Highlights of AWL’s Work in 2022
We started the year by targeting young pupils at the basic level to introduce to them the concept of animal welfare and teach them how best to take care of pets and animals in general. At Animal Welfare League, we believe when you teach them young, it will forever be a part of them and so we went out to Learners Educational Complex, a basic school within the Apemso Community where we spent time with the pupils (ages 10-14).
With the aid of short videos, pictures and fun packed activities, they learnt about the 5 freedoms of animals, the various types of pets and how to take good care of them. Pupils also learned about dog bite prevention and what to do when a dog is aggressive towards them, considering that children between the above ages make up most of 59,000 rabies deaths per year.
Later in June, we reached out to a lot more pupils and community members through our community outreach in the Akamadoa, Amoamang, Atonsu, Bonkrong and Kyebi communities. Activities that took place during the outreach included education on animal welfare at 10 basic schools where over 1,000 pupils and 80 community members were educated on the basic freedoms of animals, the distribution of free exercise books with the freedoms of animals boldly printed on them to the pupils of these schools. We summed up by carrying out a free rabies vaccination of over 270 dogs and cats within the communities.
Animal Welfare League moderated a seminar on animal welfare for veterinary medicine students at the School of Veterinary Medicine, KNUST.
This is in line with our goals of equipping the people that work directly/indirectly with animals with the knowledge and information needed for them to uphold the welfare standards of animals.
In the month of October, we mounted campaigns against ten (10) big corporate hospitality companies in Ghana and two of these companies responded for an in-person meeting. AWL had in-person meetings with these two companies; Alisa Hotel and AquaSafari in October and they both expressed interest in adopting a cage-free policy.
A second meeting is being scheduled with both companies each in 2023 for signing of the cage-free policy by these companies.
Finally in late October, we kicked started our second phase of our Cage-free campaign with a social media awareness creation among the Ghanaian public. This two week campaign consisted of posting uniquely customized flyers with specific cage-free, animal welfare messages each day on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and on Instagram amassing 4.9k impressions.
