Senegal Horse Market – Our New Location

Senegal, West Africa, is the latest location for our International filming assignments.

We have completed two films – a Country Profile for our leading client, Ceva Santé Animale featuring their country manager and the work he carries out and a profile of one of this year’s Global Animal Welfare Awards winners who operates in some of Senegal’s poorest areas.

The first report concentrates on the work of Dr. Abdoulaye Soumboundou, Ceva’s agent in Senegal and neighbouring countries, The Gambia and Mauritania where he works with vets and animal producers to improve the health and welfare of the animals they care for.

Click here to see the profile video.

Poultry, he explains, is the largest single market in Senegal and outbreaks of avian influenza several years ago resulted in a total ban of foreign imports of chicken. This has boosted the businesses of Senegalese farmers and poultry producers although a lifting of the ban is now being considered. Ceva has also been developing its hatchery vaccination service in Senegal together with the associated training as part of their partnership with poultry farmers.

Ruminants is the next largest market with sales of Coglavax helping farmers to reduce mortality in their herds. The release of Ceva’s VerY Diag field kit, the first rapid field test for the diagnosis of bovine trypanosomosis, has also been a major factor in helping ruminant farmers improve the health of their cattle. The kits have helped with a major advance in the treatment of the disease, which causes wasting in cattle and can cause the spread of the human form of sleeping sickness resulting in many deaths throughout Africa. It also prevents farmers and vets from treating cattle needlessly by showing whether they are infected, or not, within a matter of minutes of a test being carried out.

Finally the companion animal market is a small but growing sector in Senegal as more and more people are owning and caring for pets.

“I really enjoy working with Ceva,” says Dr. Soumboundou in the video. “Ceva has helped me go out in the field and work with farmers and as well as selling the products we are carrying out lots of training and this helps them improve their knowledge about disease and the best treatments that are available.”

We then travelled to the North East of the country to visit the regular horse market in the town of Mékhé, where many people who live on the poverty line use working horses and donkeys for their day to day work.

Our winning vet,Dr. Mactar Seck, works with The Brooke charity and collected his award at a ceremony held in Barcelona, Spain. Our filming in Senegal featured his work alongside fellow vets from the international horse and donkey organisation The Brooke, to introduce their new assessment tool SEBWAT.

It takes just 10 minutes to assess the welfare of a working horse or donkey using Brooke’s tool). Developed in 2010,  it  evolved from the Working Equine Welfare Assessment, the result of an earlier collaboration between Brooke and Bristol University.

Between 2010 and 2016 SEBWAT was used over 71,000 times across 11 countries. Brooke has now made public a summary of what was learned during that time, including SEBWAT’s main benefits and limitations, and how it may develop in the future.

Click here to see the video report on the work of The Brooke and Dr. Seck.