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Everyone who has owned a pet has gone through the trauma of coming home to find their fluffy loved-one escaped from the cage.
But imagine when that pet is not remotely cuddly and has prehistoric jaws that can rip your fingers off.
In a quiet compound in Saar, photographer Neil Whichelow is momentarily concerned that his one-year old crocodile called Mr Green, pictured above, had escaped from the impressive multi-layered tank that dominates the sitting room.
“Oh no, there he is,” says Neil, pointing at a 61cm-long predator blowing bubbles beneath a clay outcrop.
Mr Green is one of scores of crocodiles sold in Bahrain’s pet shops every year. Often they are kept in tiny tanks, poorly fed and when they “out grow” their new homes end up being dumped in Tubli Bay. “I wanted to make sure he survived,” explains Neil, 33, who bought the crocodile, which at the time measured just 15cm-long, from a pet shop in Bahrain for BD20. GulfWeekly was offered one for BD35 this week.
“There were three crocodiles in the tank,” he explained. “They were about four months old were being fed with dead fish. In my opinion they looked unhealthy and they were living in a tank with only an inch of water.
“The air-conditioned temperature was too low for them to survive much longer and there were no heaters in the tanks. Few people understand how to look after a creature like this.”
Buying a marauding reptile in Bahrain is much the same as buying an innocuous goldfish. No license is needed and there are no restrictions on the age of the buyer.
The kingdom is not party to an international agreement which aims to ensure that the trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival and the pet shops and ‘farms’ seem to know little about the animals they are selling.
“I don’t know what type of crocodile Mr Green is,” says Neil, “until he grows, the only way I can find out is if I take a DNA clipping of his tail and send it off for tests.”
Even more problematic is the fact that pet shops sell crocodiles without selling the equipment to care for them.
When Mr Green was first brought to his new home, Neil had to feed him with a home-made feeding device made out of a syringe and piece of air-tank tube.
He constructed a temperature controlled three-meter tank, with both water and dry areas and spent hours painstakingly researching how to care for the reptile.
To his girlfriend’s alarm, the growing Mr Green would occasionally escape.
“Because of the tiles on the floor he has trouble running and just slipped around. It meant he was easy enough to pick up but now I can’t let that happen again because he is too big.”
Growing at the alarming rate of one inch a month Neil quickly realized his pet needed a bigger home.
On a trip to the UK he bought heaters, special bulbs and dietary supplements and set about constructing a giant crocodile tank. Using a timber frame, chicken wire mesh and cement he set two plastic pond tubs above a network of sculpted caves. He then incorporated jets, water pumps, filters, timers and humidity gauges to create the optimum environment at a cost of more than BD 600.
But Mr Green’s new habitat is a far-cry from the homes that other crocodiles bought in Bahrain face.
“On someone’s roof in a nearby village there is a full size, three-meter-long crocodile and its owner just chucks it a chicken every couple of days,” says Neil.
Depending on the species, crocodiles can grow to a vast size. A large salt water crocodile can reach five or six meters and weigh in at a startling 1,200kg.
Neil has suspicions that Mr Green is a salt water crocodile bred in Saudi Arabia. Given the recent incident in which a Saudi man was discovered smuggling 250 baby crocodiles in his hand luggage at Cairo airport, his claim has some weight.
If it is the case, then Neil believes Bahrain is in for a serious problem.
“There are so many of these crocodiles, and when they grow people don’t know what to do with them,” says Neil. “I’ve seen kids going into pet shops saying I want this and I want that, and walking out with things they have no idea how to care for.”
When crocodiles get too big too handle, Neil says there have been reports that they have been dumped in Tubli Bay.
“If that’s true Bahrain could have a real problem, they could take over the eco-system,” he says.
Neil was recently approached to give a talk at a school to warn children and their parents not to buy exotic animals like crocodiles.
Already Mr Green is a handful. He hisses as he gobbles up raw beef and fish fed to him with chop sticks and although he has yet to bite his owner, he tries.
Neil has been careful not to interact too much with Mr Green and plans to keep him in his current artificial habitat for a maximum of a year.
“My intention is to send him to Australia and get him into a reserve,” says Neil. “If I can’t then I’m looking at a serious possibility of setting one up here.
“I would like to find some land and build a proper sanctuary for the imported animals that people don’t know how to look after,” he says.
“The best way of doing something like this is to build it into a tourism venue that could bring in money.”
The ordeal of Mr Green the crocodile may spearhead a revolution in the way that exotic animals are sold and treated in the kingdom.
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By -RdS-
editor@gulfweekly.com
