They say that every dog has its day, and for Apollo, a young stray who roams the Giza necropolis in Greater Cairo, that day was Oct. 14. Just after sunrise, a paraglider pilot named Alex Lang spied the dog frolicking atop the Pyramid of Khafre, a 448-foot tall limestone monument in the famous Giza complex that people are not permitted to scale.
“I looked down and saw something move,” said Mr. Lang, an accountant from Atlanta. He was taking part in an adventure sport called paramotoring, which allows you to strap on a backpack attached to a small engine and wing and turn yourself into a human aircraft.
“He just stood there confidently, like he was king or maybe pharaoh of the hill,” Mr. Lang said.
Mr. Lang filmed a short video that quickly became an overnight sensation, amassing 28 million views on Instagram and trending on several other online platforms. The footage prompted social media commenters to ponder whether the creature with the large erect ears was Anubis, an ancient Egyptian god of the dead often depicted as a man with a jackal’s head.
“Wrong god,” said Vicki Michelle Brown, co-founder of the American Cairo Animal Rescue Foundation. “The workers at the Giza pyramid complex had already named him Apollo.”
Ms. Brown and her business partner, Ibrahim Elbendary, live in an apartment building across the street from the 4,600-year-old pyramid.
While online shortly after Mr. Lang’s video was posted, Mr. Elbendary recognized Apollo by his coloring and the curl of his tail. For the past three years, the animal welfare operation had provided food, water and medical care for the dog, his eight siblings and their pack mother.
The brood tends to camp out on the steps at the northwest corner of the Khafre pyramid, and it ranges freely with a dozen other packs at the site. Just about every dog has been vaccinated and, with the exception of Apollo, spayed or neutered.
“Whenever we try to trap him, he runs straight to the top of the pyramid,” Mr. Elbendary said.
Pyramid scheme
While soaring over the pyramid, Mr. Lang got so distracted by Apollo that his paramotor ran out of fuel, causing him to begin descent. He landed safely beyond the pyramids, in the Sahara. When he reached the designated landing spot, he told his fellow pilots about the dog and showed them the footage. He remembers one pilot, a self-styled social media influencer, telling him, “That’s an awesome video.”
The influencer, Marshall Mosher, then edited the footage, replacing a selfie of Mr. Lang with a photo of himself in flight and gazing downward, as if he were observing the dog. Without asking Mr. Lang’s permission, he then posted the altered video to an Instagram account, identifying himself in the caption as the pilot.
(Asked for comment on the video, Mr. Mosher wrote in an email: “It’s my video edit, my post, and I’m not required by any legal or moral rules to tag him.”)
When the clip went viral, the influencer gave numerous interviews to newspapers and TV outlets around the world, often accepting credit for spotting Apollo.
At the end of Mr. Mosher’s ersatz press tour, he texted Mr. Lang a quasi-apology: “I’ve been working toward a viral video like that for years and I think I just got caught up in the opportunity.” He told The New York Times he shared the several hundred dollars in earnings he made on the post from usage rights with Mr. Lang, which Mr. Lang confirmed.
Mr. Lang shook off the episode: “I wasn’t in this for the money or the notoriety,” he said. “I’d rather be like Apollo, standing above it all, enjoying the view.”
Wild in the streets
Five years ago, Egypt’s agriculture minister estimated that the country had 15 million stray dogs, and that they were biting some 200,000 people a year. In Cairo, the strays are called baladi, an Arabic word that means “native” or “local.” Baladi dogs are a mix of Saluki, pharaoh hound and Canaan dog breeds that evolved naturally. “They’re literally everywhere in the city,” Ms. Brown said. “On stairs, on side streets, on the roofs of cars.”
Humans and dogs have a fraught history in Cairo. Alan Mikhail, an historian at Yale University, said that contrary to the common notion that dogs were considered impure in Islam, their relationship to people was mostly harmonious and mutually beneficial. Beginning in the 1500s, dogs were particularly valued for eating garbage, and were even granted some legal protection.
By the end of the 18th century, though, Napoleon’s three-year incursion into Egypt signaled a change. The semi-feral dogs that informally guarded Cairo’s winding alleys so annoyed the French troops that on Nov. 30, 1798, sharpshooters were ordered to execute every stray they encountered and squads of soldiers walked through the city with baskets of poisoned meat. By morning, Cairo was filled with dead dogs, Dr. Mikhail said.
It wasn’t long before dogs “came to be seen primarily as noise polluters, competitors for urban space, potential disease vectors and useless sources of filth,” Dr. Mikhail wrote in a book, “The Animal in Ottoman Egypt.”
Until recently, the authorities culled baladi dogs by scattering the toxin citrinin in streets overnight. Today, it is illegal to poison them in Cairo, though enforcement tends to be lax, Ms. Brown said.
“The society here considers street dogs to be varmints,” said Ms. Brown, who grew up in Tennessee. “Fortunately, strays are increasingly gaining acceptance and grass-roots support.”
Her organization shelters 266 dogs and Ms. Brown has facilitated adoptions all over Europe and North America. Over the last month, requests have poured in for Apollo. Ms. Brown has turned down every one.
“The pyramids are Apollo’s home, and to make him a house pet would be very unfair,” she said. “But if anyone wants a dog from the pyramids, we can very easily ship them a puppy that would love to be loved.”
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