At some veterinary checkpoints you may be asked to drive your vehicle through a dip with disinfecting solution. (Hannelie Bester)
massive market for Botswana. Be a responsible visitor and respect your host country’s regulations.
Veterinary fences
Veterinary cordon fences are physical fences demarcating control zones in accordance with the guidelines of the International Animal Health Authority. These fences are referred to as vet fences and they are indicated with red lines on T4A’s GPS maps. The movement of raw meat and animal products, including unpasteurised milk, are allowed into but not out of an area classified as an infected zone. Often visitors feel that their vacuum packed or deep frozen meat poses a minimal disease risk, but unfortunately the logistics of having every possible permutation of the rules in a form that can be understood by the vet fence guards, is quite impossible. Therefore you should rather not try to take raw meat in any form past a vet fence checkpoint.
In Botswana vet fence restrictions basically allow you to move meat from south to north and from east to west. However, you cannot move meat from north to south and from west to east past the vet lines as the northern regions are classified as foot-and-mouth infected zones. The vast majority of veterinary fences and the gates allowing access are static; therefore some checkpoints have been in operation at the same places for years. However, temporary veterinary gates are erected when it is possible to contain a footand-mouth disease outbreak within a smaller area, thus preventing it from spreading through the entire sector. This occurs quite often in Botswana on the western side of the pan handle. The temporary gates operate similar to police road blocks; sometimes they are in operation, but more often not. It all depends on the veterinary health in the area at a specific point in time.
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