Animal Treatment

Dogs are a huge problem here. Dogs are actually the hardest thing for me to adapt to culturally. I want to write a bit about how my views about dogs have or have not changed since I arrived in country. This is brought on by a quote I just found in a recent NPR article about Michael Vick's dogs:

"a famous Gandhi quote: "the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." The idea being that in order to lift the whole of society, you must first prop up the lowest among its many parts. If you show good will and kindness toward those who cannot stand up for themselves, you set a tone of compassion and good will that permeates all."

Dogs and cats are often very mistreated. I like to say my cat won the kitty lottery when I plucked her from her mother over a year ago. My town is fascinated by my relationship with my cat and often ask me about Cleopatra as one would ask about a family member. When they see her, they often say how fat she looks and sometimes ask if she is pregnant. Cleo, by American cat standards, is not fat. But since she eats cat food every day she is much larger than the other cats in the community.

Dogs and cats here are seen as serving a very distinct function here in El Salvador- to scare off intruders and to kill rats, respectively. There are of course a few exceptions of houses that cuddle their dog and keep it in good shape. My host family has an abundance of cats that receives bread leftovers every day. These cats are the lucky ones.

What is painful is to see the people kick the dogs or hit them with big sticks to get them away. The dogs will leave on command but the people feel the need to go a step further. For this reason, nearly all dogs in this country can also be scared off with the mere action of lunging like you are gonna hit it or pretending to pick up a rock and throwing it. They have been trained to fear people. It's not uncommon for people to laugh as a dog runs off crying. This is what I had such a hard time getting used to. My American boss told me that by the end of my service I would hate the dogs like the people did. Her world view had changed since she'd been in country. In training, a fellow PCV once told me not to correct the little boy in her host family's house because it was culturally offensive to do so. I disagree. To this day, I almost always correct the children. I do not usually correct the adults usually because that I think is pushing it. Sometimes I wince in disapproval though to send a message of how unnecessary it is to hit. I still worry about and pity the dogs after two years here.

Sometimes I bust out bible reasoning about the treatment of animals. There are many things to use- Saint Francis of Assisi being the most obvious. As the patron saint of animals, I try to remind people that he and Jesus would not approve of the mistreatment of animals. The people usually agree but like with littering they often fail to make the real world connection.

In all fairness, after two years here, I can see where dogs are pests more than companions but that is because there is a total lack of animal control. Dogs roam the streets in gangs often raiding trash and getting into fights. The reason there are so many is because sterilization is nearly unheard of. When I told my doctor that I was bringing vets to sterilize the animals here, she said that the people would not likely agree to sterilize the male dogs because of the machismo culture.

The vets will be here for a week in November. I am praying we can get the 20-30 dogs/cat a day and reduce the animal population in the future. If not, people will continue to kill by poison or drown unwanted litters or worse let them grow up in the streets starving. The sight of a dog with its rib cage protruding out is not a something enjoyable to see multiple times a day.