Family Walks miles for Their Pet

In Cuba, the government uses prisoners to range through the ciities in trucks to pick up stray dogs. Those poor souls are caged in a facility 15 miles west of Central Havana for 10 days without food but with water. On the 10th day they get a meal laced with strychnine. Adults and puppies, males and females, they lie on the cement cage floors for up to a few hours enduring an indescribable agony. Finally their bodies are relegated to a dump.

This ridding the streets of strays is done in the name of tourism, as the spectacle of straving animals wandering, fighting, or even languishing is bad for tourism, Cuba’s biggest source of hard currency. It doesn’t matter that the zoonosis center where they are killed is staffed with technicians trained to give IV injections—there is no budget for humane injectable drugs. It doesn’t matter the staff hates their work and would love to use IV injections—there’s no budget for anything but strychnine.

And how do the prisoner crews tell owned dogs from strays? Not very well apparently, as Cuban city dwellers usually have no yards, and their dogs are let out into the street to relieve themselves. Collars and tags are rare, and many family pets have been taken away in these stray sweeps. To atone for this, the families are permitted to go to the center and find their pet and take him home during the 10 day impoundment.

On my first trip to Arroyo, the zoonosis center, I remarked on how far it was from the town center as we rode in a cab. I thought it would be hard for a Cuban family to go to Arroyo to look for their pet, since most people don’t have cars. While we talked with the staff, a man, a woman, and a little boy appeared at the entrance at the top of the hill. After a brief conversation at the gate, they were allowed to walk through the long rows of cages until the boy screamed the name of his dog. Yes, against the odds, their long walk had paid off, and they found their dog. A while later, after filling out forms, they started the trek back home, this time leading the dog on a leash.

Nora Garcia, as President of Aniplant, is negotiating with the government to replace the strychnine with injections. If it happens, the change to humane euthanasia will use humane euthanasia medicines furnished by Aniplant, but it will be worthwhile to the 2000 dogs a year being sacrificed to tourism.

Les Inglis