Dogs

Just when I settle in and think I will be accustomed to things here, something happens to wake my ass up. Take last night (technically this morning) for example. I had gone to bed late because of a baseball game that was being played on TV which it seemed everyone in my community was watching at my neighbors house. At about 4am I woke up to the unmistakably terrible noise that is called Tipico music here being blared what seemed to be directly into my house. As I woke up screaming expletives about the shittyness that is my housing location, I tried to convince myself that everything would be fine and I just needed to get used to the sound and fall back asleep. 15 minutes later I climbed down from my loft and walked over to my neighbors house to investigate how this could have happened. I first I thought that maybe my first host brother had broke in and turned the music up as loud as possible and then leave or fall asleep somehow like he used to do when I lived there. That wasn't the case.

I creeped around the house slowly realizing that Constantino, my neighbor, was sleeping. I could barely here his snoring over the terrible music. Confused and still half asleep I tried shining my light into the window which did nothing but wake up the dogs. After standing in the dead of night for another 5 minutes I just decided to go for it and start knocking on the part of the house that I knew they slept at while calling their names. It worked and Constantino woke up and I explained that I couldn't sleep because of his noise I started to find relief. An hour later I went to sleep. An hour after that I was woken up by my phone.

Soon after I got up and started to wash my dishes from the night before, I heard a dog barking and crying loudly. This is a pretty normal event as the dogs here fight each other all the time inflict pain, but this sounded different and somehow worse. I looked over the corner of my house to find Constantino holding his dog by the neck while beating it with a belt over and over. People walked by and carried on with their days as nothing out of the usual was happening. This incident came a day after I went to Solomon's house to find that most of his dogs were gone along with his two horses. I soon found out that his dog of 8 years had died after giving birth to her last litter of puppies. As I looked for a reaction after he explained this to me I only found his wife making fun of it and laughing. He had given the litter away along with another dog and both horses because as he put it “dogs don't last long here because they get sick and the yard wasn't big enough for a horse”. This made sense and I realized that Solomon is probably one of the more sympathetic people in the community. That said, I don't think I will ever get treating other animals the way that they do but before we all get high and mighty, we do the exact same thing every day without even knowing it. Pigs are said to be smarter than dogs and we torture and kill them every day. It's just that we don't see it, so it doesn't really exist.

Another note that no one probably cares about: It seems that the dog that my ex girlfriend and I had has now gone to her sister who will take care of him. In the little communication that I've had with them both it seems that I might be able to get him back when I get back. I sure do miss that little booger and I can't help but day dream about me and him hitting the open country in a jeep. Me rocking out to Rage Against the Machine and Kuma (that's his name) rocking his freshly cut mohawk hanging his tongue out in the wind. A Pomeranian never looked so good in my mind.