Zambezi Working Donkey Project - Activity Update June 2021

During the month of June we held 6 mobile clinics in the village communities, as well as attending to donkeys at our Maramba Farm workshop. The team attended to 131 donkeys and provided 8 new sets of harnesses, to replace wooden ox-yokes.

It is winter here and people may be surprised to hear that it gets very cold in Zambia! The grass is becoming poor now, so at Maramba Farm we have started to supplement the rescue donkey’s nutrition with hard feed.

Thanks to AAA support we were also able to buy-in 200 bales of lovely hay to see us through the long dry season... we won’t get rain now until November!

Two donkeys, Bank and Mimi, were returned to their owner this month. Emmanuel had spent a lot of time educating the family and we were satisfied that they now know how to take care of their animals properly. We will follow up with regular visits.

Sadly, we had a very extreme case of abuse where a female donkey had been axed. It was a horrific injury that had severed her spine – there was nothing we or the vets could do for her and so the only option was to euthanise. In these very sad circumstances, she also lost her unborn foal, and her previous foal who was with her also died a couple of days later – we think from the effects of shock and witnessing such a traumatic scene.

This has really upset us all and we were extremely disappointed that we couldn’t save them. We are resolved to working with authorities to ensure the law regarding animal abuse is upheld, and further meetings with senior traditional leaders are being planned.

In other more positive news, we undertook more harness and donkey welfare training with a gentleman, Wamunyima, who travelled very far from Chiyabi Village in Sinazeze, near Lake Kariba. He had learnt about our work and asked if he could come to us – he will now return to his village and share what he’s learnt with other donkey owners. We have more training workshops planned with partner organisations in coming weeks as word is spreading!

Thank you very much for all you do to support working donkeys in Zambia and across Africa!