NIVA WINTER NEWSLETTER

It has certainly been a busy year, and the last few months have been no exception, with lots going on across a number of fronts – veterinary medicines, TB, agricultural policy, NIVA events and presidential invitations.

COUNCIL ACTIVITIES

Veterinary medicines

We have continued to work closely with BVA colleagues to keep the issue of a secure supply of veterinary medicines for NI in the forefront of the minds of politicians and UK Government with on-going meetings with VMD and the Windsor Framework team and meetings with MPs, MLAs and House of Lords representatives. Mark Little (NIVA’s Honorary Secretary and the main protagonist, over the last few years, in the vet meds arena) and I gave evidence to the House of Lords Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee along with representatives from UFU and AHDA.

This was followed up by an invitation to address the AERA Committee. We were extremely well received by both.

The support of both Committees and that of the NI agricultural industry who co-signed a public letter, co-ordinated by BVA, and signed by NIVA and BVA-NI, resulted in increased political lobbying and the proposed meeting with the Veterinary Medicines Working Group (VMWG) being brought forward, with a further industry meeting with Baroness Hayman taking place before Christmas.

Links to the technical guidance to the VMHSS and VMIHS, as well as supplementary guidance, can be found at the following link.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/northern-ireland-veterinary-medicines-supplementary-guidance

As the VMIHS has been designed as an extension of the cascade, its guidance should be read in conjunction with that of the cascade.

The cascade: prescribing unauthorised medicines – GOV.UK

In addition, VMD have recently released a webinar “Upcoming Changes to the Supply and Prescribing of Veterinary Medicines for Veterinary Surgeons in Northern Ireland” that can be accessed on the following link.

Changes to veterinary medicine supply in Northern Ireland webinar recordings – GOV.UK

For any questions you may still have please contact VMD directly using this Slido Link

Supply of Veterinary Medicines to Northern Ireland from 1 January 2026

If you encounter any issues with any veterinary medicine availability, or even hear rumours of potential supply problems, please report them directly to windsorframework@vmd.gov.uk or let us know by contacting any NIVA Council member or via info@vetni.co.uk and we will be happy to pass on the details.

TB Partnership Steering Group

There have been at least monthly meetings of the TBPSG recently, with NIVA contributing to additional workshops on the regionalisation project and the biosecurity questionnaire.  While NIVA welcomes many of the proposals being put forward, we continue to press for an evidence-led strategy, for maximised co-design of all elements and for action that will benefit affected herd owners in all parts of NI. ,

Agricultural Policy

With our BVA-NI hats on we continue to press for animal health and welfare to be considered via our representation in DAERA’s Agricultural Policy Stakeholder Group. We are really pleased to see the subject of sheep sector support is now on the agenda, are setting out our priorities for this area to DAERA and welcome the invitation to take part in the new Sheep Sector Support Working Group.

DAERA Expert Advisory Group carrying out a Review of the Dog Breeding Regulations in NI

NIVA also met with the above group again, hearing about and contributing to the survey designed by Susan Cunningham (NIVA past president and current Council member).

Can I please encourage you all to help generate the information so urgently needed, to support future proposals, by completing this survey. Click HERE

NETWORKING

It’s not been all work though! I have thoroughly enjoyed being invited, as President of NIVA, to the BEVA Conference, Vetireland 25 Conference, VCI gala dinner and AVSPNI Autumn Conference.

RECENT EVENTS

“Leading the Way for Horses”, organised by past-president and Council member Esther Skelly-Smith, was a fantastic all-day equine welfare symposium with contributions from exciting speakers on understanding learning in horses, the role of farriery in welfare and performance, equine traceability, sustainable parasite control and behavioural issues. Kindly supported by Summit, this was well supported from across the equine world with attendees, from both north and south of the border, including vets, trainers, farriers, breeders and owners.

“Vets All Areas” was another well attended event, at the excellent Vic-Ryn T3 venue, where those joining enjoyed refreshments and time to network and catch up with friends old and new before hearing from two local vets, Jim Ross and Terence McManus, who have taken a path less trodden and gave us great insights to the world of European veterinary audits and the meat industry. The third speaker, a former veterinary student who decided that a vet’s life was not for her, was unable to attend but was happy to be videoed explaining her work as an ethical taxidermist and showing us some of her amazing lifelike pieces. Our thanks go to Tim Skelly-Smith who produced the excellent video and to the ABP Group for their support.

We also welcomed Tracey and George from the Farming Community Network who updated us on the “Nip it in the Bud Campaign” being undertaken in conjunction with McMillan Cancer Support.

Looking forward to seeing you all in 2026.

Kirsten

APOPO is a Belgium-based humanitarian organisation, famous for training Tanzanian rats to save lives across the world. On 28^th April NIVA members gathered (virtually) to hear Anna Bouchier, Swiss and European Development Director of the charity, describe its history and current work.

The charity has been training rats to clear minefields in post-conflict regions since 1997. It was the brainchild of Belgian founders Bart Weetjens and Christophe Cox, the former of whom bred pet rats as a hobby and observed minefield problems first-hand while travelling as a student in Angola and Mozambique.

APOPO’s training centre is situated in Morogoro, Tanzania and uses Southern African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei). These adaptable, intelligent, social, and mainly nocturnal omnivores typically weigh in at between 1and 1.5kg – 2 or 3 times the size of our local European varieties. They are known for their amazing sense of smell (compensating for poor eyesight) because they use olfactory cues to communicate long distance in the wild, and have been selected for heroRAT training because they are also ubiquitous, resistant to local disease, easy to transport, easy to  transfer between trainers, and long enough lived to repay the training investment.

Anna was at pains to point out that animal welfare is at the very heart of all that APOPO do. All the rats are the product of a dedicated breeding programme and extremely well cared for throughout their lives. Training starts with socialisation and habituation from 4 weeks of age and progresses to reward-based operant conditioning, which takes between 9 months and a year in total. Down-time is spent in rich and stimulating play cages or resting in cosy clay-pot nests. Vet checks are regular and natural diet and behaviour are respected, with working hours being early mornings or evenings, and weekdays only. The rats typically live for 6-8 years and only work for as long as they want to. At the first sign of any waning of enthusiasm for the task, they are retired to luxury accommodation at the training centre.

No animal has ever been harmed on active duty. It would be unlikely that a rat would trigger a landmine as they typically require 4-5kg pressure to cause deployment, but it is more impressive that the rats have never missed a mine that has subsequently exploded. Accreditation requires the rats to clear 400 sq m of mines without missing any targets and with no more than one false ground scratching indication. Amazingly, in contrast with humans in a “rat race”, they demonstrate little propensity to cheat to gain reward!

The rats can clear an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, compared to 4 days for a man with a metal detector. They are particularly efficient in short scrub or desert, however the length of their legs proved to be a limitation in dense bush and the jungles of Cambodia, leading to APOPO opening a facility training Technical Survey dogs. These Belgian Shepherds carry GPS backpacks with a microphone and camera, enter dense scrub unaccompanied, and sit to indicate 1 metre from any unexploded ordinance. The dogs may miss targets, but this technique allows large areas to be assessed for contamination before sending rats in to micro-search.  

In 20 years APOPO’s heroRATs and heroDOGs have cleared over 108,700 landmines and released millions of square metres of land for safe farming. This work will be ongoing for some time – despite the Ottawa convention, 60 countries have remaining minefields and there were almost 6000 mine-related accidents in 2019,  43% of which involved children.

Ten years in, APOPO’s work diversified into training rats to detect another deadly global threat – TB, in sputum samples. Prior to Covid, TB was the world’s most deadly infectious disease with 1.3 million deaths in 2019 alone. It spreads easily in densely populated areas and, as the leading killer of HIV patients, Is particularly deadly in Africa. In Europe, the gold-standard for diagnosis is culture, which takes a week to produce a result, during which time the patient must isolate. Molecular testing needs expensive hardware, electricity and internet connectivity, so the current African solution is microscopy…which is fairly quick, but only 50% accurate. This is where the rats come in. In 20 minutes a trained rat can assess 100 (heat-treated and therefore safe) samples, and, to date, the program has picked up 20,000 positive TB cases which had slipped through the microscopy net, allowing timely treatment and prevention of further spread to contacts. Fascinatingly, for reasons unclear,  the rats are particularly quick and accurate at detecting cases in children.

Future uses for the skills and talents of these fabulous animals seem practically limitless. The scope for detecting other pathogens and diseases is obvious and exciting, as are the prospects for detecting trafficked wildlife, drugs and other contraband, and environmental contaminants. Work is even under way in training “rescueRATs” with tiny smart backpacks to search rubble for survivors.

NIVA would like to thank Elanco for their generous sponsorship of Anna’s talk, and helping to raise awareness of the amazing work of this excellent charity and a much-maligned species. Anyone reading this who isn’t so keen on our long-tailed friends could do worse than visit the APOPO website (https://www.apopo.org/en) – I cannot imagine how even the most determined musophobe would not be beguiled by pictures of these beautiful and intelligent creatures in action, saving human lives.