Africa & Middle East > Morocco > Northern Morocco > Fez > Articles > Medina Mercedes

“You’ve seen the pickups around the old town? With their mirrors tied on with bits of old wire and their windows sheeted with plastic?” Dr Denys Frappier was asking. “Well, there, metaphorically speaking, go the donkeys of the medina.” A decade of struggling to keep the clapped-out wheels of Moroccan inner-city commerce running at full ‘horse-power’ has left the Canadian veterinarian with a quirky way of looking at things.

Known to Fez’s legion of guides as ‘Medina Mercedes,’ there are an estimated four thousand horses, mules and donkeys working in the labyrinth of alleyways that make up Old Fez. The souks still echo with warning cries - “Barek! Barek!” - as chains of diminutive donkeys scythe through the crowd, loaded with fresh skins for the tanneries, or an aging packhorse struggles to fulfil a contract for a house removal.

Like the battered Mercedes taxis that are kept tentatively on the desert roads by a resourcefulness that sometimes borders upon alchemy, ancient medina workhorses are coaxed, one way or another, to keep their shoulders to the task for just one more day. These animals work in conditions that have not essentially changed since the time of Mohammed - though, in a rare concession to progress, the medina muleteers have now taken to shoeing their charges with recycled Dunlops to give them extra grip on the slippery cobbles!

Horses are necessary to the functioning of this vehicle-free community, just as they are in so many other parts of the developing world, yet the most brutal treatment of a workhorse that I’ve ever witnessed took place beside Bab el Guissa, on the edge of the medina. The scrawny horse’s knees were buckling under the weight of a cargo of boxes that rose to twice the height of the animal’s head. It was hard to understand how the whip-wielding owner thought it would get it to its destination alive and - even in a country where you can see Berber women and children struggling under similarly disproportionate loads - it was a sight that, almost ten years later, sticks in my mind as an image of Fez.

Presumably it was a similar experience that provoked American traveller Amy Bend Bishop to found a free animal hospital here in 1926. A fondouk is a Moroccan inn or caravanserai, but the American Fondouk is relied upon throughout the area as the only place where the poor medina-worker or farmer can bring his sick workhorse.

“At first we would see real atrocities every day,” Dr Frappier, who left his position as veterinarian for the Canadian Olympic riding team, recalls. “After three months I was cracking up and wanted to go home. But they didn’t find me a replacement quick enough and 10 years later I’m still here. Now, thank God, treatment is much more routine and we see only about one really dire case a week.”

As we wandered among the stables that often house up to 36 ‘in-patients’ I had to wonder what constituted a ‘dire case’ in Fez. One horse was blind in one eye. The owner claimed that it had happened the day before but the wound was already maggot-ridden. One in three of the animals here would have to be put down and there was every chance that this poor creature would be in the happy grazing grounds by the time the muezzin wailed out the last prayer-call of the day. Another, ‘luckier,’ horse had been speared in the shoulder by a metal bar and there was a donkey whose infected eye was cleaning up and who had foaled while she was in residence.

Accidents with vehicles and fights with other horses in cramped backstreet fondouks are everyday occurrences and the unnatural diet - for an entire city of horses that will never know grazing - leads to tooth problems. Respiratory disorders are almost universal and there is a never-ending procession of saddle-sores, harness-injuries, lameness, colic, deformed hoofs, worms, parasites…and the ingestion of plastic bags.

The American Fondouk opens its doors to as many as a hundred animals in a morning and treated 17,000 such cases last year. Funding now comes from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Dr Frappier figures that about ₤2 is enough to treat an average case and, often, to save a local family from the loss of their only form of income.

Just as the diminutive donkey cargo-trains around the tanneries remain in the minds of many tourists as the classic snapshot of Fez, so the romantic horse-drawn calèches of Marrakech will always be an icon of ‘The Gateway to the Desert.’

Here, lined up along the road where the shadow of the Koutoubia minaret probes accusingly into the swirling marketplace of the Djemaa el Fna these green, lantern-decked carriages can appear to be just a touristic fancy. But these calèches are found throughout the souks, far beyond the usual reach of tourists, where the locals know that they are cheaper than the Peugeot petit taxis…and offer infinitely more baggage space.

A fair number of Marrakech’s 149 calèches seemed to be queued in the hot desert sun when I arrived one afternoon outside a gate that bore the legend ‘Société Protectrice des Animaux et de la Nature.’ A team of vets and farriers were hard at work on a three-day programme to carry out a series of examinations, micro-chippings and hoof-brandings that amounted to what someone described as ‘MOTs’ for these Medina Mercedes convertibles. New legislation had been passed giving the British charity, SPANA (Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad), the authority to rescue sick horses.

Apart from the calèches, the vets at SPANA Marrakech offer free care to most of the city’s registered three thousand working equines. A mobile unit is also permanently on the road, touring the rural markets, giving on-the-spot aid to farmers and transporting serious cases back to the city and once a month it visits Imlil to check on the trekking mules that work at ferrying baggage, and sometimes ‘trekkers’ themselves, up the slopes of Mount Toubkal. Here, in the High Atlas, ‘the Medina Mercedes’ takes on its other guise as ‘the Berber 4x4.’

There are isolated communities in these mountains that are only able to survive winter beyond the frozen passes because of the mule-trains that are sent out for provisions during the summer. Even for a, relatively rich, city-dweller a mule can be worth six month’s income, but in the country a good mule is worth its weight in gold and its demise will spell disaster for a whole family.

Wanton cruelty to their animals is a luxury that few Moroccans can afford, as Dr Gigi Kay, Director of SPANA Morocco, illustrates when she recalls incidents during the aftermath of the earthquake that killed almost 600 people at Al Hoceima in February 2004. “I remember one man who used his family’s allocation of aid agency blankets for his mule and cow,” she says, “and there was a mule, with a fractured leg, sharing a tent with the children while the farmer and his wife slept in the rain.”

All Creatures Great and Small
As the animal that the Prophet Mohammed singled out for kindness, cats are common in all Moroccan cities, but dogs (second only to pigs in terms of ‘uncleanliness’) are so rare that after two weeks in the country you find yourself stopping to stare when you see one. Unused to anything but hatred, the few village dogs that you come across are invariably savage and, sometimes, rabid.

“We get about sixteen cases of rabies a year,” the supervisor of the SPANA’s Marrakech quarantine compound told me. Despite the fact that this compound alone held more howling canines than I had seen in all my travels in the country, my guide was confident that all that had escaped rabies would eventually find homes as guard-dogs.

Not so, the centre’s ever-growing supply of cats. The number of kittens, born here in captivity, reflected the population explosion that is visible throughout the country. SPANA sterilise all cats as a matter of course before they are given to new owners.

“Sometime this place is like the Ark,” Dr Frappier had said back in Fez, “apart from horses, donkeys and mules we get sheep, goats, cows, dogs, cats, turtles, ferrets, parrots, pigeons. One of my men spent an hour working on a sick pigeon the other day,and as its owner walked out through the gate he just threw the pigeon up in the air. Without thinking, I ran out and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.”
“‘Why should I take the trouble to carry him?’ he said. ‘It’s a long way back to the village and this way he’ll be back home long before I am.’”

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