Gaining a Home and Family

 

Here's an often repeated scenario:

A tourist plans to spend a few days in Havana.  Perhaps she is part of a people-to-people tour, an educational tour about dance or music or art.  She checks in at Havana's Hotel Inglaterra right in the center of Central Havana and walking distance from lots of interesting places to see—the Capitolio, art museums, the ballet, Chinatown, and so on.

Every time she walks out of the hotel, she enters Central Park and makes her way through a surprising number of Cubans passing time in the park.  Many are all too ready to chat her up and try their soft swindles for money on her, but she avoids them.

From her first day in Cuba she has seen an inordinate number of dogs in public places—many in the park or near the hotel.  Mostly they aren't running or walking.  Like the human park goers, they are stationary—passing time.  One particular dog catches her eye each time she leaves or returns to the hotel.  It's a little dog, smaller than the US average like most Cuban dogs are.  It's none too heavy; in fact outlines of his ribs show through his fur.  Curled up near the base of one of the hotel's columns, she worries about how the little dog can live.  She asks a bellman about the dog, and he tells her it's a homeless dog like so many in Cuba.  She'd like to help it if she could, but doesn't know how.  She's leaving in a couple of days.  She snaps a few photos and brings him something to eat.

She gets back home and browses the Internet looking for a way to help the dog.  She finds The Aniplant Project website.  With the aid of her photos, Nora Garcia of Aniplant in Havana sets out to find the dog.

That's the scenario, and it happens a few times every year.  It sets into motion a search, which if successful leads to vet care, fostering, and adoption or, less frequently, rehoming to the US or Canada.

While Aniplant is an animal protection organization, it cannot address the individual needs of all of Havana's homeless pets, and it does not operate a homeless shelter for pets.  Still, they respond to those tourist inquiries about individual dogs, especially if they are sick or injured.  Instead, they endeavor to address Havana's homeless animal overpopulation with regular, massive, low-cost spay-neuter campaigns.  5000 such neutering operations were performed last year.

Animal advocates have long believed that sort of campaign is the only effective humane way to reduce populations of street animals.  But the rescued street dogs that are adopted or rehomed to other countries make heartwarming stories, and indeed we have told several of them in these blogs.

How do you find a stray dog in a city of 2 million people, perhaps only starting with a picture and a sighting one or two weeks old?  Well it isn't easy, but it can be and is being done.

Posting the pictures is an obvious start in the search.  The location of the tourist's sighting is a starting point, and you don't have to cover a wide area.  These dogs stick to tourist areas like parks, hotels, and museums.  That is because tourists are a much better source of food than native Cubans.  As a result of pervasive food scarcity, natives don't waste food.  On the rare times they go to restaurants, they bag the leftovers and bring them home.  They don't buy lots of street snacks, but tourists do, and like here at home they often discard part of them.  Homeless animals rapidly find and consume any edible discards.  They don't readily move away from tourist areas, which become their homes.

So, a couple of blocks in each direction is as far as you have to go with pictures or posters,  Also the park sitters are really a quite stable group.  It tends to be the same people day after day.  Nora finds the regulars and chats with them about the dog she is looking for.  Cubans are easy to talk with and are as likely to start the conversation as Nora is.  Also in my experience, Cubans are often animal lovers, so they're motivated to help find the dog in question.  Pablo, a recent rescue, was found after talking with a small group of young men who are regulars at the park.  They liked the dog, played with him, and had even given him a name—Bucanero, the Spanish word for pirate and also a popular brand of Cuban beer.

Those young men were protective of Pablo (or Bucanero).  They wanted to know what Nora was going to do with the dog.  She convinced them that Pablo was destined for a good home in the US.  These guys, Pablo's de facto owners, happily gave their consent to Nora's taking the dog.  Of course it didn't hurt that Nora is a public figure in Havana.  Her Saturday radio show and a weekly television appearance during which she gives advice about good treatment of animals make her easily recognized.

So, even though Aniplant is not in the rescuing, business, it still sometimes finds itself searching, vetting, adopting and rehoming animals.

In the past we've told the stories of Pablo, Bella, Cuba and other dogs who are happy to have been extracted from homelessness and delivered to a better life.

Les Inglis