Looking back to the beginning—past the scores of Balinese dead from rabies, past the thousands of dogs brutally put down, all the way back to the cold forensic facts of who bit whom—it was probably Thomas Aquino’s dog that caused all the trouble. In May 2008, Aquino and a friend, known only as Freddy, sailed to Bali from their native island of Flores, which protrudes from the sea a few hundred miles east down the chain of Indonesian islands that spray off from Singapore toward Australia. Like many travelers on those waters, the two men brought along a dog, the company of which is held to protect the sailor not only from pirates but from more spiritual dangers, too—the mysteries of the animistic Hindu faith extending beyond the iconic beaches and into the deeps of the Bali Sea. For all recorded history the island of Bali had been rabies-free, and so, at least in principle and according to law, dogs could be imported only from other nations where the disease lacked a foothold. But enforcement of this law, fairly reliable at the airport, was entirely absent on Bali’s shores. Dogs trotted freely off ferries, pleasure craft, and fishing boats, with no one examining their papers or scanning them for signs of disease. Once on land, these four-footed immigrants mixed easily with the other dogs of the waterfront, where strays (unusual across Bali as a whole, where more than 95 percent of dogs are owned) stalk the beaches in a friendly crush, living off handouts from tourists. The locals, for their part, paid little attention. Among the Balinese it is typical not to acknowledge any dogs except for their own, and sometimes those only cursorily.
So the arrival of Thomas Aquino’s dog—silently harboring in its body, somewhere along its nervous system, the seeds of an island-wide epidemic—went wholly unnoticed by anyone, or at least by anyone who understood the scope of the damage that one imported dog could do.
The dog and the two men from Flores settled in Ungasan Village, on the arid Bukit peninsula that hangs like a hammerhead from Bali’s southern tip. There, nuclear families make house in compact, densely constructed dwellings, rather than in the sprawling extended-family compounds that are common on the rest of the island. All of Bali thrives on tourism, which every year brings in some two million foreigners and $2.8 billion of their money in search of South Pacific paradise. But lately that business has particularly boomed in Bukit, where large resorts—owned by such luxury conglomerates as InterContinental, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and Orient-Express—have proliferated. Jobs in and around these resorts have lured many more Indonesians to the peninsula. Muslim and Hindu families live side by side in its neighborhoods, as transplants from the northern part of Bali mix with immigrants from other islands, all seeking to profit from the incessant, explosive growth.
Two months after Thomas’s dog made landfall, it bit both him and Freddy. Soon a three-year-old in the village, a boy named Ketut Tangkas, was bitten by his own, suddenly furious dog. By that September, rabies had claimed its first human victim on Bali: a forty-six-year-old woman in the village named Putu Linda. Although a postmortem test for rabies came back positive, public-health officials did not follow up on the implications of that fact for more than two months.
In October, another boy in Ungasan—Muhammad Oktav, also three—was bitten on the face in front of his home by a stray. When his mother took him to the hospital and asked about a rabies vaccine, the doctors refused to provide one. Bali was “rabies-free,” they pointed out. They sutured up his wounds and sent him home. Over the next few weeks, the boy seemed to be recovering normally from his injury. He went back to playing as usual in his family’s tiled front garden. But a month following the bite, Muhammad abruptly fell ill with chills and, soon, the hallmark fear of water; within two days he was dead. It took two more deaths in Ungasan before the government finally acknowledged, on November 30, 2008, six months after Thomas Aquino and his dog made landfall, that rabies had come to Bali for the first time in history.
One rabid dog had become many. Now, with human lives at stake, no dog could be trusted. With no means of early detection of rabies on the island, the government had recognized the outbreak only after an obvious cluster of human deaths laid bare the extent of the problem. Now the challenge before the Balinese authorities was one of bringing a limited regional epidemic under control before it could spread to the rest of the island.
Barring some miraculous revolution in vaccines, on the one hand, or a near-total obliteration of all animals on the other, the worldwide war against rabies will never be entirely won. Isolated islands like Bali and Britain can win themselves reprieves, at least for a time. But on the larger landmasses, even in nations (such as the United States) where the disease has been largely controlled, its stubborn carriers in wildlife populations reside too far away from man, dispositionally if not always geographically, for us to snuff the devil out very easily. Even if we do somehow succeed in purging rabies from four-legged creatures, we would be left with the problem of the bat, which harbors its own specialized strains of the virus and does not submit easily to the needle.
The great divide in worldwide rabies control is between those nations where the disease has been largely eliminated in dogs and those where it has not. This gap is not precisely the same, it should be noted, as the divide between rich and poor. In Brazil, where bat rabies remains rampant but dog rabies has been curtailed through mass vaccination, human deaths from rabies have numbered fewer than ten per year since 2006; in Kazakhstan, which boasts less than a tenth of the population and nearly the same per capita income, the death tally from rabies is significantly higher. The special role of dogs in spreading rabies is due not just to the way they live with us, and all around us; it’s also due to the way the virus is perfectly matched to the dog as host, expressing itself in canine saliva at levels rarely achieved in other four-footed wildlife. Rabies coevolved to live in the dog, and the dog coevolved to live with us—and this confluence, the three of us, is far too combustible a thing. According to the CDC, dog bites are still responsible for 90 percent of human exposures to rabies worldwide and more than 99 percent of human deaths.
To be sure, poverty and its attendant ills—governmental corruption, social unrest, poor health overall—help greatly to explain why the two most rabies-afflicted continents, Asia and Africa, have failed to quell the disease. If controlling rabies is in some sense equivalent to keeping dogs healthy, this latter effort is in many ways a proxy for bringing order to civilization itself. Stray dog populations, and rabies along with them, tend to flourish in places where government has broken down; in the former Soviet republics, for example, rabies has resurged during the past twenty years. The problem becomes especially acute under circumstances of radical depopulation. In South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province, where some 39 percent of residents are infected with HIV, local veterinarians have reported a tremendous upswing in populations of feral dogs, leading to more cases of rabies. More extreme still, in Ukraine, is the “exclusion zone” around the former Chernobyl power plant, where scientists report an eruption of rabies in the proliferating dogs and other wildlife that haunt the zone.
Even where government functions reasonably well, the peculiarities of rabies often cause officials to become shortsighted. Preventative treatment in dogs often seems like an unaffordable luxury, especially given that the countries where rabies still runs rampant are also countries where other diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, kill far more people. But vaccination campaigns in dogs are always much cheaper, over the long haul, than giving out postexposure treatment to humans. The World Health Organization points out that the cost of a full course of postexposure treatment is 4 percent of the average gross national income for Asia and nearly 6 percent of that figure for Africa. As it stands, antirabies campaigns worldwide consume more than a billion dollars per year, and that is just to keep the number of deaths roughly equal to where it stands right now, at approximately fifty-five thousand per year.
As a rabies-free island, Bali was not supposed to add more than 150 victims to that tally. But one wayward dog ensured that it did. Indeed, Bali serves as an instructive story about how quickly any gain in rabies control can be reversed. For all its First World tourist revenue, Bali’s per capita income is less than two thousand dollars per year—making residents reluctant to vaccinate at their own expense, and making postexposure treatment hard to afford as well. Just like in the fictional British outbreaks sketched by The Rage and Day of the Mad Dogs, Bali’s rabies-free status wound up becoming a psychological hindrance, as hospitals and residents and governmental officials were too slow to recognize what they were seeing. And when officials did finally awake to the scale of the problem, their response began with the same misguided impulse that tends to strike most government officials when faced with a rabies outbreak: the brute-force killing of dogs.
Dr. Anak Agung Gde Putra is a veterinary epidemiologist at Bali’s Disease Investigation Center (DIC), which is not technically part of the government—its funding comes from the United Nations—but which closely advises Bali officials on animal disease control. Dr. Agung is elegant and middle-aged, crisply uniformed in khakis and delicate wire spectacles. His English is excellent, if deliberate, and he talks proudly of the professional visits he has made to Australia and the United States.
On the subject of Bali’s rabies outbreak, Dr. Agung felt strongly that his government had acted responsibly given the circumstances. After rabies was confirmed by the laboratory in November 2008, Bali’s governor—Made Mangku Pastika, who was elected to his office after becoming well-known as police commissioner for rooting out suspects in the 2002 terrorist nightclub bombing—notified the public within twenty-four hours. The following day he issued a decree laying out the government’s course of action, which had been prescribed by Dr. Agung and his colleagues at the DIC. The main thrust of this plan was mass slaughter. It called upon the residents of Bali to kill, personally and by any means necessary, any and all street dogs they came across. In addition, all boats arriving in Bali were to be thoroughly searched by port officials, who would immediately confiscate and destroy any cats, dogs, or monkeys they found.
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.
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.
To this day it remains shocking that Walt Disney, of all movie moguls, agreed to make Old Yeller into a film—and that he didn’t find some way to save the dog. The book’s author, Fred Gipson, was even hired to write the screenplay. Bill Anderson, a longtime Disney producer who was vice president of studio operations when the film was made, claimed in an interview that a second, more experienced screenwriter, brought in to work with Gipson, had floated the “gutless approach” of saving the dog.
“But Walt could see the drama,” Anderson recalled. “Walt knew that—showman that he was—we had to kill the dog to have a story.”
At Disney’s instigation, though, the writers did make a subtle but extremely important change. To the boy’s last-ditch suggestion in the book—that they “tie him or shut him up in the corncrib or some place until we know for sure”—the mother in the film assents, though reluctantly. The dog is confined until, in fact, it becomes mad, snarling at the children, its foaming mouth clearly visible through the wooden gate. For the film, as Anderson put it, they changed the story such that “there was no out but to kill the dog.”
For all the generations of children scarred by the movie—Anderson said that his own daughter, many years later, “still doesn’t forgive us for killing the dog,” and one critic bluntly called the ending “child abuse”—one has to see Walt Disney’s subtle amendment as a strange sort of mercy. As brutal as it was for kids to see that mad dog get shot, how much crueler the world would have seemed if its killing had been necessary only because it might go mad. Rabies, frightening though its ravages may be to see up close, has about it the comfort of certainty. However much the furious dog was once loved, it cannot be saved.
Dogs’ bond with humans is bred into their very cells, their genes; it’s written through their entire history, a chronicle that can be read in their eyes. But inside this black wire cage, in the lolling eyes of what remained of a Pekingese, there was nothing legible at all. One could hardly grieve for the dog, because the dog was already gone. To euthanize it—which a BAWA vet mercifully did, moments later, with the customary overdose of anesthesia—was merely to acknowledge its departure.