Back in the village a sad sight greeted us. The feathered sister of Warda’s dam appeared with four small, furry puppies pursuing her for a feed. She belonged to my friend. When in season one of the big guard dogs that hung around the village had somehow got into the compound where she lived and mated her. The puppies were therefore only “Luqis” and would not be kept but distributed among the shepherds as guard dogs. She was however a good bitch and would be kept. One of the Bedouin told me in all seriousness that the number of puppies in a litter depended upon the number of ties: there would be one puppy for each tie! The question that bothered me was what was the future for these hounds in the new world of conservation and tourism in which they live? Elsewhere I had been told many times that there was no point in raising Saluqis if they could not hunt. The Bedouin here had two answers: first there would always be some hunting and secondly they liked to have them around, much as they have a camel or two in the backyard. They agreed there was a need for controls but the real problem was not with the Bedouin and their Saluqis but with the hunters and their guns. Later I spoke about this to one of the leading Jordanian authorities at a ceremony in Wadi Rum to release ten oryx into the wild. He confirmed that the hunting of mammals was banned throughout Jordan and of all wildlife in Wadi Rum, but at the same time he admitted that it was difficult to change old habits and to monitor the wilderness. My general conclusion is therefore that the Saluqi is reasonably safe in Syria, where there are evidently lots of hounds and the hunters have found a niche for them on the margins of the desert and the sown; whereas the hold of the relatively small number of Saluqis among the Bedouin in Jordan is rather more precarious.