A few months ago one of the neighbours started renovating their house. We don’t live next to them. We don’t share fences. Let’s just say that their backyard is almost adjacent to ours. Almost.
Some time after they started the work, I began to hear a dog whimpering from time to time. Usually at dusk or at night. I thought it was just a puppy at a neighbour’s house and was whimpering and crying because it was left to sleep outside the house. I thought the puppy would soon get used to it and would stop crying. Unfortunately it didn’t.
When I got back from Indo the weather here was not too good. It often rained and the workers could not come to continue the renovation at the neighbour’s house. The dog’s whimpering got worse. One day it went on from morning to night to the next day. I began to worry about the dog. I tried to peep through the high wooden fence behind our house. I couldn’t see anything. The crying and whimpering got more desperate. I listened from our backyard, trying to locate it from the sound. I heard chains being tugged against something. It felt really horrible. I suspected that it was in trouble, but I couldn’t do anything because I didn’t know where it was.
In the afternoon a good friend came. She works with dogs so I thought she probably knew whether the crying dog was really in trouble or just looking for attention. Straight away she said it was probably in real trouble. I asked if she would accompany me to investigate. She agreed. We went to my next door neighbour and knocked on the door. The neighbour came out. She knew before we spoke that we were looking for the dog. She told us the noise came from the house next to hers, the one that was being renovated. Her own side fence had been removed by the other neighbour so she could see everything next door. She took us to her back yard. We could see the half-done building. Nobody was working there that day. She asked us to follow her as she went into the construction site. Right at the back near the fence, chained to a post, was the dirtiest, smelliest, ugliest dog I had ever seen. It’s coat was caked with dried mud. There were flies circling over its head and back. It went quiet when we approached. The neighbour said probably the owner did not feed it properly. That was why it cried from time to time. The last day the workers came was Friday, and it was already Monday. So it had not been fed for a couple of days. (In Indonesia the workers usually spend the night at the site, not is Sydney.) She didn’t dare feed the dog because she was afraid of the owner of the house. My friend and I left feeling horrible. I called RSPCA immediately to report the condition of the dog. Then we left to have lunch, but it was difficult to eat when you know a creature was starving to death right next to your doorstep. I bought some bread to give to the dog. We knocked on the neighbour’s door again, but this time she wouldn’t open the door. We came back to my home and I called RSPCA again to ask when they were coming. Definitely not today. So I asked them what I could do to help the dog, without doing something illegal. I was told I could throw food for the dog. And that was when the mini saga began. My friend called our area Council. I talked to other neighbours and planned to submit a petition to our Council if RSPCA could not help. I did everything except talk to the ‘preman’owner. I threw in bread, boiled sausages, and at one point I even made meatballs for the dog. I didn’t feed it everyday, of course. Only when the crying was really bad, usually during the holidays. This went on for a few weeks, until even my next door neighbour stopped opening the door when I knocked. I got a bit desperate and tried to find another way. I put a chair next to our backyard fence to see if I could throw food over our fence, past the neighbour’s back yard, over the neighbour’s fence, and on a spot reachable by the dog. I cut the branches of a couple of trees to clear the way. I threw a meatball. Not far enough. I asked my niece’s help. We cleared a few more branches and she threw a meatball. It landed on the other side, at a place near the dog! She threw a few more and we could hear the dog moving around trying to reach them. The rest of the family came out to look, and somehow decided it was time to prune the trees some more. I went inside and let them do it. I went to the bathroom and when I got out of the bathroom one of my nieces was sitting back on the sofa, holding a bandage to her eyes. There were drops of blood on the bandage. A branch had swung back and hit her in the eye, shattering the glass of her spectacles and showering the glass bits into her eye. We took her to the emergency ward at a hospital. It was boxing day but thank God an eye specialist agreed to come to the hospital and the injury wasn’t too serious, just a small tear on the white of the eye. But needless to say, it totally ruined our holiday period and holiday mood.
From that moment on I stopped feeding the dog. I was angry. My niece got hurt partly because I was too chicken to confront the owners. No dog is worth the safety and well-being of my family. Feeding it is the responsiblity of the owners, no matter how busy they say they are. My niece wrote an email to RSPCA, they called me and I tried one last time to ask them to do something about it (an ispector did come to the site a couple of weeks before but the owner gave her all kinds of excuses and she let them be). After that the dog still cried a little, but not as pathetically as before. I gritted my teeth and mentally closed my ears everytime I heard the cry.
One day when I went out to get the mail, I saw the dog. It was with one of its owners. My neighbour was right, the owner really looked burly and ‘preman’. The dog did a poo poo in front of my next door neighbour’s house (the one that refused to open her door), and the owner didn’t bother to clean it up. These people deserve each other, I thought. I made brief eye contact with the dog (hahahahahaha) but kept a poker face just in case it came to me. It was as dirty and muddy and ugly and surrounded by flies as the last time I saw it. It looked very thin, but other than that, it was okay. I threw a few expletives toward the owner (in my head, of course) and went inside.
A few days later it was all quiet. No howling or whimpering anymore. No sound of chains being pulled and dragged. I waited a few more days. Still quiet. I saw my next door neighbour one day and she said the dog was no longer there. I hope the owners have put it in a safer and cleaner place. And I hope it’s no longer left hungry so often.
Update
All those things happened during the Christmas and New Year holidays. It’s early in March now. Still no sign of Dog. Yesterday I passed by the construction site and stole a look through the plastic covered fence. The basement was filled up with water, like an indoor swimming pool. Well, it has been raining almost everyday for a week, and the weather forecast says that out of the 28 days in February, 21 will be rainy. I am sure that that is very bad news for the owners. Then another thought crossed my mind – maybe this is God’s punishment for those cruel people who tortured a helpless animal for months and months. And later I remembered who used to think like that all the time. My mother. She always always always connected good deeds with good rewards, bad deeds with punishments (no matter how remote and how illogical). And I used to giggle inside (if anyone can really giggle inside) when I listened to her stories while keeping a very straight face. I can’t help but smile. Now that’s one thing I inherited from you, Mom.
