2009 02 12

I could learn to hate people, and here are two reasons why.

Reason 1. When I came to this little village in southern Mexico, there were four dogs about the place, three little ones and a Dalmatian. I blogged, on a different site, about Walt Disney having a lot to answer for in popularising a difficult dog such as the Dalmatian: high-maintenance puppies who require a lot of consistent and patient training, starting from when they are very young. They, and Great Danes, get purchased as cute little pups for all the wrong reasons by people who don't know anything about how to raise them or what they'll look like when they grow up, and then, when they get older and are turning into a total pain in the ass or a giant that no longer fits into the one-room flat, they get abandoned or shunted off to other people or fates even worse. This is the case with the Dalmatian here: the original owner got rid of him to the owners of my house because they couldn't control him. He had a lot of bad habits firmly entrenched by the time I arrived on the scene, and I put a lot of work into persuading him to behave in a more gentlemanly fashion. I was making good progress, and he was becoming a good companion. The proper work when he was young, and he would have been a very good companion from the get-go. Everyone with children has seen 101 Dalmatians, and all the local children used to love to come and see the living example. Which leads to ...

Reason 2. This is a very rural, agricultural living-off-the-land kind of village. There are seventeen identifiable types of animal shit in the road leading to the front gate. There are cows in the fields next door, just like on the real farms you drive by between major cities. Apparently, there is also some kind of predator that the locals kill off with poisoned meat. Reverting to Reason 1 for a minute, there are some cardinal rules in raising dogs, and one of the most important is to teach them not to eat anything that you don't give them. It isn't easy, but if you don't, you end up with a dog that eats whatever it finds on the road or in the field or wherever. Getting back to Reason 2, all the dogs have died from poisoning. One of the Dalmatian's bad habits was not allowing fences to delineate his territory, so that every time I left the yard, he came too. On the occasions that it wasn't convenient to have him with me, I would put him on a leash tied to something he couldn't move. The neighbours like to throw food they won't eat out into their 'trash' heaps, and the Dalmatian would regularly go visit in the night if I didn't confine him in some way. And they complained bitterly about it if I didn't confine him at night, so it had become a regular habit.

This morning, I needed to go into the village to buy food, so I left him on the leash with his water and feed and blanket. I got home, let him off the leash, and he raced around the yard a bit and then followed me around doing my chores. Sometime in that first hour of freedom, he ate something in the yard that killed him. I don't think he jumped the fence, but if he did, it was only for a very short while, as I couldn't move without him underfoot. Whatever it was, it was very fast-acting: he was running around and being a dog and then he was writhing in pain and convulsing.

This whole sordid episode could have been avoided by a little bit of thought on the part of the people who bought the dog and then couldn't/didn't train him, and the locals, who don't think about the ramifications of their actions in throwing poisoned meat into their fields to control the coyotes or whatever the hell they are. Manchas, 2007 - 2009 R.I.P.