Drought, desperation, and tourism: There's more to Morocco's tree-climbing goats than meets the eye
It’s a challenging Friday morning for Jaouad Benaddi. He’s been trying to get his goats to climb an argan tree and settle in its gnarled, thorny branches. None of the 12 are cooperating.
Animal welsfare advocates and ecologists say that making goats stand in argan trees for hours is bad for the animals and bad for the trees.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited. He says he started putting goats in the tree in 2019 after his wheat crop failed. Back then on a good day, at least 10 vehicles would stop, and he’d take home about $20. Then during the pandemic lockdown, all but one of his 13 goats starved to death. Since February, when Morocco reopened, Benaddi has acquired a new herd—the dozen animals he and Khalid were cajoling up the tree that Friday morning. But he says he’s lucky now if three cars stop to gawk.
Back at Benaddi’s argan tree, when it’s time for his goats to go home, 11 get down easily. Khalid climbs up to coax the straggler, a female, while his older brother, Abdelmajid, tosses small stones at her, then uses a stick to agitate the branch she’s standing on. The goat teeters and crashes to the ground, a fall of about 12 feet. After a few attempts, she struggles to her feet, and as the others walk to their pen, she trails behind, limping.
“While the activity might appear to be benign, it is animal cruelty,” she says. Tourists, she adds, “are essentially getting photos of living props. What’s going on here is not natural. It’s coerced, and any time you introduce an element of coercion, it’s not relevant whether their bodies can manage to stand on trees.”
About half-a-mile along the road from Benaddi’s argan, Miloud Banaaddi—who also has had to give up farming and is training his eight new goats to perch in his almond tree—dismisses any notion that what he’s doing is cruel. “The goats are only in the trees for three to four hours at a time,” he says. “Imagine if I kept them inside the house”—they’d be imprisoned and would go hungry. “Where would the money come from to feed them? There is nothing else to do. There are no jobs.
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