The Brooke - Action for working horses and donkeys

The Brooke is working to reduce suffering of animals especially horses, donkeys and mules. It is active in many countries like Afghanistan, East Afric Read morea, Egypt, Ethiopia, Latin America & Caribbean, Nepal, Pakistan, West Africa besides India. It encourages compassion to these animals on which the human society is dependent on income. It goes about creating awareness about good animal handling practices by giving trainings on this subject to veterinary doctors as well as animal owners. It promotes such equipment which would not cause harm to the animals like rope head collars which would cause wounds to the horse due to rope being soft. It has set up an initiative named “Saddle aid” which looks at ways to help these load carrying animals through improvement of equipment that are used to harness them to carts or to loads that they carry. It is working to address working hours and load limits with local authorities besides trying to come up with lighter designs for carts. To conduct research on ethical behaviour towards working animals The Brooke organisation has set up AWERB(Animal Welfare and Ethical Research Body). This body focusses on research about the animals in this case horses, donkeys and mules. Through this research the organisation is trying to know more about these animals and use this knowledge to their welfare. To assess the condition of an animal the organisation with help from the University of Bristol has come up with an assessment tool called “Standardized Equine Based Welfare Assessment Tool”. Through this tool the condition of the animal can be gauged. The tool contains information like animal description, general health, behaviour, any wounds due to working conditions, any pains and a check up of its hooves and limbs. It has developed a lot of literature to aid in good handling of these working animals like Sharing the load manual, Welfare interpretation manual, welfare policies and animal welfare indicator repositories.