A Real Difference | rogergale

Famine, Flood and Disaster – “Wake up and save the animals” – MP

North Thanet`s MP, Roger Gale is today ( Sunday 10th July) pressing the case for charity support for working animals and livestock in areas affected by famine, flood and natural disaster.

Commenting on the very high profile appeals launched on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee the MP, who is a Trustee of SPANA (The Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad) says:

“There are fourteen charities now represented on the DEC. They are all worthy but there is not a single animal charity amongst them.

Time and again we hear reporters saying that people have lost “their homes their livelihoods and their livestock” but far too frequently little effort is made the save working animals – which often are the livelihood - until it is far too late.

The brutal end-result of this neglect is that we are saving women and children today who will either die of starvation tomorrow or be condemned to a life of squalid existence in refugee camps because their whole means of normal and sustainable existence has been removed from them.

It should not be too much to ask that the DEC “club” should embrace at least one animal charity – SPANA is just one example – that has the husbandry and veterinary experience to get into disaster zones fast and to save livestock so that when the immediate crisis is passed people have something to return home to and with which to begin to rebuild their lives. To ignore this need – and this is what is happening all too often – is to build long-term disaster into short-term devastation.

This is emphatically not a “bunny-hugging” plea. We are talking about the harsh reality of existence at the margins and at those margins it is animals, not people or donated food, that can make the real difference between long-term life or death.”