I vividly recall the only time when we got a goat home for sacrifice was that it made me quite embarrassed as I was then in my teens.

The goat was brought tied on a cycle by a burly man and as it was untied, it took one look at our massive Alsatian dog and started sprinting down the street of my quiet, suburban hometown.

The butcher ran behind it, followed by our very joyful dog, that was appropriately named “sheroo” (lion) and the trio disappeared round the bend while our toothless old cook cackled all the while.

There were not many Muslim families in the neighbourhood at the time and the commotion brought my curious friends out of their homes and they all thought my festival was such great fun.

I can’t remember what happened to that goat, but years later, in Saudi Arabia, I was reminded of that episode when I saw a huge sheep with brown wool taking a ride in a plush Buick in Jeddah — a cosmopolitan seaside town.

I was taking a boring, long ride in a bus at that time and when we stopped at a traffic light, the car pulled up beside us with this very contented looking sheep on the back seat. There were two boys on the front seat besides the driver and they kept looking back at the sheep and smiling as if they were taking a newly-found friend for a drive. (I don’t remember noticing at that time whether anyone was wearing seatbelts).

Then a couple of days later, my editor asked me to go to the sheep market, way, way out of the city, somewhere in the desert, and there I saw one sheep that looked like it was genetically modified.

The sheep was huge and it was being treated very majestically by the sheep herder who had brought it here from a far-away hilly province. It was being sold at an exorbitant price as it had kilos and kilos of juicy mutton chops and very fine wool.

Very soon, the scene became chaotic as cars and pickups started streaming into the market, throwing up large dust clouds and there was a massive traffic jam.

People started picking up the sheep and tried to put them on to the pickups or on to the backseats of the cars. Some sheep were so large that they couldn’t go through the doors of the vehicles despite all pushing and shoving.

There are many sheep and goat jokes said at this time across the Muslim world. You must have heard of this recent one: A Saudi took a photocopy of the cheque his friend had paid for a car spare part. The amount on the cheque was for Saudi riyal 1,300 and the friend added three more digits, making it 1.3 million. Underneath it, he wrote: “Towards the value of a goat”.

He then put the picture of the cheque on a social media site. The man’s clan members heard about his purchase and got wild that he did not put that money to better use as building an orphanage in the village. “These people do not know I don’t even own my own home and live in a rented flat,” said the hapless man on Twitter.

The municipalities in the UAE prohibit unlicenced sacrifice of animals during Eid and it must be due to a good reason. One of them is that it is unhygienic and eating the meat could be bad for your health.

There is also another reason. Some years ago, I had heard of a story about a sheep that fled from one unlicenced butcher from a rooftop and fell on a car below. A statement from a department said: “The sheep preferred to die from falling” rather than at the hands of an inexperienced butcher.