My trip to the Arabian Saluki Center!
It is enough to say for the intro of this post that today we are visiting some puppers, enough said. The Arabian Saluki Center is located near the Abu Dhabi International Airport, and tucked behind the more popular Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. The center is basically what it sounds like, a place where they hold and breed a bunch of specific Saluki dogs who are owned by some sheikhs (probably from the ruling family) and used for races and beauty contests. The Saluki breed of dog is a desert breed that has been very popular among the locals here for many years. Supposedly they are good runners and hunters, and they can handle the desert weather conditions pretty well which puts them up with camels in terms of importance to local Arab tribes.
When we went to the Saluki Center it was in the middle of the day so all the dogs were in their indoor housing taking naps, but they got a bit more excited upon seeing some new faces. The center is made up of two separate rectangular buildings and a yard with a bunch of stuff for the dogs to exercise and play with. When you drive up and park your car, on the right is the first building which holds all the dogs, then on the left is the second building which is the office, information, and trophy building. Lastly to the left of the office is a large sandy area that's closed with fencing and contains a couple obstacle courses, a swimming pool, and a few other things for the dogs to play and exercise with.
We started by going into the office building where they had a reception desk, a lounge and some trophy cases. There were three or four people there just sort of sitting around doing what seemed to be work and when we arrived they were all very attentive and welcoming which was nice. They invited us to sit and drink some Arabic coffee or "gahwa," and once we finished one the of the guys led us out to the dog holding building. He walked us down the aisle with rooms on either side, each containing two or three Salukis, and the last one had a mama and her three puppers.
So after he led us down and introduced us to each of the dogs, explaining which ones were related to each other and what roles they played in the different local competitions, he walked us outside to the food preparation area where we ran into several infiltrators (the rooster was especially suspicious).
After that he walked us past the exercise area and told us a little bit about what the dogs' daily routine was like. Then he led us back into the office building and talked a bit about the history of Salukis in Arabia and we discussed what races and other events they go to. He also showed us their trophy case and talked about some of the competitions that their dogs had won, and then he got us to write a little guest review.
After that we said our goodbyes, got some sanitizer and went on our way. So that does it for this post, I hope y'all enjoyed. I apologize for it being kinda short but the trip just simply was that short. Aside from seeing the dogs and talking a bit about them and their history there was not a whole lot else to do. In any case I would suggest you guys go and check out the center, like I've mentioned it's short and sweet, no more than an hour or so. So you can maybe plan a trip to Abu Dhabi and if you have an extra hour or two to burn just pop by and visit it. It's free of cost and they seem to be trying to get more people to visit, considering how welcoming they all were and how eager they were to hear what we thought they could do to improve the visitor experience. All in all a very nice place and I hope they manage to do some great things with those doggos. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed, and make sure to pop back in for my next post.