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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: June 2006
Animal advocacy rumbles
to life in the Islamic world
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Left: SPARE founder Amina Abaza, of Egypt; Above: Perihan Agnelli, founder of Fethiyea Friends of Animals, in Turkey |
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BALI––“Humane Society International disaster response assessment teams have been on the ground in Yogyakarta, Bentul, and Klaten,” in Java, Indonesia, “since May 28, one day after the 5.9 magnitude earthquake struck,” HSI Asia consultant Dawn Peacock e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on May 31.
“Today,” Peacock added, “HSI sent a vet to join the already tired assessment team, and we are making a plan based on the information we get back. The most likely needs so far are food, water and basic first aid and shelter for stray or lost animals.
“Preliminary assessments have found that there is a need to help animals who have survived the earthquake and are left without guardians to provide adequate food and water,” Peacock continued. “Shelters for the animals have been destroyed. Two days of rain following the earthquake intensified the need for action. Immediate action is also needed to provide first aid and medical care to injured and distressed animals.”
Peacock previously helped to lead the HSI Asia response to the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the October 2005 Pakistan earthquake.
HSI Asia had foreseen a possible need for disaster relief help in Java for about two weeks, after volcanic activity began on Mount Merapi. “Animals in this area were not in 100% good condition pre-earthquake,” said HSI Asia coordinator Sherry Grant, “and just don’t have enough body resources to get them through without food and water.”
HSI Asia is partnering in Java with the World Society for the Protection of Animals and the Yudisthira Foundation, founded by Grant in 1998. Best known for the Bali Street Dog Project, Yudisthira has also worked since 2003 to introduce humane slaughter to the Javanese livestock industry.
“Animals [in Java] are valued,” said Yudisthira farm animal rescue team coordinator I Wayan Mudiarta. “The people just need time to get on their feet, and still have animals and a livelihood to come back to.”
Grant acknowledges the paradoxes of keeping animals alive in a crisis, only to be slaughtered soon afterward, and of seeking to make slaughter more efficient when HSI policy now opposes killing animals for human consumption. But Grant also believes that developing a humane ethic in Indonesia must begin by encouraging residents to recognize moral obligations to the animals in whom they already have a personal interest. Most often the animals in an Indonesian home are livestock, kept for eventual slaughter, not pets. Most dogs are street dogs; most cats are feral.
The HSI/Yudis-thira team represents perhaps the most ambitious humane project serving the world’s fourth most populous nation, struggling to respond to recent disasters also including the Decem-ber 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and recurring outbreaks of the avian influenza strain H5N1.
“We are concerned that people using poultry sheds as shelter are at risk from avian flu and possibly salmonella infection,” said Yolanda Bayugo, health director for the London-based aid group Merlin, in statements to Agence France-Presse and Associated Press, but World Health Organization epidemiologist Peter Mala disagreed.
“I don’t think the emergency has placed people at closer risk of avian flu,” said Mala, who was already doing disease surveillance in the area when the earthquake hit. “I don’t think the disaster has brought people closer to poultry than they were before,” Mala elaborated.
H5N1 as of June 1, 2006 had killed 37 Indonesians, 26 of them in 2006, among 127 human fatalities worldwide. As at the scenes of other H5N1 outbreaks throughout Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa, caged chickens and other poultry were killed by any means available to try to keep the potentially deadly disease from afflicting either more humans or more birds.
Almost none of the killing was done with humane oversight.
Indonesian agriculture ministry animal health director Syamsul Bahri told Reuters in mid-May 2006 that fighting cocks possibly smuggled to Papua from neighboring Sulawesi island caused the first H5N1 outbreak in Papua, in April. Gamecocks were killed along with other domestic birds known to have been exposed to H5N1, but there was no reported effort to halt cockfighting.
Indonesia has almost no organized humane community, let alone organizations strong enough to challenge cockfighting and the poultry industry.
Neither is there a deep tradition of organized humane work in most of the rest of the Islamic world. Most majority Islamic nations have at least one humane society, often founded by British, French, German, or American expatriates close to a century ago. But few of the expatriate organizations have successfully used the many pro-animal teachings of Mohammed and the rich tradition of pro-animal Islamic literature to develop authentic cultural resonance. Many are instead perceived as Christian missionary outposts, or hobbies of dilettantes, who are far removed from the day-to-day struggles of poor people.
Barrier issues
Barrier issues have included lack of ability to reach out in fluent Arabic; conflict over hallal slaughter, especially at the Feast of Atonement, when amateur slaughter is often practiced in public; and, most of all, pervasive fear of dogs in much of the Islamic world, overlapping many of the regions with the most persistent endemic rabies.
Often hostility toward dogs is mistakenly believed by both locals and expatriates to have a foundation in Islam.
Mohammed was certainly concerned about rabies. On one occasion, during a rabies outbreak within a walled city, recalled in Hadith 4:539, Mohammed ordered that all dogs within the walls should be killed, to stop the outbreak by killing the disease vector.
This is exactly what most of the world still does to combat H5N1 and other serious diseases of poultry and livestock. Futile in open habitat, where animals can freely migrate, “stamping out” succeeds in closed habitats such as barns and stockyards.
Before vaccines were developed, “stamping out” was the only way that anyone knew to fight rabies and many other contagious zoonotic illnesses.
But Mohammed was not anti-dog. He taught in Hadith 4:538 that a prostitute was forgiven by Allah for untying her head covering and using it as a rope to drop her shoe to draw water from a well for a dog who was dying of thirst.
Besides directly contradicting several of the most rigid behavioral proscriptions of Islam, the woman put herself at risk if the dog was “hydrophobic,” a Greek term for rabies which literally means “afraid of water,” but actually refers to the inability of thirsty rabid animals to drink.
Internet
The advent of the Internet appears to be sparking a humane awakening throughout the Islamic world, in part by enabling women to do things for animals even when their freedom of movement remains restricted.
In the western world, women do more than 85% of the household pet care, and may do even more in the Islamic world, where relatively few women work outside the home. From the beginnings of the organized humane movement about 200 years ago, women have also formed more than 80% of both the animal protection donor base and the animal advocacy volunteer workforce––but in societies where women have had little ability to organize activities beyond their own neighborhoods, few have found ways to donate and volunteer to help animals, beyond doorstep dog and cat feeding.
Now the isolated doorstep dog and cat feeders are beginning to find each other, exchange information, and reach out for help.
Often the appeal comes too late, exemplified by frantic requests for e-mails of protest against dog poisonings or shootings which have already occurred, for which no one in authority admits responsibility.
Equally often, the appeal is for financial help with futile projects, such as trying to shelter all of the dogs at risk in a particular city, lest they be poisoned or shot.
However, through correspondence with the outside world, Islamic world activists are beginning to learn about humane animal control strategy, including ways and means of providing affordable high-volume dog and cat sterilization.
Turkey, largely through the efforts of Friends of Fethiyea Animals founder Perihan Agnelli, has since 2004 had a law making neuter/return dog and cat population control the official national policy. The law also requires shelters to have a veterinarian, and mandates a 10-day holding period for strays, to permit keepers to reclaim them. If the animals are not claimed, they are to be sterilized, vaccinated, and returned to the locations where they were captured.
The Society for the Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt, Egyptian Society of Animal Friends, and Egyptian Federation for Animal Welfare, headed by attorney Ahmed El Sherbiny, hope to emulate the Turkish success.
As in Turkey, Egyptian city governments still tend to favor poisoning, which keeps patronage employees on the payroll, and is done repeatedly, since the surviving animals quickly breed back up to the carrying capacity of the habitat.
“In an article today in the El Masry El Youm daily newspaper on the last page,” related SPARE board member Mona Khalil on May 4, 2006, “Cairo Veterinary Author-ity chief Dr. Hussein Khalafalla announced that in cooperation with the mounted police department and Cairo cleaning sanitation deparment they will start a new dog and cat poisoning campaign,” delayed while the officials involved were killing birds to combat H5N1.
Though expected, this was a disappointment, as animal advocates had hoped that the hiatus would illustrate the futility of killing dogs and cats for population control.
“In January 2006,” Khalil continued, “the Cairo Veterinary Authority killed 3,000 dogs, but due to their work on the avian flu, they only killed 183 dogs and 971 cats in February, and 124 dogs and 935 cats in March.”
The killing is done with strychnine baits.
Pakistan
Also on May 4, 2006, the Daily Times, of Karachi, Pakistan, reported that, “City Naib Nazim Nasreen Jalil [has] suggested to Korean consul general Suckchul Chang the possibility of sending the stray dogs of the city to Korea. She said that if this proposal materialized, it would help rid the city of the dog menace.”
“Coincidentally, I met Nasreen Jalil at a play last night,” Pakistan Animal Welfare Society representative Mahera Omar e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE. “Her statement from yesterday did not come up as it was a fleeting meeting, but I did mention that I would like to interview her for my animal show on Geo TV. I will ask her about the stray dog issue then.”
Omar mentioned that Karachi officials “keep carrying on the poisonings on and off” that ANIMAL PEOPLE exposed in a June 2005 cover feature entitled “‘Mad-ness’ in Karachi rabies response.”
Meanwhile, Internet acti-vists, including Pakistan-born computer industry professionals, are informing as many officials as have e-mail that poisoning dogs is not acceptable to the best-educated and most economically successful part of the officials’ constituency.
Turkey
Even in Turkey, the law against dog-killing is still widely disregarded, and not yet actively enforced by the federal government. The implementation rules were only introduced at the beginning of June 2006, and reportedly leave the fate of the thousands of dogs who are already in pounds unclear. Reports of dogs being rounded up and starved or killed routinely reach ANIMAL PEOPLE from Ankara, Bahcesehir, Erdek, Marmek, and elsewhere.
But the Friends of Fethi-yea Animals sterilization campaign is training ever more veterinarians and educating ever more mayors, in more cities, while perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the continuing dog massacres is that many of them are being reported and protested.
Pre-Internet, they were little noted beyond where they occurred, and no one was advancing an alternative on a viable scale.
Center for Animal Lovers active in Iran |
ANIMAL PEOPLE profiled the debut of the Center for Animal Lovers in the suburbs of Tehran, Iran, in January/February 2005.
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Educational items in Arabic
LONDON––The International Network for Humane Education in February 2006 launched an Arabic version of the Inter-NICHE web site providing alternatives to animal use in life science education.
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