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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: May 2006
Kindness Clubs grew into the Ghana SPCA by Debra J. White
Scraggly dogs and hungry cats foraging on the crowded streets of Kumasi tugged at schoolteacher Roland Azantilow’s heart. Besides his love for children, including his own three, Azantilow was always fondness of animals. Indifference to animal mistreatment troubled him. There were no private or public agencies that helped animals in distress.
Born and raised in Ghana, Azanti-low was educated at the Technical Teachers Training Institute, Madras Southern Region, in Chennai, India. Chennai is headquarters of the Animal Welfare Board of India, and of the Blue Cross of India, one of the most influential humane societies in Asia, but “I never had any contact with anybody in animal welfare,” Azantilow recalls. He did, however, take a course about animal welfare.
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Left: A Ghana SPCA vaccination clinic. Right: A scene from the Accra dog market. (Karen Menczer)
In April 2004, after 22 years of teaching, Azantilow formed the Ghana SPCA, with technical assistance and limited financial support from the World Society for the Protection of Animals.
“The Ghana SPCA is an outgrowth of the WSPA Kindness Clubs,” chairperson David Nyoagbe explained in the February 2005 first-ever Ghana SPCA newsletter. “Schoolchildren of any age can start a club. Three times a year they receive newsletters from WSPA. We now have over 200 Kindness Clubs all over Ghana,” Nyoabe said. “Some have been active for over ten years.
“Our main focus is raising awareness about animal welfare,” Nyoagbe said, but the all-volunteer Ghana SPCA also helps unwanted, sick and injured animals in both Kumasi and Accra, the two largest Ghanian cities, and assists the animals offered for sale at the Accra Puppy Market.
“Most of the vendors try to take good care of the puppies they sell. Some of the pups have even seen a vet and have their vaccination certificates,” wrote Ghana SPCA newsletter editor Karen Menczer, after joining a recent puppy market visit. “Some vendors are fairly knowledgeable about puppies and their requirements,” added Menczer, who is an American––and longtime ANIMAL PEOPLE reader––who previously helped humane societies in Uganda and Botswana.
“The vendors bathe the dogs and take some out for walks,” Menc-zer continued. “But since the puppies are really there for only one reason, to make money for the vendors, they are not treated as they would be in a permanent home. They could all use attention, food, and water. The day we visited, we held the puppies, played with them, and fed and watered them. All the pups, having already been in the sun all morning were very, very thirsty.”
“In Ghana we don’t see many stray dogs and cats,” Azantilow told Menczer. “Most of the dogs and cats have owners. The real problem isn’t the stray dogs and cats, but that the owners might not know how to care for them, or might not have the money to provide good care. But many Ghanaians do keep pets at their homes.”
Some dogs are eaten or used in animist rituals in parts of Ghana, where about a third of the people practice indigenous faiths.
Occasionally dogs are poisoned, stoned, or beaten from fear of rabies, a constant threat in Ghana, as in most hot climates where vaccines are scarce, costly, and often unreliable due to lack of refrigeration.
“Rabies is considered a public health problem in many areas,” advises <www.travmed.com>, founded in 1989 by International Travel Health Guide author Stuart R. Rose, M.D. “There is a high incidence of dog rabies,” the site continues, “with frequent human cases reported. All animal bites or scratches, especially from a dog, should be taken seriously.”
Among the most recent U.S. human rabies cases was a 54-year-old male Ghanian, who died on a visit to New York City.
But current rabies advisories are somewhat more optimistic than the 1975 analysis of D.W. Belcher, F.K. Wurapa, and D.O. Atuora, in a paper entitled Endemic rabies in Ghana: Epidemiology and control measures.
“Rabies is well established in Accra,” they wrote, “and there has been no decline in canine or human cases during the past five years. In the first six months of 1975, canine cases almost doubled.” Belcher, Wurapa, and Atuora urged “improved educational and post-dog bite services,” describing “problems with logistics, canine vaccine shortage and failures, lack of owner cooperation, and control of a large stray dog population.”
To that point, the few Ghanian veterinarians rarely treated animals other than livestock and those used for work.
A decade later, the rabies risk had decreased, but was still high by global norms.
“Despite yearly vaccination programs for dogs and humans at risk, begun in 1977, the incidence of rabies is still high,” D.O. Alonge and S.A. Abu reported in the June 1984 edition of the International Journal of Zoonosis. “A total of 752 canine and 102 human rabies cases were reported and confirmed,” 1977-1981.
Alonge and Abu called for “a nationwide effort to control, if not erradicate, the disease by mass vaccination of dogs.”
“We should provide free or subsidized spay and neuter in poor communities, educate people about rabies, and provide rabies inoculation where vet services are not easily accessible,” Azantilow told Menczer. “And of course, the Ghana SPCA should continue to educate children about animal welfare.”
Sterilizations are now underway, said the March 2006 Ghana SPCA newsletter. “WSPA has approved a Ghana SPCA request to transfer half of the funds [granted for] the puppy market project into a spay/neuter fund,” Menczer wrote. “We will sterilize dogs and cats of low-income or no-income families in and around Accra and Kumasi.”
The Ghana SPCA is also currently at the forefront of vigilance against the anticipated arrival of avian influenza H5N1, which has already hit nearby Nigeria and Niger.
“Livestock transport is a big problem,” Azantilow says. “Animals are transported from the north to other parts of the country, over 300 kilometres sometimes, on the roofs of vehicles and in car boots [trunks]. We need to act with the police and the regional veterinary services to curb the use of passenger vehicles and other inhumane means of transport.
“Slaughter is [also] a problem,” Azantilow continues, “especially outside of Accra and Kumasi, where they still mostly use crude methods. I think the Ghana SPCA should be able to work with local authorities to acquire stunners for the slaughterhouses.”
Ghana is prosperous compared to most African countries, with a constitutional democracy, abundant mineral wealth, and about twice the per capita economic output of other West African nations, yet 31% of the human population live in poverty. Unemploy-ment hovers around 20%. About 30,000 people per year die from AIDS.
The 1892 British Empire humane law may technically still exist on paper to protect animals, inherited from colonial times, but it has not been enforced since the British left in 1957––if it ever was. Many former British colonies left functioning humane societies, but ANIMAL PEOPLE found no record that any were founded in Ghana.
Active animal-related law enforcement tends to be limited to doing what is necessary to comply with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, funded by foreign nonprofit organizations.
Friends of Animals, for example, gave Ghana a custom-built spotter plane in 1997, for use in anti-poaching work. FoA also built a 162-acre chimpanzee sanctuary on Konklobi Island in Ghana, but was never able to get permission to send chimps to it because of concern raised by political opponents that the chimps might introduce diseases transmissible to wildlife and human neighbors. FoA suspended efforts to work at Konklobi in 2002.
Though the colonial era ended long ago, European economic exploitation continues to have an effect. European vessels fishing off West Africa increased their annual catch 20-fold from 1950 to 2001, while fishing subsidies rose nearly 60-fold just from 1980 to 2001. Soaring fishing pressure coincided with population collapses of elephants, hippos, bongo antelope, colubus monkeys, and “almost the whole suite of large carnivores–– wild dog, lion, hyena, and leopard” in Ghanian wildlife reserves, University of California at Berkeley and Cambridge University researcher Justin Brashares reported in Science in 2004. “People turned to bushmeat when fish became unavailable.”
“If you cannot feed your family, how great a priority is animal welfare?” rhetorically asks fundraiser and publicist Heather Cowie, of the Animal Anti-Cruelty League in South Africa, whose work involves confronting comparable conflicts.
“Unsustainable hunting for bushmeat is a huge problem,” Azantilow admits. But he sees the potential for change as enormous. “Our work is beginning to have an impact, especially among the children,” he believes. “They are our future and with them, there is hope.”
Aware that U.S. and European scholars have demonstrated the association of animal abuse with child abuse, Azanti-low hopes that as the Ghana SPCA grows, it will attract funding for humane education on an even more ambitious scale.
“I would like to see the Kindness Clubs and the children trained in our animal welfare certificate course linked to senior secondary level” schooling, Azantilow outlines. “Older children could serve as volunteer inspectors and humane educators. While educating people about animal care, the group could also help raise the visibility of the Ghana SPCA by sponsoring a Ghana SPCA Day or other events with animal themes. If we have the proper equipment,” Azantilow adds, “the group could help us create documentaries about animal care, and could use video to help educate.”
Illustrating the potential, Azantilow in October 2004 presented World Animal Week in Kumasi. “We organized talks on animal handling and held a heavily attended free rural animal clinic 40 kilometers outside Kumasi, where we treated over 1,500 animals, including sheep, goats, dogs, and cats,” Azantilow recounts. The Ghana SPCA demonstrated dog and cat sterilization, goat de-worming, vaccinating cats against rabies, and protecting birds against Newcastle disease. Azantilow and Ghana SPCA associates also lectured the audience about proper animal care and kindness to all living creatures. “Children went on a ride through the streets and sang songs about animals,” Azanti-low said. “Everyone seemed to have a good time. I think they learned valuable lessons.”
Under Azantilow’s guidance, Ghana SPCA representatives are now visiting rural areas. They hold animal wellness clinics and organize Kindness Clubs.
“It is important to get the message around our entire country, not just in the cities,” Azantilow explains.
“Children who learn kindness to animals grow up to be more compassionate adults. That will help make this a better world,” says Azantilow. “I love my country and my people, but sometimes they are stubborn and need to show more concern about the plight of animals. Animals are part of our world too.”
Testifies WSPA consultant Dipesh Pabari, of Kenya, “The Ghana SPCA is grounding itself as an organization which I believe has a great future ahead of it.”
“We have not developed into a safe haven for all homeless animals, but that is our ultimate goal,” Azantilow says. “Our membership drive is slow, but still evolving, and we attract more supporters all the time. Naturally, we need more funding and we will keep looking for new sources.”
[Additional research was provided by ANIMAL PEOPLE staff.]
Contact:
Ghana SPCA, P.O. Box AN-12051, Accra, Ghana; <nyoagbe@wwwplus.com>, <razants@yahoo.com>, or <perros2@earthlink.net>.