Rabid (29 page)

The governor’s early call for citizen-led culling seems never to have caught on, perhaps because the Balinese, overwhelmingly Hindu and great lovers of animals, had little enthusiasm for the job. But government killing of dogs, both unowned and owned, and sometimes without the owners’ permission, appears to have proceeded aggressively. Part of the problem was that owners, despite having been told by the government to keep their pets at home during the cull, were accustomed to letting their dogs roam free at all times. Traditional Balinese households own at least one dog, but there is no tradition of confining them; while dogs may be encouraged to remain within the residential compound at night, to protect the family from intruders and evil spirits, they are generally free during the day to forage for food and to socialize among themselves. The typical Bali dog does not wear a collar and has never felt the pull of a leash. So by November 2009, even though only “street dogs” had been officially condemned for depopulation,
the government had removed from targeted regions more than the total estimated number of strays in the entire country.

If the numbers were staggering, the methods were ruthless. Pet dogs found at large were shot with pistols or poisoned with strychnine, sometimes whole villages at a time. One particularly shocking bit of footage, which found its way onto YouTube, shows an unidentified man strolling around a Balinese market, dispatching dogs with poisoned blow darts. The dogs stagger for a few paces before they collapse to the ground, writhing and crying as their limbs stiffen. Their faces lock into terrified grimaces as they die. This footage was seized upon and widely circulated by animal-rights groups, not just in Bali but around the world. As one might imagine, this mass extermination campaign began to place a strain on Bali’s tourism industry, which still reeled from the bloody Islamist bombings of 2002 and 2005. Six months into the campaign, the
Herald Sun,
Australia’s highest-circulating daily newspaper, ran a story about it called “Bali Dog Cull Shocks Aussies.” In it, one Australian woman described how her own dog had died after eating a strychnine-laced meatball from a trap. “We found her dead surrounded by vomit and faeces in our garage,” the woman said, “and the little meatball was next to her body.” Another Australian, a chef, witnessed the shooting of a dog on a beach while a Hindu ceremony took place just nearby.

As the government was eventually to discover, the problem with culling is not that it goes too far but that it can never go far enough. In theory, one could wipe out rabies from a region by exterminating all the dogs. But usually some humans refuse to let that happen, even when a rabies outbreak is charging through their community. Inevitably, there are holdouts: the family with a new puppy, say, or the pensioner whose mutt is not merely his best but his only friend. It takes just a small contingent of softhearted objectors, exempting their own pets, to ruin the whole campaign. Even though many Balinese dog owners seldom come into physical contact with their dogs, often maintaining
them in a semi-feral state, as a people they are quite caring and sentimental about their pets. Anecdotally, this is evident as one walks the streets of Ungasan Village, where the outbreak began. Asked about the cull, a young Balinese woman in a T-shirt and plastic flip-flops brags about how she hid her dog and cat in her house. “I love them,” she gushed, smiling at a rangy orange tom as it slunk by on the street.

Even in the parts of the world that seem least able to afford a love of animals—places where humans are hungry, where disease runs rampant—this love nevertheless abides. Roughly a third of the world’s human rabies cases are believed to occur in India, tempting many officials there to order mass culls. But of course India, too, has its own ancient cultural tradition of preserving animal life. And where rabies is concerned, the more humane alternative is also the more scientifically sound one. In Chennai, India’s fifth-largest city, the activist Chinny Krishna of the Blue Cross of India infuriated some officials when he insisted that the local municipality rely on neutering and vaccination to reduce the rabies problem, rather than continuing to cull street dogs. Krishna pointed out that it was in 1860, back when the city was called Madras and ruled by the British, that Chennai first began exterminating dogs in hopes of reducing their number. He says his group became convinced that “if a procedure designed to control or eliminate street dogs had not showed positive results after implementing it for over a hundred years, something was wrong.” The rationale of “animal birth control,” as Krishna famously called his now-nationwide program—he wanted people to understand that it was “as easy as ABC”—is that neutering and vaccines together will reduce the fraction of dogs susceptible to rabies, creating a stable community of immunized dogs as a barrier to the ongoing spread of the virus.

Bali’s initial plan did include some vaccination, in addition to culling. But imported vaccines, which have been proven protective for up to several years with a single dose, were rejected in favor of an inferior vaccine, locally produced in Indonesia, whose average protective effect was less than six months in duration. Moreover, the government chose
not to vaccinate island-wide, concentrating its efforts in the area around and to the north of Ungasan Village, with the intention of confining and extinguishing the outbreak on the Bukit peninsula. In both respects, the problem was inadequate funding. According to Dr. Agung at the Disease Investigation Center, when the initial decree responding to the rabies outbreak was released, roughly US$110,000 was allotted for its implementation, but the money wasn’t actually made available to those undertaking the task, because of the timing of the end of the fiscal year.

The resulting campaign could never afford to get out in front of the epidemic. Three weeks in, on December 18, the
Jakarta Post
reported that 281 dogs had been destroyed and another 683 vaccinated against rabies. (The government “has vowed to regain Bali’s rabies-free status before the end of the year,” the newspaper reported.) But by January 9, the government was forced to acknowledge that its efforts to contain rabies on Bukit had failed; a rabid dog had been captured in the capital city, Denpasar. On January 18, scores of high-ranking local government officials participated in a Hindu ceremony at the Puncak Mangu temple seeking divine intervention to stop the outbreak. By November 2009, despite the extermination of 26,705 of Bali’s estimated 300,000 dogs and the vaccination of thousands more, the disease had spread to seven of Bali’s nine regencies.

Even though postexposure treatment for humans became available in late 2008, people continued to die. Thomas Aquino’s friend Freddy wisely began getting shots; Aquino was still deciding whether or not to do so when, on December 14, 2008, he developed muscle cramps and soon began literally foaming at the mouth. Meanwhile, his three-year-old neighbor Ketut Tangkas died at home on December 30.

Although it may have been easier on the government’s budget over the short term, and may also have quieted the early Balinese popular outcry for swift, strong action against the outbreak, Bali’s decision to slaughter dogs by the thousands rather than concentrate on vaccination—and effective vaccination—proved to be quite expensive
in the long run. In its race to win back the island, Bali had given rabies a yearlong head start.

Into this horror story stepped an unlikely demon slayer. In 1973, fresh out of the University of Oregon, Janice Girardi relocated to Bali and began making and selling her own jewelry. By 2007, this operation had swelled to become a multinational business, furnishing pieces to shops and large department stores around the world, and the income allowed Girardi to start a group called Bali Animal Welfare Association (BAWA). BAWA makes its headquarters in the same building in Ubud—the cultural heart of Bali, and a popular destination for the less surf-inclined tourist—that houses the jewelry business. Over the years it has gradually grown to incorporate a fully staffed shelter and veterinary clinic, a twenty-four-hour animal ambulance, a mobile sterilization clinic, a school-based education program, a puppy and kitten adoption program, and a continually expanding range of community programs funded through local and international donations.

The clinic, in particular, stands as a visible monument to Girardi’s dedication. Situated in front of lush rice paddies on Ubud’s outskirts, it’s a graceful two-story building with wooden doors carved in the typical Indonesian style, elaborate hand-cut reliefs of flowers and vines with human and animal figures festooned throughout. The clinic’s hallways and terraces are packed full of wire kennels housing softly bedded puppies, which fill the air with their desperate murmurings; ever since rabies came to Bali, the clinic has quarantined all incoming puppies and kittens for one month or more, in order to screen them for signs of rabies. From deeper inside the clinic, the low and earnest barking of more mature dogs adds a subtle baritone to the chorus. BAWA staff move cheerfully about, freshening up cage linens and water bowls and doling out dog food—a mix of rice, carrots, egg, and commercial dog kibble that looks almost appetizing to the human visitor.

In late 2009, after rabies on Bali had started to claim human lives and the mass extermination of dogs had begun, Girardi felt moved to
get involved. “At the beginning,” she recalls, “I went to meetings where there were hundreds of people clapping when they talked about shooting the dogs or strychnining the dogs. And I’m the only one in the room saying, ‘Let’s vaccinate!’” A manic talker, Girardi unself-consciously reenacts the scene in her quick staccato, with a chipper grin plastered on her face and her hand stretched high in pantomime of an eager schoolgirl. After some persistence, she persuaded the government to allow BAWA to establish its own vaccination pilot program across the Gianyar regency, which encompasses Ubud and stretches down to greet the island’s southeastern shore. Unlike the government, Girardi proposed to use only long-acting foreign vaccines and to kill only those animals that had already demonstrated clear signs of disease. Based on the advice of international rabies experts—from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, the World Health Organization in Geneva, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—she argued that the vaccination would need to cover 70 percent of Gianyar’s dogs in order to curb the disease. The campaign proved Girardi correct: such a prevalence of immune dogs, or “warrior dogs,” as she later took to calling them, saw the incidence of rabies decline notably in the region.

Despite this success, Girardi had surprising difficulty in convincing the government to extend this campaign island-wide. BAWA played host to a series of international rabies conferences, bringing together Balinese government officials and the world’s top rabies scientists; without fail, the latter cited overwhelming evidence in favor of a long-acting vaccine-based strategy for eliminating rabies from Bali, as opposed to large-scale culling. The organization even secured major funding for the larger campaign from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), a U.K.-based alliance, and the necessary vaccine from AusAID, the Australian government’s foreign-aid program. Still, months of negotiation were required to convince Bali’s governor to sign a document approving the plan. In October 2010, more than two years after the first human death from rabies on Bali, the island-wide vaccination effort finally got under way.

The entire campaign was to be coordinated out of BAWA’s headquarters in Ubud, a boxy, two-story office structure whose upstairs conference room soon became commandeered as a sort of vaccination war room. There, Girardi and a handful of her BAWA staff—sometimes with Elly Hiby, the London-based head of the Companion Animals Programmes Department for WSPA—could be found in a constant succession of logistical meetings, often huddled over a hand-sketched map of Bali’s nine regencies. Into each regency they penciled the numbers of vaccine and surveillance staff required, along with the projected dates. Arrows displayed how the teams would move from regency to regency in pursuit of that 70 percent vaccination rate. This difficult, dangerous work would have to be accomplished neighborhood by neighborhood, compound by compound, dog by dog.

In November 2010, a few weeks into the campaign, the vaccine teams were finishing up the Jembrana regency in rural west Bali, far from the tourist centers of the southern part of the island. Unlike the winding, urban maze of Ubud—where the streets, with their rows of sturdy old family compounds, often feel like fortified lines of walled keeps—Jembrana is more spacious, more agricultural. Some compounds are lined with open metal fencing, so the traveler can catch a glimpse inside; others are hardly fenced at all. The family temples, which in Ubud are graceful concrete structures with elaborately thatched roofs, in Jembrana can sometimes be more ad hoc affairs: piles of bricks, even, with a piece of tin perched on top.

“We are BAWA, here to vaccinate your animals for rabies!” This was the usual exclamation with which the team members entered a family compound. The shouting was necessary in order to be heard above the urgent barking of countless dogs, as the family dogs joined voices with those outside the compound walls: a piercing dissonance of woofs and wails. Made Suwana, BAWA’s director of educational outreach, wound up screaming himself as he translated the vaccine team’s shouts.

Each vaccine team was made up of four net-wielding dogcatchers; a veterinarian, in charge of drawing up and administering each rabies vaccine; and a record keeper, who noted details about every vaccine recipient on a clipboard. During most of their field excursions, the vaccine team was accompanied by the local
klian banjar,
or elected community leader, who smilingly reassured families of the benign nature of the intrusion. Upon entering each compound, the team asked the residents whether they could handle their own dogs during the injection. The large majority could not. Although the dogs live peacefully among the humans—eating the plentiful remains of the religious offerings laid out daily by the observant women of the family, drowsing comfortably below the
bale bengong
(a sort of gazebo), where the family lounges together during the humid afternoons, or following eagerly at the master’s heels as he walks across the road to converse with a neighbor tinkering with his motorbike—the dogs do not approach the family members directly for caresses or for morsels of food, and the family members do not regularly have occasion to lay a hand on the dogs. Indeed, they are usually afraid to do so. As the vaccine team worked, many owners seemed to derive a thrill from watching their semi-wild dogs get unprecedentedly manhandled.