Horror in Cairo – Dogs and camels nightmare in Cairo Market

September, 26, 2007

Last week, Ha'aretz Weekend section published a piece by the writer Benny Tziper. Unfortunately this was excluded from the English version, so you'll have to rely on my translation of the most interesting paragraphs.

You can click on the picture for a slide show

Excerts from Benny Tziper, Ha’aretz Weekend, 12/09/2007

http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/903241.html

Let us spend a minute in the dogs section in Soul Al-Goma’a (Friday market). Their barks and their howls can be heard from afar. A symphony of the canine misery. The difference from the human misery is only that the man, who ties the dogs in straps and iron chains, can now abuse them for leisure. The biggest dogs stimulate the crowd’s lust for brutality. If they are black – they are fated to be the damned of the earth. The owners who tied their dogs to a very short chain that chokes them with every move now stand and throw stuff on them, sometimes a burning cigarette, and they are happy when the dog’s tongue gets scalded, and he is furious and his eyes are moving out of their holes. And the crowd sits on wooden benches from a safe distance. Sometimes, a so-brave teenager gets closer and manages to hit a dog’s nose with a branch or a stick. Others are getting closer and move their arms in a peculiar dance in order to scare him, and he is mad, anxious, his tongue is hanging out from thirst.

In the competing stands, other owners demand the crowd’s attention in their own abuses. Here walks a guy, owner of half a dozen Shepard dogs, and kicks the ribs of one of them. He is folds with pain, the others run around and get entangled in their chains because of the fear. And on the top of a cage on a pedestal, a scared poodle that maybe a spoiled lady stroked him yesterday in a villa in the Ma’adi neighborhood. If one deludes himself that the crowd had a pity on him, he is wrong. The crowd will teach the “snob” a lesson. His current master now forcibly pulls his tail and encourages the potential buyers to do the same. The dog cries. Such a sissy.

Everything happens in a small place between the concrete columns that support the intersection bridge. The concrete creates a sounding board, imprisons the dust under the dogs’ legs, and becomes a big cloud when a new dog comes to sale, and they gnarl toward him and one needs to hold him tightly to prevent him from biting the other dogs. The merciful heart prays that this theater will end up in a positive moral, like having one of the dogs release himself and bite the behinds of one of the human abusers. But such an ending exists only in novels. Mostly, the dogs live a dog’s life and die a dog’s death.

…

We saw them, the Sudanese nomads who walked from Sudan a thousand kilometers with their camels. The camels are their lives and sometimes more expensive than that, and in this Cairo market they part with them, indifferently and emotionlessly, because these wild and desert learned people know not spoils. They speak the camels’ tongue, in growls, inhuman shouts and strong strikes with sticks. You see how each strike injures the camel’s skin and breaks it. In order to prevent the camels from running away from their masters, they fold one of their legs and tie it. It must be painful for the animal.

Hundreds of camels cover this sandy plateau. The weaker ones will become mincemeat, and the stronger, who survived the hardships of the journey will be sold to the farmers, to turn the pumping wheels back and forth until they will grow weaker and become mincemeat.

We have seen such a negotiations between a Sudanese family and an Egyptian trader…The Sudanese screams, rips his Tarbush off his head, hits the ground with his stick, and his family follow him and start beating the limping camels herd. And the scary camels snore, scatter, gather and emit gasses.

… The traders came to terms. They urge the camel to enter the master’s pickup. The camel doesn’t want, or can’t, so they pull him with ropes, tie his neck, he grunts, surrenders….

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