Ethnoveterinary Knowledge

Local specialists with local knowledge

In many places, people still rely almost exclusively on local knowledge and local specialists, with no outside inputs at all. Local knowledge may include use of some drugs, vaccines and other exogenous husbandry practices as well as traditional practices or treatments. New projects need to ensure they do not undermine this existing local knowledge.

Ethnoveterinary knowledge (EVK) projects

Some projects have been set up specifically to support the continuation, propagation and verification of local traditional veterinary treatments and knowledge. While EVK includes husbandry, spiritual and surgical practices as well as remedies, specific projects often focus on plant-based treatments. There are many EVK-based projects in India, some aiming to make the plant remedies commercially available, others giving greater emphasis to social factors affecting their use within the community. There are also examples from Africa. Heifer Project International was involved in establishing gardens of veterinary medicinal plants in Cameroon. IT-Kenya has a project in Samburu District investigating local treatments which are used with confidence and returning knowledge to the community with ‘added value’. The Christian Veterinary Mission has a similar project in Karamoja, northern Uganda. In Tanzania there is a collaborative project between the Animal Disease Research Institute of Dar-es-Salaam and Vetaid, a British NGO, investigating local veterinary knowledge. In addition, many individuals and small community projects are collecting and dealing with their own local knowledge either informally or as part of their other work. Increasingly, it is being recognized that EVK should provide the starting point for all CAHW projects – an approach advocated in this book.

see also:

EVK page (page 3 of CAHW pages)
ETHNOVETWEB - the ethno-veterinary website
the ethno-veterinary e-mailing list
PRELUDE Database of Veterinary Medicinal Plants of Africa