Rabies Eradication

Of the 18 Wards comprising the Pokhara Municipality, we have completed the systematic survey of 15 of them, thus enabling base-line estimates of the current free-roaming dog population.

After each survey a comprehensive mass anti-rabies vaccination program (MARV) was conducted for the free-roaming street and community dogs in those Wards – plus some cats!

We have also held a number of MARV camps around the Pokhara area to enable owners to have their pet dogs vaccinated.

Studies reveal that a minimum of 70% of the dog population must be annually vaccinated against rabies in order to control, and ultimately eliminate, this lethal disease.

We're well ahead of that target and HART's data indicates that 88% of the dogs were vaccinated in these surveyed Wards.

Survey and MARV in the remaining three Wards is now under way.

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Humane Dog Population Management

WSPA very generously sponsored a visit to the Blue Paw Trust in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and, as a result, we have adopted many of their CNVR (Catch, Neuter, Vaccinate & Return) working procedures for use in the Pokhara area. This method of working is particularly relevant as we expand into the villages adjoining the Pokhara Municipality.

It's not practical to transport dogs over long distances or on difficult terrain. In these circumstances we use a mobile operating theatre - as seen here - to take our surgical sterilization services into the outlying areas which form an anti-rabies buffer zone around the city.

Whilst our main effort is directed towards the free-roaming street dogs, we have also embarked on a widespread campaign, principally through Chandra Rai, our Community Liaison Officer, to better inform the local dog-owning population that we can offer their dogs surgical sterilization as a proven alternative to chemical contraception.

The message is clearly getting through and we are very encouraged that 24% of all the female dogs that we have spayed since July 2010 have actually been provided to HART by their owners.

Education About Animals

We follow an education programme devised by WSPA and this involves us in visiting local schools to give talks and to hand out educational materials.

 

Educating the school children is a highly effective means of passing the information into the household.

 

In order to gauge the effectiveness of our education programme, we set the children a number of written questions to test their knowledge of dog bite avoidance, rabies and the importance of dog sterilization, before and then again after the talk.

 

To date we have visited 19 classes of 13-15 year-olds in 13 schools, totalling 645 children.

 

The bar chart above shows the percentage of correct answers, before and after the talks, in each of the classes visited and demonstrates the huge improvement in the children's knowledge by the end of each class. We will revisit these children after a four month interval to evaluate their long-term retention of information.

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