From early 2000, various agencies and individuals involved in livestock relief work began to question the quality and professionalism of their interventions. For example, inputs such as emergency veterinary care often arrive too late to be of any value and when delivered to people free-of-charge, undermine local service providers. In these situations, although some animals may have been saved in the short-term, the capacity of local services to provide more long-term support is damaged by the relief response. These kinds of problems are compounded because donors and NGOs often lack in-house livestock expertise and decisions on livestock programming are made without professional input.

Over time, these concerns were linked to current thinking on livelihoods and the concept of ‘saving lives and livelihoods’. The challenge is to design emergency responses which both save human lives while also protecting people’s assets and the local services and systems needed for post-disaster recovery. Some agencies started to explore ways to deliver emergency livestock de-stocking programmes using local traders. Others began to deliver emergency veterinary care through the private sector.

During the last five years or or, various agencies began to document their experiences independently. For example:

• Oxfam GB began to compile experiences and lessons learned from their livestock programming in emergencies
• The Feinstein International Center at Tufts University began to document their experiences of coordinating large-scale livestock programmes in complex emergencies, with a focus on community-based approaches in the Horn of Africa, and incoherence between donor relief and development funding
• The African Union/Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources convened a multi-agency review of best-practice in livestock interventions in complex emergencies
• The Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance, United States Agency for International Development, developed internal guidelines on livelihoods-based approaches to livestock relief
• The Food and Agriculture Organization began to develop guidelines on livestock relief interventions with a view to assisting its non-livestock field staff to design better responses
• The International Committee for the Red Cross commissioned a regional analysis of livestock issues in the Horn of Africa, which highlighted the need for livelihoods programming and combining short and long-term strategies

The LEGS process brings these and other initiatives together to produce a single set of international standards and guidelines for livestock emergency interventions.

From a global perspective,

• the most pressing need is to improve livestock relief programming with communities who rely heavily on livestock for their social and economic well-being. While LEGS will cover livestock interventions in these areas, it will also address livestock support to settled farming communities and livestock kept by people in urban areas.
• climate change is resulting in more frequent and diverse types of disaster. Especially vulnerable are livestock-dependant communities in fragile arid and semi-arid environments who are experiencing increasing drought followed by severe flooding.