Animal Rahat Update

August - October 2008

Animal Rahat ("rahat" means relief) is a nonprofit animal welfare organization that PETA helped to establish and is now helping to expand. Most working animals in India belong to people who cannot afford to provide even a minimum standard of care for them and who have not been taught how to properly care for their animals. Bullocks, buffaloes, horses, camels, and donkeys suffer from poor nutrition (sometimes they eat only weeds!) as well as dehydration, untreated sores, overloading, injuries, and even beatings from drivers who are determined to keep them going. Two of the most common problems are lameness and depression. These debilitated and despairing animals even lose the will to carry on as a direct result of their poor diet and the grueling physical demands that are made of them.

Staffed by a team of well-trained veterinarians and their assistants, Animal Rahat offers vital relief to these animals. The program helps animals' owners, who often don't have enough money to meet animals' basic nutritional requirements. When needed, Animal Rahat pays owners to repair broken harnesses or to obtain medicine to treat animals' serious illnesses or injuries.

Rahat also teaches people about basic animal welfare, including fundamental, practical measures (for example, the importance of providing real fodder rather than contaminated scrub and giving animals who work in the heat enough water so that they won't collapse). Carts full of passengers or commodities such as bricks can weigh thousands of pounds, so it is crucial to teach people to reduce and balance the loads that animals are forced to pull along heavily rutted tracks on unpaved roads.

Founded in 2003 with just one treatment station, the program now has 51 treatment stations—27 in Solapur and 24 in Sangli (two districts in Maharashtra, which is one of the largest and most populous states in India). Animal Rahat started with just two employees and has now grown to include a staff of seven.

A bullock receives care at an Animal Rahat treatment station.

At first, Rahat veterinarians could only treat between 10 and 15 animals per day, but now the average number of animals treated daily is 60!

In this report, we list a few of the many achievements that Animal Rahat has made from August through October 2008.

Providing Crucial Time for Recovery
One innovative service that Animal Rahat provides is paid rest days. Many people are living at a subsistence level that does not allow them to sacrifice the income from even one day's work in order to give their animals a day of rest. Therefore, when the Rahat staff encounters an animal who is so ill or injured that rest is imperative for recovery, they provide the owner with enough pay to cover the income lost from the prescribed rest days for the animal.

In a recent case, the Rahat veterinarians treated a bullock whose right hind leg had been punctured with a stick while walking in mud. After dressing the wound and dispensing the necessary medicines, the veterinarians offered the owner three days of paid rest, which was vital to the bullock's recuperation.

However, in light of the heavy rains, the owner said that he would not be able to work for the next seven days and therefore could manage to rest the bullock anyway, so he wouldn't take the pay! Cases like this one show what a trusting relationship the Rahat team has developed with the community and the extent to which the owners truly value the services provided.

Filling a Broad Spectrum of Needs
The Rahat team was called on to make several home visits this quarter. One was to the home of an owner whose bullock was bloated and eating nothing. It turns out that this owner had been feeding his bullock only chapattis, which the animal could not digest. Our veterinarians were able to get the bullock feeling better a