The Story of Eitan and Huriya

By Ida Bat-hipushai

Eitan was born in a nomadic goat herd, on April 21^st, 2014

An activist in one of the animal rights organizations heard the goats walk near her house, but long after the herd had passed her house she kept on hearing loud bleating. She went outside and was amazed to find a newborn kid, tiny and wet. He was left behind after his miserable mother was forced to move on with the herd.

A couple of activists who were called to the site took the kid to the veterinary clinic to be examined, and bottle fed him with plant based milk substitute (how absurd: supermarket goat’s milk can be dangerous to…. goats).

Eitan was transferred to an activist with vast experience with caring for suckling animals, and received some Colostrum (milk produced on the first few days after birth), somehow obtained. Eitan’s next stop was to be his permanent home: the shelter run by Sharbel Balloutine, an animal rights activist who wrote the first Arabic book about veganism, and set up a group of Arab/Palestenian/Israeli animal rights activists.

The shelter is located in the back yard of a pastoral home in the Bat-Galim neighborhood of Haifa, 50 meters from the beach. Eitan shares the shelter with three chickens and two horses, as well as one other kid. Of the chickens, two were found barely alive not far from the shelter, and the third was found on the street in the downtown German Colony neighborhood. The second kid – Hurya (“freedom” in Arabic) was released from a goat herd at the age of two weeks and also found her home at the shelter.

Any human visiting the shelter receives a warm welcome from the two kids, who run to greet and check out the new visitor, hoping for a rub or a pet. They are both energetic and content. It’s hard to think that all this joy and playfulness was meant to be stifled and oppressed in a dairy farm (for Huriya), or a meat farm (for Eitan. Young kid flesh is considered “prime meat”).

The kids are of course unaware of the life that was spared them; they are just living in the moment. But the human visitor knows. Visitors of the Balloutine family and Sharbel’s patients come to play with the kids, to touch them. They get to meet face to face the animals who are usually viewed as “food”, to admire their lovable nature, and most probably gain a new perspective about the animals they are so used to eating. Activists visiting the shelter (the two kids have become “celebrities” in the vegan community) are encouraged by its work and find in it a source for renewed energy – to continue their work in saving more lives, giving these beings a better present and future.

תגובות