The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  One stares at this scene and wonders. This vet has been here before, many times before. Unlike the viewer, who can turn off the television at any time, he has to see it all again tomorrow. He has to do his job, or try to, despite the stupidity and the cupidity of the human beings who do not see their animals as sentient creatures capable of feeling pain, or even as partners in the harsh game of survival, but only as inanimate machines. Because he does care whether this animal lives or dies, even if the owner doesn’t. So he continues his work. He will do this again tomorrow, if he has to, and again the next day. Because, as he would say years later after that award in London, “My love and care for the animals made me not just focus on their treatment but furthermore on ways to prevent animal disease,” on keeping them from being put in situations where there was no hope for anything better. Dr. Salah makes it clear that this is a world filled with pain and ignorance. But it is also a world of hope, because compassion can be taught just as cruelty can. It is a world where, thanks to the educational work of Brooke clinics, people are beginning to put their animals first, not just because they are a family’s meal ticket but because they are a part of a human family. The garbage-picker children of Cairo are one example. Seeing their fathers whip overloaded donkeys, they are apt to do the same themselves, but they think differently when they, as Christians, are reminded by a Muslim vet that Jesus rode a donkey. Hearing his words as a revelation, they look at their animals with a new light in their faces. And they drop the whip.

  Perhaps the most inspiring moment at the end of this often painful documentary is when the camera follows the oldest serving vet at the Cairo clinic, picking his way through the night-darkened grounds of the hospital, a swaying lantern in his hand. Long faces and bright eyes greet him from boxes along the way, as if they are all in on the secret mission. But it is not so secret. The old man’s lantern light spills over hay on which a new foal has been born. “It will have a better chance of life,” says the narrator, “thanks to a woman called Dorothy Brooke.” The last frame is filled with the benignant, slightly puzzled gaze of the foal’s mother, safe in the privilege of her maternal duty of caring for her offspring in this strangely peaceful place located in the heart of so much noise and misery.43

  Still a practicing veterinarian, Dr. Graham Munroe has strongly colored memories of his experiences in Cairo in 1989. One thing he points out is that he was nowhere as controlled in his reactions to what he saw as he appears to be on film. “It is very easy to go to these places and be utterly frustrated by the mindset,” he says today, “as it is completely different to a western concept of animal welfare. And it is very easy to get angry and condescending,” he adds, noting that the scene of him with the man who put his injured horse through the back street endurance test did not include a few frames when he lost his cool. This underscores what Dr. Munroe believes is the jewel in Brooke’s crown—its preventative work in the field. Admiring as he is of the hospitals and of the utter dedication of the vets and staffs in them, Dr. Munroe says, “You can help lots of animals through preventative education. I spent a lot of time with Richard Searight in Cairo. He’s a lovely, gentle man; his vision is very much that of his grandmother—he carried that forward. He said to me, ‘This is all about teaching people how to look after their animals. It’s about how important it is for them to understand how economically crucial the animal is to them.’” He also points out Searight’s apparent unflappableness in the face of harsh scenes of abuse or neglect of working animals in the streets and the patients in the Cairo hospital, scenes that made a seasoned vet from the United Kingdom wince. “He takes it all on the chin,” says Dr. Munroe, “and, believing in what he is doing, gets up and tries his best. Again, very like his grandmother.”44

  Richard Searight remembers the event very clearly. “I recall how Mo Bowyer wanted to translate everything Dr. Salah shouted at the horse’s owner,” he says, “but they were such terrible swear words, many of them unrepeatable, that the subtitles had to be watered down considerably!” He adds, “The most important part of what is happening in that scene is that it takes an Egyptian to deal with Egyptians, just as it takes an Indian to deal with Indians and so on. It is the same principle in how one deals with people from a veterinary and preventative care perspective. One of the problems with the SPCA in Egypt was its legalistic approach to animal welfare. It was all about making people obey the rules. But that doesn’t teach them how to do better. This is what made my grandmother’s concept so successful, and makes Brooke so robust today. It is about the people and the animals.”45

  It is still about the people and the animals, and people and animals far beyond Egypt’s borders.

  After Geoffrey Brooke’s death in 1966, Richard’s father, Philip Searight, a former stockbroker, helped grow the organization in Egypt and then expand outside it as needs elsewhere were identified and recommended by others. One of the latter was Princess Alia bint Al Hussein, daughter of King Hussein of Jordan and an acknowledged expert in Arab horses, who was concerned about animals being worked at the famous site of Petra. Brooke was now able to look beyond Egypt’s borders to areas where a combination of poverty and lack of education led to a cycle of misery for both animals and humans: Jordan, Pakistan, India, Kenya, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Nepal, Senegal, and Nicaragua, the last in 2013.

  These nations endure problems springing in some cases from overpopulation and consequent lack of opportunity and adequate resources to serve everyone equally; in other cases from sectarian violence inflaming towns, neighborhoods, and families with divisive civil wars based on religious schisms few completely understand, none of which are worth the anguish and bloodshed they cause; and in all cases from poverty that mandates the use of horses, mules, and donkeys in work that to people in First World nations can seem a throwback to medieval times and mindsets. Often without rest or food or water for long periods of time, these animals haul double hods of bricks from hot kilns under broiling sun for many miles each day, or pull carts overloaded with garbage or farm produce or carriages or carts for the tourist and trekking trades; they are worked in fields or as pack animals in the mountains and in mines and quarries. Where Brooke has gained the trust of these communities and educated its laborers, still offering free veterinary care and educational support for owners of working equines, it has begun to break this cycle using Dorothy’s holistic philosophy. Yet while this philosophy has endured through world war and the local and national revolts, sorties, and coups that have made up the unending game of power in the Middle East over the past several decades, animals living in the region are as exposed to the dangers of armed conflict sixty years after Dorothy saved the horses that war left behind.

  In 1990 Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait, touching off the Gulf War. “The Gulf war added a new dimension to the risks for animals as well as humans,” writes John Loretz, “the use of oil as a weapon.” Dumped into the Persian Gulf, crude oil devastated wildlife habitats, killing thousands of birds, while oil leaking from Kuwaiti wells and going up in smoke from oil fires poisoned the atmosphere, sickening and destroying uncounted wildlife. Perhaps worse, if possible, is what happened to the animals caged at the Kuwait Zoo. Over four hundred of them “were killed by Iraqi soldiers”—some tortured or used as target practice—while others “died of starvation and injuries, or were removed from the zoo to unknown locations.”46

  The Kuwaiti emirate was a tourist destination that, like so many, relied on horses and camels to transport visitors, and as in all upheavals, the owners and their animals became trapped in a situation where they could not work, and because they could not work, they could not get enough to eat. “In their straitened circumstances,” wrote Sarah Searight, “owners were threatened with having to destroy their animals.” This is where Brooke stepped in. Matched by funding from the kingdom of Jordan, the charity fed all the horses for free, saving their lives and the livelihood of their owners. Though Britain and Jordan were not on the best
of terms, given that Jordan had thrown its support to Iraq, a parallel reality existed where the animals were concerned, mutual compassion for which ensured that relations “between government and charity remained warm and friendly.” Thus the animals themselves proved able to negotiate diplomacy where human beings had failed.47

  The Gulf War crisis was a trial run for disturbing events Brooke would face two decades later. The Arab Spring began in December 2010 with the suicide by fire of a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi.

  Life for this young man had never been easy. He was known to be kind, even generous with what he had for those in worse straits than he was. But everyone has a tipping point. Desperately poor and unable to bribe police to allow him to continue selling on the streets of his small town, Bouazizi was confronted by an official, who shut down his business. When Bouazizi complained to the local governor, he was spurned. Fetching gasoline, Bouazizi doused himself, lighting a fire that ended his own life but touched off a series of blazes, literal and political, starting in Tunisia and spreading across the Arab world.

  It took a year for those flames to reach Cairo, and when they did, just after the fall of the Tunisian government, they met plenty of dry tinder, waiting to explode. These grievances had been lurching past the halls of Egyptian power like Boris Karloff’s undead mummy, most of them dating back to the 1952 revolution and, depressingly, still as relevant decades later. Poverty, lack of employment, and lack of affordable food and shelter had been endemic to society throughout Egypt even before the ousting of King Farouk. Added to these universal ills were more particularly recent ones complained of during the rule of President Nasser and his successors, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak: accusations of unimpeded police brutality and fraudulent election processes, and perpetual “state of emergency” laws dating from the 1967 war with Israel, only briefly lifted before being restored after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and the beginning of the rule of President Mubarak. Corruption at the highest levels, a sinking sense among the Egyptian people that they had no democratically elected government but yet another royal dynasty, and continued deterioration of services to the least powerful in favor of smoothing the way for the most powerful set tectonic plates grinding against each other long before January 25, 2011.

  That day, however, was when the earthquake finally came. For two and a half weeks, Cairo was rocked by public demonstrations and increasingly violent official response. “Downtown Cairo is a war zone tonight,” reported Jack Shenker; “as reports come in of massive occupations by protesters in towns across Egypt, the centre of the capital is awash with running street battles.”48

  A little over a week later the “camel incident” took place. On February 2, alleged supporters of President Mubarak dashed into Tahrir Square, epicenter for the uprising, on horses and camels. According to Al Jazeera, “In Dokki, in western Cairo, thousands of Mubarak supporters gathered in Lebanon Square, chanting, ‘He won’t go.’” The largest segment of this group positioned itself near the Egyptian Museum, where government guards had been placed to protect the collections, and “the camel and horse riders from Dokki galloped through the crowd,” while their fellow pro-government supporters threw rocks at the protesters in Tahrir Square.49

  Several of the mounted pro-government men charged into the protesters, beating them with sticks; a camel was seen to trip and fall. Gunfire burst out from the pro-government protesters, wounding animals as well as people, and firebombs caused burns for both. As video footage of this charge made its way to television and the Internet, there was outrage in Cairo as well as around the world. Mona Khalil, a board member of ESMA (Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals), found herself shoved around along with animals. She would also see not just stray dogs and cats lying dead in the streets of the city but house pets left behind—more victims of human disorder—and she voiced concerns about the condition of animals in the Cairo Zoo, which, like the tourist sites, was a ghost town in the aftermath of the unrest in the city, impacting the budget and consequently the animals’ care.50 In her 2012 book Cairo, Ahdad Soueif writes of calling her sister, frantic from having seen the violence in Tahrir Square. All was well, Soueif’s sister laughingly shouted over the din. “They attacked us with horses and camels, but we’ve captured them,” and people were riding the no doubt terrified animals around, their festive tassels swaying.51 Karen Reed, Head of Animal Welfare and Research at Brooke in London, did not find the incident amusing, commenting in barely restrained frustration, “Horses were ridden into the middle of the protest with little thought for the welfare of the animals. They were pelted with rocks and sticks. This should never have happened, using these animals in such a way is distressing for the animals as well as being both frightening, and dangerous, for the people around them.”52

  Veterinarian Dr. Mohammed Abd-Elhay of the Brooke Hospital was then volunteering with another animal rescue organization when the revolution came to Cairo. “It meant a lot to us,” he says, “the young educated men who could see Egypt leading a better future. But these owners who came all the way from the Pyramids to Tahrir Square, driving their animals through the protesters, wanted to kill that revolution.” They were, he adds, echoing the remarks of Mona Khalil, believed to be duped with the promise of compensation for their participation in helping put down the demonstrations. He recalls hearing that a few Brooke vets even went down to Tahrir Square to join the sit-ins after their daily shifts. When the “camel incident” occurred, some of the owners were recognized by these Brooke staff members. Later on, a few of these men came to talk with the vets, admitting that they had been encouraged in their actions by Egyptian government operatives.53

  Most Brooke staff were confined to the clinic during the first days of the revolution, and the field clinics they would normally have conducted at the Pyramids and in the brick kilns were postponed for the time being (to be resumed in early February, a few days before President Mubarak resigned from office). But concern for the horses and camels used during the Tahrir Square charge prompted immediate action on the animals’ behalf. On February 13, Brooke joined the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends (ESAF) and the Donkey Sanctuary (based in the United Kingdom) to feed animals left starving because the sudden drop in tourism had driven the cost of feed too high for most owners to afford, even if they had not already been deprived of their livelihood by that same dearth of tourist dollars. “We found that other animal charities that are working in the area of the Pyramids or became interested in feeding distribution had the same goal,” says Dr. Ammr Mahmoud, communication and information officer for the Brooke Hospital. “So we developed a memorandum of understanding to organize the roles and responsibilities of each organization, avoid overlapping and maximize the impact of animal welfare.” Such organization was vitally important for every animal as well as every human who lived off their labor. In November 2011 the Daily Mail of London estimated that the protests had deprived the Egyptian economy of over $3 million for each day of unrest—not a price even a wealthy nation could afford to pay, much less one on an insecure footing.54 “For people working in hotels and bazaars it is bad,” says Dr. Abd-Elhay, “but for people who own tourist horses for a living, it is a crisis because they not only have to feed themselves, they also have to feed their animals, who are now no longer bringing any money to put food on the owner’s table.”55

  Harrowing photographs were published in the Daily Mail, showing gaunt, barely living horses as well as dead ones lying on the ground like garbage, their corpses torn by scavengers. Though a Cairo animal activist, Dina Zulfikar, would later clarify that many of the photos released to the press showed not animals starved by lack of tourism but those who had died of disease well before the revolution and been dumped in a carcass yard in the area near the Giza pyramids,56 Dr. Abd-Elhay says he saw the neglect everywhere he looked. “Animals started to die of hunger and thirst at the pyramids,” he says, “and you could see them in the street as you walked about.” That said, he points out his
impression that the tourist trade crisis of early 2011 was far more complex that it appeared. “I think it was more about panicking than loss of jobs,” Dr. Abd-Elhay explains. Many of the owners solved their problem, in part, by selling their extra horses, keeping only those they could afford to feed. “The problem at the pyramids goes beyond the issue of feeding,” he adds. “It is about changing the attitudes and a history of poor practices by the horse owners there.”57

  “The Brooke Hospital for Animals’ approach was to provide 1 kilogram a day or 7 kilograms a week of concentrated feed,” recalls Dr. Ammr Mahmoud, “to supplement each animal’s diet. This represented 25–35 percent of a full ration, and was provided with weekly token to be exchanged with feed from the local feed seller’s shop.” By the time the feeding project was wrapped up in April 2011, almost eighty thousand tons of food had been provided to over eight thousand animals (with ESAF focusing on camels, not included by Brooke or the other charities), with double that number of veterinary care treatments for animals not just in Cairo but in Edfu, Aswan, and Luxor.58