Our pack of thirteen dogs has its rules. Some of the rules they get from me, like "no growling in the house" but some of them come from the boss dogs. JC brought his girlfriend Marte from a dirt road next to us to the farm last summer. She came in all confidence and sureness, thinking that she was going to take over control with JC, but Calypso, who rules the house, was  having none of it. There weren't any serious fights but there was a lot of posturing and I scolded Marte for not paying attention to the pack structure. Gradually, she settled down and came to an agreement with Calypso ..read more

    I started writing Living in Egypt in 2003 when I was still living in our family home in Maadi, a nice suburb of Cairo. I had a pack of dogs at the time but I don't know how organised they were. Since about 1998, I haven't really had less than almost a dozen dogs at a time, but a dog pack is very different from a bunch of dogs. A dog pack is a social organisation run by dogs for the welfare and benefit of the dogs, and it may or may not be associated with humans. There are probably more dog packs on farms or homes that can tolerate a lot of dogs than we are aware of, just as it ..read more

 One of the things about Corona has been the fact that the focus of life has changed enormously for everyone. People I would never have expected to have baking skills have been turning out some astonishing loaves of sour dough. One family got an egg incubator and hatched a few duck and chicken eggs that they got from the farm. I have found myself paying more attention to the social lives of my dogs this year as the pack at the farm seems to have attained some sort of maturity. It was formed initially by the incomparable Finn, who passed his authority on to JC and Calypso, with Rocky actin ..read more

 One of the things that I was intrigued by in graduate school was how communication could work between humans and animals. Sadly, I was studying at the University of Waterloo where the social psychology department was entirely given over to the game playing, semi deceitful variety of lab experimentation. There were no animals involved with this and I had serious doubts as to whether these studies really were telling us anything about human beings as well. This didn't make me a lot of friends in the department and I ended up leaving with my MA and my sanity, to go teach in community colle ..read more

  I realise that I went to the dogs years ago. I have had over a dozen dogs at any given time since about 1997. That's a long time. At first we were a normal family, sort of. We started with one baladi dog in Alexandria, and when she vanished one day we collected a pair of sisters from Smouha Club. We stuck with two dogs for a while when we moved to Cairo, until my daughter and I went to Greece on a spring break, and we found Molly sitting in the snow on a mountain. From the face she looked like a Golden Retriever and from the butt she looked like a Corgi. We brought her home, telling ..read more

"Y’all will never believe what I have been doing during this quarantine/vacation. I’m not sure that I entirely do, but it is something that I am quite proud of. There are a lot of people in the equestrian world who know me even outside of Egypt, and in 2012 I was asked by a friend to check out a group who were said to be helping horses in Nazlet Semman. The group went by the rather odd name of Prince Fluffy Kareem, but I found a contact for them and I tried to arrange a trip to see where they were working and what they were doing. I was unsuccessful at the time and I told my friend that I was ..read more

What day is it anyway? Without the Friday/Saturday family crowds, without the Tuesday clinics, it's too easy to forget where we are in the week. Currently the schedule for people living in Egypt is that we have a curfew from 7 pm to 6 am every day and then on Friday and Saturday any place one might want to visit is going to be closed and there are no public transport services. There is a rumor that the 7 pm curfew is going to be changed to 3 pm next week and then a possible 100% lockdown soon after. Maybe the idea has been to ease the population into this. Egyptians, like most people, are not ..read more

Like many governments all over the world, the Egyptians have been told to stay at home unless it's absolutely necessary to leave their  homes, schools have been closed and there is a 7 pm to 6 pm curfew every day. In addition public transport has been stopped on Friday and Saturday. In a country with so many people living in rural areas where there is no public transport, this poses some interesting issues. How close is too close now? For many in the rural areas, walking is the main means of transport unless one owns a donkey cart or something similar. But I have noticed some greater se ..read more

My morning started with a good friend of mine who lives with some pets in a house in a rural area and, when there are no viral shut downs, she's a teacher in an international school. Oddly enough, she and some other friends of mine, many of them connected with schools but not all, came down with a really nasty flu, for lack of better identification, that involved high fever, aching limbs, a dry cough, and no real respiratory symptoms...but this was in November/December before COVID-19 had even been identified as far as we know. For my friends a penny dropped with the symptom description, but a ..read more

When I was about ten years old or so I found a copy of Rats, Lice, and History in our local library. My mother had already made it clear that I was allowed to read anything at all that I wanted, so I checked it out and entered a fascination with the changes that epidemics can bring to society that continues to this day. In the process of reading about the medical history, the economic and political history, and all the updates to our knowledge in the past 60 years, I also read the Decameron, which was written by Boccaccio almost 500 years ago, although that came rather later. Essentially, the ..read more