Politically Correct 

Years ago, in a board meeting for a large humane organization, I said something like "The dog in the street knows when he is hungry."  A friend suggested I should say "it" instead of "he."  He said that we wouldn't want to anthropomorphize the dog.  In this same vein, some stuffy scientific types want us to use "that" rather than "who" as a relative pronoun when referring to animals. My friend in the board meeting was suggesting it is unscientific to ascribe human feelings and emotions to an animal by using he, she, his, her or hers.

Well, after a career as an engineer, I'm as scientific as the next guy, but I admit I think of my dogs as little people.  I can tell when they are happy or sad—feel good or bad—and they can tell the same things about me.  Sorry, scientific world, but to me Peachy and Princess are like my kids, and I'll always think of those two girls as "she."

People try to manage the language to press their political points of view.  While we used to say (even though not very grammatically) "everyone has their favorite color," it saved us from assigning a gender to "everyone."  Some years ago the women's liberation proponents were fairly successful in getting us to use "his or her" in place of "their."  And they were pretty effective in doing away with "mankind" instead of using their preferred "humankind."  I'm sympathetic to this idea of equalizing the sexes.  I'll admit I like it lots better than trying to think of Peachy as an "it."

During my lifetime, we've run through a whole progression of words for blacks or African Americans.  Use the wrong word and you're sure to insult or hurt feelings.  I try to be especially sensitive to this stricture, and I hope I always will be.

Animal rightists are not above a little language tinkering.  They recoil at the word, pet, and insist upon "companion animal."  The idea is this elevates the status of the animal.  I've tried over the years to use "companion animal," but the word, pet, keeps working into my writings.  In no way does the awkward, Latinate phrase, companion animal, make my pet seem better.  My pet is something I love, caress, take care of, and defend.  After a very few humans, there is nothing I love more than my pets.

In one of my recent blogs, I talked about a new dog in our house as an "acquisition."  That drew a comment from a good friend, Diana, who pointed out that "acquisition" connotes purchase or ownership and non-human animals deserved better descriptions than that.  Diana, thank you; you're absolutely correct, and my use of the word was insensitive, especially for someone who has had pets his whole life and tries to be an advocate for animals.

For many years now, I've thought of myself as an animal rightist, but I've also come to realize that I don't always speak that language correctly.

Les Inglis

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

Street Dog

Pro-Life
 
I follow Tom Friedman and his op-ed column in the New York Times.  Today he straightened out my thinking on this pro-life vs. pro-choice business.  Basically, he said you can't call yourself "pro-life" if you oppose gun control laws, environmental protection regulations, universal health care, etc.  Being "pro-life" can't start at fertilization and end at birth; it demands a pro-life position on all the issues of our lifetimes.  That shines a new light on a major polemic in the news today.  Picking and choosing some life issues while opposing others trying to make life longer, better, more enjoyable, and healthier is little more than political clap-trap.  And such fragmented thinking wastes our time and deflects our thinking away from issues government can do something about, like the economy, national security, etc.

 

As I mused over this way of looking at life issues, I realized that what we are doing in The Aniplant Project and at Aniplant in Havana is certainly pro-life in a broad sense.  By sterilizing thousands of dogs and cats, I suppose you could say we're interfering with their God-given reproductive lives.  But doesn't that sound silly?  We're really promoting a lifetime of well being, and we're diminishing the animal's chance of future abandonment, hunger, and illness.

 

Yes, and some of the dogs and cats who show up for our sterilization clinics are already pregnant.  In those cases, sterilization becomes abortion, but few people would militate against ending these pregnancies because those pregnancies only make the possibility of animal abandonment and the terrible life that follows more likely.
 
Even those who have a holistic pro-full-life point of view probably would not object to terminating unwanted pregnancies when discovered in our s/n clinics, especially in a place like Cuba where abandonment sometimes follows animal pregnancies.  It's not a callous, heartless attitude that causes pets to be left to live in the streets; it's a generally depressed economy that makes feeding every living thing in Cuba an iffy proposition.  While a family might have enough scraps and leftovers for their cat, they know there won't be enough food for the family, the cat, and a litter of kittens.  Once nursing has ended, it becomes time for separation.  The children cry, and the adults insist, while not showing how terrible they feel.  It's so much better to have Tabby spayed, and that's where Aniplant steps in to help about 5000 families a year sterilize their pets.  The weekly clinics move through Havana's neighborhoods offering sterilizing services on a love offering basis..  Those with no money to pay for it get it for free.

I never really thought about it before, but in a sense, like Tom Friedman I'm a pro-lifer.  I'm working for better, longer, healthier lives for Cuba's companion animals and happier lives for Cuba's pet owning families.  If you want to help, visit our website at https://www.theaniplantproject.org.  All pro-lifers are cordially welcome.
 

Les Inglis

My Menagerie

 

On the walls of the southeast corner of my study hang pictures of the dogs we have had in the 32 years of our marriage.  Only our most recent acquisition, Princess, is yet to join the gallery, but it is inevitable she will.  We've had more cats than dogs, but only Inky, a Maine Coon and one of the first, hangs on my study wall.  To tell the truth, it would be impossible to fit pictures of all the cats into the free wall space left in my study.  From our point of view, it's not a case of too many animals, but rather one of too little wall space. 

I should have known we'd have so many animals—Charlene had 4 cats when I met her.  It was a clear mandate: love me, love my cats.  So we've always had a menagerie in spite of its concomitant work and expense.  When we had a farm, a few of our dogs lived outside, and some of the cats lived in one of our barns.  They all seemed to so well, thanks in no small part to many long trips to the nearest good vet and also to many station wagon loads of pet food (unavailable at any price in our tiny hamlet, Patriot Indiana.) 

But our household dogs and cats are only part of the story.  In Cuba we're connected to another menagerie.  First there was a pack of about ten survivors of Havana's streets living in Nora and her mom's 10th floor apartment. When I first saw them there had to be 10, and since then, their number has ranged from 8 to 12.  Whenever I visit, a knock on Nora's front door ignites a riot of barking that finally abates when I take a seat.  Nora had one little roly-poly curly who wants to snuggle up by me.  They're all delightful, but she's my favorite, though I can never remember her name.

Another part of my Cuban menagerie is 10 to 12 lucky dogs who are permanent residents of Aniplant's slick new headquarters.  There you'll find the protagonists of several of the posts in this blog.  My all-time favorite is Aló Presidente (see my 8/20/10 post to this blog), a curly black Cocker-like leader of the pack who rules the roost from a defended fort between a large box and a wall and under a table.  He couldn't be more my dog if he were here in Florida, sitting next to me as I write this.

Aló has a female counterpart, Bella, also beautiful, long haired and hospitable to visitors.  Bella perhaps belongs to Angela more than she belongs to me, not for any lack of my love, but for the amount of Angela's.  She is a flight attendant from the UK, who was on one of her layovers in  Havana, who spotted Bella, sick and shy near the Plaza de Las Armas, a popular tourist spot.  At home Angela got on her computer, found us, and then Nora found Bella, took her in, treated her pneumonia, and then adopted her into the headquarters pack.  Bella means "beautiful" in Spanish, and the name certainly applies to this dog.  Angela takes every flight she can work to Cuba, and she is a regular visitor to Aniplant's headquarters, always bringing treats and toys for the whole bunch.  Bella's story is told in these posts on 2/26/12.
 
And, although I'll only see most of the other Cuban dogs in my menagerie only once, I can't end this post without a mention of them.  They're the dogs and cats whose owners bring them to Aniplant's clinics for low cost sterilization.  Aniplant's primary activity is spaying and neutering animals.  They do thousands every year with TAP funding the medicines.  When I visit Havana, I always try to visit one of the Saturday clinics that move weekly through the neighborhoods.  There animal lovers and their companion animals wait patiently for their turn in the veterinarian's schedule.  It's a great gift to the animal to be neutered, and each operation is also a gift to the community because massive spay/neuter programs are the only humane way to reduce the population of homeless animals.
 
So, while I usually don't know their names, I pet them, chat a little with their owners, and mentally add each one to my Cuban menagerie

 

Les Inglis

Chinatown 

On my first trip to Cuba I was surprised to learn Havana has a Chinatown.  I wanted to see it, but why the surprise?  After all, the Chinese, as the most populous country in the world, for centuries had sent its people to the far corners of the world.  Thus we have Chinatowns in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco—why not Havana? 

To find Havana's Chinatown you only need to walk around to the back side of the Capitolio, Havana's most famous building.  Then take a few steps past the Cuban Telephone tower where my friend, Dulce, worked many years ago.  (The Cuban Telephone company was the first US owned business to be nationalized after the 1959 Revolution.)  Now you can see a large oriental arch with a pagoda roof at the entrance to Barrio Chino, Cuba's Chinatown.

Once through the arch you see Zanja Street is closed to autos.  It's a narrow pedestrian street stuffed with Chinese restaurants, each with a young man or woman out front trying to show you a menu.  In truth, after several visits, I've never passed completely through the street.  I always got waylaid by the menu hawkers and guided in to a table for lunch.

Of course they all have the traditional Chinese dishes—chop suey, Bhudda's delight, lo mein —but these restaurants also offer rice and bean dishes like my favorite, Moros y Cristianos, which is black beans and white rice.  I'll admit I could probably find something more exotic, but I happen to love beans and rice.  I think after years of practicing vegetarianism, my tastes have become simpler.  Anyway the many types of beans and of rice and the many ways of cooking them offer vegetarians a large variety of dishes.

You can sense that life in Cuba isn't easy for most people, including Chinese restaurateurs.  Coping with shortages is a constant problem.  On one of my Chinatown visits I was given a paper napkin.  As I opened it, I discovered the napkin was actually half a napkin neatly torn into two rectangles along a fold line.  Other periodic shortages force waiters to explain that not every menu item is available every day. 

Service is good or bad depending on your luck in choosing a restaurant.  Most dining is on the second floor so you can't see how crowded the place is while out on the street dealing with the menu hawkers.  One time we were we were worried to see our little table for three was right next to a party of twelve at a long line of tables pushed together.  I knew we were in for slow service, and I was right.

The servings always seem large to me, but in Cuba everyone has a plastic bag to take home leftovers.  Nora calls the plastic bags the Cuban's second stomach.  Not having a bag was no problem for me—for a few coins the restaurant offered styrofaom boxes for leftovers. 

My leftovers were for a couple of dogs I'd seen in a fenced vacant lot used as a parking lot.  These dogs obviously belonged to the lot attendants and ran to me when I stopped by the fence.  A few words is Spanish got me permission to feed them.  I knew they would love even beans as you could see traces of their ribs under their fur.  It turned out there were three dogs, and I divided the food into three portions.  The dogs politely each ate his own portion and didn't bother his canine friends.  How like my own dogs, I thought.  They never bother their housemates when they are eating. 

I made the parking lot stop to feed dogs two times on different trips a year apart.  The lot attendant said he remembered me, but he my just have been being polite. 

I know the dogs remembered me, though. 

Les Inglis