This is mainly as BVWs specialising in poultry - backyard poultry are locally important and they seem controlled almost entirely by women - but there is one, now famous, woman paravet. Her condition of training was that her brother also got trained. She is very good. Two more have now started the training.

I like the processes that go with these community-based service approaches: going out to villages, meeting community members, visiting individual herders, seeing their animals, walking out to look at pastures, or at tents being put up for winter housing of sheep and goats, discussing the problems they face and engaging in discussion about how best these problems can be addressed. For me as a foreigner, it is also fascinating to get an insight into such different lives, lived often in beautiful places. At times like these I feel I am lucky to be a vet. I realise it is different for my local colleagues.

‘You live in a dramatically beautiful country,’ I once said to an Afghan vet colleague on my way to visit a paravet outside Herat. ‘Through your eyes,’ was his reply. We were driving up the start of a wide valley in towards hills of fantastic variety and colour. A line of trees marked the course of an irrigation canal that wound its way across the land following a meandering contour, the parent river at the end of summer nearly dry. Occasional villages appeared patched around with the only visible green, and flocks of sheep seemed to be grazing bare earth. ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘To us it is just barren desert and dry mountains. We’d like to live in a place with green mountains so we could be richer.’

With the re-emergence of a service oriented government in Afghanistan, the government vet service is busy engaging with the NGO sector. In the past there were around 120 government veterinary clinics which, nominally at least, provided free services. However their reach was not long, and their cupboards were often bare. The vets, paravets, and BVWs in the NGO sector are essentially private practitioners: subsidies have mostly been withdrawn and herders pay near full market price for treatments, vaccines and services. The system is working but central government, provincial government, the NGOs and the private sector are now working together to see how it can be moved forward and improved.

The role of government is to ensure quality and responsiveness of services to satisfy the herders, as well as the international trading community if Afghanistan is to take advantage of international markets for its animal products. Another role of the vet service is to ensure that animal products are safe to use and eat. As with most sectors, it will take the arrival of legislation, regulation and the ability to police and enforce this, before everything works according to plan. In the meantime we are busy training and putting systems in place to facilitate good practice.

Of course, this short article paints only part of the picture. Although there are huge areas of land usable only for food by livestock, livestock inevitably intersect with the agricultural and horticultural sectors. While in some places animals permit human habitation that would not otherwise be possible, eat plant by-products that might otherwise be wasted, and produce dung that can be used for fertiliser or fuel; and the company of animals and the rhythms they impose on people’s lives can be valuable and reassuring; in other situations they can denude the land and destroy young trees, eat and convert inefficiently food that people could eat, waste precious water, displace wildlife, and pollute the local environment. In addition, animal keeping can involve cruelty and cause great suffering to the animals involved. Well husbanded, extensively ranged grazing animals and backyard poultry appear to have ‘good’ lives - provided they have enough food, they are also able to satisfy their behavioural needs. This is not the case in, for example, intensive poultry production for eggs or meat. Animal keeping therefore needs to be negotiated sensitively.

Afghanistan’s sheep also produce top quality wool for carpets; and its goats produce top quality cashmere. Unfortunately, because there is not yet a recognised ‘brand Afghanistan’ much of this is exported to be blended with inferior fibre. Some of this gets re-imported. Next time you buy a carpet or a shawl, ask about these things. It may be that the seller will not know the answer, but if enough people are asking, and make it clear they would prefer to be buying all Afghan products, and might even be willing to pay a premium for the Afghan brand, the more likely the local market will grow and the rural economy will start to pick up.

Perhaps you are reading this while waiting for supper. How much better to eat a delicious kebab from the meat of a fat bottomed sheep that grazed the high mountain pastures of central Afghanistan (and one day quality assured all the way to the skewer), than a chicken leg. Although backyard poultry are locally important, they do not have a large share of the Kabul egg or meat market. Most chicken meat is imported, often after a haphazard journey from some intensive shed somewhere entirely soulless, to undermine the local food economy of one of the world’s poorest nations.

So, if you want to do something concrete for Afghanistan, buy local products and eat locally produced food. And if you want to eat meat, at least for now, eat mutton.