It was like we had just committed murder.
Walking out of the lion enclosure at the only zoo in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, we could still feel the fur on our hands.
“Don’t post pictures of this online,” I told Tyler, as we turned our attention to the hyenas.
We had come to the zoo with one goal in mind: hold the lion cubs. It wasn’t difficult. The moment we pushed our way through the zoo’s gates, an employee spotted foreigners and led us to the cubs—they are, after all, the only reason non-Egyptians come to Cairo’s dilapidated zoo.
The facility sits on the west bank of the Nile River, an oasis of green in a sea of dusty yellow. Cairo has few public parks, and the zoo gives Egyptians a chance to both interact with the animal kingdom and enjoy a day under some trees.
But the Giza Zoo was becoming quite run-down and struggling to maintain a status as a real attraction, despite its proximity to the beasts of the African Serengeti and the deserts of the Middle East. The animals actually looked sad in their tiny enclosures. Black bears paced around in a caged area not much bigger than a shoebox Manhattan apartment, and a popular exhibit was devoted to common housedogs, where German shepherds wandered across a desolate patch of grass and dirt. Animal rights advocates have often cried foul about the zoo’s treatment of animals. This month, they were alarmed when zoo officials reportedly claimed a baby giraffe there committed suicide.
All this didn’t matter to Tyler and me, who were singularly focused on holding some cute, furry lion cubs. After we entered a back area and forked over our $3.50 each—a considerable sum in poverty-ridden Egypt—the sleazy zookeepers, who seemed more interested in a quick buck than the animals’ welfare, reached into a dark cage and thrust a baby lion into my arms.
Our delight almost immediately turned to dismay, as it became clear these lions were probably mistreated and definitely heavily sedated. Their eyes drooped, they moved lethargically and they seemed almost despondent, unaware of the world around them. Still, worried that my cub might snap out of it and bite off my hand, I quickly posed for photos and passed it on to Tyler.
We felt dirty. An activity that had seemed so novel made us complicit in what appeared to be the mistreatment of animals. With our wallets and a generous foreign exchange rate, we apparently enabled the zoo workers to make money at the expense of their charges. And we had photographed it all.
So we turned our attention to our fellow zoo-goers, distracting ourselves by watching the Egyptian families who had taken advantage of this urban refuge. They let their kids run amok, throwing down blankets for picnics and paying off workers who gave the children lettuce to feed the sea lions and ostriches.
A soccer ball whizzed by my head as we approached a man painting whiskers and a mane on an Egyptian child’s face. Families sprawled out on picnic blankets and parents whipped out hookah pipes, digging in for a long afternoon at the zoo. Outside the gates, taxi horns blared, workers sweated through gridlock and the unemployed milled about, worried about how they’d buy bread that day. But for the small price of admission, working-class Egyptians got the privilege of taking it easy, savoring each other’s company, lounging in defiance. And checking out some exotic German shepherds.
We pushed the drugged lion cubs to the back of our minds and, in doing so, were able to catch a glimpse of life that, as foreigners, we might never have had the privilege of seeing.
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