My relationship with dogs
Ketan Jung Dulal
Dogs in Kathmandu are not like what we usually find in country like the one I live in currently (Canada). Most dogs in Kathmandu are not kept inside the warmth of the house with the comfort of a good owner. In Nepal, people usually keep dogs for guarding purposes. In developed countries, one might encounter a few agonistic interactions between dogs, but such interactions are plenty in the streets of Kathmandu. Although I hated dogs while growing up, my family had several dogs one after the other all through my younger days. But, I would say that not a single one of them was ‘domesticated’.
The first dog was a female Border Collie that we named Lily. Lily was very quiet and liked to be alone. She loved loneliness I suppose. We had her in an army barrack in eastern Nepal where soldiers interacted with her. But Lily hated that and mostly responded with aggression. Biting was quite common. I think Lily died a virgin. We wanted her to get pregnant and once we brought a very active dog from the neighbourhood for breeding purpose. We locked them together in a room, but from outside we did not get any hint that anything was going on inside. It was all Lily’s fault: she was not interested at all. Lily died in Kathmandu.
Another dog we had was Teeny. It was a white Eskimo dog (come to think of it our family always had small dogs mainly due to my mother’s preference). Compared to Lily, Teeny was a very active dog. She was very wild. She used to go around chasing cats and chickens. Once she killed a chicken in a nearby farm and brought it home. So proud was she of her achievement that she pranced about the house displaying the prize that she carried in his mouth. Embarrassment for us of course because we had to bear the brunt of our neighbours.
Teeny was also sexually very active. All the male dogs in our neighbourhood (street or otherwise) wandered about our house in search for an opportunity to have her (anthropomorphically I would say she was beautiful too). We used to get really tired chasing away all those dogs that were circling our house.
Next we had was Rocky. Rocky was Teeny’s offspring, and his father an ‘unknown’ street dog. He spent hours during night howling, a trait that led my mother panicking. Being a religious woman, she believed that such dog howling was ominous of some misfortune that would strike our family. Go take Rocky to a temple and leave it there, she told me.
Although I did not find her idea to be appealing, I did as I was told. I tied the dog appropriately to my motorbike and went to a temple four kilometers away. I put it with other dogs in the area, but Rocky followed me as I tried to ride away. Yet, with heavy heart, I left him in the temple with other dogs.
Only a day had passed when Rocky appeared at our doorstep. But my mother did not deter even slightly from her decision. We finally succeeded in leaving him in the streets, and I wonder how he must have died. It must have been a painful death. Teeny also died some years later.
Then one day my brother brought home a Doberman from his friend. He thought it was a good breed dog and not the type of mongrels found in Kathmandu. I don’t know why he thought mongrels are not better. Anyway, we decided to call him Chester. Chester began having problems immediately after coming to our house. His face always seemed to reflect some sort of pain that he was experiencing. Although a kid, he was never playing around. He died when he was around 5 years old, not a particularly long life for a dog.
Dogs in Nepal have a lot of welfare issues. They are usually tied at night and sometimes also during the day. They are also not always properly fed or given plenty to drink. Such treatments towards dogs are reasons why we see a lot of aggressive dogs in the country. There also seems to be the problem of overpopulation of dogs especially in the urban areas. The solution that the government brought at one point was to poison the dogs. But it was not effective. More humane approach is vasectomy or ovarictomy which some private animal welfare NGOs are doing at the moment.
However, this is not to conclude that Nepalese in general do not love dogs. Just as a case, there was a story of a Nepali ‘dog woman’ that media featured, who rescued street dogs and fed and cared for them. And in the aftermath of the devastating April 25 earthquake, an image circulated in the social network sites of a woman who was crying for a street dog that had died in the quake. It is just that appropriate information about how to handle dogs and how to raise them are not given to people. Spreading good education and information on animal welfare is necessary to ensure that domestic animals like dogs are cared for.
