Random Rant: Mascotas – Por que?

I don’t like animals. It’s not that I wish them harm (I mean, come on – I’m a vegetarian), it’s just that I’d rather not deal with them. I guess it all goes back to the dog I had growing up, the one whose head my dad had to wedge tightly under his arm so that I could pet him without being bitten. Let’s just say that when, at the age of 4, I returned home from a week at Flo and Lou’s to find out Skates was “no longer with us”, I was not exactly what you’d call devastated.

What does this have to do with Argentina….? Oh yes, everyone here has some sort of pet, everything from schnauzers to turtles named Penelope. A day rarely passes when I don’t happen upon a dog walker on the street, attempting to wrangle 12 dachshunds while nimbly eating a choripan. Even my host family had 2 cats when I first moved in, though Tito and Ina sadly left us last week to go live in a factory (?) due to my host mother’s allergies.

In general, I have no real problem with animals; in fact, when I don’t have to live with them, they can actually be kind of cute. There are, however, several irksome pet-related habits that I have observed in my three weeks in Argentina:

1. No one cleans up after their dogs. It is only now, after nearly having tainted my shoes on several occasions, that I can fully appreciate those little signs all over our parks and streets reminding us to pick up after our animals. Gross gross gross.

2. In contrast to the increasing trendiness of owning ugly little rat dogs in the US, Argentinians really seem to love big dogs. Pit bulls, rotweillers – name a giant dog, and you’ll probably see it that same day. Though I’m not normally afraid of dogs, there’s something about a loose pit bull roaming the street that freaks me out. It kind of makes me regret not getting a rabies shot before I left the US.

3. And speaking of rabies, there are an incredible number of feral animals here. (Ugh – even the word feral grosses me out. Vom.) A few weeks ago, I went to the Botanical Gardens with some friends for a nice picnic. Sadly, there was nowhere to sit because the place was overrun by angry feral cats. According to my host mom, people like to just abandon their cats there – apparently a big problem, since I’ve seen a lot of signs about how abandoning animals is a crime and yada yada.

Even worse than the feral cats are the homeless dogs. It’s just that they’re mangy and needy, but also that for some reason (they must know that I want nothing to do with them), they love to follow me around. Last weekend, a group of us decided to pack up and go to Mar del Plata for the weekend, as a kind of “end of summer/everyone in the US is on Spring Break so we have to get a tan, too” beach trip. As we were walking into the bus station in Retiro (Sidenote: More to come in future posts about the omnibuses in Argentina, but to make a long story short – I am in LOVE with the buses. If I could, I would buy/rent one and travel around the continent on a micro), one particularly mangy scoundrel (ha!) decided my friends and I looked like a friendly bunch. Not only did said dog follow us into the station, it also proceeded to follow us throughout the station, including a trip into the women’s bathroom with me. Let’s just say I got some nasty looks while waiting in line for the toilet.

Dog #1 must have been an indication of the rest of the trip, because my next run in with a stray dog (we’ll call him Dog #2) was fairly similar. Not only did Dog #2 follow us from the hostel onto the beach, he also planted himself squarely between Maia and I as we attempted to tomar el sol at 8 in the morning after a 5 hour bus ride. A few words about Dog #2 – first, he was extremely restless, at one point deciding to dig a hole, i.e. douse Maia with clumps of wet sand (pobrecita!). He also, much to my chagrin, had an open, oozing wound that made me suspicious of any diseases he was likely carrying. And lastly, Dog #2 seemed totally oblivious to our hints that we didn’t want him around. Despite Tom’s chasing him away, he just kept coming back. It wasn’t until more people showed up at the beach (we were really really early, apparently), that we finally got some peace.

So in sum, I just portrayed myself as a total prissy prima donna and now need to stop complaining. Ha. No, in all seriousness, Buenos Aires is lovely and amazing and fantastic in spite of its animal problems, and I promise that not all of my posts will be crazy rants about totally random things. I just felt it necessary, and not completely out of character, to insert a little ridiculousness into the ole blog.

Random Argentina Fact #5: “Random Argentina Fact #5″ will be postponed until further notice because really, this entire post is a random fact. It may also be useful to note that I’ve been reading Dave Eggers recently, and I fear that his writing style, for better or worse, may be infiltrating my own. Please advise if it becomes a problem.