How’s Africa? Town Animals

A few weeks ago, someone on Facebook asked me about the animals we have here in Uganda. I thought I’d begin answering that question by sharing about the animals we have here in town.

Mbarara recently gained city status in the country of Uganda. There are only a couple other cities that have this status outside the capital of Kampala (and both of the other cities could be considered suburbs of Kampala).

In the US, most cities have ordinances banning certain kinds of animals inside city limits. Uganda doesn’t have those sort of ordinances so domesticated animals roam the roads freely. 

Most people keep animals in their yards. Our neighbor has dogs, chickens, turkeys, and occasionally, goats. Another man up the road from us keeps cows and lets them out to graze on the local golf course. Yes, you read that right. We have a small golf course here in town and the cows graze on it.

Today, on our morning jog, here are a few of the animals we saw:

Chickens roam free all over the place, but somehow everyone just knows who they belong to. In other words, if you tried to take one, the owner would come and get you and you’d be sent to jail for stealing.

This is one of the larger herds of cattle I’ve seen in our city. Most times the big herds are kept outside town and we dodge them as they walk up the road while we drive to church. It’s our own version of heavy traffic. 😉 

Stay tuned for the next installment of Animals in Africa! I’ll be sharing pictures that we took ourselves with our own camera.