WHAT IS EVM?

Also sometimes called veterinary anthropology (McCorkle, 1989),^† ethnoveterinary medicine or EVM can be broadly defined in this way:

This definition suggests the myriad scientific disciplines that are implicated in the research and development (R&D) and application of EVM. It also signals attention to all aspects of a people’s knowledge and practices in animal healthcare, productivity, and performance, that is, their diagnostic (including ethologic) understandings; preventive, promotive, and therapeutic skills and treatments; and a wide range of health-related management techniques.

These aspects in turn embrace local Materia medica, which include minerals and animal products or parts, as well as plants and human-made and natural materials; modes of preparation and administration of ethnoveterinary medicaments; basic surgery; various types of immunization; hydro, physical, mechanical, and environmental treatments and controls; herding, feeding, sheltering, and watering strategies; handling techniques; shoeing, shearing, marking, and numerous other husbandry chores such as ethnodentistry; management of genetics and reproduction; medicoreligious acts; slaughter, as one medical option; and all the various socio-organizational structures and professions that discover, devise, transmit, and implement this knowledge and expertise. These human elements span not only traditional healers of animals (Mathias, 2003) but also families, clans, castes, tribes, communities, cooperatives, dairy associations, other kinds of grassroots development organizations, and more.

Impelled in large part by livestock development projects around the world, EVM has evolved to embrace other topics, such as zoopharmacognosy (animals’ self-medication) as a possible source of EVM ideas; participatory epidemiology; gendered knowledge, tasks, and skills in EVM (Davis, 1995; Lans, 2004); safety in handling and processing food and other products from animals; product marketing and associated agri-business skills; conservation of biodiversity in terms of natural resources, including animal genetic resources (Köhler-Rollefson, 2004); health- and husbandry-related interactions between domestic and wild animals; ecosystem health (i.e., how animals, humans, and their environment can interact to protect or improve the health of all three); EVM-related primary education curricula in rural areas and in training programs for veterinary professionals and paraprofessionals; and policy, institutional, and economic analyses in most of the foregoing realms.

For fuller discussions of all the previously listed topics and themes in EVM, see related studies in Reference Section (Mathias, 2004; McCorkle, 1995, 1998b; McCorkle, 2001). It is important to mention, however, that by far the most-studied element of EVM is veterinary ethnopharmacopoeia, especially the use of botanicals.

WHERE DID EVM COME FROM?

All over the world and down through the ages, people who keep livestock have developed their own ideas and techniques for meeting the health and husbandry needs of their food, farm, and work animals. Their knowledge and skills may be hundreds or even thousands of years old. Classic cases include Ayurveda in India and acupuncture and herbal medicine in China, all of which were (and are) practiced for animals as well as for humans. These and a few other traditions of EVM have long-standing written records, like scrolls of the Talmud and the Bible’s Old Testament, which occasionally advise on Jewish pastoralism; Sri Lankans’ 400-year-old palm leaf manuscripts on cattle and elephant health and husbandry; early military manuals from numerous peoples on the health care, conditioning, and training of warhorses and draught animals; and, probably most ancient of all, hieroglyphic papyri on Egyptians’ care of sacred bulls.

In preliterate or still-nonliterate societies, EVM was and is perforce passed down verbally across the generations. With the 14th century Renaissance in Europe, however, literacy and publishing opportunities expanded and nascent scientific disciplines emerged, some of which occasionally mentioned EVM—most notably, agriculture, botany, medicine (both human and veterinary), folklore studies, and anthropology. In the so-called developing world, European colonialism from the 16th to the 20th century stimulated the production of government reports, personal memoirs, enterprise records, and so forth, by civil servants and technical staff, missionaries, large landowners and ranchers, and others who worked or traveled in the colonies. Some of these authors chronicled their observations and impressions of native veterinary knowledge and practices—albeit often in very ethnocentric and unflattering terms. But even today, much of EVM is transmitted orally. To take just one example, this is still the case for local acumen about the care and training of hunting dogs and mules in parts of rural United States (personal communication, from C. M. McCorkle, for her native state of Missouri).

However, not until the 1970s did a noticeable number of peer-reviewed scientific articles, book chapters, special journal issues (Ethnozootechnie), and report series (as from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]) emerge that were devoted to “traditional,” “indigenous,” or later, “local” or “community-based” animal healthcare and husbandry. From the 1970s onward, an ever-growing number of graduate theses and dissertations in anthropology and, especially, veterinary medicine also addressed EVM. These initially spanned a few universities in Africa, India, and West Germany, plus at least four in France. Later they were joined by Dutch and UK (notably Edinburgh) universities, along with several prestigious schools in the United States (e.g., Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Tufts).

HOW HAS EVM EVOLVED?

On the basis of a review of emerging literature along with firsthand research in 1980 among Quechua stockraisers in the high Andes of South America, EVM was finally codified in 1986 as a legitimate field of scientific R&D (McCorkle, 1986). An annotated bibliography on EVM and related subjects followed soon thereafter (Mathias-Mundy, 1989). Published by a US agricultural university program of indigenous knowledge studies within a series on technology and social change, this item was available only as “grey literature.” Nevertheless, it was in high demand. Only in 1996 did the first formally published anthology of scientific studies dedicated solely to EVM reach print (McCorkle, 1996).

Between 1986 and 1996, however, the field of EVM literally exploded. This explosion was ignited and thereafter fanned by various fuels.

One major stimulus was the World Health Organization’s project to incorporate valid human-ethnomedical techniques and—on the model of barefoot doctors in China—local medical practitioners into real-world strategies for achieving WHO’s goal of “basic healthcare for all.” EVM seeks to do likewise for livestock; e.g., via the creation of cadres of community-based veterinary paraprofessionals (ILD Group 2003) that ideally deliver both conventional and ethno-options. EVM embraces a cost-effective return to the “one medicine” concept, in which such healthcare services are delivered jointly to both animals and humans—especially in poor and/or remote areas (Green, 1998; McCorkle, 1998b; others in the special section on human and animal medicine in this issue of Agriculture and Human Values), along with the creation of cadres of community-based veterinary paraprofessionals (IDL Group, 2003) that, ideally, deliver both conventional and ethnomedical options.

Another stimulus was the developed world’s burgeoning, billions-of-dollars clamor for more healthful and organic food products (including those for livestock), as well as safer, more natural medical options with fewer adverse effects for both humans and (especially companion) animals.

Probably most important, however, was the growing realization among international livestock developers and even some early policymakers that conventional, formal sector, “high-tech” (thus also high-cost) healthcare and husbandry interventions transferred from the developed world could not sustainably meet the basic stockraising needs of most rural people in the developing world, where every rural community keeps animals, as do many urban inhabitants as well. This realization grew out of the on-farm experiences of agricultural, animal, and social scientists and veterinarians in governmental and nongovernmental overseas field projects.

An early public-sector leader in this regard was the US Small Ruminant Collaborative Research Support Project. Begun in 1979 in Peru, but growing and continuing until 1997, it involved some 15 US agricultural universities and research centers that worked in cooperation with literally hundreds of governmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Bolivia, Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, and Peru.

Pioneering international NGOs in EVM included: in the US, Heifer Project International (HPI), notably in Cameroon and the Philippines; the Philippines-based International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR); and the UK Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), which worked particularly in East Africa. Later NGO leaders included India’s ANTHRA group, which focuses on livestock development among women in that country; also in India, the Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF); Germany’s League for Pastoral Peoples (LPP), especially with its work on camels; the US Christian Veterinary Mission; and Vétérinaires Sans Frontières (VSF/Switzerland, 1998).

A related factor in the EVM explosion appears to have been the growing volume of articles or papers published in well-known and respected journals or presented at established disciplinary conferences in Europe and the United States. Initially most such items were written about the developing world by developed-world scientists and field practitioners. However, these groups’ serious engagement of the topic seems in turn to have empowered and motivated their counterparts in the developing world to document and report on their own emic (i.e., native) knowledge and field-based observations in EVM. Had these counterparts done so previously, they would have risked ridicule by their national peers who would have perceived them as nonscientific, ignorant, backward, or even superstitious. Indeed, this same fate was suffered by many developed-world explorers of EVM in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was also helpful that between 1986 and 1996, new outlets and technologies came into being for more rapid, informal, and globally inclusive exchanges of EVM observations and information across a much wider range of national and disciplinary groups. A pioneering outlet in this regard was the Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor. Based first in the United States and later in the Netherlands, this development magazine was published from 1993 to 2001 and was distributed gratis to developing world subscribers. In 1999, it was followed by a global electronic mailing list devoted solely to EVM. Recently, this list was expanded topically and renamed the Endogenous Livestock Development List (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ELDev/). Although initiated and funded in the developed world, all these efforts relied on hands-on management by and content input from a panel of editors who represented nearly all continents of the globe.^*

In hindsight, perhaps it is not surprising that this period also saw an increase in grants for R&D and conferences on EVM. Funding came from agencies such as Sweden’s Foundation for Science, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the World Bank, FAO, and national federations of local grower or dairier groups. Furthermore, most of these funds were earmarked for livestock projects, researchers, or organizations associated with the developing world, albeit often with pro bono input from colleagues in the developed world. This carried forward the sincere spirit of peer-based North/South collaboration established by earlier public-sector (whether bilateral or multilateral) and NGO efforts, as mentioned previously.

A notable example is the first-ever international conference, Ethnoveterinary Medicine: Alternatives for Livestock Development. Held in India in 1997, it was supported by the World Bank and many other donors, plus pharmaceutical companies. This event was hosted by India’s BAIF based on a proposal written by Indian, German, UK, and US scientists. Together they thereafter produced two volumes of formal abstracts and proceedings (Mathias, 1999). The conference boasted 33 formal papers and nearly as many poster papers on EVM. Disciplines represented ran from A (anthropology) to Z (zoology) and included all the animal and veterinary sciences in between, along with traditional veterinary praxis as represented by local healers from India.

At this point, a patent need arose to update, expand, and more tightly focus the 1989 bibliography referenced earlier. This was done, and the bibliography was released through a major publishing house in international development, with financial support provided by the UK Department for International Development. The new bibliography (Martin, 2001) boasted 1240 annotations spanning 118 countries, 160 ethnic groups, and 200 health problems of 25 livestock breeds and species. It covered publications dated through December of 1998.

Since 1998, EVM has rocketed ahead. Publications are increasing exponentially, now with a greater number of developed-world authors researching or writing about EVM in their own cultures and native lands. Recent examples of publications and conferences in this vein come from Canada (TAHCC, 2004), Italy (Guarrera, 1999, 2005; Manganelli, 2001; Pieroni, 2004), the Netherlands (van Asseldonk, 2005), and Scandinavia (Waller, 2001).

This trend is due in part to the fact that established scientific outlets in numerous disciplines—like the Revue Scientifique de l’Office Internationale des Epizooties (OIE, 1994)—are now more open than ever to papers on EVM. Also, new outlets are coming into being. For instance, the Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine plans to mount a series of articles on EVM beginning in 2006. Even more important is the fact that the literature is beginning to demonstrate a salubrious move up from mere description of EVM knowledge and practices to more critico-analytic and applied studies. The two cases presented in this chapter are indicative.

Scientific meetings on EVM have likewise burgeoned—whether in the form of sessions set aside for EVM at long-standing events like the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) Symposium on Tropical Animal Health and Production, or entire conferences devoted only to EVM. The range of topics presented has also broadened such that workshops and conferences have been created to accommodate specialized interests in a particular region, species, or type of EVM. Moreover, such events are increasingly mounted and funded by developing-world organizations and governments. Consider the following history.

In 1994, 1996, and 1998, the NGOs IIRR, ITDG, and VSF held workshops on EVM in Southeast Asia, Eastern Africa, and Sudan, respectively. Meanwhile, in 1997, LLP convened a workshop on both EVM and conventional practices for camel health and husbandry (Köhler-Rollefson, 2000). In 1999, a conference was held in Italy on “Herbs, Humans and Animals—Ethnobotany & Traditional Ethnoveterinary Practices in Europe” (Pieroni, 2000). In 2000, an international conference on EVM was mounted in Africa and hosted by Nigeria’s Ahmadu Bello University (Gefu, 2000).

Later, a participatory workshop on EVM was held in the Canadian province of British Columbia, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the government of Canada (see http://bcics.uvic.ca/bcethnovet/rationale.htm). The year 2005 witnessed the first Pan-American conference on EVM in Latin America, which was organized and hosted by a Guatemalan university, with financial support provided by the Guatemalan government. Also in 2005, various Mexican universities, research centers, and government agencies hosted an international conference on animal genetics and the invaluable animal germplasms, including disease-resistant ones that local peoples have developed and husbanded down through time.

Upcoming in 2006 is a key conference on the same issue, which has been organized by LPP and is being funded and hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation at its prestigious Bellagio Centre in Italy. Also in 2006, the British Society of Animal Science is organizing a special conference/workshop on veterinary ethnobotany targeted to both plant and animal researchers and emphasizing, “the role of plants and their derived products as a means of preventing or treating diseases of animals and improving health” in an environmentally sustainable way.

Even more impressive is the number of universities and associated research centers that now include curricula on EVM. Besides the Netherlands, Nigerian, and UK universities already mentioned, some others include Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University, Mexico’s Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, Rwanda’s University Centre for Research on Traditional Pharmacology and Medicine, and the University of the West Indies. In addition, particularly in Africa, technical units or components of traditional medicine have been incorporated into a number of government livestock, veterinary, or medical agencies.

WHY THE INTEREST IN EVM?

The appeal of EVM can be summarized as bulleted below. Most of these considerations apply to both developing and developed nations.

WHERE IS EVM HEADED NEXT?

Along with others, all the benefits outlined previously have been attested to in the larger literature on EVM. Doubtless, readers will think of others. But beyond providing more culturally comfortable, practical, and economical alternatives or complements to conventional medical approaches, R&D in EVM may conceivably help solve problems left in the wake of, or new to, conventional medicine. An example of the former is ailments that have become resistant to overprescribed or misused commercial drugs like antibiotics and commercial parasiticides. Viral diseases exemplify the latter, in that antigenic shifts may render conventional vaccination responses unrealistic (Atawodi, 2002). Such shifts come about when two varieties of a virus concurrently infect the same host, allowing genomes to recombine into a novel subtype.

Of course, various limitations to EVM have been noted in the literature. Among others are the following claims (after Fielding, 2000).

The first and second concerns above are certainly valid. But the literature suggests that they apply equally to conventional treatments because of import, supply, or price problems with commercial drugs—whether in the developing or the developed world. A case in point involves experiences in modern-day France regarding the relative availability and efficacy of conventional and EVM treatments for sudden outbreaks of sheep disease, some of which are viral (Brisebarre, 1996).

In response to the third bullet above, this omnibus claim has been largely debunked. Time and again, historically and contemporaneously, and across different continents and cultures, the same or similar plant or other materials and management techniques have been reported for the same or similar livestock and human health problems. Indeed, many so-called modern pharmaceuticals for both animals and people derive from plants and other materials (or their molecular models) used in traditional medicine. In 1990, it was estimated that world sales of medicines derived from plants discovered by indigenous peoples amounted to US $43 billion.

With increased bioprospecting (Clapp, 2002), this trend has intensified and become even more profitable (Lans, 2003). In the developing and the developed world, companies that process or merely package and then retail or wholesale “natural,” “organic,” or “ancient” alternatives based on ethnomedicine for livestock and humans have expanded, proliferated, and specialized. In the past decade alone, a number of companies have sprung up in Europe and on the East and West coasts of the United States to distribute EVM-based herbal preparations, many of which are imported from India. Some of these enterprises even specialize in preparations for a single animal species such as horses (Stephen Ashdown, DVM, personal communication).

More intriguing is the fourth bullet’s claim that EVM has little or nothing to offer against viral diseases. To date, this statement has gone largely uncontested in the EVM literature. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of a wide variety of EVM treatments for parasitic and bacterial ills, wounds and fractures, fertility and obstetric problems, and numerous husbandry needs has been clearly documented.

The primary conventional response to viral epidemics is mass vaccination. However, this approach can have drawbacks that go even beyond those implied for conventional veterinary medicine discussed earlier. These concerns are listed here:

In light of the foregoing considerations and in response to the question of “Where is EVM headed next?” the following sections offer two literature-based cases that illustrate EVM potentials for prevention and control of viral disease, whether in livestock or people.

EVM AND VIRAL DISEASES: TWO CASES FROM POULTRY PRODUCTION

The cases presented here focus on major viral disease in family poultry enterprises in the developing world. There, more than 80% of poultry are raised in such enterprises. These “backyard birds” provide up to 30% of household protein intake in the form of eggs and meat. Trade in these poultry products and (depending on the culture) in fertilized eggs, chicks, and live birds also contributes significantly to household nutrition and income. Often, this income is used to step up the family farming enterprise through the purchase of larger stock, like pigs, sheep, goats, or even cattle and buffalo (Ibrahim, 1996).

Family poultry enterprises normally consist of small to medium-sized flocks of free-ranging birds. They are typically owned and cared for by household women and children. Generally, producers endeavor to supply their flocks with local or purchased feed supplements; various types of protection from predators and the elements; assistance in incubation and chick fostering; and more. However, rarely do they employ costly commercial veterinary inputs.

Arguably, viruses are responsible for the most massive and pervasive economic losses from disease of poultry worldwide—especially in family enterprises, but also in agro-industrial poultry production. Newcastle’s disease (ND) is perhaps the best known of these banes. However, much in the news of late is avian influenza (AI), which constitutes a new strain of the centuries-old “fowl plague”—today, generally called simply “bird flu.”

Developed-world producers can ward against such threats with modern immunizations, albeit with the drawbacks already noted. However, many family poultry enterprises in the developing world simply cannot afford commercial vaccines–—even where these are available and reliable (i.e., unexpired, unadulterated, or unfalsified), with trained personnel to administer them (such as community-based paraprofessionals). Although some ethnoveterinary vaccines of variable efficacy do exist for viral diseases of poultry,^* poor or remote people in the developing world rely primarily on plant-based prophylactic measures to stave off such ills in their birds.

The question is: Do any such measures really make any difference? To begin to answer this, Cases 1 and 2 below respectively address: Africans’ phytomedical treatments for ills identified as ND; and Africans’ and other peoples’ botanicals for responding to unspecified respiratory signs in poultry, which are here taken as suggestive of AI. Unless otherwise indicated, for Case 1, production data on ND in Africa are drawn from Guèye 1997, 1999, and 2002. For both cases, technical background on the etiological agents and clinical signs of both ND and AI is based mainly on Alexander 2000 and 2004 plus Tollis 2002. Both OIE and WHO offer a periodically updated technical and other information on AI at their websites (www.oie.int. and http.www/who.org).

Finally, it should be noted that for both cases, the references to and discussion of EVM treatments for ND and probable incidences of AI are only illustrative. They derive from a convenience sample of English-language publications available to the first two authors, rather than from an exhaustive review of pertinent EVM or human ethnomedical literature globally.

CASE 1: NEWCASTLE’S DISEASE

ND is especially devastating to free-ranging flocks in developing countries, where it kills 70% to 80% of unvaccinated birds every year. ND was first identified in 1926 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, and simultaneously in Java, Indonesia. However, almost certainly, these were not the first outbreaks.

ND is caused by an enveloped RNA virus of the Paramyxoviridae family. It can infect at least 241 species of birds. Chickens are particularly susceptible, whereas waterfowl are often asymptomatic. Today, ND is described in terms of multiple pathotypes. The velogenic strain is the most virulent and occurs as two subtypes—viscerotropic and neurotrophic. The former is characterized by diarrhea, facial edema, nasal discharge, and, often, sudden death. The latter manifests as respiratory and subsequently neurologic signs, along with high mortality without gastrointestinal lesions.

Although a thermostable vaccine against ND exists, family flocks in Africa are rarely immunized due to the reasons discussed previously. Family-level producers instead rely on their own local/indigenous knowledge and resources. Indeed, Africans’ choice of EVM to treat poultry diseases in general reportedly ranges from 55% of family producers in Mozambique to 79% in Botswana. Across Africa, people use many botanicals to control ND. Usually, the Materia medica are crushed and then mixed into birds’ drinking water.

Table 3-1 lists a sampling of the plants involved in such preparations, labeled by the names given in the original scientific paper about them. As discussed in the following paragraphs, a number of these plants have proved promising for combating ND.

TABLE 3-1 Plants Used in African Ethnoveterinary Medicine for Newcastle’s Disease

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