JEDDAH, 24 April — Not long ago there was an animal exhibition in a couple of the Kingdom’s cities featuring reptiles, spiders and insects from different parts of the world. The caretakers of the animals were very committed, and whenever I talked to them they told me about their eagerness to learn more. However, they were not properly trained, and their main brief was to please visitors. So, for example, poison arrow frogs from the rain forest were kept on sand so that the visitor could better view them. They died in a very short period of time. Reptiles were similarly kept in enclosures too small for them without hiding places so they could at any time be observed. They too soon died.
What the organizers found was that it was cheaper to buy new animals than to take proper care of their habitats.
Snakes even had their mouths stitched close so they wouldn’t bite in the event that visitors might want to handle them.
I went into a couple of pet stores recently and what I saw there caused me the worst nightmares I have ever had.
In one, I found baby dhubs, lizards of Saudi Arabia which are on the endangered animal list because of over-hunting. The owner told me that he knows that customers don’t know how to treat them properly, but he sells them anyway. They usually like to buy a cheap animal for the kids, and he typically offered them these lizards.
“They only cost SR50, live a couple of weeks even with bad care. and then can easily be disposed of,” he said.
Fortunately, a couple of months ago the sale of dhubs was outlawed in the Kingdom. Hopefully, the population of this animal will once again begin to prosper.
In another shop, I found chameleons caught in the southern part of the Kingdom. They are solitary living creatures, but were kept in that shop with 20 animals in a small box on an oven grill without proper food and without any plants.
When I pointed out the bad condition of the animals caused by the inappropriate habitat to the manager of the shop, he told me that he had a license and that gave him the right to treat the animals just as he wanted.
Because customers liked to see the reptiles in his shop he had many kinds for sale. None of them were properly taken care of. They hadn’t enough space and the terrariums were too cold. In the same shop I met a customer who had just bought a snake. She was neither told how to keep the animal nor that snakes need warm spots and hiding places to feel comfortable. On top of that, it was explained to her that these snakes don’t need to eat, but just drops of sugar water every now and then.
This shop employed a very committed, if ignorant, veterinarian who was very eager to learn and improve his knowledge. So I provided him with information about reptile care, hoping that it would improve the situation of the reptiles in that shop. Beside reptiles, this shop was exhibiting toucans (large-billed tropical American birds) squeezed into a tiny cage, which allowed them not even enough room to climb on the walls.
Another big shop with a beautiful plant exhibit offers wild animals for sale. You find a hyena next to a young kangaroo, baby baboons separated from their parents, a pelican, deer and so on, all of them in barred cages so they can smell and see each other.
It is an extremely stressful situation for all animals. When humans come to visit, their presence merely adds to the general air of degradation. People are allowed to rattle on the cages and throw garbage at the animals. Visitors do not reprimand each other; nor does the shopkeeper dare to implement the rules for fear of scaring them off.
However, thank God that it is not all doom and gloom.
There is this lady who managed to fulfill her dream in a district of Jeddah (she doesn’t want to reveal her name). When she moved to Jeddah she was confronted with a great deal of cruelty towards animals, especially cats. She found animals with cut off extremities and tails, burned-out eyes, broken spines.
She managed to nurse many of these animals back to health and set herself the aim of educating her neighborhood about the respect they should have for living creatures. It didn’t take her long to learn enough Arabic to be able go and visit her neighbors, parents and children, and she set about teaching them about the suffering animals.
At first she was laughed at, but she persisted and people started to listen. She even invited children from the neighborhood over to her house to teach them how to take care of the animals in her front yard.
They learned to value the friendship with this lady and her animals. “Nobody ever told us this before,” the children admitted. And that says it all.
