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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: January/February 2008

New Animal Care in Egypt
shelter resembles mosque

LUXOR --The most ambitious new expatriate-directed animal welfare project underway in Egypt appears to be the construction of a headquarters for Animal Care in Egypt, incorporated in Britain in September 1999 by former International Fund for Animal Welfare representative Julie Wartenburg.

The domed ACE building, behind a high wall, from outside resembles a mosque. Wartenburg had already acquired land and had begun fundraising to build when ACE in April 2007 received a bequest of £80,900.

"The whole project is for the future as well as now," Wartenburg told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "I knew I only had one hit at it, so when receiving this heaven-sent legacy, I slightly enlarged on the original size to provide everything we may need in the future."

Downstairs, says Wartenburg, "So far we have a consulting/lab room, operating and post op rooms, an office for the veterinarians, and a small office for our accountant. Alongside these rooms is a very large room which is for the future purpose of housing small animals. In the
main our past work has been with large animals, due to not having any facilities for small animals in our previous place. Operations were
done on the office desk. It was not at all suitable. In the future I hope we will do more for small animals."

The top floor is residential space "to be used for visiting vets who will help train our staff," Wartenburg said. "Egyptian university training is not up to western standards nor are they taught anything for small animals. For the future," Wartenburg added, "it could be used for office space."

Outdoors within the compound are the present dog and cat housing, a boarding kennel built quickly just before Christmas 2007 to take advantage of the seasonal revenue opportunity, and extensive stables.

The new ACE clinic officially opened on January 1, 2008, receiving 17 visitors with their animals in the first three days. A quirk of Wartenburg's procedure is that visitors with equines are asked to wash their animals, which she believes helps to encourage bonding between drivers and their horses or donkeys. On a more practical level, the washing helps to control parasites, and the chance to wash a horse or donkey is not always easily found in a desert nation.

ACE has been criticized for presenting an excessively luxurious appearance, partly to impress anticipated tourist traffic. The grounds offer space for tour buses to park and turn around. Wartenburg hopes visitors will become an expanded donor base.

"I do not believe the local people will resent any money that someone else has spent," Wartenburg asserts. "Quite the opposite, they like to tell tourists that they take their animal for treatment and washing to the best hospital. The education centre is large, but I feel very strongly that we have to concentrate on this generation, and classes of 50 children each day will come.

"I suppose the building does look as if I have spent millions on it," Wartenburg allows,"but it is functional for the work we do," and the design is energy-efficient.

"We do not have a single air conditioning unit in the whole building, up or down, despite the 110-120 plus degrees heat in the summer
months," Wartenburg explains. "The domes and balcony upstairs provide cool rooms, which also help the lower floor to keep cool." The total cost is expected to be about £130,000--a fraction of the cost of building to similar specifications in the U.S. or Europe.

More difficult to rationalize is a policy against adopting out dogs to Muslim Egyptians, because, Wartenburg told ANIMAL PEOPLE, many erroneously believe that the Qur'an "states that a dog should only be owned for the purpose of a being guard dog and should not be allowed in the house. Therefore the dog spends his or her entire life tied up outside the house, usually with wire or rope cutting into the neck. Hence we offer dog collars and leads to prevent this problem.

We have homed to Coptic Christians who do not keep their animals tied up, and expatriates."

The newest expatriate-led animal welfare project in Egypt, the Animal Welfare of Luxor, takes an entirely different attitude toward doing local adoptions. AWOL would rather adopt to Egyptians than expatiates, the cofounders told ANIMAL PEOPLE, because sometimes the ex-pats return to England and abandon the animals they have adopted.

AWOL was begun in 2007 by British retirees Graham Warren and Pauline Warren, and Dutch-born Sabine Borkes, four years after the Warrens arrived in the Luxor suburb of El Marise, on the far bank of the Nile from the main part of Luxor, and began "helping a few animals by the side of the road," as their web site recalls.

Later all three cofounders volunteered for ACE. As yet lacking a clinic or shelter, AWOL focuses on teaching better care of animals from the back of a truck. "Our aim is to break the circle of ignorance," the AWOL web site adds.

"Much has been done for animal care within the tourist areas of Luxor, but there is much more to Egypt and just a short distance from Luxor nothing has changed. Currently we are doing what we can in the villages, but we now urgently need a centre to work from so that we can help many more animals."

 

Contact:

Animal Care in Egypt
c/o The Veterinary Hospital,
Maypole Road,
East Grinstead, West Sussex RH19 1HL, U.K;
telephone 01732-700710;
julie@ace-egypt.org.uk; www.ace-egypt.org.uk.

 

Animal Welfare of Luxor
c/o 9 Briavels Court,
Downs Hill Road, Epsom, Surrey KT19 8DS,
United Kingdom;
telephone 010 574 1071 (Luxor) or 01372-726702 (U.K.);
teampeg@-hotmail.com; www.awol-egypt.org.