Ethnoveterinary Medicine - What Is EVM?

What Is EVM?

In the 1980s the term "Veterinary Anthropology" was coined for a particular approach to animal health care, which was researched through "using the basic repertoire of anthropology's research skills and techniques, including observation, interview and participation" (Köhler-Rollefson and Bräunig, 1998). Ethnoveterinary medicine or ethnoveterinary research was defined by McCorkle in 1995 as:

The holistic, interdisciplinary study of local knowledge and its associated skills, practices, beliefs, practitioners, and social structures pertaining to the healthcare and healthful husbandry of food, work, and other income-producing animals, always with an eye to practical development applications within livestock production and livelihood systems, and with the ultimate goal of increasing human well-being via increased benefits from stockraising.

Stock owners continue to utilize EVM until better alternatives in terms of efficacy, low cost, availability and ease of administration, are found. By far the most-studied element of EVM is veterinary ethnopharmacopoeia, especially botanicals. Besides, several studies published in recent years (e.g., Confessor et al., 2009; Froemming, 2006, Souto et al. 2011a, b) have demonstrated the importance of animals as sources of remedies used in medicine for Ethnoveterinary..

Ethnoveterinary and human ethnomedicine practices overlap in several parts of the world. Parallels between medicinal practices in human and animal ethnomedicine not only include the types of resources used and the prevalence of use of those wildlife resources, but also in the modes of administration of these remedies and the ethnomedical techniques employed (see McCorkle and Martin, 1998; Souto et al., 2011a, b).