I had confirmed contact with a little girl with H1N1, and I've also been sick for the last week....but all is well.
So I wanted to let you know about a few of the interesting things we have heard people tell us since we've been here- specifically on the topic of animals. Hopefully these quotes will give you some sense of why it is so important to develop long-term sustainable programs that are community-driven, because if you don't address the problem at the source, as soon as the organization running the program pulls out, everything goes back to what it was before because that is the way the people think.
Note that many of the following quotes were made by professionals and highly educated people:
"Animals have no feelings"
"I would rather see my dog dead than have him neutered"
"If you spay or neuter your dog or cat, they'll get fat"
"Castrated dogs are not aggressive anymore, so they won't protect us or our house"
"Surgical sterilization is cruel"
"I didn't know it was even possible to sterilize male dogs!"
"All female dogs should have at least one litter before spaying, for their health"
"It's not our responsibility to pay for surgery to sterilize my pets, the municipality should pay"
"My male dog needs a girlfriend, so that he can fulfill his destiny to breed" (We see posters just like this one all over town)
These are just a few examples of what we hear every day, and you can see that things are different. It will take a great deal of time to change peoples minds about the benefits of pet sterilization. Lowering the reproductive rate could alleviate a lot of the dog suffering that we see everyday, but it will only last if the people here believe in what we're doing.
Education is the key, and this is where we will be focusing a lot of our attention!
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