A still from the below video clip -- can you spot the brown dog baring his teeth at me (click on the photo for a close-up)? This explains my distraction, leading me to walk into the man with the bicycle....
Since anthropologists love to foreground their positionality – that means all the stuff that make us who we are (class, race, gender, childhood traumas) and shapes the way we do ethnography and interpret the world around us -- let me say that my experience of the Hounds of Hell-Alto is shaped deeply by an early childhood experience that has left me super scared of dogs. Period. I like them little and yappy and the size I could drop kick if necessary. Some friends with big dogs have helped me (begin to) face those fears (e.g. Elizabeth and Ben’s sweet yet massive pup Dalva). But as a general rule I permanently give off that musky “I fear you” scent that drives the dogs wild. So forgive me if I am unusually negative in this post.
Terror, Panic, and Trepidation are particularly bad scents to give off in El Alto, a city that has recently been the site of much lamenting and gnashing of public officials’ teeth over the astronomical stray dog population. Well, stray dogs and “pets” that residents encourage to hang around their streets at night to keep watch. Thus in addition to the usual factors contributing to strays, El Alto’s enormous dog population thus reflects circulating anxieties about “citizen security,” as residents crown their adobe walls with broken glass and keep vigilance over people who are not recognizable as vecinos (neighbors), a powerful trope for separating the known from the unknown. In a city notorious for its loteadores – people who sell land claiming it as their own, and disappear when the real owners show up to claim the property and start legal proceedings against the new inhabitants -- many lotes (empty properties) and homes still under construction include guard dogs that pace nervously around the skeletal structures, growling menacingly at people as they pass by.
Now I do not condone animal abuse. And yet, I do fear for my hide and am generally in favor of self-preservation, particularly in a city struggling with endemic rabies. Alteños will commonly advise you to just carry big rocks for self-defense. In my zone I frequently see people picking up stones as they approach the packs that circulate on our streets. And, in fact, many dogs are so abused that at the mere sight of you leaning down as if you plan to pick up a rock will cause them to flinch and back away.
This pretense to rock throwing is usually my strategy. But my neighborhood seems to have attracted a particularly rowdy pack of dogs that is unfazed by my pantomime of violence.
The other night I got home much later than I like to (close to 11:30pm), and had to walk a lonely stretch that takes me past their favorite hunting ground: an unpaved callejon (alley) where my neighbors (and I) regularly dump and burn trash when our collection service is being unreliable. Most days the pack can be seen foraging through plastic bags of toilet paper (the septic system can’t handle paper) and vegetable scraps. It is a lean dog’s paradise. On this particular night, an exceptionally mean white dog that often gives me trouble spotted me on the empty streets and came at me full tilt, growling, baring his teeth, and setting off the impulses of several dogs roaming nearby. The whole group flew at me, and I was only saved at the last moment as they crossed into another dog’s territory and he bolted toward them, coming between us. As soon as he had chased them off, he turned his sights on me. With my path home cut-off, I spent the next 20 minutes trying to make my way home through unlit back alleys where I encountered more and more dogs whose instincts had been aroused by all the hysterical neighborhood barking and my stench of terror. I have been jumpy walking home ever since.
This video is a small taste of my daily dog interaction – all clips shot over a 2 day period within 2 blocks of my house (walking to and from the corner store, standing in the doorway of my home). None of these clips include the pack in all its fury – because I try to avoid that scenario. But as you can see, I am still skittish and basically run away at the first sign of approaching canines – thus the unusually shaky shots (many of them of the ground as I flee). So, uh, please forgive the palpable cowardliness.
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