Published in Travel Sri Lanka magazine, August 2004.
By Laurie Ashton
Immediately upon arriving in Sri Lanka, I went to cargo to pick up my two cats that I brought with me from Canada. We had to fill out paperwork, get signatures, and pay fees, and somewhere in the middle, I visited my two cats.
One man brought me some water for my cats, and within a few minutes, a crowd of men asking questions surrounded me. What are their names? Where am I from? What am I doing here? Why did I bring my cats? They looked in amazement first at the female cat, Tellulah, a measly 7 pounds. I didn’t understand why.
Then they saw my male cat, Oberon, who weighs in at a hefty 15 pounds and change and their jaws dropped. He’s not unusually large for a Canadian cat. In fact, I’ve seen many who could beat him up effortlessly if they crossed paths in the ubiquitous dark alley.
One man, trying to explain the reactions in an accent I had a hard time with, brought me outside to show me a neighborhood cat – in other words, a stray. Until I got a closer look, I thought it was a rodent – it might have weighed about three pounds soaking wet. I was shocked at how tiny it was, having never seen a cat that small before. Tellulah, my smaller cat, is still easily twice as big as this neighborhood cat. Now that I’ve been here for a while, I’ve seen a lot more stray cats, and I understand their sheer amazement and open-jaw staring at Oberon.
Our neighbor’s servant, when we first moved into our house, used to put clay bowls of water out in front of our gate every morning. There was a female dog that’d just had a litter, and she and her pups would hang around all day, drinking water and begging for food.
Since the dogs got used to drinking their water at our gate, they tended to stay hanging around our gate, and given the opportunity, try to sneak into our yard. When we went out, they sniffed at us while surrounding us, looking for food. When we came back with groceries, they nipped at the bags – while we’re still carrying them – trying to get at the food.
We don’t mind the dogs being watered and fed – we don’t want them to starve to death, either. We just didn’t want to encourage the beasties to come into our yard and home or bother us.
After the pups were old enough to leave home, this female dog had the misfortune to attract another group of suitors. At times, she had well over a dozen male dogs all hanging around, all trying to be her next best friend. They barked and yipped and fought and got in everyone’s way and otherwise made a general nuisance of themselves. And then they barked some more. All of them at the same time. In the wee small hours of the morning.
In Sri Lanka, there are many animals that wander around on their own without an owner, leash, or any other signs of belonging to someone. Cows, bulls, water buffalo, goats, cats, and dogs top that list. I have been told, though, that some cows are trained to go grazing during the day, but at night, go home. They do this because there isn’t enough grazing land in the city, whereas out in the villages, it isn’t a problem.
But even where I live, just outside of Colombo where it’s still city, we have screaming monkeys, birds, squirrels, polecats, and the like living in the jungle just a hundred feet away. There seems to be little fear on the part of the animals – we’ve had squirrels climb up on our balcony and even climb in our living room windows. They leave quickly enough when Oberon starts chasing them, though.
I find it fascinating that here, cows can wander down the road, weaving in and out of traffic, and traffic will weave in and out and around the cows. I’ve seen cows trotting down the road, and then decide that they wanted to lie down – and did exactly that. Nine cows taking a collective nap in the middle of a busy intersection.
The stray cats and dogs, though, annoy me.
The cats because they climb up on to our balcony, slip into the house, and eat my cats’ food. They’re brazen, fearless creatures. I chase them out, sometimes day after day. They wander around as if they own the place, and my own cats, timid, shy pushovers, let them. Then, to pour salt on the wound, they fight with my cats, causing injury and distress. Worse yet, they make me or my husband get up off our comfortable couch and chase them out of my house, broken brooms and mops littering the way.
I suspect the dogs are the most bothersome to me because they tend to be the most obvious, being most brazen and outspoken of the lot, and there seem to be sooo many more dogs than all the other animals combined.
They dig into all the garbage, and usually less than ten minutes after it’s put out. They strew the garbage all over the place, making our neighborhood – and everyone else’s, too – look like a garbage dump. And all their neighborhood friends join them in their fun. And they procreate.
On the one hand, I feel sorry for the animals. There are those that walk on three paws, have matted and dirty fur, and old scars peeking through. Some are obviously in distress, like the one dog I saw who’d had his flesh bitten into to the point where chunks of flesh were hanging from his body with huge gaping wounds. I wondered, while fighting the impulse to vomit, how he was still alive and had the energy to walk anywhere.
Some of these dogs are severely emaciated, despite rooting through garbage and being fed by people in the neighborhood, such as our neighbor’s servant who regularly leaves out leftovers. And there are those who throw rocks at the animals to make them go away.
I find that, since coming here, there’s a part of me that now both dislikes dogs and pities them at the same time.
I talked to a few people who are sympathetic with stray animals. Some people take stray animals into their homes, care for them, and try to re-home them. One such person, Anusha David, in 2003, re-homed some 92 dogs. Then there are the organizations like Blue Paw, Pet Vets, KACPAW in Kandy, SPAR – Society for the Protection of Animal Rights, and the AWPA – Animal Welfare and Protection Agency – who do what they can to help, whether it’s by providing veterinary care for neighborhood animals, providing a shelter for strays, educating people on proper animal care, or trying to re-home them.
In my conversations with some of these people who are actively trying to help with the stray situation, I was told again and again that there are some prevailing attitudes in this society that make it very difficult to deal with strays effectively. One such attitude is that it’s wrong to spay or neuter these animals. Another is that it’s wrong to kill them. And yet these same people will dump the animals over someone’s wall to get rid of them or to throw them on the road to get run over.
Without spaying or neutering, though, these animals will reproduce, and then there are more animals to starve to death on the same amount of garbage and scraps. They’re still dying – the only difference is it’s a slower, more painful, form of death. But that’s only the malnutrition side of it. What of disease, accidents, and other medical problems that crop up?
What can be done? In other countries, stray animals are rounded up and held until adopted. Any that aren’t adopted within a certain period of time are killed. “Disposed,” to use the neutral term. The ones that are adopted are spayed and neutered, when possible. By doing this, the stray animal population has declined dramatically.
Even with these measures, there are still more than enough animals to go around to those who want to adopt them as pets. I adopted one of my cats from one of these initiatives in Canada. But the other side of this is that, because there are less strays around, those animals which do exist tend to have more comfortable, satisfying lives and are much less likely to suffer abuse or maltreatment. There tends to be less disease, such as rabies or distemper, spread among the animals, and as a direct result, these animals are safer for humans to be around. And there’s much less garbage littering the streets.
