Sulaiman Tamer - GARC World Rabies Day awards nominee

Description of your work

As a consultant veterinarian: Since I graduated from Mosul University/Veterinary medicine and surgery college I started to work in this field in different ways:

• I worked with local, international, and United nation NGOs (as a team leader, supervision, monitor, mine detection dog veterinarian.)

• With GOV. as a senior and consultative veterinarian as an animal health officer.

• A head of Duhok vet. Syndicate from 2000 till now as a NGO/vet syndicate.

• A CEO and founder of Kurdistan organization for animal rights protection as the first Iraq NGO established in 2009 asking about animal rights and welfare. • I published many books, brochures, leaflet, banners about animals and especially stray dog populations and ways to control by scientific ways.

• Animal right protection and welfare law drafts were written by us and sent to the Iraqi parliament, Kurdistan parliament and all Iraqi and Kurdistan ministries, agencies, and NGO more than 10 times.

Impact in numbers

Education and public awareness raising about love, respect and care for all animals and the environment. Organization of seminars, workshops, fun quizzes and interactive games in kindergarten, schools and children centers for 2021 -2022 season we done more than 35 seminars, workshops, fun quizzes and interactive games and more than 875 children and students attended.

 We are daily in negotiation with Education ministry for Introduction of animal welfare articles and textbooks into the public education system;  

Information and content production via traditional and social media (newspaper, magazine, T.V Radio, FB, etc.) for 2021 and 2022 season we did 61 interviews with different media TV channels.

Control stray animal population (dogs and cats).  Advocate to obtain the allocation of around 10,000 square meters of land to shelter stray animals and find investors to fund and build adequate infrastructures (discussions in this sense advanced in Duhok but stopped due to the economic crisis).

We coordinate spay and neuter (sterilization) programs of stray animals in Kurdistan to control the animal population; for 2021-2022 season we spayed 57 dogs and cats.  Pressure and advocate the Governments (Iraqi and Kurdish) to cancel the Stray Dogs Campaign kill to control Law Number 48 of 1971 &1986 and instead work to implement new modern and scientific ways to manage the growing stray animal population;

Rescue abused, neglected, and abandoned animals and promote adoption, treatment, and vaccination. We have long term experiences in following stray animals, rescue, spay and neuter them. We take care, tag, vaccinate and release animals to the nature again. We also promote adoption of rescued animals. This is our daily job that we mainly do on a voluntary basis, using our personal equipment and cars. For 2021 -2022 we rescued more than 121 stray dogs and cats and the last one was small kitten we sent and adopted to family in Germany in 29 August 2022.

Impact (description)

People day after day inform and recognize that there are many zoonotic disease between human and animals and all this disease are can be infected the owners and peoples around the animals so the awareness of vaccination is increase day after day.

The number of bitten from stray animals to human have not decreased but the number of infected by rabies have decreased if you look back 5-7 years ago.

We have noticed better community relationships between dogs and people because now the desire and request to breeding stray dogs and cat are increase day after day and there are no any afraid from parents to children

My personal experience with rabies

In 2012 on one day in Erbil (capital city of Kurdistan region) two boys (kids) died on the same day from a dog bite. This was a hard day and very dark day to all Kurdish citizens. As veterinarian and as a KOARP we thought to ourselves that this is our work and we should help our GOV and our people. From this point I started and will work to end Rabies forever in Kurdistan.

Partners

In this campaign we have many partners the main ones are GOV.

Ministry of Education,

Children centers like Zewa Children rights protection center,

Press (TV, newspaper, radio, etc.)

Veterinary directorate

Health directorate

Environment directorate.

*All information supplied by nominee. Content edited for language and formatting only*

Sulaiman Tamer - GARC World Rabies Day awards nominee
Sulaiman Tamer - GARC World Rabies Day awards nominee