Bitches and queens

It’s raining cats and dogs! Or rather, it’s bleeding cats and dogs. Where? In Cambodia. When? All the time.

Cambodia's bitches and queens (female cats) are always either pregnant or in the midst of getting pregnant. Dogs stuck together at the asses are common middle-of-the-street sights. Cat love is less visible, but way more vocal. Shrieking feline sex yowls are part of my nighttime soundtrack. 

These yowls lead to lots of kittens. Lots and lots of kittens. At last count, nine cats were living outside my host family's house. They sometimes get inside the house, but don't really live inside. The discarded bones and leftover rice from lunch and dinner are the only things that keep them around.

The impregnator doesn't join the lunch and dinner action. He's too busy chasing pussy. He only comes around at night. Like all players, he's big and black.

Knocked-up Cambodian cats stay in pretty good shape compared to Cambodian dogs.

With their saggy tits that brush the ground as they walk, Cambodian bitches look more like cows than dogs.  

Pregnancy takes a lot out of the dogs. It almost took the life out of Miro, one of the orphanage's dogs.

"I think she will die." Those were the words of a French guest about Miro.

Her half-dozen pups were sucking the life out of her. It didn't help that Miro was raised on French sausages and now refused to eat anything but meat.

This in a country where "dog food" is leftover human food. There's never any meat left over. Only rice, veggies and bones.

Luckily for Miro, the visiting French guy was good at finding her meat. He fed her a whole sausage one day, just like old times.

So Miro didn't die. But the orphanage wasn't taking any more chances. Miro is now the only dog I know on birth control. 

Miro is a beautiful bitch, especially compared to most Cambodian dogs. Her brown and white dappled fur is sleek and thick, not matted and patchy.

Most Cambodian dogs are hairless, mangy and rabid. They line not only the sides, but the middle of the streets. They lounge in the dirt where the median should be, only bothering to move in the face of approaching car, bike, moto, truck or tractor wheels.

During a scavenger hunt, Peace Corps Trainees were tasked with finding and taking a picture of the mangiest, ugliest dog. The hardest part of this task was deciding which mangy, ugly dog to photograph.

Before coming to Cambodia, I read cautionary tales from Peace Corps Volunteers who carried sticks to beat dogs away.

Volunteers receive a smorgasbord of rabies shots. But there was still an uproar when a Volunteer was supposedly bitten by a rabid dog. 

Dogs used to go after me when biking. One dog in particular — a big, white, crazy beast. A lot like Kasey, the German Shepherd my family was chained to for 10 long years — but fluffy. Like Kasey, this white Cambodian dog is a biter. It bit me on the leg on two separate rides. Luckily, no rabies.

I began to fear this white puffball, and biked meters out of my way to avoid it. The dog's image took over my dreams, or I should say, nightmares.

My fear of this dog and every dog grew stronger after viewing an Animal Planet special documenting packs of wild dogs taking over the world. Their method? Mauling and murdering. 

My childhood fear of dogs was returning. As a kid, I couldn't enter the homes of people with dogs until those dogs were locked in basements or spare rooms.

But all this was before I learned the secret to dog domination.

During my early Cambodian days, my defense against dogs was to yell and bark. While this strategy sometimes works, it often doesn't. The dogs call your bluff and realize that their jaws can easily rip off your face.

Aggression isn't the secret. It's the opposite. Non-aggression. Disengagement. Disinterest. Pretend the dogs aren't even there. Don't look at them. An internal chant of "calm, calm, calm..." also helps.

Disengagement is how most Cambodians treat dogs. Except for a few cases in Phnom Penh, Cambodians don't consider dogs pets. They're for guarding the house. (Although most the time they're busy guarding the middle of the road.)

You know the clicking sound that people in the States make to call dogs? Cambodians make that sound, too. But here, that sound doesn't mean "Come." It means "Go away." Grunts and huuuhs are also common "Get the hell out of here" sounds.

The most common dog engagement is violence. Raise a hand to pet a dog and the dog's gone. Hands are for beating, not petting.

Dogs aren't allowed in the orphanage's cafeteria. Unless the dog's name is Centhuit. (pronounced Sanweet.) This black and tan puppy gets VIP privileges. 


Why? Because the young French woman who lives and works here has adopted him as a pet. In French, Centhuit means 108. That's how many orphans are at the orphanage. As you can tell, the French woman and Centhuit are very close.

Centhuit is fed meat from the cafeteria tables. Meanwhile, another little tan thing of a puppy is left to whine at the wooden gate at the cafeteria door. But this little tan thing is clever. It wriggles through the hole in the gate, even after this hole is blocked with flip flops, mats and blankets. It simply pushes these obstacles aside and barges in. It wants meat, too.

But the little tan thing can't have meat. Its name isn't Centhuit. It's yelled at and put back over the gate, and it soon grows too big to squirm through the hole.

This is what it's like at the orphanage when the French founder is around. When he's gone, the cafeteria is a den of doggy mayhem. Centhuit isn't the only one allowed in. The tan pup is also admitted, along with Miro, Luke and an ugly bitch whose name I can never remember.

These dogs don't wait docilely for scraps either. They still are reduced to eating scraps, but they actively go after these scraps by gumming the bones off the tables.

To help me pronounce the name, the French woman tells me that Centhuit sounds like sandwich. Which reminds me of another dog-domination technique: eating them.

Woah, woah, woah, before you get all huffy, I don't mean eating all dogs. One will do the job. If you eat just one dog, other dogs will know. They can smell that stuff, just like they can smell fear. 


And what they smell is power. They smell someone who is stronger than them, because that someone can, and will, eat them.

Power. That's what eating dog is all about. Eating dog gives you power and energy. It's energizing. Especially black dog.

That's the kind of dog I want to eat. The best kind of dog to eat is black and the best time is now, before the sweat-drenched hell of March, April and May.

Organizing this eating of dog shouldn't be difficult. My townmate and fellow Volunteer, Rachel, has already found a place. A couple of my Cambodian friends have agreed to be escorts, so we don't end up with dysentery and giardia like an Australian volunteer in town. 


(Rachel maintains that anything could have given the Aussie volunteer that combo, especially the warmed-up duck fetuses he likes to scarf.)

Next you hear from me I will be a proud, card-carrying dog eater. Now I just have to find out where to get one of those cards.