NEAR the border of the southeast and southwest mountain ranges of Cebu is an unusual household arrangement.
What the upland community views as extraordinary is not so much the couple’s construction of a sprawling home reachable only after taking 200 steps from the barangay center, or that, at twilight, the mountaintop home is the only one lit up by electricity for miles around.
These trappings of affluence do not get as much comment and speculation as the couple’s treatment of their pets. Small and large dogs, short- and long-haired, the animals are housed in their own building. The Labradors, heavy, sleek and rambunctious with good health, have separate cubicles, two dogs to a unit. A handler feeds, cleans after, grooms and exercises every pair.
The kennel staff, young men recruited from nearby farms, views the dogs’ life of privilege as the very best fortune to happen to any creature, man or beast. In noting what impresses them—the canine shower and bath, the tiled cubicles kept clean 24 hours—the listener remembers how covetousness works: we envy what we see every day.
Told that the couple’s arrangement may just be the standard observed by all dog breeders, a staff member, whose dog handling duties freed him from the farm, could not be dissuaded. His employers are good to the dogs because they bring suerte (good fortune), he says, reverentially.
Masters and tyrants
This opportunistic view will turn off genuine pet lovers, for whom an animal is not a possession but a companion as deserving of devotion and fealty as any human.
But if pet ownership is more than about reciprocal relationships, it certainly ties human owners to the highest standards of responsibility and humanity.
In a street in Mandaue City are two households of contrasting pet ownership styles. On the left side of the street is a home flanked by two rectangular cages. In one is a Boxer whose skulking, cowering form is often mistaken for that of a mangy street mongrel.
Its scarred coat attests to the beating it gets from its owner who, neighbors say, beats it with a chain when the animal’s barking keeps him awake.
The other cage is empty, its occupant long expired from the vagaries of its master’s sleeping habits.
Across the street is a couple breeding Boxers. The old bitch they first own still follows them as if she were still a pup, or as if they were her pups.
They’ve kept one of her sons, partly to guard and partly to enter into dogfights. He shows some promise but not enough of the viciousness that makes champions.
Indulgent amateurs rather than serious gamblers, the couple doesn’t really plan to join every dogfight that’s arranged privately among owners. The stakes can go very high. Perhaps it was understandable for one Ormoc owner to act as he did when a champion he had pitted against a local dog ended up losing the stakes.
The dominant Boxer spared the Ormoc dog in that fight. Not its owner: he shot his defeated champion, its mother and the rest of her litter to make sure the strains of cowardice and scalding defeat would not mar the bloodlines.
Perhaps before we can call ourselves their best friend and boon companion, we must first deserve our dogs.
