Tony Waters is a British expatriate who has been living in Bahrain for over thirty years. He originally arrived to set up a chain of hair dressing salons, however, his life has turned out very differently; his daughter began rescuing stray animals from the cruel streets of Bahrain, and from those acts of kindness three decades ago, Bahrain’s only no kill animal rescue centre was born. The “Tony the Dogfather - Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre” became official in 1995.
In Islam, the mistreatment of an animal is considered a sin. The Quran and many examples from the Hadith clearly forbid animal cruelty. Only recently, in 2014, did Bahrain pass the Gulf Co-operation Council States of the Arabian Gulf States (the GCC) Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Law, falling in line with the other GCC member states who are similarly new to the concept of a criminal law to protect animals. Three years on, despite this criminal law and the ancient religious law, there is no actual enforcement of the animal welfare/ protection laws in Bahrain. Indeed, the attitude here is that animals are dirty and dangerous. The government’s strategy for resolving the stray dog situation, for example, is to shoot them. Over the years, this has caused a public outcry from the various expat communities, and so authorities then switched to catching the dogs and removing them, making it look like a humane strategy, but then taking them out into the desert and abandoning them there to die of thirst where no one could see.