UAE Old News Resurfacing

Picture this: A huge three-lane roundabout with elegantly landscaped “Welcome to Sharjah” flowers in the grass, decorating its sloping side. Just behind this roundabout, there lies your exit; a two lane road, the right side of which is adorned with the Sharjah vegetable & plant market and the left which is now the fish market. Go back five or six years in time and you’ll find the fish market was once the Sharjah Animal Market.

My family and I drove into this market and parked our cars almost a decade ago. There, there were no buildings or proper shops. Each animal outlet was no more than some flimsy sheet-wood boxing off each pet salesman’s merchandise. The first thing you notice is the stench of the entire area. Animal feces and death seem to smoother your senses in the hot desert air. Covering your mouth and nose with whatever is handy; you will walk to the stands nearest to the road and shock your sight with one ghastly scene after another.

In all of the shops you’ll find only bird cages, each of which homed by different species both exotic and not. In one of the cages you’ll see what seem to be six or seven litters of kittens, all too young to eat solid foods, piled on top of one another without a milking mother in sight. At the bottom of this pile of hardly living kittens that barely even seem to struggle due to weakness, you’ll find the source of that stench. Dead kittens of all colors and types make a cold stiff mattress out of the base of the cage. No one thinks to remove of burry the corpses.

In another cage, you’ll find budgies & finches. Some chirping softly, some without an eye or leg, many of which pecking at each other; most lying as lifeless corpses at the bottom of the cage. You’ll see that their water dishes have long since evaporated dry, and no one is rushing to refill the same under the scorching sun and sweltering humidity. There is no bird feed.

In the back of one of the shops you’ll find a falcon. Its eyes are swollen, just about as badly as its bleeding feet, and its covered head seems limp enough to fall from its body. My father being a falconer knows that this bird is suffering a deadly contagious bird disease called, New Castles, and warns us not to choose from any of the living birds in or around this shop as they’re all doomed for the same tragic fate in a matter of time.

You will find dogs in their own feces, with eyes almost sad enough to make a dog-hater like myself, want to save them from their tortured misery by bringing them home. You will find monkeys, so sick or outraged you want to shoot the shop owners on spot. You will not find a single cage in the place without a corpse, without some diseased animal, with food or water.

Opposite the makeshift shacks nearest the road you’ll find the farm animals. Chickens, sheep & cows. You will find the slaughter house, covered from wall to wall in animal blood that no one considered cleaning. You will not forget this hell on earth for animals; even a decade later.

My mother left that day with a number of exotic birds, taking only those who looked healthy enough to nourish back to life. It wasn’t a month before they all died due to some illness or another. I left that day with a kitten. She was a beautiful desert cat with a severe attitude problem. She lived on to use her full nine lives, being hit by cars, cut up in the fan belt of another while she was sleeping, and even chocking herself to second from death by getting her neck caught up in the wires of a curtain, only to die almost 6 years later from a deadly spider bite.

Today I opened this letter on the Sharjah Animal Souq. The souq has now been moved to a more modern building with air conditioners and legal regulations have been made insuring safer keeping of all animals. I haven’t been there in a number of years now, but the last I saw it, it was heaven compared to my first experience with Sharjah Animal Souq. Animals had feed and water and kittens and dogs weren’t half as packed in as they once had been. You didn’t see corpses of dead animals in every cage. And a large percentage of the birds were living, seemingly healthy.

My heart bleeds for tortured animals. Just as it does for the plight of your abused construction worker, or unjust sentencing of criminals. But seriously, those of you who are bitching need to see just how far along this fucking country has come in such a short period of time, and appreciate the miracles don’t happen overnight. Anyone who hasn’t been here more than say, five years hasn’t seen anything in terms of abuse; be it animal or human, red-tape bureaucracy, or unjust sentencing. Things are changing, rapidly. About the only valid thing you have to bitch about is the traffic, and to put it blunt if all you UAE haters would get the fuck out of the country you hated so much, the rest of us wouldn’t have to suffer the additional crap you bring with you.