The organisation treating sick and injured animals

Abdul Haq Karmi was hauling groceries in his little cart to sell at the local souq when he spotted the scrawny donkey foal. It was lying on the ground almost lifeless and at first glance Abdul Haq feared the foal was dead. Then he saw some faint signs of life – it was still breathing. Looking around, he couldn’t see its mother or owner, and Abdul Haq realised the foal must have been abandoned.

Desperate to save its life, the 12-year-old boy loaded the animal carefully into his cart. Then under the blistering sun he pulled the heavy load home to his village in Chemaia, Morocco, to give the foal some food and water. On the way he named the foal Mensi, which means “forgotten” in the local Berber language. Even after having had food and water, Mensi was weak and struggling to move.

Determined to help the poor animal, Abdul Haq sought the advice of his father, a mason who was bedridden as a result of an accident a year earlier. It was because of his father’s condition that Abdul Haq had to give up school and work to help support his parents and three younger brothers.

Abdul Haq’s father suggested he take the foal to Spana – the Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad. The organisation protects and cares for working animals in some of the world’s poorest countries. The youngster hauled Mensi 2km from his home to the Spana centre where vets examined the animal and found it was suffering from a serious internal medical problem. They operated on the foal immediately and bottle-fed it milk and honey for a week until it recovered.

Since there was still no sign of an owner, the vets asked if Abdul Haq would like to keep Mensi. He was delighted. In a few years, he hoped, the grown foal could pull his cart so he could earn more to send his brothers to school. “Sure, I’ll take him,’’ he said.
That was late last year. Now Mensi has made a full recovery and accompanies Abdul Haq to the souq every day.

The boy and his foal are just two of the recipients of help from Spana, which celebrates its 90th birthday this year. It was founded when Briton Kate Hosali and her daughter Nina visited North Africa in 1923 to enjoy some winter sun. Seeing the extreme poverty of animal owners and their lack of medicines and education, they set up the charity.

“We realised that behind this picturesque beauty there existed a vast sea of neglected animals suffering,” Nina wrote. “How many tourists had glimpsed this hidden world and like us, done nothing about it?”

Helping animals to help people

Today Spana has a dedicated team of volunteers and has permanent programmes in Ethiopia, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Mauritania and Syria. According to the charity, there are now at least 100 million working donkeys, horses and mules worldwide. Around one billion of the world’s poor rely on animals to generate income, and for subsistence and transport.

Working across Africa and the Middle East, the London-based international charity offers free veterinary treatment to working animals. Last year alone, the charity provided over 360,000 veterinary treatments.
 
“The need is huge,” says UK-trained vet Laura Higham, who works as a Spana veterinary programme adviser. “The number of working animals is on the rise. People need them for their livelihoods, and in some places the income from just one working animal can feed an extended family of up to 30 people.”

Laura’s work takes her to challenging environments like Darfur in Sudan and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. “I feel very fortunate to visit these fascinating places as part of my job. As a vet, I’m trained to care for animals – but my personal motivation lies in the concept that helping animals helps people.

“A family in sub-Saharan Africa may rely on a horse or donkey for transport, to get their goods to market and as a means of ploughing fields. In poor rural communities, animals can be a lifeline, and I’m very passionate about supporting this crucial relationship in places where veterinary assistance is non-existent.”

Alemayehu Bekele from Ethiopia knows the importance of the relationship all too well. As a married man with a young son, he found the income he got from subsistence farming was too meagre to support his family. He borrowed money from his father and bought Keyo, a cart horse, hoping he could use it to transport goods and produce from the farms to the souqs. Yet within two months, Keyo fell sick, with a locked jaw and no appetite.

With no other veterinary assistance available to him, Alemayehu, 31, walked Keyo 25km to reach the Spana clinic.

“He was very distressed because he thought his horse was going to die,” says Spana vet Dr Hanna Zewdu, who treated Keyo at the Debre Zeit clinic in Ethiopia.

The vet diagnosed tetanus, which he said the horse could have contracted from eating hay contaminated with the bacteria. Keyo was treated with antibiotics, muscle relaxants and an anti-toxin injection. Without treatment, the horse would have died. After 18 days in the Spana clinic, with all costs covered by the charity, Keyo was well again and Alemayehu was delighted, saying “I cannot thank Spana enough for saving my Keyo.’’

Animals suffer alongside their owners

As CEO of Spana, campaigner Jeremy Hulme has been involved with the charity for 25 years. “Like our founders, I love the countries we work in – their people and their animals. Many of these people depend on animals to get them through their day-to-day lives, carrying water, firewood, ploughing and carting goods to market. Without them, life would definitely be harder – who has to carry the water home if the donkey dies? ”

Of the 100 million working equids (horses, donkeys and mules) in the world, 98 per cent will never see a vet, says Jane Harry, Spana veterinary adviser. Even if they do, often these vets in places like Ethiopia and remote areas of Sudan lack the necessary training, equipment or medicines.

Jane adds that, “It is very rare for animals to suffer as a result of intentional cruelty. But equids, donkeys especially, are very tolerant and resilient to adverse conditions. They do not complain much so it is hard to appreciate that they may be suffering if you do not know the subtle signs of fatigue, heat stress and pain that they show.’’  And many suffer simply through the same poverty that their owners endure, Jane explains. “They may not have enough food to feed their children so are unlikely to prioritise
their donkey.”

In Tunisia, the medical team visits Douz in the south of the country every Thursday. Here camel owners offer tourists a 2km trip around the desert for a meagre fee that they often use to support a large family. Since their income is so low they cannot afford a vet. Spana treats the camels for ailments like palm spines getting stuck in their feet and legs.

Lessons in proper care

Education is also a huge part of Spana’s work. The charity works with schools and children, and with communities as a whole, to teach, for example, the correct feeding, first-aid and harnessing techniques.

In parts of the world where meagre veterinary services are available, Spana also trains vets and animal health workers, equipping them to do their job better – and will train farriers too, to deal with lameness and avoid preventable injuries.

In some cases carers need to be re-educated as some of the remedies they use may actually be harmful to the animals. In Ethiopia, Spana treated a 16-year-old horse, Bulo, whose lameness had been made worse by firing, a traditional treatment where red hot irons are placed on the horse’s skin in the hope it will heal the lameness. Instead Spana vets gave the horse antibiotics, painkillers and an anti-tetanus injection, and the owner agreed not to take Bulo for firing again.

“People often use traditional remedies that may do more harm than good, because this is what they are told to do by someone they respect in their community [like a traditional healer],” says Jane.

In addition to practical assistance, Spana works for change too. “In some communities, we have worked with local authorities to help create welfare legislation, and help them to implement this,” Jane explains. “For example, in Marrakech, the horses used as taxis have to come to Spana three times a year for an inspection, and they will only be issued a licence if they are deemed fit for work. We are currently rolling this scheme out to pilot in towns in Tunisia and Ethiopia, and hope to expand these if they’re successful.”

Amid the heartbreak of poverty and hardship, there are life-changing moments for the vets of Spana. For Jane, the most striking memory was from a village in the middle Atlas mountains in Morocco, when the charity went to do a biannual deworming campaign and no fewer than 750 horses, donkeys and mules had gathered to receive treatment.

“The extraordinary thing was the patience with which everybody waited for treatment. They queued up along a road for as far as we could see, having walked many miles to reach us,” she recalls. “The most special was a small boy who approached at the end of that day. He was blind, and thanked us for helping to keep his donkey healthy. He said, ‘He is my eyes’. This boy cared deeply for this donkey, without which he would have been unable to get around this rugged, mountainous terrain.”

His gratitude is reminiscent of that of Abdul Haq, who can look forward to the day when his recovered foal Mensi is grown up enough to help him improve his family’s life.

“I hope that once Mensi is grown, he will be a great help to support my family, and one day my brothers will be able to go back to school,” says Abdul Haq, cuddling the foal.

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