While I was gone this summer, the innumerable stray dogs in town multiplied and unleashed innumerable puppies. I might have written about this before, but the Malagasy people absolutely loathe dogs. (In fact, if you're a sensitive animal lover, you might want to skip this entry). They seem to tolerate cats, but they will go out of their way to torture dogs just sleeping in the shade, minding their own business. I've seen them beaten with bamboo sticks, hit and kicked, have rocks thrown at them, and even babies throwing pebbles. (It isn't clear which children are taught first: to call all moving white things "vazaha" or to abuse animals).
A small yellow puppy has been hanging around my house lately and while I can't say I like the thing (I'm not an animal person) I do kind of like that the dog seems to realize that I, if only one person, won't hurt it. So it sleeps on my porch or under my peach trees and I give it pieces of banana once in a while. (I also fed it a mouse I caught the other day but that's a different story). The town's 11-year-old bully, named Tina (a boy), is accused of having committed a heinous, premeditated assault on this thing. Seeing the dog peacefully asleep, the kid went to his house, boiled a pot of water, went back to the dog, and poured it all over its side. (The fact that only the dogs side and leg are severely burned, and not its back at all, lead me to think it must have been asleep).
I tried talking to the father of one of the children around my house, who happens to be a pastor. I asked why Malagasy people hate dogs so much. He laughed at this and told me "Well, there are just too many of them," looking at me like I asked him why kids like ice cream. I wanted to voice my opinion that there are too many children running around town and see just how committed he was to this premise of torture as a way of population control. Instead, I said "well why don't you just kill them and spare them from being abused?" He looked at me kind of shocked, and said "we can't kill them, that's against our beliefs." So now I'm the bad guy. In fact, last week in Fianar the authorities poisoned all the stray dogs. Naturally, they didn't bother themselves with the dozens of rotting corpses for a few days but that's neither here nor there. The point is that they were put of of their misery and I'm OK with that.
The pastor told me that the first volunteer in this town adopted two dogs and raised them in my house. 'Why don't you do the same?' Well, for one, because I hate dogs. These ones, furthermore, are infested with fleas, are trained from birth to be aggressive and un-house trainable, and I leave site to often. That doesn't mean I want to see the things run for their lives if I walk within 10 feet of it, tails between their legs and paws covering their faces. Tina is a messed-up child and will likely grow up to be a murderer, but this is an epidemic in Madagascar and I don't know how they're ever going to change.
