Ever since Morocco began its drive to host major sports events a decade ago, this dilapidated facility has been one of Marrakech’s measures to control the stray dog population.
The most recent event was the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations, where Senegal beat Morocco in the final on Sunday to claim the championship. Attention now turns to 2030, when Morocco will co-host the FIFA World Cup together with Spain and Portugal.
Football’s governing bodies seem to have a particular fondness for the city—over a year ago, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) held its African Player of the Year awards ceremony at a conference center not far from the Gueliz Slaughterhouse.
Local residents stated that ahead of events attended by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, animal catchers raided the area and rounded up a large number of cats and dogs. Some of these animals were even sent to the slaughterhouse despite wearing identification tags, which is in line with Moroccan law.
One father explained that he retrieved his pet only after paying a fee to the officials, but when the pet was returned, there were scars on its neck that he believed were signs of stab wounds.
The International Animal Welfare and Protection Coalition (IAWPC) argues that Morocco has exhibited a disturbing pattern of behavior in recent years, meaning that whenever the country hosts events with visitors from across the African continent and beyond, the local government carries out animal culling.
The IAWPC points out that although organizations like FIFA did not issue orders for the killings, they have facilitated such actions.
Despite the IAWPC submitting a 91-page evidence document to the world football governing body, including photos of poisoning, forced starvation and shooting of dogs, concerns remain over whether the matter has received the attention it deserves.
The Moroccan government drafted a law aimed at addressing the stray dog problem in mid-2025. The law was revised in October 2025 and was supposed to enter parliamentary deliberations, but there has been no sign of progress so far.
Camel Live contacted Morocco’s Ministry of the Interior, the Moroccan Embassy in London and FIFA regarding the issues raised in this article, but received no response from any of them.
Camel Live also obtained documents from the local government of another Moroccan city, showing that the city ordered 1,000 rounds of ammunition in September 2025 to deal with the stray dog problem.
We have also received eyewitness testimonies from cleanup operations in the same city. The witnesses expressed fear of being hit by stray bullets and detailed the distress of being near such incidents. Parents’ main concern is that children who witness these events will suffer psychological trauma and that this will normalize violence in their minds.
In early December, a few weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations, an eyewitness in another Moroccan host city (who, like some other sources cited in this article, agreed to remain anonymous for safety reasons) said she saw dogs being roughly stuffed into a van driven by local street cleaners.
She followed the van to a garbage dump, where staff told her that dogs were brought there every day, and some of them were burned alive after being starved for three days.
The woman managed to negotiate with the shelter manager to release a mother dog with eight puppies for approximately $134. In a text message sent to Camel Live last December, she wrote that the scene she saw next “will haunt me forever”.
Before the mother dog and her puppies were thrown to her “like garbage”, she saw up to 40 dogs crammed into an enclosure no larger than three square meters. There was no air or light inside; the dogs licked the moisture on the walls, and there appeared to be at least one dead dog’s body that had been gnawed on by other dogs struggling to survive.
In Marrakech, dogs are sometimes fed poisoned bait, and the bodies of the poisoned dogs are transported to garbage dumps outside the city, far away from any passing vehicles and left unattended. In this impoverished area, children make a living by rummaging through garbage to find things to sell. They have been warned not to touch the dead animals to avoid poisoning themselves.
Last August, Morocco proposed a bill stipulating that anyone who “intentionally kills, abuses or injures stray animals in any way” shall be sentenced to 2 to 6 months of imprisonment and fined $500 to $2,000.
However, the bill also states that anyone found “housing, feeding or treating” stray animals may be fined $50, and repeat offenders may even be sentenced to imprisonment.
