The Dog at the Gate
Feeding a stray dog causes ripples in a pond.
Edgar caught my eye as I was walking down the stairs which lead to our front gate and I guilty held up the saucer of dog food I was holding.
At our gate sat a brown dog which has probably never had a name. She’s sweet and also kind of ugly, a brown, lumpy mutt who acts as if she’s been mistreated or neglected for all of her days on earth. She shows no viciousness and seems to have no violence in her, and instead has reacted to an unkind world with fear and submission. But after weeks of consistently treating her with kindness and speaking to her in a soft voice every time I’ve seen her, she had followed me home.
Some months ago I began noticing her on the street, and as with virtually every dog I encounter I smiled at her and gauged if she wanted a pet. She didn’t. In fact, she was incredibly scared, skirting away from me as if every movement I made was prelude to a hurled rock or a vicious kick.
Many street dogs here actually do have homes, and are allowed to wander during the day before they return home at night. I learned this dog also has a home, in a way. But soon after I first met her this particular dog started showing the telltale signs that she was carrying a litter of pups and she was so obviously hungry I began occasionally feeding her our scraps, bringing them far enough away from our house that she wouldn’t start begging at our gate.
Dogs in Oaxaca subsist almost entirely on bits and pieces of food nobody wants. For the average stray, old tortillas, leftover chicken, fragments of chicharrón, and hunks of pork carnitas are the most precious of treats, and this particular dog would devour anything I put in front of her. I didn’t feed her often and there were weeks when I didn’t see her at all, but I tried to make her life just a little bit easier.
Soon she disappeared and a few weeks later was back on the street, clearly having given birth. But rather than react with even greater suspicion, which is what I expected from a dog with puppies to care for, instead she was far sweeter. She recognizes my face and whenever I drive by in our car she runs up to the driver’s side window and starts following the vehicle.
This week, for the first time ever, she walked right up to me and let me pet her. It was a nice moment but fleeting, and after a minute or so I began the short trek home. But after I turned to lock the gate I discovered she had trailed me, silent as a ghost, to the entrance to our house. She sat there quietly, watching me walk away.
Loo quickly appeared and while he normally greets strangers at the gate with a flurry of barks, he met this dog with a quiet wag of his tail. Had she come to the gate before without my realizing it? Did he already know her scent? With her eyes on me I felt compelled to bring her more food.
Edgar told me, not unkindly, that I shouldn’t feed her at the gate, and the problem is twofold. First, the dog would grow dependent on us even though we’re not able to adopt her or even provide much real care. She’d simply end up hanging around the gate, contributing to the large number of dog poops which already plague our road and the vacant properties next door which Edgar cares for as one of his side gigs. But beyond the extra trouble the larger problem is that caring for the dog would likely bring us more directly in contact with La Escuelita, “The Little School.”
We learned about La Escuelita well in advance of moving to San Agustín Etla. The name is colloquial, an ironic nickname for a small, two-story, white-painted concrete house that sits next to a portion of road which abruptly transitions from pavement to a rutted, stoney path unfit for any but the most rugged of vehicles.
La Escuelita is the source of the bottles, cans, and empty bags of chips littering the junction our road connects to. The people from La Escuelita also, in the past, ran an illegal bar which brought drunk drivers to the foot of our road. La Escuelita is the home of the pack of mean dogs which haunts our neighborhood, and it now is also the temporary shelter for the very sweet brown dog which has decided, after many months, that she likes me.
The biggest problem with La Escuelita is that trying to improve the neighborhood signals to them that they can ramp up their bad behavior. If they see people picking up track they simply put more trash in the road, realizing that someone else will solve their problem. When a wooden drain cover on the road broke and I suggested we hire Lalo the ironworker to make a replacement I was told it’s better if we don’t do that, as the drunks from La Escuelita will simply steal the cover and sell it for scrap. So if they learn someone else is feeding the brown dog and taking care of it, they’ll take even less care. By helping we may make things even worse.
My sympathy for the dog makes me wonder if there’s something we can do to more actively address the blight of La Escuelita, but our options are limited. We’ve been told that in the past the police and the ronda haven’t been able to do anything about La Escuelita, and they’re not really committing any actionable crimes, more just being bad, dirty neighbors.
Our friend Ehren told us that in her village, San Andrés Huayapam, when a resident commits an infraction the town broadcasts their name over a loudspeaker, telling everyone in earshot exactly what rule or regulation was broken. It’s an act which Ehren says has on occasion inspired mob violence. It’s hard to picture an upper middle class Mexican town getting whipped into a frenzy by someone not correctly sorting their trash and I can only hope that their semi-organized vigilante justice is reserved for the most severe of petty crimes.
We don’t have anything like that here in San Agustín Etla, which perhaps is for the best. As annoyed as I am by the miscreants on the corner, being a litterer and irresponsible dog owner isn’t quite enough to justify a public beating, although the idea is not entirely unsatisfying. The whole thing is definitely made worse by knowing that in the near future her puppies will also be roaming around our area.
For now I don’t have a solution. Edgar told me there’s a kindhearted elderly man who lives on another, nearby road, who’s been feeding her real dog food. Perhaps once the puppies make an appearance we can find someone local who’d be willing to foster and re-home them. In the meantime I’ll see if I can keep sneaking her food—just well away from the gate to our house.
Aww, she's a sweetheart. I would give her all the chicharrones. I am not very familiar with Mexican dog names but I think that Canela would be a good name for a sweet brown dog.