Elska- The first meeting

A week ago to this day, my husband and I went on our usual Sunday loaf. Having recently being diagnosed with a sluggish thyroid, I had done the research and found out that eggs were a good source of iodine and had decided to add a rooster to our brood of hens, in order to increase our number of chickens. Our quest for the rooster led us to a pet shop on Madiwela Road, where every kind of chicken imaginable were available for sale. The birds looked good, their feathers glossy and slick, but amongst the caw and cackle of a hundred birds there I saw three little dogs in a tiny cage.

The last time my husband and I had gone in search of guinea fowls we had ended up in a pet shop not unlike this one, and there too I had witnessed the debilitating sadness of the plight of these pet shop dogs. They are housed in the smallest of enclosures and never have any water. They sleep in their own swill, and often have the rounded, distended stomach that is characteristic of worms. The cages are often stacked, where one dog's excrement falls upon the head of another. But this particular lot were the worst I had seen. The cage was fully exposed to the sun and during the heat of these March days, it beat down on the dogs mercilessly, suffocating them. Two of the dogs were Dobermann puppies, and came to the chicken wire when I poked my fingers through. The other was a Dachsund and simply leaned weakly against the cage, not caring enough to make an impression worthy enough for me to take her home. I pleaded with the shop owner to give the dogs some water, but he informed me that they were about to be bathed. I later learned that the female was one year old and had given her owner puppies to be sold at the cost of her own proper growth.

As Sri Lankans would put it, I am one of those people that can't just wait. There were already tears in my eyes and a horrible ache in my chest. I asked my three-wheeler driver to inquire about the price for the sick dog. He told him 7000. My driver told the shop owner that the dog would likely die, to which he replied "I do not care if the dog dies, I have spent so much on her already"

The sight of the dog haunted me well into the ride home and into the nights that followed. I could not afford 7000 rupees and also wondered if the dog were seriously ill, how would I pay for veterinary costs?My husband told me that by buying the dog, I’d be encouraging the industry only to find another dog in its place. But still, I couldn’t get the image of that cage out of my head. So I decided to petition a higher power- his mother. My mother-in-law is just like me when it comes to dogs, and I knew that I could overrule the husband with some clever complaining. Needless to say, it worked. she also very kindly offered to help us with the cost of the dog and any subsequent veterinary care.

I had to wait until the weekend until I could return to the pet shop and finally on the following Saturday, late in the evening I went to bring my new dog home. It was worse than I remembered. When I had visited the pet shop for the first time I was reluctant to express too much interest in the dogs, in case the pet shop owner capitalized on my sympathy. The two Dobermann pups looked thinner than I remembered and the Dachsund now no longer had the luxury of a cage she could turn around in. There was no water and even the evening heat was causing rivulets of sweat to run down my back, acting as an adhesive between my shirt and my skin.

The shop owner had cleverly deduced by this point that I was indeed a sucker. He told me seriously that he knows that dogs cannot be raised without a garden. When he took me to the dogs cage, the dog promptly vomited and when I pointed this out he said “no she hasn’t”. He snatched her from the cage then to be displayed. The dog was reluctant to come out and was reluctant to walk around. She was tiny. One side of her stomach was dotted with mange and when I pointed out to the shop owner that she had a rash he said “no she doesn’t”.

He told me that the dog was worth 14,000 thousand rupees and that he was more or less doing us a favour by letting us have her so cheap. I laughed outright at that remark. He also said proudly that the dog had already produced one litter which alerted me to the fact that she had been bred on her first cycle and thus she would never grow to her full capability. I wanted to beat the man, but I was alone, the husband was out of town so I haggled meekly and managed to bring down the price by a meager 500 rupees.

Don’t get me wrong. I have spent much on rescuing dogs and would spend millions more if I could, but the idea that this revolting man would make money on a sick dog, and a dog that he had made sick was unacceptable to me. What was also unacceptable was the pretense. He pretended to care about her. He pretended like she was a healthy animal and worst of all he knew that he was ill treating her and pretended like he wasn’t.

But my principles, no matter firm or sound they may be, had a terrible cost that day. The dog would die if she continued in this way- this was a certainty. And when I looked at her, I didn’t see what was there. I saw what could be. I thought to myself that this dog could be the greatest dog in the world, but no one would know unless they dared to find out. She could die in a year, in a month or in a day even in my care. But I wanted to show her, if even for a day, that she could be loved completely and unconditionally by a human being.