A walk home at night yields a cornucopia of fauna – lizards scuttle into the bushes before you, a yellow snail about four inches long was at our front gate the other night, fireflies flashed around the garden last night like drunken shooting stars, and the local dogs are always willing to announce to the entire neighbourhood that you’re back home. One night recently two of them charged at us, growling, so all we could see approaching us from the darkness was a mass of teeth and eyes. They sidestepped us at the last minute and got into a fight of their own, but I have since been advised that, when approached by an aggressive dog, the trick is to bend down to pick up a stone. Simply bending down is usually enough to send them running.
The dogs in the house opposite are nasty swines that start fights with any other dog that walks past. I remarked on this the other morning when Hannah asked me if I had heard the noise earlier in the day. No, I said, I think I recalled a lot of yelping at one point but I thought that was during the night, another dogfight. It turns out that the neighbours had been sufficiently concerned about their aggressive dogs to call someone round who lightly sedated them, leaving them staggering around, before pinning them to the floor and cutting off their canine teeth. Never did it occur to them to get the dogs castrated.
Hannah has visited the man who runs horse-and-carriage rides around Angkor Wat, to check on the health of his horses – he is in danger of going out of business because no tourist in their right mind wants to get into a carriage that is pulled by one of these pathetic, underweight, whipmarked creatures. He is doing his best to pay more attention to their health, but it has taken imminent ruin to bring this about.
People here for the most part aren’t deliberately cruel to animals – they have a very different relationship with them to most Westerners, one based upon the animal’s usefulness as a tool or a commodity, though more people are starting to keep dogs and cats as pets. There are only about three non-Khmer veterinarians in the whole country – this according to the one who works in Siem Reap. While in the West we have the luxury of being able to say that people’s treatment of animals is an indicator of their level of compassion towards humans, here, people’s treatment of animals is an indicator that many hardly know enough about maintaining their own health, let alone that of their animals.
The landlady showed us what we have in our back garden the other day. A crocodile farm with around a hundred and fifty crocodiles of all sizes. Don’t go sleepwalking here.
The attitudes towards domestic and working animals that you describe are prevalent all over the world, not just in Cambodia. The WSPA says, “Globally there are some 600 million dogs, and a similar number of cats, of which an estimated 80% are stray or unwanted.” The Brooke tries to provide veterinary help and education for owners of horses, donkeys and mules, who are often worked to death, starved and dehydrated. Like the situation in Cambodia you’ve told me about, the death of so many animals is often regarded as acceptable – “This many usually die”. When so many people are suffering worldwide, animal charities that work overseas don’t attract as much attention, which is odd when you consider that animal charities in the UK, like the RSPCA, are often better off than ones that help people.
Here endeth the animal welfare lesson for today.
150 crocodiles! They’ll be better off dead.