I saw a wonderful film a few years back called The Story of a Weeping Camel, which was all about a baby camel rejected by his mother. And this morning I was reminded of it when I visited the live animal market in Doha where I saw a baby camel that had just been orphaned. As you can see from the short clip I took, he was crying for his dead mother. His keeper was doing his best to console him giving him his finger to suck on but it didn’t help much. Even the camel in the cage next to the baby’s enclosure was feeling his pain and was also crying. Perhaps they all cry.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/31047928[/vimeo]

That was the sad part of the visit. The fun part was watching a lone man sitting with his lambs making telephone calls as if he was in an office. For a minute he made me feel like wanting a similar office. Minus the smell!

Perhaps it was him or perhaps it was another of the animal sellers who had sold the two lambs the men were carrying on their back taking them to slaughter — you have the choice to either have your animal butchered in the nearby slaughterhouse or have it loaded onto your car or van to take home and have it butchered there, usually by one of the men of the house.

They also had beautiful goats there and very soon it will be Eid el-Adha (the feast of the sacrifice) when the market will become a hive of activity with people coming to buy one or more animals to feast on and when the prices will practically double. Sadly, I will be gone by then but if I were to stay and had a place to cook, I would get myself one of these beautiful goats below who couldn’t find a better place to sit than on their own feed!