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It was not very long ago, back in March 2011. We were on another visit to Cairo. We needed to talk with a couple more animal groups and meetings had been arranged. The Friends of Animals Vetenary tent was active each week just down the road from where we stay privately. The main road alongside the wall running South from Sphinx-square leads off to all the main village stables... Hence the best position for a mobile free animal clinic.
Just below us where the road widens into a square, it is section used by everyone to throw their garbage. This builds up over several days ino a festering mess which is picked over by children, adults and animals. The latter for food of any kind, before a bulldozer and truck finally clear it away again.
The garbage raft is visited by every animal which can get near it. There is an added danger for camels, horses and especially donkeys which are less discerning. They make no distinction between plastic bags and genuine food scraps.
The result is often like in India; the animals end up with a knotted bloated mass which binds up their stomach and eventually kills them.
On this visit, to our surprise, the first rain of the year arrived with a massive downpour for a few hours. This resulted in many sizable sections of roadway over the city which were impassable from surface floodwater. One of these was ouside our apartment block. It had the effect of producing what looked like a garbage island instead of a road. The water was too deep for normal passage for a couple of days. But, the garbage could still be negotiated and picked over by the strays.
It was early hours of the morning and there was a break in the rain. I grabbed the chance with my camera and caught these pics of a couple of stray dogs keeping company with a sorry donkey who was washing its garbage food down with a good swill of floodwater !!
 
Before dawn the Donkey had been reclaimed to continue working
Back to Index for the next story : The Puppy in the Desert
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