By Arjuwan Lakkdawala
JEDDAH: Saudi national Umm Abdullah is an ardent animal lover. When she found out that a group of kittens whose mother had been poisoned were starving to death on the first floor of an empty building, she called Civil Defense and asked them to get a ladder and rescue them.
“I was told that they don’t rescue animals and that I should call the municipality,” she said.
When she called the municipality, she received news that disturbed her. “They told me that when the kittens die they would come and remove them!”
Umm Abdullah had come to face this situation after she had learned that the mother cat had been poisoned by a neighborhood resident. The man owned a watchdog and had become annoyed that the dog would bark each time it saw a stray cat. So the man decided to leave poisoned food next to the trash bins to kill off the alley cats.
“The man got rid of many cats in the area,” a local doorman had told Umm Abdullah. Dismayed by the response of government officials, Umm Abdullah paid the expatriate watchman to bring a ladder and get down the kittens.
Jeddah’s streets are filled with cats that forage from the open trash bins found on nearly every corner. This municipal waste-management strategy is a recipe for creating a huge population of stray felines, yet the city has no animal control strategy.
“It is a shame that there is no law for the protection of animals even though Islam has given animals their rights,” said Umm Abdullah
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