The Political Economy of Stray Dogs

Shots from the opening scene of 101 Dalmatians

Today we’re talking about what dogs can tell us about order and hierarchies in society. I’ll write about my experiences living in Macedonia and in the US, and my observations and thoughts on how these two countries treat their dogs. Now that I am writing this, I think two things make dogs a particularly interesting parallel to us. First, they are “man’s best friend”. I’m conjuring images from the opening scene of the iconic 101 Dalmatians — every human perfectly matched with their dog, a reflection of themselves. Our best friends we treat like… well, best friends. Second, dogs are still animals, and as animals humans don’t generally feel the need to go through our normal apologia when we’re being shitty to them. When we’re being shitty to humans, we invent all sorts of stories to delude ourselves that we’re not actually shitty. With dogs, we’re a little more honest. Similarities with humans are not incidental in this blog, though I will let the reader leave with any conclusions about those connections may or may not be.

In Macedonia, I grew up with stray dogs running amok. They live in a world of their own, and we’re just sharing the space. Some stray dogs are neighborhood favorites, beloved and taken care of by everyone. When I was a kid, I practically kidnapped a dog — her name was Booba — from my grandpa’s village to my neighborhood in the town. She was only a puppy then, but she kept following me, and I felt like we bonded, so I took her — something I was smacked for by the village kids when they realized I took their dog. My mom would of course not let me keep Booba at home, but she stayed in our neighborhood as a stray. We lived in one of those crowded communist block apartment complexes, with dozens of families around — and everyone just loved Booba!  She was a stray dog, but she was our stray dog! Booba was an institution, the Matriarch of her one hectare Queendom.

Don’t let me give you the wrong idea. Stray dogs are usually a nuisance — scattering trash, pissing and shitting all around. Sometimes, stray dogs can even pose danger to humans. They will band up into large packs like wolves, with whole societies and hierarchies of their own, and will often attack people, especially if they are in the heat of mating season. Most people I know have been attacked by dogs at some point in their lives. At times things get so dire, that a rogue group of young men will basically go out into the night and massacre a bunch of stray dogs. In one of these heists, they killed Booba. I cried that night when my mom told me, and the whole neighborhood was crushed. A rogue massacre? In the Balkans? What’s new?

When I came to the US in 2013, one of the few culture shocks was the fact that there were literally zero stray dogs anywhere I went. Everything was so orderly, with bunnies and squirrels usually hopping around idyllically. Of course, I thought, the institutions here just work so much better. I’m sure there are well-funded, well-organized, non-corrupt dog shelters that keep any stray dogs. Things are just more orderly in the US… people stand in lines to get coffee, they actually Stop at the Stop sign… the absence of stray dogs should not have been surprising.

Fast forward to a few years ago, in one of those long kafana outings in Skopje where we were drinking and eating for hours, a friend of a friend told me he had established a non-profit to deal with the problem with stray dogs in Macedonia. He told me it is a difficult problem in Macedonia, but also that other countries like the US, UK, and the Netherlands, have solved this problem with euthanasia — they basically kill all the stray dogs! Now of course, these are civilized societies and there are procedures. Usually, shelters will keep the dogs for a few days to a couple weeks, in case the owner claims the dog, or someone adopts the dog — shelters would often advertise that the dogs are up for adoption, leaving it up to the people to “save them“. If at the expiry date the dog is not adopted, it is deemed “unadoptable“ and is unalived. Google is telling me that US euthanizes almost a million shelter animals annually, of which 400,000 are dogs. The US seems to be doing everything better than Macedonia, including dog massacres.

Everyone at the table was aghast. Euthanasia would simple not pass in Macedonia, even if it was institutionally feasible! On moral grounds, people would rather take the chaos of stray dogs than have them systematically eliminated if no one adopts them. I’ve been thinking about this conversation a lot since then. I’ve even brought it up to some Americans, most of whom are oblivious that euthanasia is the rule, or that the waiting period is so short. It’s basically a silent violence of much grander proportions than any dog massacres I’ve experienced growing up in Macedonia. Booba would have been killed before I even met her.

This twist on the public order with the stray dogs has been intellectually troubling. Does order necessitate a kind of silent violence? What does order buy us? Is the silent violence worth it? Outwardly, the US seems like an orderly country that has solved the problem of stray dogs through good institutions, better social norms, or what have you, and Macedonia like the embodiment of chaos, engulfing everything institutionally and socially. But that is not the whole story. For the whole story, we need to look on the other extreme tail of the distribution of dog hierarchies.

People have pet dogs in Macedonia as well. They usually will keep them in the yard or inside the house, they are of a “purer“ breed than the stray dogs, and are our best friends just like anywhere in the world. Now, on average, we treat the pets better than the stray dogs — Booba is not a representative example. Pet dogs don’t have to scavenge for food among the trash, and are not mercilessly killed in the night. But they are also not that special! Dogs usually eat human leftovers — stews, stale bread, the bones from our meat. Special dog food came on the market when I was a kid, and until very recently, was out of reach financially for most people. The dogs just eat whatever we eat. Sometimes even less — my dad’s friend is notorious for feeding his yard dog egg shells, which the dog will gobble them up happily. All that is to say, that our pet dogs, like us, are modest. They live better than the stray dogs, but not that much better.

Back to the US, I am contrasting the euthanized dogs in the shelters with their spoiled pets. With designer foods, professional groomers, expensive health insurances, rented dog walkers... some dogs in the US have it better than actual humans! Some of these dog food ads that deliver wholesome, real food for your dog (like the leftovers we give them in Macedonia), would cost as much as my own modest food budget. What usually sends me spiraling is seeing someone carry their dog in a baby stroller. Now I know this is completely innocuous but it makes my blood boil — thinking of my dad friend’s egg-shell-eating dog in Macedonia, and of homeless people battling “hostile architecture“ in the US, I cannot but react with anger. It’s a fucking dog! Why is it being treated better than actual people?

Cruella de Ville

What I am saying is — Lady and the Tramp could not have been made in Macedonia. There, all dogs are kind of Trampy, living with the Chaos on the streets, let to co-exist with humans, until they cross a line and are massacred back to manageable numbers. The Lady and the Tramp is a very US movie. It is Dog American Dream, a feel good story about dogs from different social backgrounds falling in love, a story about dog social mobility, ending in the Tramp symbolically receiving the same collar as the Lady by his new owners. In reality, the Tramp does not have a happy ever after — he is one of the 400,000 others euthanized in 2 to 7 days after being caught. Cruella de Ville, the villain in 101 Dalmatians, is perhaps a more honest representation of this potential for cruelty. Humans do like to relegate to the arts what is repressed within us. Cruella is the unscrupulous fashion diva who wanted to slaughter Dalmatian puppies to make a fur coat, glamour and high class epitomized. Just imagine! She wants to skin cute little Dalmatian puppies to make a gorgeous coat, a quest for power and status, if we are to see glamour as the symbol of feminine power it often is in media. Cruella de Ville could also not have been imagined in Macedonia — she is politically unthinkable!

So yes, there is Chaos on the streets of Macedonia, with packs of Tramps running amok. In the US, Order reigns and the Ladies are enjoying a much better life on average, at least if we exclude from our calculations all the euthanized Tramps. If I were a dog, behind Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance, what kind life would I want? Would I choose to be in Macedonia where I am either a Tramp on the streets rummaging through trash risking vigilante “justice“, or a Lady, eating leftover stews and maybe even egg shells? Or would I choose the US, where I can perhaps be a Lady, riding in baby strollers, dressed in little clothes like a princess, but where being a Tramp means almost certain death, a quiet and institutionalized violence?

There seem to be trade offs between efficiency and equity, between wealth and inequality, in the political economy of dogs. The open question is — are the same trade offs there in the political economy of humans?