Animals

One of the first things I noticed about animals in Haiti is that all of the dogs are the same:  slender, medium sized, short-haired, usually light brown, sometimes with white collar or feet markings.  It occurred to me that creating different dog breeds for the pleasure of humans is a concept that has not reached this part of the world.

The dogs don’t seem to belong to anyone.  Sometimes during the night, I hear awful-sounding dog fights, and I have to remind myself that this is a normal dog’s life here.  People don’t feed them, for obvious reasons.  I was told that if a culturally insensitive visitor were to feed a dog off of a plate, the Haitian cook would destroy the plate.

There are chickens all over the place. They wander in and out of yards and buildings and cluck around anywhere they please.  Some chickens are marked with paint to indicate possession, but I don’t know how anyone keeps track of them.  However, Rose told me that someone brings a rooster to the cholera clinic and ties it by its leg to a tree root, where it crows all day. I suspect its owner doesn’t want to lose a future meal.

There are goats wandering all over, too.  Some are tiny babies and are really cute.  A lot of them have a wooden triangular frame around their necks that apparently keeps them from passing through narrow spaces, like the fences here made of tall, slender cactus.  On our first day, we saw a pig tied to a tree, and she had several babies, too.  I’ve seen a couple of small horses (young or underfed?  I don’t know) tied in different places around the campus.  One day they were tied to a tree near the pool.  One had broken free and was galloping around and around the pool area, dragging its long rope and seemingly having a blast.