Client / Financial Support: LPP
Duration: 13 minutes

Indigenous people and pastoralists are the guardians of much of the world’s remaining livestock biodiversity. Their traditional knowledge and lifestyles are a pre-requisite for the conservation of breeds which have evolved their special traits over long periods of interaction with particular, often challenging, eco-systems. Thus indigenous people, breeds and their environment are connected to each other in mutual interdependence, such that if even one component is removed, the whole system will collapse.

As scientific efforts to document livestock breeds have focused on their physical traits and production characteristics, the association between breeds and communities has often remained invisible and concealed.

This film brings to light the role of Biocultural protocols as a means of depicting the crucial role of communities in conserving indigenous breeds and in maintaining the web of life that depends on them. As examples the film portrays the role of the Raika community in Rajasthan and the Samburu in Northern Kenya.