Sleeping Dogs

I am kind of a dog fan. I have never had a dog of my own but I spend a lot of time with other people's dogs and I dog sit a lot. I was appalled by the way dogs are treated in almost all of Mexico. Not just Mexico but in almost all of Central and South America that I traveled through.

Mexicans all seem to love puppies. Puppies are for sale in almost every marketplace and in most neighborhoods there are people trying to give away or sell puppies of all types. People buy or take the free puppies and spend a few weeks or sometimes months doting on the puppies and treating them like royalty. Then when the puppy starts to turn into a dog they seem to all lose interest. At that point in life most of the puppies, now dogs, are merely released on the streets to fend for themselves. Sometimes they put food out for them for a couple of weeks before they stop feeding them and ignore them totally. The dogs are not fixed so if they survive long enough, they reproduce on the streets and they have more puppies to keep the cycle going.

There are dogs everywhere in Mexico. They sleep all over the streets and near any potential source of food or loving attention they might find. They are all covered in fleas and most of them have mange. The mange in Mexico is a particularly bad type of mange. The dogs end up with open sores that flies love and then the sores just fester untreated. The lifespan of the dogs is not very long. I have seen many Mexicans go out of their way to kick a dog sleeping on the street as they walk past the dog. That always infuriated me. I stopped one guy that seemed particularly entertained by kicking sleeping dogs to ask him why he did it. He just laughed and told me it is to make sure that the dogs know their place. Mexico is the only place where almost all dogs you see have their tail between their legs almost all the time. They have a terrible life for the most part.

Some cities have groups that try to help the dogs. They are volunteers and are mostly foreigners living in Mexico. They frequently try to round up street dogs and get them fixed to try to reduce the population somewhat. It is a nice idea and a valiant attempt to help the dogs out but the numbers are against them. They make very little difference because they just don't have the money and the number of people it would take to do this job well. So the dogs just keep having puppies and the cycle goes on.

One day I was riding around town with a Mexican man and I saw a big German Shepard dog in a yard. I called it a nice junk yard dog. Then I had to try to explain what a junk yard dog is to the man in my broken Spanish. I got the idea across to him but he just laughed at the concept of people being afraid of dogs. He told me here in Mexico we make sure the dogs are always afraid of us so a junk yard dog would be a poor guard he told me. I could only shake my head at his indifferent attitude toward the dogs. But if he ran into a true American junk yard dog he would rethink his lack of fear toward dogs. There are a few rottweilers in Mexico that have a reputation for being guard dogs but almost no other breed garners any respect, even pit bulls are kicked into submission there. Maybe one day there will be so many street dogs that they will rise up and take back their self pride from the guys walking past them kicking them just because.