21/ 100 Curled-Up Dog
Why Bother When You Can’t Even Eat it?
We had a very interesting conversation with one of our friends on a previous trip to India. The topic of discussion was dogs – more specifically about the fact that we had one, and that he lived inside our house.
We were asking Gaffar about the dogs in India and whether or not they were pets or simply feral animals living in the street. The first order of business was to actually help him understand the whole concept of a pet.
‘So, you keep this animal inside your house, and you buy special food for it?’ He asked how much we spent per month on food. Our dog Chip is small and doesn’t actually eat very much but, even so, he was genuinely horrified at the cost. We didn’t dare even mention vet bills, or the fact that our neighbours have a 50kg Bernese that eats 5 times more than Chip.
‘So why do you keep it in your house? Can’t you just feed it and let it live in the street with the other dogs?’ That’s a good point, I thought. Is having a pet truly about caring for a dog in the best way possible, or is is actually about ownership and not wanting your furry friend to wander off and go and live with someone who has better biscuits?
About 30 minutes of rumination later, our friend Gaffar was clearly still a little perplexed by the idea of simply keeping a dog and caring for it, almost like a member of the family.
‘I have pets too, I think’, he confessed. ‘They are my goats. Each day I let them outside and they can go and find food. Each night my children go out into the street to round them up and carry them up through the house to the roof where we all sleep together’.
‘But I only look after my goats this way because I will eat them in the end. Why do you keep a dog, spending all of that money to raise it, and not even eat it?’
In answer to that I would have to say that I am really quite attached to little Chip and I also think I would have been better choosing a breed that’s less scrawny than a Jack Russell if I was, in fact, planning to eat him. You’d get much juicier kebabs from our neighbour’s Bernese, Bruce,
“The difference between a pet and a stray is not the dog—it’s the love it receives.” (Unknown)
