Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic

Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.