The death of an animal

In America we have pet shops, pet grooming, doggie daycare and so many pet products to spoil your parrot more than you’d spoil your child. We have an obsession with giving our pets human characteristics, baby talking to them, dressing them up in sweater vests and carrying them while we go shopping. We’d spend thousands of dollars if we found out our cat had a tumor and then spend years force feeding it medicine and changing its diaper. Does this seem normal to you? Well, go visit a developing country and be prepared to bawl your eyes out.

This morning, while I was drinking my coffee, I overheard my host dad telling my host mom that he found the brown dog dead. The brown mawga dog that just had puppies? She tried jumping over the fence but her chain was too short and she hanged herself. What a way to go. It does make me sad. I’ve never been much of a dog person and I can’t say I’d spend thousands on pet surgery, but I do want to give her human characteristics and so I think about the loneliness, fear and regret she must have felt during those few moments between jumping and losing consciousness. I often reflect on things with other PC friends and one friend asked me if I thought she did it on purpose. Could a dog plan her own suicide? I couldn’t go that far. I don’t want to believe that she was so aware of her suffering that she figured a way out.

 In Jamaica, dogs are not often treated as family but more as alarm systems. Feeling empathy for a dog isn’t the norm. Coming from bi-racial family I can understand both sides. My Mexican mother (who spent most of her youth on el rancho) never let us keep pets inside (while she was looking) and when she speaks of my dog back home she talks about him as a dog, doing silly dog things. My American father encouraged us to sneak the pets inside and will talk about my dog as if he were another person in our family with a quirky personality. In a lot of cultures pets are viewed as tools rather than family and a dog’s loyalty makes them great to guard things. When you don’t have a disposable income you don’t want another mouth to feed, so if a dog didn’t have a purpose then why would you have it? I’m not sure where I fit in. A dog is not a human, but it does obviously express simple emotions.  

I’m trying to find an ending to this post, but I don’t know what my point is here. I’m just reflecting on the nameless, brown, mawga dog and wanted her remembered.