The use of animals and plants for traditional medicine has emerged since the origin of humankind. Plants and animals are used as a source of food, medicine, clothing and other livelihood services. The study on indigenous ethnozoological and ethnoveterinary medicinal practices in Leka the Dullecha District was designed to investigate animal and plant species used as traditional medicine and the different modes of preparations, applications, storages and human and livestock ailments treated in the area. Data were mainly collected through a questionnaire in the form of an interview with 132 purposively selected respondents and group discussion. A total of 17 medicinal animals and 23 plant species were identified to treat various kinds of human and livestock ailments. The local people used smashing, chopping, powdering, squeezing and anointing as modes of traditional medicinal preparation methods. Traditional medicinal practitioners used plastic bags (27.78%), clay-made pots (25.56%), a sheet of cloths (24.44%), hanging in the home roof (16.67%) and bottles (5.55%) as a storage mechanism for traditional medicine in the study area. The result revealed that the local communities have rich knowledge about ethnozoological and ethnoveterinary traditional medicine, which could serve as baseline information for further ethnopharmacological studies. Documentation of such indigenous traditional medicinal knowledge could also be helpful for the invention of modern drugs. Hence, animal and plant species identified as sources of traditional medicine in the area should be conserved since extractive resource use patterns lead such species to local extinction.
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