Focus on: The Ethnoveterinary Mailing List

Exchanging information on local animal healthcare, through cyberspace

Back in the 1970s, when I studied veterinary medicine in West Germany, one of my professors would make fun of alternative veterinary practices in his lectures. Acupuncture points could not be verified with scientific methods, he said, and how could a homeopathic remedy work if it contained so little of an ingredient in such highly diluted solutions?

At that time, development projects were busy exporting conventional veterinary medicine to countries in the South and establishing veterinary schools, laboratories and services modelled on those in Europe and North America. They dismissed as 'superstition' and 'ignorance' the knowledge that local communities possess about their livestock, how to treat them, and how to keep them healthy and productive. This knowledge is what is meant by 'ethnoveterinary medicine'.#1

Things have changed. In Europe, a growing number of veterinarians now offer alternative treatments: acupuncture, homeopathy, and phytotherapy. And development efforts now increasingly recognize the value of indigenous knowledge, both as a resource that provides alternative solutions to problems, and as a basis for understanding local communities.

Getting started
Ethnoveterinary medicine is an age-old practice, but as a field of study it dates back only to the mid-1980s. Even today, university curricula provide hardly any information on this type of medicine. But ethnoveterinary research and development is finally gaining momentum. It focuses on: the local knowledge upon which appropriate and effective development solutions have to be based; the testing of local knowledge and practices in terms of their efficacy and applicability; and its application in livestock development. Healers and other local experts-the bearers of the knowledge-can be valuable partners in the process.

The first international conference on ethnoveterinary medicine was held in 1997 in Pune, India. It was attended by 200 participants from 20 countries, all of whom stressed the need for further information exchange and recommended the establishment of an electronic mailing list.#2

Participants in the Pune conference who were involved in the international IK network began exchanging information in the field of ethnoveterinary medicine and exploring ways to set up an electronic mailing list. In early 1999 they found Nuffic-CIRAN willing to host such a list with the help of its IK website and an administrator. A team of eight 'ethnoveterinarians'-most of whom had attended the Pune conference- agreed to act as moderators of the Ethnoveterinary Mailing List (EVML).

EVML
The moderators represent five continents (Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe) and three major languages (English, French and Spanish). This multinational team has tried to achieve wide international coverage and to overcome the linguistic barriers that so often separate people who share common interests. Together they compiled a list of potential subscribers from among their own contacts and from lists of conference participants, etc. They then sent out an announcement, inviting people to subscribe to the new e-mail list.

The first message was circulated to 68 subscribers in June 1999. The list has since grown steadily, to 210 members in September 2000. This is a net growth average of ten people a month.

The list's administrator is in charge of the technical work, but the moderators deal with all aspects concerning content. They contribute information from their regions and encourage interested persons to join the list by promoting it at conferences, for example. The moderators also handle any problems that arise.

Every three months, one of the moderators summarizes the main points of the discussion and places information in categories for the benefit of all the subscribers. These quarterly summaries are placed in the lists' archive and can be browsed online. The categories facilitate searches. For example, if you are looking for details about a recently published book, you do not have to scan all the messages in the archive. Instead you can just go to the section 'Books' in the quarterly summary.

Characteristics
No record is kept of the subscribers' postal addresses or backgrounds, but the text of messages reveal that they come from at least 45 countries and from a variety of fields, including veterinary medicine, botany, anthropology, pharmacy, agriculture, animal husbandry, biology, and farming. They work in the field, in universities, laboratories, non-government and government institutions, and in industry. Several consultants and students also subscribe to the list.

Over 300 messages have been circulated in the list's 15 months of existence: roughly one message every 1.5 days. Most are announcements of publications, training courses, conferences, databases and websites, or they contain information about projects either in the field or in the laboratory. Some messages have asked for information about specific plants. Others have sought contacts. Such requests elicit responses, not all of which are sent to the entire list. People often reply directly to the person requesting the information rather than to the wider list. This makes it impossible to count the exchanges, but in general, feedback has been positive. For example, one subscriber reported receiving a number of very helpful replies after she had circulated a request for collaboration to establish a network on local livestock breeds.

The list is used less as a discussion forum, although several short discussions have taken place. These have covered topics such as the roles of ethnoveterinary and modern medicine in community-based animal health projects, and local livestock breeds and their conservation.

Has the list indeed brought together English-, French- and Spanish-speaking ethnoveterinarians? This is hard to tell, as there is no way of knowing how many non-English speakers have subscribed. A few messages in French (and one or two in Spanish) have been sent from time to time, but all other contributions have been in English. The moderators at first planned to translate messages with the help of automatic translation programs, but the results were unsatisfactory so the idea was abandoned.

Apart from one incident, where a subscriber kept sending messages of little relevance to the subject of local animal healthcare and production, the list has run smoothly over the past year.

What next?
E-mail and the Internet are expanding very rapidly. Increasing numbers of people are getting 'wired'. There is a wealth of mailing lists on different topics: http://www.liszt.com registers over 90,000 of them. With this breathtaking growth it is easy for people in the North to forget that only ten per cent of all Internet users are in developing countries,#3 and these tend to be the richer people in the cities. But many ethnoveterinary practitioners and field workers live and work in remote areas and have limited access to the new media or may lack the education and skills needed to use them.

So while the ethnoveterinary mailing list is useful, it does not go far enough. It should rather become a starting point for other efforts-a place where local networks, newsletters and projects can pick up information which they then translate, disseminate and exchange.

Another challenge is to produce hard data on the scientific validity and economics of ethnoveterinary medicine. Without such data, policy-makers and development managers will remain sceptical of the value of building on this resource. The ethnoveterinary mailing list can help stimulate research on these issues, and encourage the development and adaptation of methods for measuring the validity of ethnoveterinary medicine, for demonstrating its benefits, and for sharing the results.

Dr Evelyn Mathias
EVML moderator
Independent Consultant
Weizenfeld 4
51467 Bergisch Gladbach
Germany
Tel.: +49-2202-932 921
Fax: +49-2202-932 922
E-mail: evelynmathias@netcologne.de

1. For information on this subject, see Martin, Marina, Evelyn Mathias and Constance M. McCorkle (Forthcoming) Ethnoveterinary Medicine: an annotated bibliography of community animal healthcare. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

2. Mathias, E.; D.V. Rangnekar, and C.M. McCorkle (eds) (1999) Ethnoveterninary medicine: alternatices for livestock development. Proceedings of an international conference held in Pune, India, on November 4-6, 1997. Volume 1: Selected Papers. Pune: BAIF Development Research Foundation.

3. Geisz, Martin; Jutta Janzen und Heike Schmid Internet - eines neues Medium für die entwicklungspolitische Bildungsarbeit. Rundbrief Bildungsauftrag Nord-Süd, World University Service.

The Ethnoveterinary Mailing List
Joining the ethnoveterinary mailing list is simple. Just send a blank message to this e-mail address: join-EVM@lyris.nuffic.nl. A new subscriber receives a welcome message stating the purpose of the list, describing its audience, and saying how to use it. For example, messages should be short, to the point, and written in a friendly tone (this is called 'netiquette'). File attachments are discouraged because they take longer to download, some Internet users cannot receive attachments, and some have to pay for each bit and byte they receive.

Sending messages is also very simple. The subscriber just sends his or her e-mail message to EVM@lyris.nuffic.nl.

The list is designed to run almost entirely automatically. It uses Lyris, a computer program on Nuffic-CIRAN's server that automatically distributes messages to all subscribers. Members can choose to receive each message separately, get a 'daily digest' (one e-mail compiling all the messages sent that day), or receive only a daily index. All the messages are archived on the Internet (at http://lyris.nuffic.nl:3335/scripts/lyris.pl.). This website is open only to subscribers.

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