Tuesday, July 25, 2017

"Chelm....We Live in Chelm"

That's the best quote I've heard in the ongoing "saga of the wild dogs", Chelm being the prototypical "city of fools" in Jewish folklore from Eastern Europe (I just had a flashback to my Folklore and Folklife days at Penn....).

As a "glass half full" kind of person, I hate to write anything negative about my new home country, but, as we're now approaching two years here, I think it's okay to  (occasionally) peep out from behind my rose-colored glasses.  It also feels appropriate that my first post since Ed's death is not a "happy happy" one.

When we arrived two years ago, we occasionally heard that there had been some wild dog sightings on the main street that our house overlooks.  Never having seen a dog there, I actually laughed it off the first time one of Penina's friends told her about it, and chalked it up to teenage hyperbole.  Within the last year, however, there have been more and more sightings, until, about six months ago, the dogs started (with great regularity) attacking and biting people.  Although the dogs are now wandering all over, our neighborhood has been an epicenter of the attacks, as we are at the very edge of the city.  Wild dogs feed largely off of garbage.  Our neighborhood's garbage cans being the closest restaurant for the hungry dogs, we have seen them a LOT.  We've each encountered them at one time or another (Chana had the scariest moment when she was walking on the stairs and encountered a pack of them.  Thankfully, they left her alone).  They are especially active on Shabbos as there are no cars to bother them.

The city has tried many things over the past months, including sending the city vet out with a tranquilizer gun so she can capture them and bring them to a shelter.  This has not worked out very well, as in the time it takes the tranquilizers to work, the dogs go off and hide, she oftentimes can't find them, the dogs wake up with a hangover and all goes back to as it was.  About six dogs were captured and sent to a shelter, where they were eventually euthanized, as wild dogs can't be rehabilitated for adoption.   The city also tried putting up traps, but they were broken by those who support freeing the wild dogs (clearly, these are people who either don't live here, or never leave their houses)

Recently, the city announced that they had approval from the Minister of Agriculture to have hunters kill the wild dogs.  The Mayor gave his approval to continue and then went out of town, leaving the Deputy Mayor to deal with it.  The city vet (who truly has seemed to work hard on this issue but may have been having a passive/aggressive moment.  Or maybe it was what she legally needed to do.  It's unclear) announced on Facebook something like "all dogs should be kept inside tonight, as hunters will be shooting on sight any dogs seen between 3-7 a.m.".  It spread like wildfire through social media (I got it forwarded on every single Israeli Whatsapp group I'm on) and prompted (as they hyperbole goes) "busloads of green-haired vegetarians from Tel Aviv to come to the city to protest".  Truthfully, that night, *I* saw neither wild dogs nor vegetarian activists around.  Too bad, because I would have been happy to invite them (the vegetarians, not the wild dogs) in for something to eat and to try to have a civilized conversation (the best the activists seem to come up with is saying that "they'd take a bullet" for the dogs, but, y'know, that doesn't really help the situation on the ground here OR they offer the solution that the dogs should be captured, spayed/neutered and then released, which also doesn't really help the situation, as we will still have roving packs of wild dogs until the current generation dies out).

Meanwhile, the Deputy Mayor decided he'd rather not be the fall guy, and put the whole thing on hold until the Mayor returned. Also meanwhile, Sara Netanyahu posted an impassioned plea on her husband's Facebook page (i.e. the Prime Minister's official FB page) asking that Beit Shemesh not harm the dogs and saying that "there must be a better answer".  And further meanwhile, the activists brought a suit to the Supreme Court (which does not operate at all like the US one, if you can't tell that by the fact that a case brought there was heard almost immediately).

Upshot:
--The Supreme Court put a stay on the shootings.
--The Mayor returned and fired the Vet.
--Some residents got extremely peeved and started contacting the Mayor on his cell phone.
--The Mayor re-hired the Vet
--The dogs are still doing as they please, including biting another neighbor of ours numerous times on the leg when she got off a late-night bus in the empty mercaz.

Chelm--we may, indeed, live in Chelm.



3 comments:

  1. Oy vey, can you perhaps carry dog bones to throw at them and then run?? Or invite Sarah Netanyahu over to see the problem and then come up with a join solution? Like capture them and then put them all in a zoo?

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    1. I do wonder how Mrs. Netanyahu would react to seeing these brutes up close and personal......(Although since I just read that Kayla, the Israeli First Dog, bit two people at the PM's Chanukah party two years ago, maybe the Netanyahus wouldn't be fazed by the wild dogs' behavior?!)

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  2. Just joking of course-Why can't bitten individuals be given a gun and have permission to shoot the dogs themselves???-They of course should receive special training in how to shoot so that no one else gets hurt. At the very least people who are in affected areas should be given sleep darts-that most likely requires special training as well. Good luck with this problem!

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