If Dogs Run Free
I only like homeless street mutts
In Cairo I took a picture of a dirty street dog curled up underneath a car and posted it on Instagram. A friend sort of flagged it. Watch out, he said, that might make dog lovers mad! As if I had posted a picture of cruelty to animals or a suffering puppy. But I thought it was cute. The dog was getting some shade. I liked seeing this slender mutt in its natural habitat, and what’s more, I was surprised and even proud of myself that I liked it. I had never in my life posted, shared, or possibly even taken a picture of a dog before, even though my family had owned a golden retriever for nearly 15 years. I just hadn’t gotten it. Dogs left me cold. I wished them well, I really did, but I didn’t have any idea how to behave with them and didn’t see why I should have to learn. When I tried, I felt fake, like a politician pretending to like his constituents. “Hey there, boy…” I’d say unconvincingly, sort of chucking it under the chin. The dog would look at me with a confused expression. Who was this person, and why was he behaving strangely? With dog owners it would go just as badly. “Isn’t it funny,” I would say, “how the different breeds all really have their own personalities!” At which the dog owner would look up from his phone to eye me with suspicion and hostility, as if I’d just remarked on how interesting it was that children were smaller than adults.
I wisely stopped pretending to care about dogs, which meant that everyone assumed I hated them or was afraid of them. In New York, no one can believe you’re actually indifferent to their pet. When I lived in Germany, I was warned (unnecessarily) that in that country it’s considered rude to pet a stranger’s dog without asking. In New York it’s the opposite: if someone’s dog is within petting range or paying you any attention, it’s expected that you coo over it a little, and if you don’t, the owner will showily pull the dog away from you and apologize while at the same time casting a judgmental glance your way. Oh fuck off! I would think. I don’t have an opinion about your dog. It’s fine. Your dog is fine. I smiled benevolently at it – isn’t that enough?
Well, maybe it isn’t. Dogs aren’t cats. Cats can be street cats or house cats, but these exist on a continuum, street cats will sometimes rub themselves against your leg and purr and house cats will sometimes slash your face and run away. But pet dogs have crossed some line and renounced their animal citizenship. They’ve given up their independence, through – love, really, through their love for a specific human being and this human’s home and family. This is their Fall. They’ve given up everything for us, they’re in love with us, they’d die for us. We cut their testicles off and snip their ovaries out and they still love us, they love us more than ever. We’ve marked them and taken them under our protection and now have an obligation to love and command them. And I thought I could just smile politely. Had I no honor? Really I wasn’t indifferent to dogs at all: I avoided them because I had a bad conscience.
So how nice to discover there were places where this compact had not been struck and dogs and I could meet as equals. The dogs in Cairo were free to maul me to death and fight over my carcass. Instead it was clear that they were, in a vague way, well-disposed towards me. When I walked by, they would perk up and look at me with curiosity. Sometimes one might trot a little closer to investigate and then turn around and trot back when it was clear I wasn’t going to give him any food. Most of the time they just went about their own business: eating out of garbage piles (which they shared amicably with cats), sleeping in the dust, barking at random, or just standing around with erections. Those livid pink dog dicks – the obscene ridiculousness of them – really underscored the fact that these dogs weren’t like the ones at home. These were animals – not pets, not children, not accessories, but filthy city animals – and so it was a pleasant shock when they would look at me intelligently, and with their faces, their tails, their entire bearing, acknowledge some fraternity with me. They were partly human, but only partly. What charm! Their hunched posture, their sheepish, untrustworthy expressions, their laziness (so unlike dogs in New York, which when you see them are always straining at the leash or tearing around the park). And also their pointy-eared alertness, their enthusiasm, their comic self-seriousness. Of course I liked dogs: there’d have to be something wrong with you not to.
For the week I was in Cairo, the street dogs were a benevolent presence, good spirits. At the pyramids, I watched the small figures of yellow dogs trotting along the enormous stone blocks 40 or 50 feet above the crowds. The atmosphere at this ancient site was less than romantic: hawkers selling trinkets or camel rides, tourists posing for pictures, all seemed to be, in their small way, doing their best to desecrate these monuments. But the dogs in their small way were honoring them. I looked up with relief at the strays sunning themselves on the ancient stones and thought, they get it.
*
The temples in the old city of Patan, in Kathmandu, are a part of ordinary life: kids in school uniforms hang out on them in the afternoon, dangling their feet and eating popsicles. People don’t really stand on ceremony with these monuments, but still it’s funny to see the dogs sleeping on the temple steps, occasionally lifting their head to survey the square or hopping up to bark at some intruder. Kathmandu is a dog town. In the old cities especially it’s impossible to imagine the streets without them. You share the street with them like other pedestrians. There’s something slightly mellow about the city’s stray dogs1, just as there’s something basically friendly and even-tempered about its busy street life. During the day the dogs lounge in front of shops (sprawled on their sides like fish), sleep in the sun in temple squares, trot along the sidewalk on unknown errands. At night they take over the streets. Kathmandu streets after dark are not especially dangerous, and this goes also for the dogs hanging out in them, but still you can’t help feeling uneasy as you walk home at night down narrow streets, lit harshly by bare bulbs, empty except for dogs. You might turn a corner and come upon half a dozen of them in some sort of obscure conclave, standing or lying down at odd angles to each other. They let you pass but they don’t get out of your way. What they’re doing is uncertain, but what’s clear is that their daytime part-partnership with human beings, where they lounged in shop entrances and might trot behind you for a minute hoping for scraps, is over, and they are now engaged in independent dog business. They look at you and then look away.
I don’t know what their business is, but of course it involves a lot of barking. Every night we went to sleep listening to it. Usually it was just one dog at a time, sometimes with others answering it. It was impossible to tell what the occasion for the barking was or whether it was the same dog each time or even what direction it was coming from. Lusty, untiring barks. Like a machine, like an athlete in his prime. In America it would have driven me crazy because somebody would have been responsible for that barking dog and after five minutes I would have considered myself in a feud with him. But here the dogs were free, and no one was responsible for them. What the hell were they doing out there? At night the empty streets looked like stage sets, and I pictured the strays loping through them (they looked taller at night, their bodies elongated), those gangs of Montagues and Capulets trotting out to insult each other in dog iambics. We rarely went out late while we were visiting and so it was possible to imagine the city streets after midnight populated by nothing but dogs. It was adorable, this spoof version of human traffic, this comedy that played out every night. The barking became woven into my dreams and in moments of semi-consciousness I would fleetingly be under the impression that I understood it. “Do you bit your thumb at me, sir?” I’d chuckle and turn over. Doggos, I thought. Puppers...
My wife, who grew up partly in this neighborhood, denies this, and is still wary of Patan street dogs, ever since a pack of them almost knocked her down on her way to school as they came tearing around a corner, barking savagely, in pursuit of another dog who’d trespassed on their territory.