Canela

I'm a dad now.

In my mind's eye, I see a sad sack, lost somewhere in his late twenties. There's an eighteen pound screaming baby strapped to his chest like a suicide bomber. He's sweating, multitasking, trying to defuse the explosives once again while attempting a conversation with an old friend. Inevitably, he's asked about his child, how that came about. Forcing a wincing smile, he explains that it "just sort of happened". Well I feel like it "just sort of happened" to me too.

Her name is Canela. She has glossy caramel-colored fur that's accented by stripes of white that cover her neck, belly, and paws. Her emerald green eyes look at you with this eternal dopey stare. Being that she's only 4 weeks old, I have no idea if she sees me or just a blurry mess of shapes and colors. She routinely hiccups, making her seize as she sleeps atop a discarded pair of boxers on my floor.

Despite being just one of a large litter, she's now an only child. Birthed into a shallow latrine hole, my host grandmother tells me that when they went to check on the pups one day, all the rest had disappeared. Something had come in the middle of night to take them and for whatever reason wanted to leave a witness. Only Canela knows what happened to her brothers and sisters.

Her mother's name is Princesa, who is by no means an exemplary mother. While the two were living at my host grandmother’s house she would leave Canela to sleep alone as she went out into the night to slum through the neighborhood, looking for love. Extremely emaciated, her leathery underbelly looks worse for wear. As she reluctantly lays on the floor, Canela pounces and pounces on her mothers chest, as if performing CPR on a teat that had died long ago.

I say that this whole adoption just happened because my host mother and siblings wanted a puppy too. It was a good sign that they said they really wanted to care for her and take her on walks, as most dogs here are kept behind fences and fed tortillas their entire life. So I decided to bring her to our house one day last week. I think I slept for about four hours that night as she whimpered and tried to escape the hodgepodge kennel that I had made with a guitar case, cardboard box, and a trashcan.

Let me just state that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I’ve become a manic parent that bombards Google with an endless stream of questions in the hopes of becoming a bonafide Puppiologist. My two chief advisors are my girlfriend Sammy (life long animal addict) and this guy:

Unsurprisingly, my ideology on how to raise a puppy drastically differs from that of my host family.  Most of this came about when my host mother became annoyed when she learned I had taken Canela to her old house so she could breastfeed, fearing that she’ll never become our dog if she keeps visiting her old house. I tried to explain to her that I had read extensively online that separating a puppy from it’s mother before 8 weeks can be damaging, but my host mother just scoffed and told me that was nonsense.  She then proceeded to deny that animal behaviorists are knowledgeable and then affirmed that she knew as much as anyone else about the raising of puppy despite the fact she’d never done it before. I envisioned Ted Cruz In a Hummer doing donuts on a melting ice cap while shouting about the great hoax of global warming.

Needless to say, rural El Salvador is not a culture that champions scientific-based facts. For instance, when I was cuddling with Canela one day, I was told that I shouldn’t hold her too much because she will get skinny if I do so. I’ve heard a lot of Salvadoran myths but this one was extraordinarily ridiculous. And this belief’s effect shows in the behavior of my host family. The youngest is the only one that actually touches Canela. The rest kind of admire her cuteness as if she was behind a show window.

Essentially the only thing puppies have going for them is their appearance, a living and breathing doll to gaze at. They are strapped to a poll and kept behind a fence, forced to watch as people come and go without much interaction. Instead of learning to be friendly with people, social deprivation makes them weary of any visitor and by the time they’re an adult they bark at anything and everything that comes close to their fence.  Like Russian orphans denied the simple pleasures of touch, dogs too become antisocial and violent.

I was talking to my brother and he was imagining what would happen if you showed a Salvadoran a well trained dog? You know, one that can do all those stupid tricks like fetch a beer. I’d like to imagine that it would make them realize how complex and dignified dogs can be.  In reality, the image that actually comes to mind is a rural Salvadoran in a hammock, throwing stones at an oblivious pooch, yelling “CERVEZA, CERVEZA!”.