Healthy Animals, Healthy Planet

Improving animal health is not only essential to animal welfare and wildlife conservation, it also creates a cascade of effects that can positively impact livelihoods, human health and nutrition, gender equity, and biodiversity. To learn more about this, explore the topics below.

Human Health Through Animal Health

We provide communities who live in close proximity with animals (domestic and wildlife) with information on how to prevent bidirectional disease transfer between humans and animals. Simple preventive measures can be keep both animals and humans healthy. We also focus on improving the health of low-input animals such as poultry and goats in small-scale farm settings. Not only do these animals generally have a smaller carbon footprint, but increased consumption of animal-source food products (meat, eggs, milk) from animals such as these, provide essential micronutrients that can reduce nutrition-related illness in pregnant and breast feeding women and children.

Empowering Women and Children

Improved animal health and sustainable production provides opportunities to elevate health, education, and income of women and children, who typically oversee the care of animals, and in the case of women, also manage household nutrition decisions.

Biodiversity Protection

When communities work to health and resilience of local wildlife and natural resources through balanced coexistence, they thrive and biodiversity thrives. This is particularly important in areas where local livelihoods depend on mixed animal-crop farming, ecotourism, and sustainable ecosystem provisioning. 

Conservation Through Food and Livelihood Security

Using locally sustainable methods, we collaborate with regional and local specialists to enhance animal health and production in underserved communities. To many subsistence farmers, the concept of environmental conservation is beyond the scope of daily survival. However, by prioritizing food security and livestock health first, households can work toward long-term goals to sustain agro-pastoral traditions through conservation of wildlife, indigenous crops, and natural resources.