Champa Fernando Secretary – KACPAW (Kandy Association  for Community Protection through Animal Welfare)

It is laudable that successive governements since 2008 had continued to-date with the intrinsically HUMANE National Dog Sterilization Programme for dog Population Management  (DPM), recommended by world bodies such as the WHO, OIE (Office International des Epizooties – World  Organization for Animal Health) and, GARC (Global Alliance for Rabies Control). 

Sterilization is the only successful DPM method providing sustainable results that benefit Dog Rabies Control (DRC) and eradication as it reduces dog populations permanently towards zero growth if consistently done, enabling achievement of the Globally recommended 80% rabies  vaccination coverage of the lessening and most importantly nonreplacement of the dog population,  needed towards achieving  herd immunity, leading to eventual rabies eradication. 

With such technologically and scientifically sound  approaches practiced in Sri Lanka both in terms of DPM and DRC, it is sad that both these programmes have not been able to provide the desired sustainable  results, not because the  method is faulty, but because the application of these vital  programmes has not been followed up dilligently enough and with annual feedback, monitoring and improvement. 

In this backdrop, a haphazard plan to give a human birth control drug called Depo-provera to “free-roaming domestic bitches” has been drawn up by the Director of the Public Health Veterinary Services  (PHVS), who as a Veterinarian is fully aware of the damning and fatally detrimental effects of this drug, even given once, and particularly on a set of unmonitorable free-roaming dogs, whom he says will be monitored by Human-Health Workers – Medical Officers of Health (Doctors) and handled by PHIs and staff. 

Female dogs given one dose of this injection will inevitably suffer from a complex set of progressively worsening and extremely detrimental and fatal health effects, of which Pyometra (pus filling up in the uterus) is what some of us Animal Welfarists who carry out sterilizations witness most commonly in dogs  and cats given depo-provera, offen by quack vets, a plague which the SLVC should address.  

Scientifically too it has been highlighted and explained  that this injection should not be given.

So with the immense suffering and sure death of all of the free-roaming dogs administered with 50,000 WHO-provided doses of Depo-provera as per PHVS Director’s haphazard unscientific plan, bereft of any impact on rabies or dog population control, the only thing that will happen is tarnishishing  the hitherto practiced HUMANE and Science-based DPM and DRC in Sri Lanka with inhumanity and unprecedented Animal Abuse. 

The Sri Lanka Veterinary Council (SLVC) wants this plan stopped immediately as Depo-provera is immensely detrimental to the health of animals, and the same professional  sentiments have been intimated to the Health Ministry  by the Sri Lanka Veterinary Aasociation (SLVA)  and State Veterinary Surgeons’ Association (SVSA).  

Several Animal Rights/Welfare (AR/AW) Groups have written to the SLVC requesting that Depo-provera be banned in Sri Lanka  from being used on animals. 

These AR/AW Groups have also written to the WHO, expressing their dismay that the animal-abusive human drug Depo-provera is to be provided by WHO  to Sri Lanka  Health Ministry to be used on Sri Lanka’s “free-roaming domestic bitches.” 

Another grave concern the AR/AW Group raises with WHO is if WHO provides this drug to Sri Lanka to activate this short-sighted animal-abusive plan, similar plans may get pilot-tested or even established as widespread practice as a DPM (dog population management) measure in other rabies endemic countries, countering  its own recommendations of DPM and DRC.  

The AR/AW Groups urged WHO that the drug should not be provided to be given to dogs in Sri Lanka.

They have also written to the Minister of Health to stop this planned inhumanity. 

A Change.org petition on this animal abuse issue can be signed at 

https://www.change.org/p/stop-abusive-plan-to-slow-kill-sri-lanka-s-dogs-and-cats

Champa Fernando

Secretary – KACPAW (Kandy Association  for Community Protection through Animal Welfare)