After they’re sold to Egypt’s tourist sites, camels and horses endure daily abuse without rest or relief as workers force the exhausted, injured, dehydrated, and emaciated animals to carry visitors—sometimes to the point of collapse. One horse was blinded—apparently after someone whipped him in the eye. Desperate for food, malnourished horses with open wounds scrounge through garbage dumpsters near the pyramids of Giza. Eventually, many of the camels who are too weak or worn out to carry tourists may be sent back to the market to be sold to slaughterhouses. Others are callously abandoned like trash. At a dump site behind the pyramids, the bodies of dead camels and horses lay in the baking sun as birds pecked at their eyes. Some of the animals were still alive but too sick or old to move—they had been left there to die in agony.
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