A Dog's Life

Yeah I'm gorgeous.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I guess that I could say that I know dogs. I've been breeding American Rat Terriers for over ten years now for rat hunting. Rat Terriers are more or less the American version of the Egyptian baladi dog. They were bred from a variety of working terrier breeds to produce a hardy, intelligent, loyal dog who could be trusted to guard the farm, livestock, and family of the farmer. Any dog who was too stupid not to learn to leave the chickens or sheep alone was shot, as was any one who bit a human. Veterinarians were in short supply so only the strongest survived. My working terriers are great dogs.

When we moved to Egypt we were given a female baladi dog in Alexandria. Pepsi was one of the smartest dogs I've ever seen. She was adult when she came to us, but she settled in right away and seemed to know that the children were her mandate. She was there to play whenever they wanted and was patient with the nonsense that a four and seven year old could come up with. If we went out for the evening, the babysitter had to understand that Pepsi slept outside the children's rooms and no one, but no one, was allowed in. When someone stole her shortly after we moved to a new house in Alexandria, we were all heartbroken.

A year later a lovely baladi dog called Lackie had a litter of pups at Smouha Sporting Club and I promised the children that we would take one of them. Someone took Lackie away to a farm when the pups were about 8 weeks old and it took us a couple of days to find the pups. We couldn't find the brown one that we'd decided we wanted so we collected a white one with a black face. Once she'd been cleaned up, Milligan was an adorable ball of cream fluff with a sooty face. When we found the sister that we'd originally planned on adopting a few days later, the difference between the two dogs was horrifying. Without her mother, the pups was thin and hungry. There was no way to leave her behind, and Stella came home with us.

Stella died last month of heart failure. She was over 15 years old and had helped to raise my children. She was unfailingly gentle with people and other dogs, although in her old age she did find the active terriers a bit annoying sometimes. Her sister Milligan died about 5 years earlier from cancer of the thyroid. These two dogs were amazing individuals and important members of our family. Whenever I had to have someone in our home to do any repair work, one or both of them would station themselves near the workers and simply watch them. As long as the men did their job in that place, the dogs simply watched, but if they wanted to move around the dogs would herd them to the kitchen door.

A couple of years ago my neighbour Morad had a litter of pups over at his place. My daughter saw a lovely auburn female and decided that this was destined to be Stella's understudy. Having had Pepsi and then Stella (the name of a local beer) the new dog was called Ganja, a name that is utterly meaningless to the local population. Ganja is not as patient as Stella was, but she is constantly on guard watching the house and garden, when she isn't catching a few rays on the picnic table.

Not all baladi dogs have such a good life. These are basically feral dogs. They may be descended from someone's family pet that was tossed out in the street and managed to survive. They might be descended from the wild dogs that have lived in Egypt for centuries. Virtually every farmhouse has one or two lying about in the yard ready to warn the family of a visitor or to drive off any marauding dog or fox that might show up. The farm families might give them a crust of bread every so often but usually the dogs fend for themselves entirely. They do not, however, prey on the livestock of their own house. For reasons best known to the dogs, they choose a family and then proceed to protect the members and belongings of that family, despite the fact that they get nothing, even affection, in return. Most of them are lucky to live to be two or three years old, considering that they are never vaccinated for anything and no one has the means or the money to take them to a vet if they get sick.

The feral baladi dogs of Egypt play an important role in the ecosystems of the country. In the cities where they live in the streets, they help to dispose of garbage if it is left around. They also are major predators of rats, mice and weasels. They are also a pool for the propagation of rabies, distemper, parvo and corona viruses. They also often suffer from some utterly brutal treatment at the hands of children who have never been taught to care for or understand animals.

Associations have been formed to help the animals of Egypt who have no else to help them. One of these associations is SPARE (the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights, Egypt) which has a shelter not far from where I live. They have a website at http://sparealife.org where it can even be arranged to adopt a dog from Egypt. Imagine, you too could have your own authentic Egyptian baladi dog. Some other groups such as Animal Haven specialise in cats, while the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends http://www.animalfriends.info) works with both dogs and cats. The Middle East Network for Animal Welfare has a site at http://www.menaw.net The Brooke Animal Hospital (http://www.thebrooke.org) is there for donkeys, mules, and horses in Egypt, many of whom lead lives that would make Black Beauty blush. But then the lives of their owners isn't exactly a picnic either.

An Interesting Egyptian News Source

Egypt Election

Every so often I Google the word "egypt" just to see what comes up and I usually like to use the Google news to get a broad view of what the world thinks is happening here. In the course of checking information on the bombing in Cairo, I ran across a site called Egypt Election Daily News. I emailed the people running it and got an answer after a day or so. Turns out to be the brainchild of an Egyptian living in London who felt that it was too hard for people to get information on Egypt that was relatively unbiassed. So he set up his own website that compiles news stories on Egypt and our neighbours and the range of articles is quite fun. You can read about our movie stars, our sports, the impact of technology on the region, all sorts of things.

I check Egypt Election every day as part of my news routine and find all varieties of interesting stories. For example, did you know that you can now email the new pope? Now that is a fascinating concept. There is something utterly unpopely about emailing the pontiff, but on the other hand, I believe that it is a healthy sign.

When my daughter was here in January she bought me a television set and arranged for me to get BBC World on cable so that I could watch the news if I wanted. Once in a while I do, but I'm much more likely to sit down for an old X-Files episode. I can get much better news coverage from the net, frankly. I mean, where else can you get the Chinese angle on events in Cairo? The old intro to the X-Files used to say "The truth is out there" and I suspect that it is somewhere. Now there is another way to look for it.

A Doggone Tough Week

The Daemon Meets Margarita, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Keeping a puppy quiet with an IV canula in her arm is not a job for the faint of heart. My current houseguest Tracy and I have spent a rough four days and nights adjusting needles, replacing Ringers Lactate and Glucose bags, and injecting antibiotics into canulas. So this morning when a suddenly recovered and starving Morgana bounded into the kitchen for the third time asking for yet another breakfast, we were delighted. As she's felt increasingly better over the day, a number of plastic bags, a pair of rubber sandals, a rope and about four plastic dog toys have fallen prey to the galumph of a newly bouncy Great Dane puppy.

We arrived home from a ride at sunset last week to hear a hideous racket from the corner of the garden just as the Dalmation and one of the rat terriers decided to take a stroll through the fields. We broke up the altercation but had to wait for the terrier to decide to come home, which he did eventually. When he finally showed up, he was stiff and not at all willing to be picked up. One of the other dogs had picked up a couple of nasty bites that needed stitching. When we called around to collect supplies and aid, we discovered that one neighbour had driven a mother and son to nearby hospitals after a pickup truck driven at ridiculous speed (we'd seen it flash past my driveway earlier) plowed into them as they sat outside their door. Another neighbour came over with some sutures and we had a quilting party with poor Harpo as the quilt.

It's pretty hard to pay attention to three gimpy dogs at once. The slightly banged-up wanderer probably got the least attention. Morgana got the most attention until this morning when Harpo's stitches had to come out and we realised that one of the wounds had gotten infected despite the antibiotic he's been taking. Off to the vet office for yet another visit. They really do think that I'm going to rent a room now.

Veterinarians are not the most highly revered doctors in Egypt on the whole. Traditionally being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer is of higher status than being a vet, which is a problem for people needing veterinary services. I have many young friends who are recently graduated veterinarians. Most of them are not in the career to make a million dollars, but the likelihood of them even making a decent living isn't always so great. A few young vets have been fortunate to be able to work with Dr. Adel Amer, an Egyptian vet who worked for almost thirty years in the United States and then opened a clinic in Maadi after retiring in Egypt. Many Egyptian vets are more concerned with protecting their client lists than they are in providing training for successors. Today one of Dr. Amer's young doctors spent a couple of hours cleaning out Harpo's infected bite.

About four hours and ten stitches later Harpo is asleep on the dog couch while Morgana has asked for an additional five meals. The rest of the pack, most of whom had been avoiding Harpo prior to the cleaning out operation, are scattered around the invalid. Both Tracy and I had noticed the change in attitude of the pack after the fight and tonight's change surprised both of us. All we could guess was that somehow the other dogs were noting and avoiding the smell of the infection. Now that it is gone, Harpo is lovable again.

Florence Nightingale Canid-style

Morgana.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

A week ago a friend of mine asked me to check out a litter of Great Dane pups to evaluate them for another friend who was looking at buying one. I went to an engineer's apartment in Heliopolis where I met an utterly lovely and charming black Dane female who was the mother of the litter. The pups were staying in an apartment nearby and when I saw Morgana I knew that it was a lost cause. I grew up with Great Danes and they are probably my favourite dogs.

I brought her home to the lunatic asylum and the poor thing was utterly flabbergasted. After living indoors all her life, she could run around in a garden, there were flowers, tortoises and other dogs to investigate. The world was amazing! But unfortunately it also included a virus that attacked her intestines and the first sign that I had to tell me I had a problem was a loss of appetite. That worried me, but when she began vomiting and got diarrhea I was really worried, despite the fact that the first thing she got when she arrived was a puppy shot against distemper, parvo and so on.

So now I have a baby Great Dane on an IV drip who has to be monitored constantly. She sleeps next to me at night and on an armchair during the day. The vets tell me that it could be okay in anywhere from 2 to 14 days. We try to feed her a bit of honey-sweetened soup every hour to help keep her strength up. It's heartbreaking work and all we can do is hope. Send healing energy for Morgana everyone.

It Isn't Just Us!

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

And I thought that it was just us in Egypt! I love this article. I'm sure that the numbers would be higher than that here. We were awarded the highest number of fatalities per kilometer of road in the world, but then we don't have so many kilometers of real road here.

We Didn't Need This...No One Does

ABC News: Egypt Blast at Bazaar Kills 2, Injures 19

I'd been spending a non-riding day yesterday, as I did the day before, having come off of one of my geldings while riding on Tuesday afternoon. He stopped and spooked at something, I rolled over his shoulder and landed with an audible thunk on the hard-packed clay of the trail, and I managed to pull a couple of muscles in my back. They are getting better, but the hour and a half that I had to spend in the saddle (on another horse) right afterwards were no picnic. That's the price of running your own business when you are the main asset. Note to self: get another asset.

Anyway, not being able to ride despite the absolutely beautiful weather was annoying so I decided to chase down some rabies vaccines for my dogs and horses. Merri and I dove into the misery that is Pyramids Street to make our way through the buses, crowds and pollution that is Giza to the Pfizer store where I bought 50 doses of 3 year rabies vaccines for my horses and dogs and the dogs and horses of a couple of neighbours. On our way back I stopped at a pharmacy to buy one hundred 3 ml syringes (the pharmacist did ask what I needed so many for) to make sure that I had plenty for administration. Once back at the house, all the house dogs and the cat got shot, and then we all headed over for the paddocks to do the horses, dogs and donkeys. Gameela the Gamoosa was exempt. Rabies is a real problem in the countryside, and about 4 months ago we had something like 10 dogs die from it among the farm dogs, who are never vaccinated for anything. For this reason, I vaccinated my horses and donkeys, since they are out and about in an area where they could possibly be exposed.

All the animals shot, we headed back to the house to prepare some Chinese food for a potluck neighbourhood dinner with my Norwegian friend Pal, but the preparations were interrupted by another neighbour whose husband had just called to say that he'd heard there'd been a bombing in the Muski area of Cairo. We turned on BBC World, the main television news source in this household, to hear nothing. Big sigh of relief, maybe it was just one of those stupid rumours. But then I checked Google News online, which has to be one of the best sources of news on any subject anywhere in the world, and found to my sorrow that there had been a bombing. Damn.

This morning, the Google sources say that two people were killed and about 20 injured from a blast from a small bomb filled with nails. The area where the blast went off is a street that extends towards the Nile and downtown from the Mosque of Hussein in the area of the main bazaar. While Khan el Khalili is a tourism area, it is far more one of the main shopping areas of Cairo, a sprawling site that contains smaller sections for gold, brasswork, herbalists, clothing stores, fabrics, tools....whatever you might be hunting for in Cairo, you will find it in this part of town, and at a cheaper price than other places, so it is filled, packed, inundated with lower middle class and lower class Egyptians all the time. Tourists like to come because it is an extremely interesting place, and the bargains are real, but the main clientele is local. At least half of the people injured were Egyptians, and there are conflicting stories about the killed. One news story says that the daughter of an Egyptian shopkeeper was among the casualties, while other foreign reporters are only talking about a foreign man and woman. Friday is usually a very busy day in the Muski area, but I'm betting that the shopkeepers are not doing much today.

Naturally, most of the conjecture is around the topic of who would have done such a thing. Some people say that they saw a man on a motorcycle throw the bomb into a knot of people including tourists, while others say someone placed it on a motorcycle. An unidentified woman who was seriously mangled (and killed) in the bombing may have been a suicide bomber according to others. It's going to be a while before we have any idea. Does this herald a period of attacks against foreigners? I doubt it. Most of the problems that Egypt had in the past were part of a struggle between people who were in opposition to the government, specifically the security forces, and the police. Ironically, the government's response in the 90's was to insist on police escorts for tourists, which simply made the tourists targets even more than before. I just hope that we don't see an exodus of tourists from Egypt, as the hotels and resorts are currently packed with visitors. In the meantime, my two American visitors are feeling very safe here in the countryside, and I feel no danger to myself at all.

Now we will all wait to see how the foreign press covers the event, how the government investigates, how the tourism industry reacts. As far as I can see, this was one of those tragic random events that could happen anywhere. Even the "safe" United States has had pipe bombing episodes in the past. No one made it out to be part of a sinister plot against Westerners or Easterners when it happened there. On the contrary, it was quite realistically described as a random act of violence by a deranged individual, just as most of them are. Suicide bombing is most surely an act of a deranged individual, one for whom despair is the overriding current in his/her life. Frankly, throwing a pipe bomb from a motorcycle does not seem to me to be the most balanced way of dealing with a problem either.

Egypt is utterly dependent on tourism. 99.9999% of Egyptians do not want to see anything happen to foreign tourists because a drop in tourism affects every sector of Egyptian life. The farmers get less for their crops if there is less demand. The manufacturing sector depends on purchases made by tourists or the demand of the hotel industry. The poor horse and camel men at the pyramids, as well as the souvenir sellers everywhere, are most directly hit. I would imagine that if the shopkeepers of Muski could get hold of who ever created that bomb, there would only be tiny shreds of whatever left in a matter of moments. No, we didn't need this at all.

Meeting New Faces

Hedgehog 3.25.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Molly, the little blonde dog in the photo, was a rescue from a mountain in Greece where she'd been abandoned by owners who were not happy with her for whatever reason. My daughter and I were on holiday there, driving rather randomly around the southern mountains when we spotted her sitting forlornly by the side of the road near the office of a cave that we wanted to visit the next day. We asked the people in the office about the dog and were told that she'd been sitting there for a couple of days. Not really needing another dog since we had two already in Cairo, we decided to open the car door and if she jumped in, she would go with us. No fool Molly, she hopped right in and has been a family member for the past 10 or so years. Her abused past left her with psychological scars that will never heal and she's blind in one eye with limited vision in the other, so she and my daughter's cat share a back garden where they live in peace and quiet. Molly comes in to join a selection of the terrier pack at night, however.

A week ago a friend of mine brought by a hedgehog that her daughter had rescued from a pet shop. Hedgehogs are native here and occasionally caught and sold to people as pets. Despite the fact that hedgehogs are terrific insect predators, it was felt that having one wandering the house wasn't a good idea so Phredd lived in a cage where he really wasn't so happy, so he ended up in Molly's garden for a brief stay. He was invited for a longer one, but made his getaway after only a day. He was adorable with a long pointed snout, soft facial fur, button eyes and nose and big soft ears, but I'm sure that he's much happier catching the grubs in my neighbour's fields.

The Nile Valley is a rich environment for animals with the crops year round and we have a lot of visitors among the migratory birds that pass from Europe and Asia to southern Africa in the spring and fall. Like all parts of our damaged world, the valley was home to many species that no longer survive here. Many have been hunted to extinction, others have been sold as pets like Phredd the Hedgehog and the many Egyptian tortoises who are on the brink of extinction and almost never found in the wild. There is very little education of the public, however, on the need to protect our fellow inhabitants.

One of the ideas that I've been playing with for my land is to have a center where children from schools in the city can come to visit and to be introduced to the farm animals of the countryside. A few ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys, a couple of goats and sheep, a water buffalo, a cow, and some donkeys (some of whom are already in residence) will be the visual aids and I'm sure that I will collect a variety of individuals like Phredd to help teach the children about the diversity of life in our environment. Many people don't realise that foxes and weasels are common inhabitants of Cairo along with less desirable creatures like rats and mice and the ubiquitous feral dogs and cats. They all have a place in the ecosystem, however, and this place should be understood. Geckos, small delicate lizards with sticky feet that can walk about on ceilings and walls, are common in Egypt but they are often hunted by people who mistakenly think that they poison food with their saliva. I treasure the two or three that live in my house feasting on flies and mosquitos.

My sister in law in California runs the Ojai Raptor Center where she helps to mend injured hawks, eagles, and owls to be returned to the wild. She also has some that for whatever reason cannot be returned to wild living who accompany her on visits to parks and schools for educational talks about the raptors of the area. A similar sort of center would be a useful addition here, I think. And with all the animals I have already, who would notice a few more?