It's a juvenile Uromastyx aegyptia - a spiny-tailed lizard, sometimes also known as a 'desert dragon,' 'desert dinosaur,' or, in Arabic, a 'dhub.' They used to be extremely common in the Arabian peninsula - they're tough, burrow-dwelling, herbivorous and perfectly desert-adapted.
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Dhubs pose no threat to humans. They aren't venomous or aggressive, they don't pilfer valuable crops, they don't prey on pets or livestock. They hang out in their burrows out in the dunes and gravelly mountain foothills and mind their business. There should be no conflict here.
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To the people who have lived alongside them for centuries, they are a delicacy. Bedouin used to trap them for food - they used the fat, too, and depending on who you ask you might get either an assurance or a vehement denial of the notion that dhub meat cures impotence.
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They were still common when I took that picture. You'd come across the occasional old-timer grumbling about it being illegal to hunt them for food (this has been illegal since 1983, by federal law) - not because it's now impossible to do so, but because it's more inconvenient.
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Dhubs have been food for the bedouin for centuries, they'd argue. It's tradition. Centuries of hunting them didn't wipe the dhubs out, so any law banning hunting for that reason can't be accurate. Pointless - and unenforced - laws can be ignored with a clear conscience.
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We'd bring up habitat loss, explain that the hunting was just one issue endangering the dhubs - hunting plus the fact that there was less and less space for the lizards to live in because of urbanization. The desert was, after all, changing fast. More fantasy towers, fewer dunes.
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They would scoff. Wave at the massive expanse of empty desert all around us and tell us we were speaking nonsense, that the coastal cities might be growing but "out here" nothing had changed. And besides, they were not the ones building.
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They were right. They weren't.
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Even if we were right, even if the dhubs were in decline; why, they argued, should they be forced to abandon a tradition their grandfathers and grandfathers' grandfathers had passed down to them because of what rich men in the cities were doing?
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I didn't have an answer beyond, "Because if you don't, there will be no more dhubs. Your children and their children will know them only from your stories." I still don't have a better one.
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Really underlines the power/privilege imbalance here. You couldn't stop the powerful and make them change so you had to beg for those significantly less powerful to change their ways.
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