Assessment of Provision of Extension Services and Advocacy on Donkey Health and Welfare in Kenya

Aim: To determine type of benefits from keeping donkeys, challenges facing donkey farmers and how to streamline supply of medicines for treatment of donkeys in Kenya.

Study Design: A descriptive study conducted in selected regions where donkey welfare projects are implemented and other regions without these projects between the months of May and August, 2018.

Methodology: Data collected from donkey owners and users, animal health service providers, regulatory body, and agro-vets using semi-structured and check list questionnaires. A total of 156 questionnaires administered to donkey owners and users and 87 animal health providers.

Results: Benefits of keeping donkeys included income obtained from transportation services, sale of surplus donkeys in a herd and hiring them out for a fee, such income are used for paying school fees for children and medical care. On average donkeys contributed about 20% of household incomes from livestock. Donkeys often suffered from myriad of challenges: infestation with endoparasites, wounds, colic, fractures, lameness, pneumonia, babesiosis, trypanosomiasis and zoonoses including tetanus and rabies. Sale volume for medicines used to treat donkey diseases in agro-vets (shops selling agricultural inputs including veterinary drugs) was approximately 15%, while percentage of donkey cases treated by animal health providers was about 7% of total caseload. Level of need for response to donkey cases by animal health providers was ranked 4th on a priority scale of 1-5. Furthermore, agro-vets did not stock medicines for pain relief. Moreover, differences exist between regions where donkey welfare projects are implemented as compared to other regions on level of knowledge of animal health providers on type of medicines used for treatment of clinical cases in donkeys, requirements for regulation of veterinary practices and types of veterinary providers (P = 0.05).

Conclusions: These results support prioritization of training on early recognition for conditions which compromises wellbeing of donkeys and access to pain relief medicines.