Ethnoveterinary medicine

Since colonial times scientists had always taken note of indigenous knowledge of animal health and diagnostic skills before implementing their Western-technology projects (Köhler-Rollefson and Bräunig 1998).

Ethnoveterinary medicine or ethnoveterinary research was defined by McCorkle in 1995 as: The holistic, interdisciplinary study of local knowledge and its associated skills, practices, beliefs, practitioners, and social structures pertaining to the healthcare and healthful husbandry of food, work, and other income-producing animals, always with an eye to practical development applications within livestock production and livelihood systems, and with the ultimate goal of increasing human well-being via increased benefits from stockraising.Stock owners continue to utilize EVM until better alternatives in terms of efficacy, low cost, availability and ease of administration, are found.

Recent research on EVM in the developed world has come from Italy (Pieroni, 2004), British Columbia, Canada (Lans et al., 2006) and the Netherlands (van Asseldonk).

One of the first studies to document gender was conducted by Diana Davis who noted a difference in knowledge of EVM of Afghan Pashtun nomads that paralleled the gender-based division in the society.

ANTHRA, an organization of women veterinary scientists, has been documenting and validating EVM since 1996 in different parts of the states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in India (Ghotge, 2002).

Herbal remedies used for hundreds of years by stockraisers can be put to commercial use, but scientists are demanding that traditional knowledge should be validated, to verify the safety and efficacy of the treatments.

Vetaid is collaborating with the Animal Disease Research Institute of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania while the Christian Veterinary Mission is investigating EVM in Karamoja, Uganda.

EVM is also studied to provide solutions to diseases in which antigen variation has made vaccination unrealistic and drug resistant strains to Western medicines have become prevalent (Atawodi, 2002).