Suddenly, all the Dogs are Dead

One of the fascinating things about institutional Authority on the Beautiful Island is the way it feels it can appropriate the property of others without their permission, since it is Institutional Authority and they are Little People. Authority regards all those not in Authority as serfs...

Our neighborhood experienced a very sad example of this disturbing sense of power when I looked around today and realized that our neighbor's dogs had disappeared. A large local charity has taken over many of the houses in the neighborhood and feels, since some of the houses belong to it, that the neighborhood belongs to it. And like all institutions, everything is presentation, not content, so the neighborhood had to be "cleaned up" because otherwise Life might intrude on the difficult business of presenting the best face possible.

Our neighborhood is in a spot that locals feel is very isolated and so we constantly have dogs dumped here. Some are ignored and soon vanish. Some of them have been adopted into the neighborhood as sort of neighborhood strays that everyone feeds, while others have been formally adopted, named, and collared by specific families. Nevertheless, the charity called the disposal people and had all the dogs on the street swept up -- including the collared dogs who cannot legally be taken (another disturbing aspect of the implicit Authority of Large Institutions is that they are frequently able to give orders to overrule the law, which has no normative force in local culture, and they are frequently able to give orders in areas where they have no formal authority). Females first, they said, as the charity was afraid they might have pups. As a result, a large number of local dogs have disappeared, including several very nice dogs that I loved. That was bad enough.

What was worse, however, was that the charity, wanting to have the dogs killed (and this is a Buddhist charity) slyly didn't inform the people around us who had lost their dogs so that they could go claim their animals back from the dog pound. Our neighbors searched for several days, until one of them had the bright idea of asking the representatives of the local charity if they knew where the dogs were. But by then, the seven day period had passed....

My neighbor says her heart aches. So does mine. And now I live in fear that when we're away someday, the charity will have my three dogs disposed of.... "but the door got open and the dogs got out. Sorry! We didn't know they were yours...can't imagine how that door got open..."

[Taiwan]