Jamaican Dogs

Dogs are all over the place in Jamaica. I have never met any who were actual pets and lived in the house, though I am sure some of them live that way. Just as I have become familiar with a certain segment of Jamaica by coming to know the people at the children's home, and also the family of our bus driver, I have only come to know a certain segment of Jamaican dogs.

And this segment is all over the place on the paths beaten and unbeaten by tourists. They run loose and they do not wear collars. They sleep curled up on the side of the road; they rest their heads on curbs as cars whoosh by at the gas station. They sleep on graves in the cemetery. They are un-neutered males with swinging balls and females with large swinging nipples. Rarely have I seen puppies. I think, in the absence of the funds to spay and neuter the dogs, the method of preferred population control is neglect. Sick puppies die. The strong survive. Such is the way of it.

The dogs I have known don't let you pet them very much. I don't try to pet them either. And I love dogs! But these dogs have skin ailments and who knows what other kinds of parasites and whatnot. They also bite. They do not seek human companionship. They don't run up to you in that friendly way, smiling and wagging their tails. They have each other, they run in little packs. They have their alpha males and females and their low-down-on-the-pecking-order youngsters. They have scars of bites on their muzzles, their sides, their thighs. They know exactly what it feels like to be kicked. The kids at the children's home think it is great fun to maltreat the dogs until they cry. They think it is funny. I have seen them chase them and kick them and hold them down and slam their heads in gates. I have seen them corner them and beat them and laugh while the dogs cry. When we tell the kids to stop it, they laugh and run off, only to come back later and do it again. Once I was asked by one of the older girls (this was Evelyn, 15 years old and a bed wetter, low down on the pecking order herself, treated badly by the other smarter girls, the savvy girls), "It is wrong to hurt the dogs, Miss?"

"Yes."

"But we think it is funny, Miss."

"Would you want someone to do that to you?"

"No, Miss."

"Well then, neither do the dogs."

Last summer the children's home had 11 dogs. One or two of them were the grown up pups we had seen the year before. The director uses them for security. She also lets some of the girls 'adopt' a favorite pup and care for it. By which she means, the girl feeds that pup. There is no bonding in the sense we understand with a pet. No playtime, no walks, no cuddling up together. None of that. And only minimal care. They get the leftover food. They get scraps tossed to them, chicken bones, stuff we are told not to feed them here. The alpha male of the pack, the one the kids call the "King Dog" had a perversely swollen ear last summer. It was blown up like a balloon. It bothered him. He tilted his head to the side and rubbed his ear on things. He came up to me with a pleading look in his eyes and tried to rub the ear on my leg. He sat close to me. He wanted help. There was nothing I could do. We asked about him and were told, oh yes, he will be taken to the vet.

Uh huh.

I had promised myself that this year I would not look at the dogs. But it is impossible! They are everywhere! On the bus ride up, a terrified female running for her life on a dark narrow road, trying to avoid speeding cars. In the center of the town of Port Maria (a place our driver Peat tells us is cursed because once they killed a mermaid there), in the very middle of the road, a road lit by the lurid red light of the KFC and congested with cars and people walking, and with trotting packs of dogs, there is a pair who have just mated, but they are still stuck together in that way that happens before their muscles relax. They are twisted at an odd angle and joined at the genitals. They have embarrassed doggy expressions, tongues lolling.

Or the last day of our visit, 2 years ago. It is at the end of worship at the large concrete church with wide open windows. We walk out of the shade into the sunshine and there is a white dog lying on the cool marble of the top front step. She is emaciated. She lies on her side, licking away at an open wound in her belly. Open, so that you can see the organs inside. The wound is very clean and she is definitely dying. Was she drawn to the prayers and the singing? Why is she there? And why can't I help her? Because I can't. I am not a vet. Nor do I have the luxury of of being able to do something for her as I would here at home! I do not have drugs to euthanize her. I can't take her anywhere for help. She must simply die, of infection, or attacked by other dogs, or killed by a car on the road.

Or the 2 litters of pups born at the home, within a week of each other, that same year. Twelve puppies in all, and I know that next year I will not meet 12 new dogs. The kids handle them all the time, even when they are too small to be moved (but I see one of the girls moving them, the whole litter, she carries the tiny pups in her hand wrapped in a plastic bag, and I wonder, is she going to go somewhere and suffocate them?). If they die, they die. Sometimes it is the mothers who die, suddenly outcast from the pack, not let close to the food, staggering around alone and emaciated, accustomed to kicks and thrown stones. We gave just such a young female applesauce one year; it was what we had to give her. She was too afraid to eat it. We feel moved to respond but our responses are too small and too feeble. Too self serving, perhaps, gestures to make us feel better. There, we did something. And even though the affluence we bring to the place is more than material-- it is an affluence of spirit--, we can clearly see that material affluence or the lack of it is at the base of survival. It is only when everyone has enough that everyone can have enough. Until then, it is the strong who prosper and cruelty becomes a game of power, a way of showing you are strong. That is true not just in the bare bones reality of a children's home in an impoverished island nation. It is just as true here--we are simply buffered from much of it because of the relativity involved. Here in the US, the poor have more than the poor of other nations. That is the relativity of scarcity. It is a continuum, like any other.

So, it isn't just the children that tear at my heart there. And honestly, by the time I get home from a Jamaican mission trip, I am so overwhelmed by unattended suffering, that I cannot stand to see even wilted plants as I walk down the hill to work. I want to water every single one. I want to feed and tend and love all who are in need. And I can't. It takes me months to get over this trip, it takes me months to grow into the person I will become after experiencing what I have experienced. It takes me months to assimilate what I have learned and seen. I tell myself, This is only the Caribbean! Imagine the scale of suffering in Africa, or parts of Asia! And just like the Grinch in the Dr. Suess story, my heart stretches and grows. I hope it makes me a better person. I hope it makes me more able to share the healing light of love. Otherwise, what is the point?