Dogs of Sicily

Italy, Sicily in particular, has a dirty secret. Everyone knows about the terrible traffic. The politics are the butts of jokes worldwide. Petty theft is mentioned in every guide book. The litter filled streets are eventually accepted as "normal".

But there is one thing I had been totally unprepared for, and it will never cease to bother me.

The dogs.



I love dogs. All shapes colors and sizes. If it's got a tail, or even just a nub, to wag, my heart turns to mush and I have to fight the urge to make cooing baby noises. Where I grew up, dogs were members of the family. Furry little brothers and sisters. Here, this doesn't always seem to be the case.

Let me point out now that I have seen some good dog owners here. Despite their small apartments, blazing summer heat, and the pollution of the city, they do their best to take care of their canine family. Several families in our neighborhood wake up at the crack of dawn regularly, just so Fido can have a walk before the sun turns the streets into an oven. AmoreMio's Zio Massimo keeps a small dog in the campagna (their apartment is not dog suitable) and he takes care to visit her every day to feed her an abundance of table scraps and so she can romp around the garden and play with him. These are the stand up Sicilians who pamper their furry friends as much as any American would.

Unfortunately, there are also far too many people here who get a dog for the novelty of it... until the dog becomes too big, too troublesome, or simply too much work. At which point it is usually left on the streets.

Just some of the horror stories I have heard or witnessed personally:

Families with dogs decide to go on holiday, but can't take the dog with them and can't be bothered to pay a kennel fee. The solution? Lock the dog out of the house with a heaping bowl of food, and hope it's still there when you come back.

A man used to have two beautiful dogs in his campagna, kept in a fenced in area. The only problem is that he had difficulty remembering to feed them. AmoreMio witnessed the gradual decline in the dogs' health, as they became thinner and weaker. When possible, he would throw some food over the fence for them. Then one day the dogs weren't there anymore. No idea if they died or were simply given away to someone else.

In Catania I frequently had to walk up and down Via Etnea, a nightmarishly steep street that never seems to have any shade. I can say from personal experience that it was pure agony in the full blazing heat of summer. One family who lived on that street however, owned an enormous bear-like dog. I saw it nearly every time I passed, crammed into a small balcony it could barely turn around in, above the pollution of a thousand passing cars, under the direct heat of the midday sun. No shade whatsoever.

We were walking along the beach one summer evening, when our attention was caught by a small crowd of people near the dumpster bins. A woman and her children had a box of newborn puppies they were desperately trying to nurse back to health. She had been putting out the trash, when she heard pitiful mewing from somewhere in the depths of the bin. She found them tied up in a plastic bag. One had already died, but she brought her family out to help her feed them drops of milk from their fingers and to try and convince people passing by to take them home.

Sadly, in the crowded cities in which it's difficult enough to keep the garbage men from going on strike every other month, dog catchers and kennels are considered an unnecessary expense. As far as I know, there is no program that takes responsibility for the multitudes of abandoned dogs wandering the streets or those who are severely neglected by careless owners.

Those who survive either wander about in solitary picking through the trash, or create packs which prowl the streets and scare off anyone who mistakenly crosses their path at night. Occasionally the more people friendly dogs will make themselves a kind of surrogate family by adopting an apartment building. After a few days of seeing the same dog in the parking lot, tenants will start to leave out food. There are mixed feelings about this, because there are plenty of other tenants who are deathly afraid of dogs (no doubt exacerbated by the presence of the nightly roaming packs) and do not appreciate having to skirt around them on the way to the elevator.

I'm sure that there are plenty of other idiots in other countries who mistreat dogs, but the lack of control over the wild dog population just makes it that much more noticeable here.

I love you Italy, but this is one area in which you really suck.