We're getting ready to move over to Tim's house on the east side, and I am going to miss my neighborhood, believe it or not. It's true that we are practically the only white, non-Spanish-speaking people in my whole neighborhood (aside from my neighbors, Liz and Peter, who are barrio settlers like me -- they drive a Prius and ride their bikes most of the time, and probably eat organic food and harvest rain water too), but I like it that way. I like salsa music, gigantic packs of little kids playing in the streets, the babble of Spanish coming from the houses all around me, the smells of Mexican food from front-yard cookouts, and all of that. I appreciate Tucson for being a bi-cultural city, and I like living somewhere that feels sort of like Mexico only the water is clean and the electricity always works. But there is one difference that I really find it hard to get used to, and that is the attitude toward dog ownership.
For starters, virtually every house in the neighborhood has at least one dog, and most houses have more than one. The dogs live outside -- either that, or they just happen to be outside every single time I walk or drive through the neighborhood. They are behind fences at some houses, but at other houses, they are free as birds. They can wander the streets in packs, chase bikes, run up to my dogs on walks and sniff them, kill stray cats, fight with coyotes, sleep in the middle of the road, or sit in their driveways growling at anyone who passes. As far as breeds, it's an even mix between pit bull types, generic shepherd types, and Chihuahua types. They don't wear collars and the males are never neutered. There tends to be a high turnover of dogs in the neighborhood -- my next door neighbors have lost two dogs and acquired two more in just over a year.
Every time I weed my front yard, I close the driveway gate and let my dogs out to run around in the front yard. They draw neighborhood kids like magnets. My dogs clearly stand out in the neighborhood for being purebred, well-groomed, trained (any time I work with Sunny in the front yard or on the sidewalk, I instantly acquire an audience of not only kids, but their parents), and confined. Last summer I had no fewer than three different kids ask me, wide-eyed and perplexed, why my dogs were behind a fence. They literally did not understand why my dogs weren't out running with the pack. I always just give the short answer that I'm afraid my dogs will run away, which usually elicits a sympathetic reply and a story of how one of THEIR dogs ran away once. (I wonder if it really did or if it was eaten by coyotes, or became roadkill out on Mission Road.)
This weekend I was out weeding and had the dogs out, and, sure enough, I soon had an audience of two kids hanging on my fence, with two more out on the street too shy to come close but too curious to go home. Jerrianne, who is ten, and her cousin Jelissa, who is seven, asked if they could come play with the dogs, and I said yes, so they came in and chased the dogs around for a while until they got tired of being unable to get the ball away from Sunny and Hilda. Then they came and sat next to me and filled me in on subjects like quinceneareas, annual trips to Mazatlan to visit family, pregnant older sisters, fathers in jail, the appeal of Justin Bieber, and other interesting things before moving on to the subject of dogs.
Jelissa asked me if I let my dogs have puppies. I said no. Jerrianne said her dog had puppies once. She said her dog was a French poodle and they had to give the puppies away. Then she said that her mother said that if the dog had puppies again, she was going to have to put her to sleep. Jerrianne looked very sad when she said this. She said, "I'm going to be so sad when that happens. That dog is like my best friend." I was a little shocked. "Does your mother know that she can be fixed so she can't have puppies?" I asked her. Jerrianne answered, "Oh yeah, she knows, but she doesn't want to do that." I persisted. "There's a place where she can do it for cheap," I said, and was all ready to give her the number for Animal Birth Control, but Jerrianne said, "No, she won't. I just hope my dog won't have puppies again." Yeah, an unplanned dog pregnancy is really unlikely to happen again when the dog is not spayed and is allowed to run loose. While I was still reeling from that, Jelissa started in. "Are your dogs mean?" she asked me.
"No, they're nice," I said. "What about yours?"
"Mine is mean," she said. "He doesn't like little dogs."
"Oh no?" I said. "What does he do with them?"
"He kills them," she said nonchalantly. "Did you know that dog next door?" She pointed at my next door neighbor's house. I nodded. It was a nasty little red dog, maybe a mixed-breed Chihuahua or miniature pinscher, something like that. I hated that little dog, who liked to bark hysterically at me whenever I came home and at my dogs whenever I let them out in the back yard. I had fantasies about drop-kicking that dog into next week, but never managed to realize them because it was too fast. At any threatening move from me, it would run back to the safety of its yard and bark at me from there. "My dog killed him," she said. "He bit his legs and there was blood all over and then he died." She was very matter-of-fact and not upset at all.
"WHICH dog is yours?" I asked, and she pointed down the street at the dog, lying in her driveway. It's a big yellowish-colored dog that looks like a shepherd-chow mix or something like that. I've seen that dog walking around since I moved in, but always thought it was old and stiff and uninterested in what goes on in the neighborhood. It's never given my dogs more than a cursory glance. I guess that since they are big they aren't interesting.
It's hard to imagine people who truly believe it's better to kill a dog than to spay it. Then again, I live in a neighborhood where men hang sets of metal testicles on their trucks as a symbol of what -- masculinity? -- so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that they don't believe in spaying or neutering either. As much as I appreciate my neighborhood, I admit to being relieved that I am moving somewhere where dogs are house dogs and always either on leash or behind a fence, and where I can take the dogs for a walk without setting off a storm of hysterical barking at every house I pass.
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