Dog eats chicken bone… And survives!

Anyone who has spent much time around here will tell you that there are a lot of gnarled-up looking dogs. Skin conditions, fur and ear tips missing, ribs poking out, a dozen ticks ringing their eyes, it’s all common place, even in cases where the dog actually has an owner. There are, of course, many well maintained pets, but even then are distinct from the dogs you see around the US because so few of them are neutered that dog balls and saggy tatas are commonly on display. One of the more painful things to see is an absolute stick and bones female who is obviously nursing out scavenging for their food because many owners don’t feed their dogs anything at all. Such dogs make the rounds at the post where I stay at in Bethel when I’m visiting the park, and for that reason I can tell you that a dog can eat a chicken bone and survive. They come at meal times and wait where the guards and the odd visiting researcher might throw the cast-offs of their meal. These dogs are so skinny that even I, raised with a multi-generationally strong tradition of not giving chicken bones to dogs (my dad has said that as a child he’d believed a dog would die instantly upon taking a chicken bone in its mouth), will toss my bones to these creatures. This is something I would never do with Josie. And these dogs come back for more the following day. Well, I think in the face of all the hazards these dogs face, the danger of a splintered chicken bone raking their digestive track is pretty minor. I still feel conflicted, however, every time anyone tosses these dogs a chicken bone, and doubly so when it’s me.

Speaking of gnarled-up dogs, there is one less in the world now. Black, the little dog that lived my little fenced in area, is no longer with us. Well my landlady spends great stretches of time in Guatemala City, caring for her two little grandsons while her daughter and son-in-law attend classes at the medical school. She hasn’t been up here once since I came back two months ago, though she has called me a few times to see how things are going. I stop by her mother’s house to pay my rent, a woman who is probably about 80 years old and caring for her great grandchildren (after raising their dad, her grandson) since their dad is off working at the airport during the day and the mom has been in the US for about a year as an undocumented worker. This is the 3^rd generation she’s raised. Anyway, Black hasn’t been here since I got back and I asked a few people around here about him and no one knew what’d happened, and then finally when my landlady called me the other day I remembered to ask and she said her nephew had called her months ago with word that he’d died, must have been when I was in the US at the start of the New Year. Well, he was an old dog, but I also suspect he was rather neglected by the nephew that was supposedly caring for him. He spent his time chained up on the side of the house, poor fella, and I can tell you that when I came back the plants outside looked like they hadn’t been watered in a long time, which I imagine was another of his responsibilities.