Coalition of African Animal Welfare Organisations

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Animal welfare is the well-being of animals, and it is an area of activism, science, and political action. CAAWO wants to improve the conditions for animals, especially animals that are reliant on human care. This includes companion animals, animal used for testing, animals slaughtered for food and in other settings, wild animals that are negatively impacted by human actions.
Billions of animals are kept in appalling conditions, e.g. a sow kept in a crate/stall and unable to turnaround, move forward or backwards, laying hens kept in cages where they are unable to spread their wings, dustbathe, etc.

Farm Animals

There are animal cruelty abuses such as dragging cattle by their tails or using electric shockers, rough handling, failing to provide adequate facilities or shelter, etc. Factory Farming or Industrial Agriculture is unfortunately responsible for over 90% of farm animal cruelty and environmental degradation.  The cruelty is at a massive scale and Africa doesn’t have to repeat or accommodate the systems that only seeks profit over animal well-being and environmental protection.

We don’t need sow stalls for pigs or cages for chickens or mincing of male chickens.

Some of the issues that CAAWO works on are:

  • Animal testing
  • Behavioural enrichment
  • Cruelty to animals.
  • Hunting
  • Aquaculture

Chickens in cages are cramped and can’t fulfill their social needs or express normal behaviour. They can also suffer from these unnatural settings.  A hen needs to be free, exercise, forage, dust bathe, perch and also preen, conditions in cages do not allow a hen to do so.  So when bored and frustrated they turn to cannibalise or peck on each other, what the industry does then is to ‘de-beak’ or trim the beak which is painful and involves cutting part of the beak off, cutting through bone and cartilage. Male chicks are killed at the hatchery, as they cannot be used in the egg industry.

Pigs are extremely intelligent animals, studies have shown that they are ‘better’ than dogs. In factory farming systems, sows are caged installs throughout their pregnancies.  Prolonged confinement can affect their health and their well-being. There are two different crates/stalls one for when pregnant and one for giving birth and nursing (i.e. sow stall and farrowing crate).  Because pigs are social, playful beings there needs to be an enriched environment with ‘toys’ for them to play with.  Most factory farms do not cater to this need

Fish farming – intensively farming fish contributes to a number of challenges, i.e. stocking density, water quality, and direction of flow, starvation before slaughter, movement and transport of fish, genetic modification, and manipulation.  There are a number of inhumane slaughter methods that are used for fish (such as suffocation, slaughter without stunning, and hacking).

WILD ANIMALS

Wild animals are caught in the wild for the use a variety of things, including but not limited to their skin, body parts, medicine, etc. Live animals are also kept as exotic pets by mainly the rich and powerful and in Africa by those practising witchcraft. All of this cruelty is driven by money and greed. In South Africa, it is disturbing that we are now ‘farming’ Lions and domesticating them for their body parts.

COMPANION ANIMALS

We advocate for responsible pet ownership. Especially in our impoverished communities, we need to take special care for those individuals and families who depend on their companion animal for love, care and protection. Being poor doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a pet, however, if you have one, how do you take care of it and meet its (his/her) needs?

Fish Farming and Fish Welfare

Fish farming (Aquaculture) is expanding rapidly in the African continent. Food security and socio-economic development are at the centre of this rapid development. This expansion however, brings to the fore very critical questions that relate to the state of animal welfare in these farms and the extent to which they measure up to the ‘Five Freedoms’ and the OIE Aquatic Animal Health Code  The response to these question are important considering that:

  • Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food sector worldwide and that today over 50% of seafood comes from farms.
  • On these farms, between 73 and 180 billion fish are reared at any given time.
  • Many fish reared in aquaculture will continue to suffer greatly if we are unable to respond to the affirmative to the questions above.
  • Welfare issues in aquaculture farms include diseases, crowding, improper handling, poor water quality, and the inability to display their natural behaviour.

 

Policy Development

The Aquaculture Development Bill published in Government Gazette No. 41632 of May 2018 is due to be tabled in the National Assembly soon. Amongst other things, the Bill seeks to promote coordination of aquaculture research and development activities, enable the aquaculture sector to be regulated more effectively, promote transformation of the sector and the establishment of a national aquaculture stakeholder liaison forum.

We have met with the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries regarding the fish welfare component of the Bill, which is Section 56 of the Bill. We would like to see this section being prescriptive in nature. Furthermore, we are calling for the Bill to be accompanied by an implementation plan (Regulations) once it has been passed into Law, so as to avoid it merely becoming a loose framework.

We will monitor the process, engage with it, and provide regular updates on this platform and our social media platforms.

The disregarding of fish in many of the existing animal welfare laws in the Continent is reason enough for a well-coordinated campaign to ensure that this is remedied. This can be done by ensuring that states that are signatories to relevant treaties give expression to them legislatively and in practice.

Humane education is broadly defined as education that nurtures compassion and respect for living beings. In addition to focusing on the humane treatment of non-human animals, humane education also increasingly contains content related to the environment, the compassionate treatment of other people, and the interconnectedness of issues pertaining to people and the planet. The Institute for Humane Education believes that humane education is the key to achieving “a world where all have the passion and skills to solve the most pressing challenges of our time.” Ensuring that through our daily choices, we choose activities, work and policies that are accommodating to our environment and animals. Humane education as a discrete field of education was created in the late 1800s by individuals like George Angell as an attempt to address social injustices and prevent cruelty to animals before it started

The aim of humane education is to create a culture of empathy and caring by encouraging and facilitating the moral development of individuals and groups to form a compassionate and responsible society.

Capacity-building is defined as the “process of developing and strengthening the skills, instincts, abilities, processes and resources that organisations and communities need to survive, adapt, and thrive in a fast-changing world.” An essential ingredient in capacity-building is transformation that is generated and sustained over time from within; transformation of this kind goes beyond performing tasks to changing mindsets and attitudes.  Ours is to improve data collection and monitoring for the achievement of better policies for animal welfare in our region.

Some of the methods of capacity building that CAAWO uses include fundraising, training centres, exposure visits and consultations.

Steps undertaken are:

  1. Engage stakeholders on capacity development
  2. Assess capacity needs and assets
  3. Formulate a capacity development response
  4. Implement a capacity development response
  5. Evaluate capacity development.

This is a part were we as CAAWO play a systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions, especially in and around matters of animal welfare in our region.

As indicated above, the primary purpose of research is to find answers to questions. Research allows us to find the right solutions to key issues in our communities by:

  • providing facts that will help us to analyse the challenges we (and our animals face);
  • testing the feasibility and the impact of our programmes; and
  • finding better solutions to the challenges that we encounter on a daily basis.

We garner public support for or recommend a particular cause or policy that would be beneficial to the animals in our region.  We engage different stakeholders including but not limited to government, NGOs, academia, civil society, etc.

We offer independent support to those who feel they are not being heard (in this instance, the animals and the environment) and to ensure they are taken seriously and that their rights are respected.

In all our campaigns we use the ‘SMART’ approach when embarking in an advocacy campaign. Our objectives are S – Specific: To influence behaviour, M – Measurable: Increase legal work, A – Achievable: Favourable environment as animal welfare awareness increases R – Relevant: there is no better season as this  T – Timed: our campaigns are timed, e.g. cage-2025.