Animals need our care and protection. Regarding this, there are several things that we can do to ensure that they live a good life and their welfare is up to standard. Such include;
- Providing them with balanced feeds
- Ensuring that they have clean water
- Grooming them
- Nail clipping. Long nails can easily cause them to hurt themselves on the ground
- Wool shaving to avoid infestation of bugs
- Very long horns can cause injury to the animal and other animals
- Hoof cutting
- Vaccinations against diseases
- Administering treatments when they are ill
- Clean and proper housing
- Regular cleaning of the animals
Animal freedoms
In respect to the five animal freedoms which include; freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from fear and stress, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, disease and injury and freedom to express natural behavior, animals deserve to be protected and not to be neglected or abused.
When these freedoms are well taken care of, the animal is said to be in good welfare. What most people do not realize is that good welfare increases the animal’s productivity and gives it a long life
Quite encouraging
In Kenya, we have a law, in CAP 360 that highlights animal abuse as an offence. Animal abuse in Kenya is highly punishable in a court of law.
Having the Kenyan government incorporated animal welfare in our Kenyan constitution is something to be proud of. It indicates that people recognize animals as sentient beings, contrary to when people believed that animals do not have feelings and that they cannot differentiate when someone is doing good or bad to them.
Maintaining this trend
In Africa, animal welfare was once considered a foreign concept but this trend is seen to be changing in the current and coming years.
Africans are starting to embrace animal welfare as an issue of priority largely because a three quarter of their lives depends on animals and partly because, they love animals, and have learnt to consider them as fellow beings over the years.
We can only hope that this trend will continue so that in the next five years, animal welfare will be among the top five agendas for development in the country.
