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Ancient Egypt Magazine

Volume Three  Issue Five  -- March/April 2003

Netfishing by Hapy  

As a follow-up activity to various bird and animal features in past issues of Ancient Egypt, Hapy has been taking a look at some sites featuring animals in modern Egypt. These include welfare sites and those devoted simply to enjoying the varied bird life along the Nile Valley.

To begin, those interested in ecological matters will find a number of interesting items on a regular basis in the excellent online magazine at www.egypttoday.com proving that the health and wellbeing of the Nile is as hot an issue for many modern Egyptians as it was for their ancestors.

Development along the Nile valley – including tourist developments of course – comes under the close scrutiny of the magazine’s superb writers and journalists.

Now, as in antiquity, Egypt is the winter home for a number of birds with which Europe is also familiar. For millennia bird species, including northern nesters such as swallows and martins, have overwintered in temples and banks along the river Nile, providing a real living link between the chilly north and the warm and balmy south. Hapy is indebted to AE USA correspondent Patrick Houlihan for direction to a beautifully illustrated site, www.birdingegypt.com provided by Mindy Baha El-Din. There the net browser will find categories of birds and listings of unusual sightings and can join in ‘birding talk’. The evocative images of birds in typical Egyptian settings stay in mind long after a visit to the site.

On to a well-known landmark of Egyptian towns and cities: Brooke Animal Hospital centres can be found in Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Edfu and Merseh Matrouh.

Brooke has been helping animals in need in Egypt – and their owners too - for seventy years. Its original function was to take care of war horses but now it provides free veterinary assistance for some of the poorest members of Egypt’s community, people who are still dependent directly upon their horses and donkeys for survival every day. While animal welfare issues focus on the sometimes appalling state of the equines at work, it has to be pointed out that this is a reflection of the hardship and poverty experienced by their owners who live and work in the same conditions as their beasts. The principle hospital is at Zein El-Abdein, in Cairo, providing stabling for up to 76 equines at any time. Current activity is also focussing on the donkeys of the port of Merseh Matrouh and those owned by the Coptic Christians of Zebbalin in Cairo, some of the capital city’s poorest inhabitants.

Helping their animals also assists the people themselves and this can take the form not only of direct veterinary care but also of education programmes. For further details of the Brooke Animal Hospital in Egypt and throughout the world, visit www.brooke-hospital.org It is also a pleasure to highlight another site, that of the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt (SPARE), http://sparealife.org, where achievements of Egyptian people in animal welfare can be found.

A lovely – and moving – aspect of the site is the inclusion of verses from chapters of the Koran along with stories which will appeal to all animal lovers everywhere. One such is quoted here verbatim: ‘During a journey, someone travelling with the Prophet (pbuh), gathered some birds eggs from a nest. The mother bird’s painful cries and commotion attracted the attention of the Prophet (pbuh), who asked the man to return the eggs to the nest.’ There is a number of animal welfare societies operating in Egypt, not all of which have web sites (yet!). And, of course, there are many charitable organisations to help humans too.

To conclude this Netfishing there is a brief mention of the Egyptian Cultural Heritage Organisation (ECHO), whose web site, listing the objectives and many activities planned, can be found at www.e-c-h-o.org And what better final conclusion could there be than a quote from the Koran on the SPARE web site: ‘There is not an animal that lives on the Earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but forms part of communities like you.’

HAPY

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