Shot, starved and smuggled as status symbols: the fate of Dubai’s persecuted animals

It’s home to the world’s most expensive hotels, is a honeypot for thousands of the planet’s super-rich, and practically glistens with fast cars blinged up with gold. But behind the gloss, to keep its streets “clean and hygienic”, the United Arab Emirates is accused of developing a regime that’s “cruel and callous” and leaves pet owners devastated.

Later this year, in specially built space-age pavilions amid fountains and glittering lights, the city of Dubai will host what is being billed as a “global mega event” – a world exhibition on a vast scale, designed to allow the 190 countries taking part to showcase innovations in areas from technology and property to the environment.

Originally scheduled to run from last autumn for six months, the prestigious event was put back by a year because of the pandemic and is now due to open this October. Preparations for the convergence on Dubai of an anticipated 25 million visitors for the event – together with the spread of coronavirus – are suspected of being behind the escalation of a systematic persecution of the country’s large population of stray cats and dogs on the streets.

Most global business leaders who mingle at Expo2020 will be unaware of quite how the city has been purged of animals in the preparations, it’s claimed. Animal-welfare activists, who have to work in secret for fear of recriminations by the powerful emirates rulers wary of dissent, have told The Independent that thousands of cats have been poisoned, shot, dumped beside motorways to be run over or abandoned in the desert to starve – all legally sanctioned by officials.

And, ironically, it’s happening in a country where owning lions and cheetahs has become the ultimate status symbol for the rich and powerful, desperately depleting their numbers in the wild.

One volunteer, originally from UAE but now based in London, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of losing their visa to return, says the authorities, in their zeal, have even rounded up much-loved family cats and dogs. “There is no triage – all animals are taken, whether they are neutered strays or pets, even from private gardens. There is a countrywide ban on feeding strays, with a fine of 500 dirham (£100) for members of the public.”

Indeed, notices warn people not to feed street cats and dogs, saying it’s “bad for them” because they will gather and breed in the area. The activist told The Independent that if their group was known to talk to the western press about these issues “the UAE would consider any such involvement an attack on the country” and members could lose their jobs. But evidence compiled by the activists, some from local media reports, shows cats have been mutilated amid the crackdown, with photographs showing them suffering agonising gunshot wounds.

Expo chiefs deny involvement in the purge. “Expo 2020 Dubai strongly refutes claims that stray animals in Dubai are being removed as a result of the event,” a spokesperson said. “Sustainability and biodiversity are important topics for this Expo, and we plan to be one of the most sustainable Expos in history. We have a robust record of protecting biodiversity on and around our site. Our approach to protecting wildlife is detailed in our publicly available sustainability targets.”

But whether it is a direct result of Expo2020 planning or not, the outbreak of Covid-19 was another incentive for the country’s authorities to “clean up”, according to an undercover group.

“The cull has been going on for years, but in the past eight months it has been particularly intense,” according to one. “The government says it is for health reasons, without specifying, but many locals believe cats spread Covid. And it is true that there are thousands of stray cats and dogs (cats in the cities, stray dogs in the outskirts) and many volunteers believe the authorities would prefer to clean up the streets ahead of the event.

“The methods are extremely cruel: the killing is not carried out in accordance with humane practice or international standards. Due to a lack of manpower, some animals are left to die in cages. It is an unprecedented emergency in terms of animal abuse.”

The main victims of the cull are Arabian Mau, a cat species native to UAE that was identified as a new breed by the World Cat Federation in 2008. Others are Persians, known for their flat faces, long hair and docile natures.

Dubai started the process, but thousands of cats are disappearing from the capital, Abu Dhabi, and the emirate of Ajman, according to rescuers, who advocate wide-scale painless neutering schemes to keep down numbers of unwanted animals.

The anonymous insider said: “It is inconceivable that one of the richest countries in the world cannot find any other way to deal with its stray population. And it is inconceivable that it aspires to important global positions in animal welfare organisations and buys its way into them but does not walk the talk.”

In October, French actress Brigitte Bardot told Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and a keen poet, in an open letter how she was “absolutely horrified” by the mass cull. “How can such an abomination occur in a country that prides itself on being of exemplary modernity? How can Your Excellency, whose poems denote a sensitive soul, allow such cruel and totally meaningless measures to be taken since killing has never been a solution for the management of animals,” she wrote.

Begging him to work with rescue organisations to arrange sterilisations, Bardot also urged him to educate people in kindness to animals, to encourage adoptions and enforce anti-cruelty laws.

Others appeal to the UAE’s pride in its image, arguing the policy undermines its own aspirations. Piera Rosati, president of Italy’s National League for the Defence of the Dog, says: “Abandoning cats and dogs in the desert to make them die will certainly not give an image of an efficient and clean country as is their intention, but only of incivility and cruelty.”

Offers from welfare organisations to launch “trap, neuter and return” schemes have not been taken up, and the UAE government did not respond to repeated requests from The Independent to comment.

The backdrop to the cull is ironic. While domesticated animals may be treated as dispensable, big cats caught in the wild – cheetahs, leopards, lions and tigers – are so glorified as pets in the country that they are increasingly being smuggled in, driving them towards extinction.

In 2017, the UAE outlawed owning and dealing in exotic pets, and while this is thought to have curbed some demand, the kudos of possessing big cats carries greater weight than the law, leading wealthy Instagrammers to flaunt photos and videos of their animals in their homes on leads or in chains. But a licensing system for private “zoos and menageries” allows some owners to keep wild animals legally.

The popularity of the photos, invariably described as “cute” or “adorable”, has encouraged ownership among celebrities, social media influencers and the wealthy, fuelling a vicious circle of trade and demand, with imports that outstrip the animals’ birth rate, driving a dangerous decline in their numbers.

The author of a new 10-year study on smuggling of cheetahs, Africa’s most endangered big cat, told The Independent that coronavirus restrictions had led to a sharp rise in trafficking in the Middle East. Patricia Tricorache says she found that restrictions on air travel have limited imports of great apes and birds to the region, but more cheetahs, which are taken by boat from the Horn of Africa to Yemen, have been transported to compensate.

Numbers of the world’s fastest land animal that were seized, put up for sale or even not intercepted in the Middle East rose by 58 per cent during the pandemic, from March last year to February this year, with the trade still growing. Even before Covid, hundreds were taken from the wild every year. The study says from 2010-2019, at least 4,184 cheetahs – mostly alive, but some body parts – were trafficked worldwide.

One exotic pet owner is Sheikh Humaid Abdalla Al-Buqaish, who has a licensed, legal private zoo in Dubai and flaunts his Bengal tigers, pet lions, tigers and cheetahs on his Instagram account. His 750,000 followers can see him feeding them, placing a hand inside their mouths and even pulling on their lips to reveal their teeth.

The Crown Prince of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, an accomplished jockey and widely considered an animal lover, in 2019 adopted a white lion, having previously posted pictures of himself holding birds of prey.

Tricorache’s study, spanning 56 countries, found that 1,736 social-media adverts for the big cats for sale were on Instagram, accounting for three in four, with the other 25 per cent of adverts appearing on a variety of small platforms.

A 2019 study by five scientists found that of all Middle Eastern countries, the UAE accounted for the highest number of social media posts featuring threatened wild species. The more often such posts are published, the researchers found, the more owning such animals was perceived as normal, and concern for the creatures’ vulnerable status fell. Comments on celebrity exotic pets were “overall positive”.

But more recently, the poaching gangs and middlemen who capture and supply wildlife have grown wiser since the introduction of the UAE ban. Whereas deals used to be carried out on social media, they are now turning more to end-to-end encrypted platforms or they avoid using giveaway phrases, Triocorache’s team discovered.

“We have noticed a decrease in the number of online advertisements in some of the Gulf states in the last three years, possibly due to growing regulations on the possession of predators in the Gulf States,” the study says. “Sellers still using open-source platforms avoid including the word ‘sale’ or prices. Instead they respond to sales inquiries by inviting contact through WhatsApp or private message.”

Of course, for the smugglers, it’s all about the money, cubs changing hands for thousands of pounds. The wildlife trafficking industry is worth $20bn (£14.3bn) a year, according to WWF. The Independent has been told of a corrupt Saudi-UAE border official who permits the trafficking, a UAE woman offering up to 140,000 dirham (£27,000) for a cheetah cub, and a Russian who allegedly bought a cheetah trafficked via Kuwait for a 1m dirham.

Conservationist Ronel Barcellos set up and ran the Abu Dhabi Wildlife Centre for nearly two decades, caring for trafficking victims including jaguar, serval and caracal, often rescuing abused animals from people’s back yards. At one point she saved a lion that was chained in someone’s garage. “On inspection, we found she had had her teeth filed off and she had been declawed. Her recovery took months,” Barcellos recalls.

She says she was eventually forced out of the centre and her job after repeatedly speaking out publicly against wildlife imports. From her new home in Brazil, she says most people in the UAE look away from influential people breaking the law for fear of reprisal.  “I have seen some veterinary clinics treat endangered wildlife coming into their clinics, but they would never say anything for fear of retaliation,” she says. One clinic did not respond when approached by The Independent. Nor did the government respond when asked about the ban on wildlife trading being flouted.

The buyers and sellers themselves seem either unaware or not to care that the trade exacts a heavy toll on the welfare of the individual animals involved, whose lives are short and miserable.

The Namibia-based Cheetah Conservation Fund, which rehabilitates those it rescues, says poachers may kill cheetah mothers to snatch the cubs from the wild, and three out of four youngsters die before becoming a pet. Others are made unwell by the trauma and malnutrition of transport, or are injured by having cables tied around their legs. Laurie Marker, the charity’s founder and executive director, says those that do survive live for only a year or two after being taken into people’s homes. Their short lifespans explain why social media photos usually show only youngsters.

Tricorache, a wildlife trade expert, says: “There are those who care about animal welfare, and I have seen some cheetahs well cared for. However, many only see cheetahs as ‘things’ they can show off, and if one dies they can buy more. In many cases, they die as little cubs. I’ve seen posts of small cheetah cubs sold by taxidermists.

“Cheetahs need large spaces, but I’ve had reports of cheetahs kept in a small apartment or even a bathroom.” In addition, big cats need specialised nutrition to prevent bone deformities or paralysis. But, she says, “many Arabs feed just chicken to their cheetahs, without thinking that these animals [in the wild] would be eating organs and blood and chewing on bones”.

A misconception that owners are saving animals from death in the wild also allows the culture of buying them to thrive, but Tricorache recalls: “When I was working for the Cheetah Conservation Fund, we tried to train cheetah owners on their care, but since owning cheetahs is illegal, none showed up. We were only able to train some veterinarians, but again, since it’s illegal to own them, most people don’t go to real vets.”

And since the rate of importation exceeds their natural birth rates, cheetahs are being driven ever closer towards extinction. “They are being drained from the wild so it’s devastating to the population,” according to Dr Marker, whose organisation this month launched a global campaign against cheetah trafficking. “Not only are communities draining their own natural resources, but their actions are decreasing local biodiversity, which makes for unhealthy landscapes and impacts human communities in profound ways.”

Cheetahs have vanished from 90 per cent of their historic range in Africa, and are virtually extinct in Asia now, with fewer than 7,000 left in the wild. Commercial trade in wild cheetahs is banned under international agreement, but selling captive-bred ones is allowed by facilities registered with Cites. Only two such centres exist, both in South Africa.

But the ex-Dubai resident says authorities turn a blind eye to wildlife trafficking and private ownership, “and are therefore complicit in driving animals like the cheetah to the brink of extinction, along with other Gulf states”.

As for people who “heart” or like social media posts with photos of adoptive creatures that belong in the wild, Tricorache says: “Unfortunately, their ignorance feeds the ego of those who can afford to have those animals as pets and are also ignorant or selfish enough to dismiss the conservation implications of owning them.”

What it amounts to is that every “like” click and every Instagram heart is another nail in the coffin for some of Earth’s most threatened creatures.

Tricorache warns: “As long as people do not understand, in full, that taking these animals from the wild is not only cruel and unsustainable, but also dangerous, illegal, detrimental to communities who share space with those species, and a source of income for many organised crime groups, they won’t stop.”