Bishop Embroiled in Stray Dog Poisonings

A story from Chile (here) highlights the fact that not everybody hates having stray or street dogs around. Many people actually value them. The article covers the protests in reaction to the killing of over 40 strays by poisoning. Such protests are quite normal around the world but in this case there was the twist that the protesters had an obvious target for their anger (even though they did not know who did the actual poisoning), namely, a bishop who had earlier claimed that “God allowed humans to eradicate stray dogs”. The bishop apparently made the comments after he “was attacked by six dogs a few days earlier” and his words are being blamed for the subsequent killings.

An interesting point to come from this story is that not all the poisoned dogs were unowned street dogs; at least five were pets later identified by their owners. Disappointingly, the animal activists are still only blaming abandonment of pets for the high numbers of dogs on the streets when the evidence in this case points in part to pets-on-the-loose. I am convinced that these pets, which are socialised to people, are much more aggressive to humans than dogs born on the streets. My suspicion, therefore, is that the dogs that attacked the bishop, which led to his words condemning stray dogs, which may have led to the poisonings, could well have actually been pet dogs. In which case it would just be another example of street dogs getting blamed for the deeds of pet dogs.

Learn more about the lives and issue of unowned dogs in my e-book ”A Stray View” available from Bangkok Books (readable as .pdf on any computer)