February
2002
War
News: Animals in Afghanistan
By Mia MacDonald
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The nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan racked up even before the
current conflict took a heavy toll on thousands of Afghans. So perhaps
it is no surprise that Afghanistan’s animals also paid a price
in flesh and blood for the warring ways of their countrymen. For example,
camels loaded with explosives have been transformed into living bombs,
and the breakdown of most remnants of civil administration has left
Afghanistan’s cities with burgeoning populations of stray dogs,
often sick with rabies or starving. All this before the new hardships
and cruelties brought by this latest war.
The Kabul Zoo is home to a host of walking wounded, including Marjan,
an aging one-eyed lion who lost his teeth, sight and sense of smell
to a hand grenade tossed by an angry Taliban solider. The soldier who
attacked Marjan was seeking “retribution” for the lion’s
having killed the soldier’s brother, who had climbed into Marjan’s
cage and harassed his lioness companion.
Two years ago that same lioness got sick and died. “We don’t
have the means to maintain the health of our animals here,” zookeeper
Shir Aga Omar told the BBC. “Vets come and prescribe pills but
that is all they can do.” According to Susan Scherwin of the World
Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), on-the-ground reports
suggest that the animals in the Kabul Zoo are “not in great shape,
but are holding their own.”
War Relief?
Paradoxically, the war may improve the lot of some animals as relief
supplies make their way into the country and as Western media interest
in Afghanistan’s animals, particularly those in the Kabul Zoo,
picks up while the main events of the war cool to a slow burn. A five-member
relief team, including veterinarians, from the WSPA was due in Kabul
in mid-January to assess the situation in the city and surrounding areas.
WSPA worked in Afghanistan until the advent of the Taliban, and arranged
for food, funds to pay zoo workers (who have not been paid since July
2001) and veterinary care for the zoo’s animals after the latest
war broke out. A first shipment of food was delivered in late November
by a reporter for a UK tabloid, the Mail on Sunday.
Several U.S. zoos and the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria have
pledged funds for veterinary care and food, and for renovation of the
zoo to improve the animals’ stark living conditions. Even Britain’s
Prime Minister Tony Blair, key standard-bearer for the U.S.-led coalition
prosecuting the war, weighed in, committing the UK to assisting Marjan
and other inhabitants of the Kabul Zoo.
But let’s not forget the large numbers of domesticated “working”
animals, like donkeys and horses loaded with countless households’
belongings and marched for days by refugees from the U.S.-led bombing
to Pakistan and Iran, for whom the war has also made conditions worse.
Malnourished, exhausted and already suffering the effects of Afghanistan’s
punishing multi-year drought, refugees have been arriving by the thousands
in border towns. Thousands of other donkeys continue to traverse the
war zones, many of them heavily mined, transporting goods to markets
as they have for centuries. The war has also likely worsened the situation
of companion animals as families fled homes in areas under heavy bombardment
in a hurry and left their dogs behind.
The WSPA team will be assessing and seeking ways to stabilize the situation
of stray and working animals in and around Kabul. It is also supporting
the Brooke Hospital for Animals, a UK-based animal welfare organization
that has been providing free care to horses and donkeys since October
through mobile clinics in and around refugee camps in Quetta and Peshawar,
Pakistan. Thousands of Afghan refugees have crossed the borders and
landed here after several days’ or even weeks’ walk from their
homes. Their animals are often terribly thin and have large, untreated
blisters or saddle sores where household goods chafed during the journey.
Pakistani vets working at the Brooke Hospital have been treating hundreds
of animals a day, much to the relief of refugees and, surely, the animals
themselves. “By the time I arrived [after a six day walk] my animals
were near to death,” Lal Muhammed, an Afghan refugee in Pakistan
whose animals have been treated by Brooke Hospital vets, told the BBC.
“Without [their] help, I am certain my horses would have died,
which would leave my family with nothing.” But the care available
can meet only a fraction of the needs, and working animals within Afghanistan
are not receiving any known international assistance—at least not
yet.
Captive War Veterans
Admittedly it is difficult to construct a foolproof hierarchy of cruelty
among Afghanistan’s competing factions—Northern Alliance,
Eastern Shura, Taliban and numerous freelance warlords all have been
guilty of unspeakable violence over the years—and it is clear that
in the case of treatment of animals, the Taliban were no paragons. They
banned cockfighting (now starting again under the new interim administration)
to prohibit gambling, not animal suffering. Images of animals, wild
or domestic, along with those of people, were forbidden under the Taliban’s
strict interpretation of the Koran. And neither Taliban administrators
fighting small wars nor their stretched municipal budgets made space
for the protection of domestic or wild animals. As WSPA’s Scherwin
says, “animal welfare was not one of their [the Taliban’s]
priorities.”
The Kabul Zoo animals are living a microcosm of this neglect or outright
hostility. Bored and disgruntled Taliban soldiers frequented the zoo
(the only one in the country) to taunt the animals or use them for target
practice. Rashes of bullet holes in the walls bear silent witness. One
time, a soldier bitten by one of the zoo’s deer responded with
a volley of lethal fire from his Kalashnikov. The zoo’s sole elephant,
a gift to Afghanistan from India, was killed by a rocket fired during
the remorseless shelling of Kabul by the Northern Alliance after the
Taliban took control. The zoo’s bear has a deep and until recently
untreated infection on his nose from a cut by a soldier’s bayonet.
Many of the hundreds of animals who lived in the zoo were shot for food.
Two wolves, who run from end to end of their small cage, are the only
animals that seem free of visible war wounds.
Wild Repercussions
Bombing damage to Afghanistan’s wild animals and their habitat
has not even begun to be assessed, but is likely to be considerable.
The country is home to more than 100 mammal species—snow leopards,
ibex, bears, wolves, foxes, hyenas and jackals, many of them highly
endangered well before the latest conflict. Habitats have strained under
the pressure of intensive land use by poor, subsistence farmers with
no other options. Soil erosion is widespread, and sub-optimal irrigation
practices have caused considerable damage to landscapes; the persistent
warring has put additional pressure on species—and diverted attention
and resources away from any mitigation measures.
The latest war has also been unkind to Afghanistan’s environment.
Forest fires lit by massive U.S. bombing raged throughout the Tora Bora
cave complex in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan where al-Qaeda
fighters made their last stand, and some may still be burning. Many
more bombs, including small and savage cluster bombs, litter the countryside,
unexploded, along with millions of mines laid over the past 20 years.
So little is known about how the U.S.-led campaign has affected Afghanistan’s
animal populations (perhaps not a surprise given the U.S. media’s
reluctance to cover even the civilian casualties of months of bombing,
viewing such coverage as somehow “unpatriotic”), but the news
that has emerged so far is grim. There is a chance that with renewed
attention—and resources—the situation may actually improve,
at least for Kabul strays and the denizens of the Kabul Zoo. But will
animals throughout Afghanistan, silent witnesses to decades of war not
of their making, really get a reprieve if and when peace takes hold?
More information on the war’s unfolding impact on animals in
Afghanistan and ways to help can be obtained from the WSPA Web site
(www.wspa-americas.org) or their U.S. office (508-879-8350); the Brooke
Hospital for Animal’s Web site (www.brooke-hospital.org.uk)
or their London office (+44 207-930-0210); and at the newsroom hosted
by the American Zoological Society (www.aza.org/Newsroom/HistoryKabulZoo_1/).
Donations to the Kabul Zoo can be mailed to the North Carolina Zoo Society,
4403 Zoo Parkway, Asheboro, NC 27205; Phone: (888) 244-3736.
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