Sometimes I’m slow on the uptake. No question. It was about this time a year ago that a couple of goats and perhaps a sheep appeared in the long narrow park that runs between our home and the busy highway. Kids were standing around the creatures, petting and patting them, and the goats and sheep were languidly cropping some of the grass that survives, under the trees, thanks to lots and lots of water.

“Hmm, some kids have gotten some pets,” I thought.

It took me a while to notice … maybe a month … that the domestic animals had disappeared. I saw them the one day, on the way to the office, and I never saw them again.

I saw them again yesterday.

It took me nearly all of the two years I have lived in Abu Dhabi to figure this out:

The animals had been purchased by private citizens to be slaughtered and eaten on the first day of the major holiday Eid Al Adha, which is Sunday night.

I saw them again today. Three goats, this time. Two white goats, one tall brown one. Children walking around with them. Tending them, perhaps, to make sure they didn’t escape into the roaring traffic only about 30 yards distant.

Mostly, however, it looked like the start of a petting zoo. Like the kind you might see back in the States at a county fair. The basically harmless domestic animals. Kids seem to like petting zoos; they wonder what the animals look like up close, and they like to feed them.

The difference, I would guess, is that the life of a petting zoo animal might extend a bit longer than the life of one of the animals purchased here, who have one day, perhaps two, before they are slaughtered.

I have no moral outrage here. Once we decide to eat meat, parsing how and when and where the animals are killed is a slippery slope. Is it all that different if it happens in some mechanized slaughterhouse in the West or in the bathtub of a neighbor here in the UAE?

A story in The National helped me figure this out. Our correspondent in Sharjah two years ago did a story about what appeared to be price-gouging by “meat traders” ahead of Eid. He noted that the price of Iranian sheep and goats, apparently considered the best for consumpion, had risen sharply … and how some traders were attempting to pawn off inferior Somali and Indian goats/sheep as preferable Iranian stock.

So, there you go. Our neighborhood is a bit rustic, with some chickens and roosters here and there … but we don’t actually have goats and sheep living year-round among us.

They make a one- or two-day appearance here … and then they are on the dinner table soon after.