Rabid (30 page)

Except in those unusual cases where owners could hold their dogs for the injection, the dogs had to be ensnared in nets. It was a remarkable ballet. As the dogcatchers entered a compound, they fanned out slowly, preparing to corral each dog in turn. A capture was made when one catcher startled a dog toward the other catchers’ nets. Except, that is, when the catchers missed: on occasion a net scooped only air, as a wily dog scampered to one side and then sprinted off to some distant corner. Worse, many of the dogs proved capable of breaching the compound fence, escaping into a neighbor’s yard or, farther off still, to the impossible catching grounds of a palm forest or rice paddy.

Once a dog was in a net, the net was twirled, such that the dog was left at the net’s bottom, twisted into a knot of quivering muscle, fur, and teeth. The dogcatcher then pressed the hoop, with the net now spiraled
taut across it, down over the enmeshed dog on the ground. Only then could the veterinarian, working warily through the tangle of ropes, administer the injection of rabies vaccine into the shuddering back muscles of the shrieking animal. Before the dog was released, two measures were taken to identify it as vaccinated. First, by means of long forceps, a red ribbon collar was woven through the net and knotted carefully around the dog’s neck. Second, red spray paint was applied generously to the dog’s back.

In their demeanor the dogcatchers, generally married men in their early twenties, strived for a nonchalant badassery. They wore their paw print–emblazoned BAWA T-shirts with pants that were either very tight or very loose, along with such rocker accessories as spiked bracelets or bandannas. Most had visible tattoos. During breaks they smoked cigarettes, consumed sweets bought liberally from the ubiquitous household storefronts, and hooted at attractive girls whenever they passed by. When they were engaged in the thrill of the catch, though, the young men’s swagger gave way to a quick and purposeful gait; their expressions, coolly bored a moment before, brightened to an alert apprehension.

The most dangerous step, they explained, was the liberation of the dog, which at that moment was often inclined—perhaps understandably—to reel around on its captor, teeth bared. Standard procedure for the release was to hold the hoop at maximum arm’s length, with the dog hanging in the net as it gradually untwisted. The dog writhed and snarled in the loose net until a quick flip, judiciously timed, deposited it on the ground. As soon as the dog disentangled its legs, it would be up and sprinting. The only question was, which way? The catcher held up his hoop like a shield until he could be sure the dog was running away from, and not toward, him.

While the catchers demonstrated their derring-do, the record keeper stood beside each owner, earnestly scribbling down the official data—the
name of the owner, the sex of the dog, the dog’s name, the dog’s age, and the color of the dog’s coat—on his clipboard. Not every Balinese dog has a name, but the list of names from one Jembrana community tended toward the punchy and masculine: Kiki, Jos, Boi, Boss, Lupi, Bobo, Inul, Bruno. The sex of more than 80 percent of Balinese dogs is male, due to a common practice of abandoning young female puppies. Some of them survive as strays, but most of them seem to vanish from the island; this practice, though a bit barbaric, has served Bali as a crude form of population control.

A mongrel breed reportedly related to Australia’s dingo, the “Bali dog” comes in a variety of colors, from brown to brindle to mottled white. It ranges in size from that of a large beagle to that of a small retriever, with a more or less consistent short stiff coat, erect ears, conical muzzle, and a lean, muscular body. The recent documentary
Bali: Island of the Dogs,
written and hosted by Dr. Lawrence Blair, a garrulous British expat in an eye patch, marshals an impressive group of scholars to testify to the Bali dog’s genetic uniqueness. One geneticist at the University of California at Davis, Niels Pedersen, even gives some credence to the legend that one group of wild Balinese dogs, the Kintamani of the interior highlands, is descended from a retinue of chow chows that was imported by an eleventh-century Chinese princess. As the geneticist demonstrates on a “family tree,” the Kintamani is very closely related to the chow chow—though he also holds out the possibility that the chow chow might have evolved from the Kintamani, rather than the other way around. Regardless, the Balinese seem convinced that their dogs are noble not merely in temperament but in bloodline.

Among locals, the Bali dog is held to possess nearly sacred properties. In addition to supplying owners with protection—including a sense for metaphysical danger that owners tout as a “magic alarm”—Bali dogs are believed, according to a paper coauthored by Dr. Agung of the DIC, to “cure certain diseases” and more generally to “avert calamity.” Sometimes they are given a role in religious ceremonies.
Their apparent ability to survive on rice, the primary foodstuff of the ubiquitous animistic Hindu offering, is frequently cited as evidence of their pluck and fortitude.

Such superstitions are enough to make Putu Ernawati, the smiley young veterinarian on the vaccine team in Jembrana, cautious in predicting the outcome of the island-wide effort. “It is hard to make the village people understand how important the rabies vaccine is,” she cautioned. But all around her, there seemed to be a growing awareness of the benefits. On seeing BAWA enter a nearby compound, neighbors would call and wave to make sure they would get visited, too. A few even tried to catch their own dogs in advance of BAWA’s arrival—and, having caught them, would advance toward the team with the thrashing, howling dogs in arms, presenting them proudly for injection. One local, Putu Widiasmadi, stood near the front of his compound, clearly enjoying the spectacle of the dogcatchers’ exertions. The team record keeper, who was helping to round up dogs, had entrusted his clipboard to two of Widiasmadi’s daughters, who laughed uproariously at the names the neighbors had given their pets; apparently, the names of their own dogs, Fred and Ricky, seemed thoroughly reasonable to them by comparison. “I think it’s good the government is responding this way to rabies,” Widiasmadi said. “Balinese families want to have a dog for protection.”

According to one
klian banjar,
the government dog exterminators had come through the village just weeks beforehand. The community still teemed with freewheeling Bali dogs, but soon it became obvious that their owners were steeled to shield them from harm. At one compound, an owner came running at the catchers wielding a large knife and shouting: “No, no, stop! Don’t kill my dogs!” At another, a little boy who saw the advancing team ran ahead to the community temple, in order to pray for his dogs’ survival.

The dogs themselves kept barking and barking: advancing and barking, retreating and barking; barking as they saw the vaccine team approaching; and barking just as emphatically at the backs of the team
as it moved on to the next compound. (One could understand why the Balinese are so supremely confident in the dogs’ abilities as protectors; the dogs will bark at anything.) BAWA’s teams would provoke a similar din in several more Jembrana communities that same day, and scores more that week. They would need to carry that on week after week, month after month, community after community, regency after regency—until the whole island had barked itself hoarse.

Back at headquarters, on a brilliantly sunny Wednesday, Girardi and her team were strategizing in the war room. In addition to Gianyar, vaccinated during the pilot program, Jembrana was now nearly finished; but the remainder of the island’s dogs awaited protection. And while many more teams were currently in training, none were as yet ready to deploy. On a crude hand-drawn map, chopped into rough approximations of the regencies, the team played with numbers. What if they had two teams here, and six teams here? And then, by the next month, ten additional teams?

Deny Gunawan, BAWA’s emergency response coordinator, interrupted the meeting to tell Girardi about a call from the clinic. A vicious young dog, which reportedly bit both its owner and its owner’s son without provocation, had just been dropped off for examination.

“Was the dog vaccinated?” asked Girardi.

“Not yet,” replied Gunawan. He went on to detail two ominous observations that had been made by clinic staff. First, when the dog was caught, it had tried to bite the net. Second, it had run fearfully from the water offered it.

Girardi was unimpressed. These behaviors were typical of a Bali dog when captured and confined. Rather than order the dog’s immediate euthanasia, Girardi instructed that it be placed in isolation and monitored for additional symptoms of rabies.

“The dog bit the owner and the son,” Gunawan repeated, to be sure that the gravity of the situation had impressed itself on his boss. Girardi, in response, repeated herself as well. The dog was to go into
isolation. Girardi wanted to obtain a more complete history from the owner regarding the circumstances of the bites. “Sometimes when you talk to them,” she explained to us after Gunawan had gone, “the story will turn out to be, the child was trying to take the toy from the dog and then the dad walked in”—that is, sometimes a biting dog is just being a normal Bali dog, not a mad dog. Besides, she continued, there wasn’t anyone in the clinic right now who could properly evaluate the dog.

Girardi returned her attention to the map. Her original plan, which made the most sense from an epidemiological point of view, had been to carry out an organized sweep of the island, starting in Jembrana on the narrow western end and then slowly moving across from west to east, gaining new teams as the island widened. It had become clear, though, that this methodical plan would not be tenable politically. Whenever a new human death or cluster of deaths occurred in some regency, she was immediately pressured to focus her eradication efforts there.

Irrational as those requests were, she was forced to comply. Doing so was necessary not just to keep her good standing with the government; it also was crucial to the animals’ welfare. “If we don’t get people in there,” she pointed out, “they’re going to start killing dogs.” So an organized eastward campaign across the island had instead given way to something that mapped more like nuclear war: teams would drop in targeted spots and then spread like fallout from the epicenters, until the whole island was consumed.

For all the terror of rabies, for all the superstitions that still attach to the disease (and to the dogs that carry it), and for all the individual intransigence and bureaucratic ineptitude that can mar any response to disease, the theory of vaccination should work: given the right math, and enough vaccine, this most ancient of killers will eventually submit and roll over. But getting the formula right takes patience and political will. BAWA’s first pass at vaccinating the island would eventually succeed, essentially as planned. The full array of teams would deploy within a month, and by March 2011 they would hit their target of
70 percent vaccination. The government would eventually fund a second pass, beginning two months later—a crucial step, given Bali’s staggering canine turnover rate, with 47 percent of dogs under two years of age. But following several human deaths, apparently from bites that had occurred prior to the BAWA campaign, the government’s confidence in vaccination seemed to waver. The culling of healthy dogs resumed, particularly near the recent rabies cases, even though most of the dogs in those communities had already been vaccinated; this once again lowered the overall canine vaccination rate. In May 2011, government officials announced they were abandoning the goal of eradicating rabies on the island by 2012 in favor of the significantly less ambitious deadline of 2015. If Bali recommits itself to building and sustaining its army of “warrior dogs,” in Girardi’s noble phrasing, then peace should return to this island paradise by then.

After the meeting, Janice drove over to the clinic in her Jeep. Thirty years on the island had assimilated her to the pell-mell driving style of the natives. She zipped around motorbikes, dodged dogs in the road, all at a velocity that was rather unnerving to an American visitor. On arriving, she set out to find the dog that had caused such a stir. It was nighttime, and only a dim fluorescent bulb lit the spot where it was being kept, in a little black wire kennel perhaps two feet wide. For all the fuss about rabies in Bali, you can spend a week reporting on the vaccination campaign—to say nothing of two years researching a book on rabies, or ten years as a U.S. veterinarian—without actually witnessing a rabid dog in the flesh. But here, finally, was one: its head wrenched back on its neck, eyes rolling morbidly in their sockets.

This was not a Bali dog. It was a little “breed dog” (as the locals called them), a black-and-tan Pekingese. It stumbled about like an angry drunk, attacking its cage bars and yowling—a long, mournful, strangled-sounding howl, ending in a wet desperate gurgle. Periodically, the poor dog would slump over in a haze, as if finally spent from its mad exertions. But all of a sudden it would start up again,
groaning and snarling, stumbling and biting. It seemed antagonized by our presence, and yet it never seemed fully to recognize we were there.

It’s an odd thing to interact with dogs your whole life and yet never see one laid low by this most ancient of canine curses. And in a strange way, it was less terrifying to see in the flesh than to brood upon as a prospect, a threat, a phantom. Just as the needle has become scarier to us than the bite, the reality of the rabid dog cannot quite measure up to the myth. Far more arresting than its rage is its sickness, its absentness.

Many people forget that in the original children’s book version of
Old Yeller,
published in 1956, the dog never even develops symptoms of rabies. We are made to understand that the disease is sweeping through the area—afflicting the family’s bull, for example, which “reeled and staggered like he couldn’t see where he was going…. He scrambled to his feet and came on, grunting and staggering and moaning, heading toward the spring.” But after Old Yeller gets bitten while tussling with a clearly rabid wolf, the boy shoots the wolf and then, on the hard-spun advice of his pioneer mother, shoots the dog, too, right there and then. It’s all over within just a page and a half of junior-reader, large-print type.