The Giza Foundation : Personal Stories

Dog Packs On The Plateau

From our apartment position overlooking the Village road it has been possible to take a particular interest in the dogs of the Plateau. Our position overlooks the area of the workers village which was excavated recently by Mark Lehner. This is the area where a regular pack of dogs congregate overnight. The area is South of the Wall of the Crow and is home also to a Watchman tent station.

We have observed the pack to be as much as 9 dogs strong and we understand that similar packs have territories elsewhere on the plateau and out into the desert. We have seen there is a strict pack hierachy, with little skirmishes now and then to re-establish the pecking order.

We notice as the pack disappears in the daytime to split up among the tourists or the village to see what they can find to survive. We know the Plateau guards and watchmen welcome the dogs because they will attack anyone they find out on the plateau in their territory at night when they are not supposed to be there. Paradoxically we have seen how the guards reward the dogs when they are within range by throwing rocks at them to scare them away!

We will be saying much more about the dogs in another section where we assess any problem and a best solution. It is clear however that as things are now, the dogs are freely multiplying. They are clearly troubled by parasites and injury in many cases. The poison method adopted by the government for years to systematically kill off all the stray dogs in Egypt is barbaric and arbitrary. There is a better way to deal with the dogs which is much more humane. Our proposals will be detailed elsewhere on this site.

For now, without the professional research and record keeping that is needed, which we intend to carry out;  we are only able to show a few off-cuff-snaps we gathered along the way. Notice on another pic how the dogs dig out dens on the slopes near the cemetery and the Plateau perimeter fence to shelter against the night.

There once was a time when Egyptians revered the dog. The dog was used for the hunt, for houseguarding, for battle, for companionship.

Now they are outcasts as diseased as the system which has declined from its former glory to corruption and hardship for all. The Jackal in Anubis was seen in latter day as a harbringer of death. To the initiate however, he was the protector and guardian of the gateway to higher life. The Dog and the Jackal survive, just.... but they deserve so much better than the life they have been reduced to now.

The dogs below were some of the thousands being officially poisoned in Cairo - and left to rot !

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