11th March 2010
Dog-Eat-Dog!

A dog is a man’s best friend. Yes?
Well, yes and no. It can kiss you, but it can also eat you to death. It all depends on how you treat it – and its breed. Some you can trust, some you can’t. But we still love them all, for company or for pleasure, to guard us or to fight each other, to play with our children, but to bite the neighbor’s. And, hopefully, to tear a thief to pieces.
Half the story is how you treat your dog. Whether a Labrador or a mongrel, you treat it nicely and it treats you nicely back. Feed it regularly and it’ll love you to death. Take it to the beach and it will want to go every day. That’s the regular stuff.
But there are fanatic dog lovers too. There’s a lady at Vigie who gets up every morning and cooks for the stray dogs of the Vigie Beach. There’s a local lady in town offering beauty services for dogs: manicure, pedicure, shampoo, brush and comb – the whole works. On its first beauty treatment visit, your dog gets a Membership Book complete with name, address, telephone number – yes, Home and Cell -- and, most important, the date and time for its next beauty treatment. And just in case you forget, you’ll get a call the day before reminding you that (“What’s-your-dog’s-name”) has an appointment tomorrow at such-and-such-a-time. Similarly, vets offer dog clinics and all sots of health services, including dog surgery. All that’s for those who love their dogs that much and will spend that much.
Then there are those who care for those dogs that need care. There’s an entire organization dedicated to reducing the canine population growth rate by offering neutering services. I also know a couple at Cap who share their lives and their home with their dog – and have been trying for years to get the Government’s Chief Vet to sign into a European program that could see our unwanted stray dogs and mongrels exported to European homes and hands where they would simply become a new breed of citizens of the European animal kingdom, imported and transported across the Atlantic in a humane Middle Passage.
Then there are the Don’t-care-a-Damn dog owners who don’t give a damn about dogs. They don’t feed or care for them. They’re just left loose and on their own. They eventually leave home and gang up on roadsides, especially where we buy food or dispose bones. When KFC opened its first outlet on Bridge Street, there were dogs from as far as Faux-a-Chaux and Marchand that knew the exact time the place closed and would gather around the garbage bins for the night’s Feast of Bones. These stray City dogs have always been a problem. The City Council has invented some crude ways of dealing with them. Once the Council constructed an impounding facility (for some reason it was called “de pound”) and assigned an elderly citizen named Norman to roam the streets, capture them and dump them into the “pound” to be gotten rid of. The dogs soon got to know Norman and while some ran from him, others hounded him. A bitch bit him once on the Columbus Square as he tried to hold it. Norman soon became known as “Norman Chien”. And there are those who swear that before he died he’d become so deranged that when called, he used to answer with a bark. Poor Jab.
Then there are those “bad dog” owners and those bad dog owners – those who keep bad dogs just to bite people, and those who train bad dogs to fight and bite each other to death. And those who don’t care if their dogs eat their neighbor – far less their neighbor’s dog -- in this dog-eat-dog world. Some would even go to court for their dogs, hiring lawyers to defend their dog’s right to bite. (My father wouldn’t go to court over a dog, but back then he always warned neighbors that “If my dog bites you, don’t kick it. Just come to me and I’ll give you five dollars to go for an injection.”)