The other week, I walked out of my place, down the hill, and out of the property. At the entrance, just on my side of the property boundary, I saw one of these red plastic mesh potato bags, and the rear end of a dead rat sticking out. It was … weird. Out of place. Our brains immediately fill in the blanks when we get a glimpse of something, so before I had time to investigate or even look closely, my mind had come up with the explanation. Someone had tossed a bag with a dead rat over the barbed wire fence when passing. It was WEIRD because why would you dispose of your dead rat on someone else’s property, but stranger things have happened.
I investigated by touching the dead rat with my shoe and pushing the potatoe bag off. That’s when I recognized what I was actually looking at: it was a tiny puppy, no more than a week old. And it wasn’t dead. The moment I touched him with my shoe, he started whining. That moment, my stomach dropped. Do you know that visceral feeling sick to your stomach that comes out of nowhere? The psychosomatic kind? I feel it rarely and almost always in situations like this, where I suddenly become aware of something horrifying about human nature and it strikes out of nowhere.
It’s because all the things I know about puppy developement, rural areas and what I saw right in front of me came together without needing any more processing time, and I knew: This puppy had been thrown over the fence at an age where he was not able to survive on his own, move very far, ingest solid food or regulate his body temperature. He had been left in a place where it was equally likely nobody would find him before he froze or starved to death or died of dehydration than it was that somebody would find him. And if somebody did find him, it would be very difficult to keep him alive until he was old enough to eat solid food because you need puppy formula and a way to keep the puppy warm and a lot of time to keep feeding him and activate his bowel movement and clean him …
I first typed this text on a plane, and I’m retrospectively editing it. I used “it” as a pronound for the puppy and just changed it to “he.” When does an “it” become a “they,” a “he” or a “she”? It’s up to the speaker, I suppose. Right now, I am choosing to make the puppy a him. And that editing choice is going to impact the way you feel as you’re reading this post. The moment someone becomes anything other than a neutral pronoun, we feel less distant. At least I do when I speak English. Back to our puppy story.
My own ethics are never AS crystal clear to me in theory as they are in a practical situation where I simply KNOW. It was the cruelty that struck me. I know about dogs procreating freely in rural areas. I partially grew up on my grandparents’ farm where the same thing happened with cats. My grandparents, in the 80ies and early 90ies in rural Austria, also didn’t spay or neuter their animals. It probably seemed like a grotesquely complicated, time-consuming, stressful and potentially expensive thing to do that maybe city people talked about. They hadn’t acquired the cats on purpose, the cats just moved in, as cats do when there are barns with mice. It was fine for some of them to live there, but my grandparents didn’t want hundreds of cats, so anytime my grandfather found a litter of kittens hidden in the hay, he would quickly and painlessly end their lives.
My cousins and I loved finding kittens and we’d never tell my grandfather and sometimes even hide them because we wanted to keep them around. At the same time, it was very practical and pragmatic; it wasn’t traumatizing to know what he did. It was what small-scale farmers did at the time. It was fast, painless, pragmatic, and kind. He’d cup them gently in his hands. There was no suffering. We got that even when we were kids.
So as I stood there, and it had just started drizzling, and right as the other three puppies started whining in response to the first one … the other three had made it out of the potatoe bag and dug into the grass and the blackberry underbrush … So all of that, together, gave me that feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t the fact that someone didn’t want the puppies. It was that a fellow human being had chosen to not end the suffering or ensure their survival.
So I saw my ethics around this topic clearly, in this moment, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about them as clearly before this experience: I don’t have an ethical issue with the fact that dogs in rural communities multiply and puppies are not necessarily wanted, and may be culled. I’m not on a moral high horse in this respect. I grew up with its kitten equivalent, and I understand it.
It’s also not the giving away of unwanted little animals. You could take them to someone who’d raise them. You could leave them with the mother dog until they are a few weeks older and able to eat solid food, and then you could take them somewhere near a restaurant or garbage dump where they stand a chance of finding food. You could do what my grandfather used to do and quickly end their life before suffering has a chance to begin.
What shocked me is what ACTUALLY happened: leaving puppies too young to survive to potentially die of dehydration, starve or freeze.
I only briefly feel the visceral sick-to-my-stomach thing. 5 seconds maybe? Then I move into solution mode. I got a cardboard box for the puppy in the bag and two more I saw. I heard a fourth one I couldn’t find in the blackberry brush. Because it had started raining, I took the box with the first three up to my place and came back to search for the fourth one, digging with my bare hands into the thorny blackberries until I found her.
I don’t know if there as a fifth puppy. I didn’t hear or see another one. It was raining. The fourth one was the last one I picked up.
I have no kitchen and no running water, no working car and no way to heat anything. It gets quite cold at night. Plus I had to leave the country in 2 weeks. Me trying to raise these puppies was unlikely to be successful given the current circumstances.
I reached out to my neighbor to ask where I could take a litter of tiny abandoned puppies. They said they didn’t know. So I waited for the rain to die down, and then carried my cardboard box the two kilometers to the highway restaurant. I planned to ask the folks working there.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. What is really interesting here, and I reflected on this hours later, was that the moment I picked up the first puppy, the litter became MY responsibility. No questions asked; they just WERE my responsibility and you could not have convinced me otherwise. As long as I didn’t touch them, I might even have been able to convince myself that I didn’t look closely enough and it probably was a dead rat. But the moment I picked up that first one, I had crossed an invisible line in the sand and there was no going back. The responsibility had been transferred to me. As long as they were lying in the grass quietly and I didn’t know they were there, it’s like the in-between area of a land border between Latin American countries. If you cross by land, you exit one country and get your passport stamped, and then you walk for a bit through a zone that either isn’t part of either country or at least, it’s unclear what country it belongs to, and then you get your passport stamped again at the tiny immigration booth on the other side, entering the neighboring country. That’s what you did 15 years ago anyways; I haven’t crossed land borders in a while.
When whoever found the puppies and put them into the potato bag and maybe took their motorcycle, and until the bag sailed through the air across the barbed wire fence, the puppies were this person’s responsibility. Then, they landed in no man’s land. And when I picked up the first one who knows how many hours later, they had entered the next country over. They had entered my responsibility. And there was no going back.
As soon as I had scooped them up, I knew very clearly what my options were. There were only two: because of my personal circumstances, I couldn’t raise them myself. Trying to wouldn’t be fair to the puppies; it wouldn’t give them their best shot at survival. My two options were: A, find a place where they would be raised by someone who knew what they were doing. Or B, end their suffering quickly. Given how cold they were, they were already suffering.
I looked at both options and picked A. Not for sentimental reasons. Both are, in my book, morally acceptable options. I picked A because … well, I love dogs, so of course that was my first choice. I wasn’t aware how hard it would be to find someone for them.
The restaurant at the highway was packed when I got there. I talked to one of the girls whose job it is to run back and forth between the kitchen and the counter with plates of food. You always get 3 different kinds of starch at this restaurant: rice, potatoes and a surprise carbohidrate. The pasta is my favorite. Meat of some sort and a little bit of salad. I interrupted her flow, told her I had found abandoned tiny puppies, opened my cardboard box for her to see and asked if she knew who to contact. She said she didn’t, but would ask the cook. The cook was in the area behind the counter, and while I couldn’t hear their conversations over the sounds of dishes and customers and sizzling in the background and the blasting TV that always plays Caracol News, I saw that the cook gesture towards her right as she shook her head and the younger girl’s eyes getting bigger. She returned to me and told me to just put the box outside.
I asked why; did they know someone who could come for the puppies or …? “We don’t know,” she said. I was confused. Why would I put the box outside and leave it there if there was no solution? I asked again, did they know of someone I could call? Or should I take them to the vet myself? If they knew of anyone, that would be my preference. Because I had no car and would have to take a bus with an unwieldy cardboard box. But I would of course go. I just needed to know which one it was; what was the plan if I “put them outside”? The girl went back to the cook, and then told me the cook knew someone; they’d call once the restaurant calmed down. I said, okay, great, I’ll wait. I found a table in a corner and kept the puppy box next to me; it was cold and windy and drizzling outside; no way would I place them there; they were already cold enough. Until I had handed the responsibility over to the next person, I wasn’t leaving their side. Outside the restaurant was no man’s land, and that’s not where I leave puppies.
A cyclist sat down next to me. We started talking and a little ways into the conversation, I told him the puppy story and opened the box. The puppies were not whining anymore but piled up in a corner of the box; their bodies still cold. He took out one after the other; his hands were hot after riding all the way from Bogotá and he wanted to warm them up. He was very gentle with them, went back and forth between utter kindness and empathy and problem solving mode, called a friend who was a vet who confirmed what I had told him: no, we couldn’t feed them anything; puppies need formula, not cow’s milk, and we’d make things worse, not better. We hung out for a while, warming the puppies in our hands, moving the box around the table anytime a warm and sunny spot appeared through the clouds. Customer after customer filed out and made the kind of face people make when they see a baby creature of any kind. The cyclist started trying to give them away in an attempt to help me and them, and I stopped him. These puppies were my responsibility; I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them to a random person at a reststop restaurant who’d impulse-take home a puppy too small to survive without proper care.
The place emptied out and the cook and the girl still hadn’t come back. My image of my fellow humans is generally positive, but that entire conversation had not only felt understandably rushed – a lot was going on in the restaurant – but also insincere. And as time kept passing, the puppies spent more and more time away from warmth and food and their suffering continued. Plus the later it got, the less likely it was I’d get to a vet before they closed if I had to.
I asked the cyclist if he’d mind investigating for me. I had a feeling no one was getting called. And indeed, they admitted to the cyclist they were not planning on calling anyone. Lo dijeron para salir del paso, he said, shaking his head. They just said it to get rid of you. I told the girl at the counter that the lie sucked, took my cardboard box and found a bus to town. I found the closest vet on Google Maps and walked there. They told me, no way, they could not take abandoned animals. I kept pressing and they gave me a phone number of someone who supposedly had some sort of rehoming organization. I reached out to this person, still at the vet’s office, and they told me, no way, they already had way too many animals and I should tell the vet to stop giving out their fucking phone number. Next, the vet sent me to a pet store around the corner. The pet store sent me to a different vet. When the second vet also said they couldn’t take the puppies, I asked if we could, if they didn’t know of anyone else, euthanize them. I felt like I had been prolonging their suffering for hours by now, and it felt shitty. They were getting weaker and colder and hungrier by the minute, and it was not okay. The vet said, nope, these puppies aren’t sick, so I can’t euthanize them either. Since they also couldn’t get rid of ME, they sent me to some sort of agricultural government office. This was the least likely place I expected would be able to help me … but since I couldn’t think of anything else, I went. And while this office clearly wasn’t set up to receive animals, two of the people working there took pity on the puppies or my desperation and said they’d do everything possible to sacarlos adelante. They’d do everything they could to keep them alive. We found the warmest spot in the office and they headed out before me to find formula. They knew how to raise puppies, and they clearly wanted to help. I trusted them. And I finally made my way home.
It was an adventure of several hours. I’m glad the puppies are in good hands … but wow, did I not expect things to take this long! With every passing minute, I felt like I was letting them down: they either needed to be in a warm place and get fed already, or I should have ended their life quickly and painlessly when I first found them. The more time passed, the more they suffered, and THAT is what I’m not okay with. I hope those four will go on to have wild and precious lives.
I could use the puppy story as a metaphor for other things in my life. It’s just far enough removed from human-human interactions that I could interpret it in any way I want as I mapped it onto something else; something different. It would feel like cheating though. I don’t think my morals about these puppies have a metaphorical meaning at all. They just mean that I have strong feelings about the suffering of living beings. I imagine most of us do … but what we define as suffering, or a being capable of it, most certainly differs depending on who we are.
For an audio version of this blog post, check out today’s podcast episode.