To: 

• The Prime Minister of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
• Minister of Local Administration
• Minister of Agriculture
• Governors and Mayors of the Kingdom

We, the undersigned, are writing about a practice now documented on video in Jordan: municipalities collecting street dogs and dumping them into fenced enclosures in open desert — no shade, no shelter, no clean water. Just wire fencing, bare ground, and livestock troughs of stagnant water under the summer sun.

This is not sheltering. It is slow killing.

Dogs confined this way face heatstroke, dehydration, starvation, disease, and death from fighting in overcrowded conditions. There is no veterinary care, no feeding protocol, no oversight. An animal left to die of thirst behind a fence suffers no less than one that is poisoned or shot — it only suffers longer.

This practice violates Jordanian animal welfare law, the ethics of Islam — which forbids withholding food and water from a confined animal — and the basic decency Jordanians expect of their institutions. It solves nothing: the dogs removed are simply replaced by others, while public money is spent creating sites of suffering rather than solutions.

We call on the Government of Jordan to:

Immediately close these enclosures and prohibit the collection and confinement of dogs in facilities without shade, shelter, clean water, food, and veterinary care.
Hold accountable the municipalities operating them.
Redirect these funds toward humane, evidence-based measures — sterilization, vaccination, and responsible ownership — as recommended by Jordan's own peer-reviewed research (Athamneh et al., Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 2025).

Jordan does not need cages in the desert. It needs a plan. The evidence exists, the expertise exists, and the compassion exists — in Jordan, among Jordanians.

End this practice now.

With respect and urgency,
Al-Yarmouk, Bridges of Trust Corp., and the undersigned from around the world