Most people who know me know that I’m a bit of an animal lover. I have a picture of my favourite dog Angus stuck up on my bedroom wall here in Tangalla, and am looking forward to the day when I can have my own dog. You would have thought then that coming to live in a Buddhist country would be ideal for me. Buddhists are known across the world for their humane treatment of animals, and some Buddhist monks famously walk around sweeping the path in front of them to make sure that they don’t tread on insects.
Well, the reality of living in Sri Lanka in terms of animal welfare has been a bit of a mixed bag. In some ways it has met with my preconceptions. People are not all vegetarian here, but very few people eat any meat that is not chicken or fish. This is in large part because of availability (the cows don’t really have any meat on them here, and sheep do not exist here), but also for religious reasons.
I have not seen anyone being actively cruel to animals here. Although people use animals – mainly buffalo – for agricultural activities here, they seem to treat them with kindness and respect, and the abundance of food (and litter) here means that you never see starving animals. Many people do seem to genuinely like some animals, and as you will see below, it is quite common for people to rescue orphaned or abandoned animals.
But the thing I really struggle with, and something that has really shocked me, is the stray dog problem here. There are hundreds of thousands of dogs on the streets here, and more are being born each day. People feed the street dogs but there is absolutely no culture of actively looking after them in any other way. At the same time, it is against the culture here to put an animal out of its misery if it has been hit by a car or is very ill and it is against the culture to neuter or sterilise animals.
The result of this is that in the small towns or villages, there are packs and packs of semi wild dogs that are living on a diet of rotting rice and curry, and catching and passing on to each other every skin condition imaginable. Some of the most tragic and upsetting sights I have seen here have been newly born puppies covered in mange, dogs with such chronic skin conditions that they look as if they have elephant hide for skin, and dogs with limbs bent and sticking out in strange places as indication of their latest encounter with a fast moving vehicle.
Two examples really stand out for me. One was a dog in Tangalla town that had clearly been hit by a car and was paralysed from its lower back down. It was being fed every day and was shuffling about the town on its backside with the paralysed legs jutting out. The vets here don’t put animals to sleep so my only comfort was that this dog was paralysed so didn’t seem to be in pain.
The other occasion happened over a few days, when I noticed a bad smell beside my office entrance. There are quite often bad smells here so I thought nothing of it. After several days it was becoming a bit of a stench. When I left work one afternoon a group of feeding crows highlighted to me that this was in fact a dog – well actually half a dog – that had died here and been left to rot. Yuk.
On the plus side, this lack of animal birth control does mean that you get to spend a lot of time in the company of some very sweet baby animals. It doesn’t make up for the misery of the stray dogs here, but is some compensation. Here are some baby animal pictures and a little video for you to cheer you up after a bit of a depressing post!
This is a little kitten that our Sinhala teacher, Vajira, has recently taken in
This is a baby giant squirrel that fell from a tree and is being looked after by one of Olof's colleagues
This is Gracee, a rescued street dog that some American friends have adoptedThere are lots of baby wild animals too...
A young elephant at the Elephant Orphanage
A three day old green turtle near GalleAnd here is a short clip of one of the six puppies that our host family's dog recently gave birth to...
