By Karen Reed (Head of Animal Welfare and Research)
17 Jun 2011

 Today we caught up on health and welfare and started looking at policy and legislation – we all recognise the challenge is to have governments and international organisations create an enabling environment for policies to allow working animals to be used with appropriate attention paid to their welfare. 

In order for this to happen we have to first raise the profile of working animals. But we hear there are many governments that dislike even talking about working animals in their country for fear of appearing “backward.”

With these feelings it will be an uphill struggle but one that the meeting is committed to struggling!

People take these opportunities at these meetings to catch up with others during coffee breaks. These breaks are getting shorter and shorter as we speed up to the end of the week and are filled with people grasping cups of strong black Italian coffee (or the milky weak coffee that the real coffee drinkers look at in disgust but those of us desperately missing an English or Indian or Kenyan cuppa use as a just about acceptable alternative!) and discussing collaboration on welfare assessment indicators or sharing information on good legislation examples.

One interesting discussion during the day centred on the use of competitions to promote good working equine animal welfare. 

An example from Ethiopia was a donkey day where, apart form the usual best kept donkey type of prizes, the donkey cart owners raced (not the donkeys – their owners only!) on a football field carrying the packs their donkeys use filled with the normal weights their donkeys carry! 

Apart from being fun to watch it gave the owners and onlookers a different perspective on the work the donkeys perform.