The dog is dead

And, now that she is dead, I can actually admit what everybody has known all along: namely, that she was in fact my dog, not "my landlord's", as I kept calling her (as if that would make it so).

So, the city puts out poison occasionally, to "control" the stray dog and cat populations when they start causing problems. (Spaying and neutering is too costly for most families to do.)

And apparently, there have been a lot of problems in the neighborhood lately because of all the strays. I imagine that the street-food vendors were being overrun. I imagine that there were probably a bunch of females in heat, too (or, in "jealousy", as that term translates back from Spanish), and that the nights were loud and full of barking and howling dogs as the males fought over the females, and as the females fought off the males. I imagine that, as usual, the city didn't let anybody know that they were putting out the poison, and so quietly placed hunks of meat stuffed with d-CON around town under the cover of night, then waited for the hungry dogs to excitedly devour the food, and then came back 12 hours later in a truck to pick up all the corpses with shovels.

I imagine that Lila-Gitana-Duquesa-LittleDog probably thought that she had hit paydirt when she found whatever tasty morsel that she did. Not that she didn't get enough food at home, but since she had been literally starving when I found her, she had some pretty hard-to-break scavenging habits. I imagine she probably pounced on the poisoned meat and made a little gremlin sound or two, as if to say "I gotcha!".

Nobody knows how she got a hold of it, either. She had been down at the farm in the jungle with the landlady for the 3 days prior, and basically did nothing but sleep once they got back to town (heckling cows and chasing monkeys and keeping up with the farm dogs can be hard work, you know). Somehow, though, she must've gotten out, and by the time one of the tenants found her on the patio, it was waaaay too late to save her. Basically, once any symptoms of being poisoned show up, there's nothing you can do.

Oh, and it gets better. ALL the dogs in the neighborhood were killed. The neighbor across the street's mama dog and her 5 puppies? Dead. The other neighbor around the corner's wolfhound? Also dead. Still another neighbor's bull terrier and one of her (furry adorable collie-mix) puppies? Ditto.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that the town doesn't have the money or infrastructure in place to run a shelter, and that they view the poisoning as the "least bad" way to deal with the stray issue. (Let's face it, otherwise, we'd all be getting attacked by packs of wild dogs every time we left the house.) BUT, COME ON! It does not seem to be too much to ask, that they maybe, possibly, might want to think about letting people know beforehand, so that they can make sure to keep a really close eye on their pets. It's not like the word will spread to the strays, who will in turn not eat the meat. They could just make a simple announcement on the radio in the morning, when almost every household has the local news tuned in. Or, put up fliers beforehand. Copies cost almost nothing (and jeez, I would even pay for it, if needs be). It would just be really frikking EASY, in other words, to make sure that a bunch of people's pets don't die.

Anyhow, it seems that I have my work cut out for me when I get back there (yes, I am still in the U.P.), and that it will include a visit to the commissioner's office.

I am pissed. But mostly just sad.