RULERS OF THE ISLAND
Johannes P. Christo (Freelance Photojournalist, Denpasar)
Dogs live freely here. They can easily stay in empty spaces between residential areas. Even within the area of Besakih Temple, the biggest and most sacred Hindu temple, dogs may live in peace, as if they are guardians of the sacred area. Bali’s nature and culture have given room and hope for this domestic animal to be liberated.
In Hinduism, the relationship between dogs and their masters are not simply humans and animals. A part of Mahabharata epic is testament to this. It is said that Yudistira, one of the Five Pandavas, refused to go into heaven if he could not bring his black pet dog. The faithful dog has accompanied him through the journey to the Himalaya peak on the way to nirvana. This tale then became the foundation of the Hindus living in Bali that their dogs would one day accompany them into heaven.
But the position of dogs within the Balinese society has created a dilemma. “The Hindus in Bali truly respect dogs. But unfortunately, there are rabies issues and selective elimination is urgently needed,” said Ketut Puja, a professor at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Udayana University.
In 2009, there was a rabies plague in Bali. The case temporarily made dogs in Bali to be seen as an enemy in their own homeland. Dog bite cases was put under the spotlight. Death rate increased. In the end, local government had to put down many dogs without collars to suppress virus spreading. The plague could gradually be controlled, in line with the anti-rabies vaccine that was heavily distributed. But the root of the problem is still here, as the dog population in Bali keeps increasing.
As of July 2020, the Balinese Department of Animal Husbandry and Animal Health noted there were approximately 649,028 dogs in Bali. About 90 percent of them were stray or abandoned dogs. It means, there were about 520,000 stray dogs living alongside 4,3million Balinese. This number made Bali a region with the highest ratio of human to dog in Indonesia. In reality, Ketut Puja believed that there were more dogs than estimated, as the official numbers only counted those who had been vaccinated.
The habit of abandoning dogs causes the high number of stray dogs. Some owners could not commit to care for their dogs. When they are still puppies, they tend to be cared for as they are seen as cute or easy to manage. But as they grow up, many of them are abandoned. Some masters reason that they have grown to be fierce, hard to manage, or they could no longer afford to feed the dogs. The dogs then had to try to live on their own, being wild animals that had to hunt or scrape for food to survive.
Dogs are domestic animals. They do not have any predators like wild animals within the food chain. Hence, sterilization is needed to keep the population in check, so that the island would not be dominated by dogs.