PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Animal welfare groups arrived in Haiti on Saturday to help protect earthquake victims by vaccinating stray dogs and maintaining the health of livestock.
One of the biggest animal-related threats posed by the magnitude-7.0 quake, which killed an estimated 200,000 people and left thousands more homeless, is an increased incidence of rabies, said Ian Robinson of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
“When you get situations with a large group of displaced people, and hungry dogs wandering around, then you’ve got the opportunities for dog bites to occur, and that obviously leads to the spread of rabies,” he said.
It also is important to maintain veterinary care for livestock, said Gerardo Huertas of World Society for the Protection of Animals, because families in crisis need them all the more for food, milk, sale and survival.
“The concept of pets is quite foreign to Haitians,” said Karen Ashmore, executive director of the Lambi Fund agricultural group in Haiti. “Most Haitians can barely feed themselves, much less a pet.”
Robinson’s and Huerta’s groups, the world’s two largest for animal welfare, have joined a dozen partners to respond to protection and public health issues related to animals.
The Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti will start by vaccinating stray dogs against rabies, said one official. The group also will round up dogs to feed and protect them. Stray dogs have been forming packs to look for food.
“There’s nothing more difficult to watch than a semi-feral animal eating a human remain,” said Dick Green of International Fund for Animal Welfare. “So the people react in the way you would expect them to react — they kill them. They either club them or shoot them or do something to them because they don’t want that to happen.”
The coalition is reaching out to rural farmers whose lives depend on pigs, goats and chickens. A small Haitian Creole piglet will eat and forage in weeds, fatten quickly and sell for a good price, said Ashmore, whose Lambi Fund helps Haitians by giving them a starter pig or goat, veterinary care for a year and instructions on how to milk or breed the animals.
Goats account for 40 percent to 50 percent of the livestock in Haiti, Green said. He expects they will find some that have been injured by walking through rubble. Many animals also lose productivity, he added: “This is a stressful time. Some of the cows and goats won’t give milk.”
The coalition plans to distribute food to farmers to help sustain them until they get back on their feet.
Animal relief groups are using websites, Twitter, Facebook and every means they can find to raise money for the effort. So far, they have received about $140,000 in donations, but “it will be a million-dollar project for sure,” Green said.
