Carrying a black briefcase, Leila Gheita charges past several stacks of bird and kitten cages into the small Greenview pet shop in Maadi on a Thursday night in May. The 25-year-old animal rights activist is carrying a printed list of demands written in Arabic and English. “Remember me?” She asks the shop owner, “I was here last Tuesday.” He remembers. Gheita and the small hoard of animal lovers following her—a group of roughly 20 expats and Egyptians, which includes children and veterinarians—are hard to forget. For the second time in a month, the group has made its way to each of four pet shops outside the Maadi Grand Mall, inspecting the animals’ health, cages, food and water. Their goal is to better conditions at pet shops around Cairo, many of which they say are improperly caring for animals. The group, called “Pet Shop Watch Egypt ” formed on Facebook a little more than a month ago, and exists to target a specific problem in a country where there are little protections for animals at all. The group organized after some of its founding members saw a husky outside of a…
