crazymalc.co.nz - Home Page of Malcolm Trevena

I'm a bad, bad man

14th May 2006
I've had some emails recently in response to this post.

The first one I received went like this:

I am obsolutely [sic] appalled by the inhumanness of your dog hunts. It is an absolutely disgusting way for a human being to treat innocent animals. Civilized humanity has devised many new ways to prevent rabies that doesn’t require ”hanging” domestic animals from moving trucks. My students stumbled upon this site. You should be ashamed of this atrocious act of animal cruelty.

For privacy reasons, I will not say who the email is from.

The second email I received hid behind the name of "cxzcx cxzcx". I have to put a warning on the second email as it is vile, abhorrent and disgusting. If you want to read it anyway, click here.

I suspect the second email came from the student of the teacher in the first email. I also suspect that it came from a teenage boy.

First up, some facts about rabies:

30,000 to 50,000 people died last year from rabies
Most of these were in India
There is an 80% mortality rate for people who have not been vaccinated.
I just had my rabies shots for my African trip
These cost me me about $US 100. To put this in perspective, that is two months worth of wages for the Filipino farm laborer.

Most Filipinos survive on less than $1 US a day, well below the poverty line.

Dumangas - the area in the Philippines I volunteered in - has 60,000 people and 7,500 dogs, some of whom are rabid (the dogs that is, not the people).

There was a case recently in Dumangas where a rabid dog bit a goat. The goat was killed and eaten. Nine people came down with rabies as a result. The local government spent an enormous amount of money to get these people healthy.

Fortunately, all of them survived. I don't know why the survival rate was so high. Maybe the cooking of the goat weakened the rabies. I don't really know though as I am not a doctor or a veterinarian. One volunteer suspected that it wasn't rabies, but something else.

Anyway, this is yet another story about how the Filipino people struggle day-to-day.

My two email correspondents are right. There are more humane solutions.

Unfortunately, the solutions require a lot of money that the Filipino people do not have.

40% of their tax take goes to foreign debt and 30% goes to corruption. The remaining 30% goes to what tax should be spent on: Education, healthcare and rabies programs.

I'd be more than interested in hearing from anyone who knows of a cheap and humane way to help with the rabies problem in Dumangas. You can contact me here.

A fellow volunteer has since told me that the rabies program has changed a little in Dumangas. The still try and lasso the dog from the car, but if it fails, they attempt to corner the dog and shoot it. He related the story of a dog that tried to hide underneath a house. The dog catchers ripped up the wooden floors and shot the dog in the head at point-blank range.

While it can't be nice for the dog, I still fully support the rabies program in Dumangas. The program is designed to save lives.

People are much more important than dogs.

...and just to paint a complete picture of what a bad man I am, here is a piece about a goat I killed and here is a picture of me killing a chicken.

Questions? Comments? Try contacting me.
Wanna receive an email whenever this site gets updated? Click here.

(c) 2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.