Maximillian 'Max' Jesus Esq.

 I don't share much of my life here in Mexico, and one reason (among many) is that I live a life now where most of my anecdotes are about dogs, kind of like when Reese joins a dog pack in Malcolm in the Middle. So brace yourself for a dog anecdote, but it was a win for us, well except for the dogs Doki and Usma who by-and-large didn't care.

It began with our usual morning walk. Though I go to pains to make sure these walks aren't routine, because as a house husband I try to maximise productivity through killing two birds with one stone we typically have two-and-a-half destinations for morning walks: the supermarket, the carneceria and/or the mercado which is opposite the carneceria.

For those 2.5 different destinations I have at least 10 different routes to take the dogs by so they get the intellectual stimulation of sniffing pee-stained walls that are different from the walls they sniffed yesterday.

Anyway, I'd taken the most straightforward route to the carneceria yesterday, and I'd padded out the shortened distance by stopping in our neighbourhood park we always have to cut through and throwing Doki's ball for fetch, while Usma grazes in a nearby garden bed selecting and eating the tastiest blades of grass. 

This gave our party of three the maximum chance to encounter a bunch of neighborhood dogs by virtue of standing still and letting them come to us. This created some minor chaos when it was time to leave with other people's dogs wanting to come with Doki and Usma and after some sorting we got the respective dogs all walking in the right direction.

This is so banal an occurrence that it is not anecdote worthy. I was making egg and bacon "McMuffins" so I stopped at a fairly shitty bakery "Croissants Alfredo" to pick up my favorite substitute for English Muffins. That's where our duo of dogs picked up another tagalong dog. 

Some vocabulary: Street dogs are dogs that get turned out by their owners because they are underfoot, or because the house is empty while parents are working and kids are at school, in Mexico, a bunch of dog owners just let their dogs lie out on the pavement and wander the streets as they please confident they will return home as per their routine. Stray dogs are dogs that live on the streets, nobody owns them, they are homeless. Stray dogs are rarer than homeless people, generally picked out by their mange. 

In Guadalajara, Mexico, in our 'Colony' or Suburb, Street dogs are neck-and-neck if not the majority of dogs compared to the less visible house dogs like ours and the few fellow dog-walkers I spot throughout the day.

In Australia, house dogs are the clear majority. Street dogs are almost non-existent because our councils function rather efficiently such that there's only so long your dog can wander streets unescorted before a nice person might check its collar for a contact number, or a precious busy-body calls the council to come pick it up. 

Thanks to a lack of interest and subsequent credulity in Catholicism, in Australia most pets have been desexed, are registered with the local council and possibly have a microchip in their ear. This is not the case in Mexico, which means that the majority of street dogs are male but more to the point, you can turn your dog out here and be reasonably confident nobody will pay it any mind.

I appreciate that while many street dogs are fine; in our neighborhood we are quite fond of street dogs Princessa, Whiskey, Blackie aka "Don Perro" and Pachino, enough street dogs are public nuisances that I have come to believe that having a system like Australia which renders street dogs non-viable is indeed social progress. (As is most dog owners being out of the breeding game via spading and neutering your dogs. We should read A LOT into animal rights groups like the RSPCA and PETA being so enthusiastic about taking away your pets reproductive rights.)

So at first, when Doki and Usma attracted a third collarless Chihuahua-mutt, I thought almost nothing of it. One of the most immediate things I find annoying is when street dogs are latching onto our dogs and they do a shit in front of witnesses. Because I walk Usma and Doki off leashes, I am self-conscious that people will assume the tagalong dog is also mine. There's also good odds I'm carrying a bag of shit and I can read the confusion on my neighbors faces when I clearly do pick up dog shit but refuse to pick up the shit a dog in my company did in front of their house. 

Which is what the collarless street dog did as soon as I got out of Croissants Alfredo. But whatever, I walked two doors down to tie my dogs up out the front of the carneceria and head in to chat to Gustavo and buy biscuits for Ale, bacon for our "McMuffins" and an iced tea for me. The dogs are making a minor motherfucking ruckus being tied up and still being bothered by this collarless street dog.

This in hindsight is the part I feel most terrible about, but in my mind this dog strikes me as in the annoying street dog category.

An annoying street dog is the kind that ignore all the signals Usma and/or Doki have had enough of having their buttholes and bits sniffed now. 

So I unleashed Doki and Usma, which allows them to flee attention and thus makes them less snarly and barky and snappy, and then I tried to shepherd this street dog off. 

It was "one of those" though that would not just reluctantly head off in the opposite direction but try and sneak around an obstacle like a parked car. Also not helpful when I'm shepherding is that Doki aka "Doofus" and Usma aka "Dawdler" don't take advantage of my ability to physically intimidate street dogs (one of my messages to Alejandra she enjoyed most this year was "I chased off this dog and it fled today, I felt like a big man.") and put some distance between them and the annoying street dog. This was one of those kinds where Doofus and Dawdler decided instead to come and investigate what I was doing, trying to shoo this dog away.

So I gave up and we just walked home, with the street dog following us the whole way. In retrospect, the failure of my shooing strategy was the first clue I wasn't dealing with a street dog, as maybe it's reluctance to let go of Doki and Usma's walk was that it had nowhere to go.

Up until we got home, absolutely nothing was noteworthy. There was a annoying + size = menace street dog I dubbed 'Lonely Boy' for example, that wouldn't leave our dogs alone, I couldn't shoo or shepherd away but closing our front door on it gave it enough pause for thought to find someone else to bother.

This dog didn't move on. Sparing it no thought after I got home, I started to hear howling.

Dogs howling is pretty rare. My dogs growing up Lil and Bess rarely barked, and never howled. You've almost certainly heard dogs bark and dogs whine, but maybe not howling:

So this story was a win, and this was really when Max won it. By behaving out of the ordinary, he just hung out at the front of our house, howling.

It was unusual, and just as an aside but it reminds me of those moronic morality plays that probably still populate youtube, tiktok etc. In fact I know they do, because I tried to find an example on Youtube and I just refuse to watch or share videos with titles like "Undercover billionaire changes homeless man's life (shocking!!!)" even if they have 6.7M views already. But the one's I think of are where the playwright is trying to prove something by having a homeless person ask for change and show how many people ignore them or get annoyed with them, then they dress them as a business person and have him ask for change and almost everyone is willing to help them out.

The moral is I'm guessing something like 'don't judge people by appearances' or 'look how awful/hypocritical people are' and I've always maintained, these morality plays prove nothing. If anything it's just that people with limited information manage their scarce resources by giving small amounts of money to problems that can be solved by small amounts of money and they don't small amounts of money to problems that will likely be sustained by small amounts of money. If that's too cryptic, I'd restate it as this:

A person who looks like they sleep rough asking for change is not in any way shape or form irregular or unusual. In many cities of the world, it is not unusual to be asked for change by people who appear to be sleeping rough multiple times without crossing a street. It is relatively rare to come across someone who appears to be gainfully employed asking for change. It is even rare to give such a person small amounts of money and then turn around to see them ask the next person to walk past for a small amount of change. So the big difference is, that one stereotype will not be satiated by pocket change, the other stereotype can be reasonable expected to be satiated. We can conclude that people are generally happy to help, but are wary of futility.

So Max gets credit for being a business man asking for small change. He differentiated himself from the run-of-the-mill street dog by camping on our doorstep and howling, cueing myself and our neighbours into paying attention and trying to figure out what was wrong.

My first theory was that he wasn't particularly bright, and had gotten lost by following Doki and Usma's buttholes. So I tried to lead him back to the park and he wouldn't follow me. I knew we needed to go to the supermarket latter to get lunch stuff and I'd take the dogs so we'd try again then, hoping he'd follow Usma and Doki back to the park and then remember where home was and go there, or at the least, take an interest in some other dog and leave our street and stop howling.

The howls did stop, so I assumed he'd moved on. And he had, he'd moved three doors up and was just chilling in the shade of a tree.

I tried the next plan a little later when I took the dogs to our local supermarket, but he wouldn't follow. He came down to sniff Doki and Usma, but would not follow and leave our street. He retreated. 

When we returned 45 minutes later, a Senor from the factory opposite our house where our landlord/neighbor borrows ladders to climb onto our roof and into her house when she forgets her keys came to tell me the dog had been howling, and I clarified that it wasn't one of mine and I don't know where it's from but by this stage it had been hanging out for four or five hours on our street. 

Another man from further up our street brought it dog chow in a bag and I put out a container of water. This guy tried to coax it into eat and drink but he wouldn't let anyone near him. I started to suspect some kind of trauma, and it also ruled out the prospect of me picking him up and carrying him to the park.

I messaged Ale who was now out getting her laptop repaired to tell her it was like living in the puppy's first howling video. Ale said she was walking home from the train station, so I decided to try luring him back to the park again with Usma who was really not keen on a third walk for the day (it's 30-32 degrees Celsius every afternoon for like the next 4 months here) but I dragged her on the leash and this time I was successful and Max followed us.

We ran into Ale just around the corner of our house a few hundred meters from the park, Ale suggested we all go to the park and hope he would follow us. She had asked at Michoacana's (the biggest icecream and milkshake franchise in Mexico where you can get a litre of sugar for AUD$1.40) if anyone had been around asking after this dog, and they'd said no. 

We got to the park, and Ale had obtained somewhere a Jack Link's stick of jerky and managed to get him to eat from her hand. I said ambiguously 'well he's following us home now' and then Usma pushed herself in front of him as if to say 'hey! where's my jerky?' 

After some sitting, Max howled, which moved Ale's jerky clogged heart and she decided to ask the staff at Croissants Alfredo if they recognized or knew the dog. When she came back she reported that they'd seen him around but didn't know who he belonged to. Ale said there's a facebook page for our neighborhood and she posted a 'is this your dog? come and get him.' post there, before scrolling down and spotting him!...in another 'is this your dog? come and get him.' post made by our neighbors three doors up where he'd been chilling all afternoon.

Now, some more Mexican culture, in Australia if you were to ask 'is your dog a rescue?' it would be implied that someone had adopted that dog from a dog shelter - the "rescue" part is that we rescued a dog being cared for from being humanely euthanised, to manage shelter capacity.

In Mexico if a dog is a rescue, that means somebody took a street/stray dog home and started caring for it. I'm not sure if it's even a 1 step process (my rough translation 1. approach slowly and pat it. 2. take it home and love it):

photo credit: Instagram.com/Soy_DogVader

And Max was endearing, I was feeling the name 'Sparky' at this point, and we could take on another dog but we were not the first and best option compared to someone who was considering getting a dog at this point. So Ale created a post on her personal page to see if anyone wanted to adopt this dog we'd found.

Then one of the Park locals, walked past with one of his three dogs that I don't know by name but certainly see on an almost daily basis. Ale asked him if he knew our mystery dog. He said he did, that he lives around here and he'd previously tried to walk him home but he doesn't want to go home.

With this confident response, my perception shifted - we were dealing with a street dog with an extremely shitty owner. It was a big relief though because it now just seemed a matter of time before word would drive the owner to come pick up their dog and any residents of our street would have the opportunity to give him a piece of their fucking mind.

In fact, this is where on balance despite my affections for Princessa, Whiskey, Blackie and Pacino on balance street dogs are a nuisance. The best argument I can think for the practice is that it is potentially more humane than trapping a dog indoors for hours with no real stimulation. But to use economic speak, street dogs are an externality, it is abdicating an owners responsibility for a dog onto the community, whether that means having to slow down in order not to hit the dog as it crosses roads, or other dog walkers having to chase off or otherwise get rid of your dog when there's no owner there to call them, or the people who tend to the park that have to pick up after your dog or the residents that have to clean up after your dog because you don't.

Even the street dogs I like, likely have a shortened life expectancy greater than strays but shorter than house dogs. Lula, not quite a street dog but a shop dog, recently died because she got into a fight with other street dogs.

So through the unproductive heat of the afternoon Ale and I settled down to eat our belated lunch. I should point out that all the while that Max took refuge on our step, or the step 3 doors up and howling, we were constantly checking on him. I was feeling it inevitable that he'd wind up in our house when the sun went down if Max's irresponsible owner didn't turn up to collect him.

Ale was thinking a good name for him would be Chato ("Flat") because she thought he was a Chihuahua-Boxer cross. Then she got a message, and that's how we found out Sparky/Chato's name was Max.

Max had gotten lost and wound up almost 5km from home, 4 days after he went missing before happenstance had him glom onto Usma, Doki and my morning walk. 

Max had stopped howling because three doors up our neighbors with a dog called Matilda were out on their stoop comforting him. They'd also successfully coaxed Max into being patted and was securely purched on a lap receiving constant reassurance.

We informed them of Max's name and then Ale compared notes on the timeline of Max's adoption of our street. After about 20 minutes, Max's family arrived to pick him up.

Relieving such a state of anxiety both in dog and man, is a very sweet thing. I'm sure none of us wanted to budge for the payoff of witnessing a lost dog reunited with his owners. 

In a testimony to Usma's seperation anxiety, Max's response to seeing his owners after 4 days living on the streets was very subdued compared to Usma's response to seeing Ale after an hours separation.

While Max was cradled in the daughter's arms, we got the missing pieces of Max's puzzle.

One of the daughter's of the family, not present had taken Max with her to Morelos Park, 5km to the North of us. She carried him, meaning that Max wasn't well oriented to where home was relative to the destination, a Michoacan opposite the Park. She'd left him to wait outside while she got her sugar fix, and some pendejo kicked Max, causing him to panic and flee. That was the last they'd seen of him.

He'd then wound up heading South instead of West and kept on heading. 4.2km via unknown route to wind up where, credit where credit's due, he'd found us. 

His owners speculated that the neighbors three doors up from us, had a front door that looked a lot like theirs and that's probably why he got attached to it in particular. Even down to the DIY dog flap of unattached fly-screen. 

This happy ending, needs to be remembered as an ordeal that ended in relief, a precious second chance. I recall, every time, with annoyance, a former colleague of mine describing an incident to me where her smart phone got snatched but some hoodlums in the Melbourne CBD who then ran straight into some police officers and she described it as a real 'God moment'. All affection I have for my former colleague aside, she knows we have this point of disagreement, but I recall sharing reassuring glances of incredulity with colleagues in the break room to this attribution.

Presumably, should the hoodlums have got away clean with her phone, this would simply not be a 'God moment' but something else. God's presence or absence oddly coinciding with the presence or absence of a tax-funded public institution that has been refined over centuries in an ongoing scientific process. 

And of course, God gets credit aparantly for putting police on a street corner, but not for putting thieving hoodlums there to steal the phone. Or maybe those hoodlum's life purpose in the eyes of our Creator is to afford one of the devout a truly trivial demonstration that God's there and he cares. Just as he cares and loves for the young people who were predestined to live the kind of life that motivates phone snatchings. If only they'd open their hearts to Christ... their life could be marginally better.

And so too, Max was unlucky that some cunt kicked him. He was lucky to run into myself and the other dog lovers that populate our street. He could have run west and got his bearings and only be missing for one or two hours tops, or located the next day as the search began with posters in his home neighborhood. He could have run North or East and I'd never know his story, but it quite probably would have worked out the same. 

He could have been very unlucky and met someone worse than someone who kicks a dog, because there are people who murder dogs for whatever unfathomable reason. He could have been hit by cars crossing the indeterminate number of streets he crossed before I got to him. He could have been lucky and his owners unlucky if somebody just liked the look of him and adopted him in the one-to-two-step-process of Mexican 'rescues' making no effort to determine if anyone was missing or looking for him.

Then there's all the matters that weren't luck. It's not luck that I strongly empathise and sympathise with dogs, to the point they hack my brain and take over my faculties. I feel terrible about trying to shoo Max away, given the ordeal he was going through. 

It wasn't luck that Max had no collar, dramatically increasing his vulnerability to being lost for prolonged periods. It wasn't luck that Max didn't know his way home. Small as he is, he is clearly capable of walking up to 5km. 

It also wasn't luck that Max's behavior drew attention and resources to his plight. A quick google tells me dog's were domesticated somewhere between 14,000 to 29,000 years ago, or 2.3 to 4.8 times a young earth creationists duration of all existence. Staying on our street and howling was by far the biggest contributing factor to Max's rescue.

And there's the incomprehensible, the black box of what a dog is thinking. Did Max end up in our park via a random walk? Was he incompetently thinking he recognized landmarks all the way and stopped in our neighborhood on the 4th day in a state of confusion. On the morning of publishing this article, I ran a 9km round trip to the park where he went missing and back to my house. 

It seems "truly" a "miracle" that four days later Max was in my local park. I don't know when he actually arrived, he could have been there all the previous day. It's just that the journey is simple but not straight forward, as in straight, forward. A major freight line needs crossing, then there's major 4 lane arterial roads, two of them, before you get to our sleepy neighbourhood tucked behind the bread and cake factory. In the backstreets there's so many opportunities for unfriendly dogs to send a lost dog off in random directions.

Of course the odds of a shuffled deck of playing cards coming out in any order is astronomically small (literally 1/(8x10^67), or more than there atoms on planter earth) yet we know the cards have to come out in some order. Just so, it's lucky Max ended up in one of the times and places that would lead to his owners finding him, but there's probably less outcomes of where a stray dog can wind up after four days in Guadalajara.

If I locked myself out of my house and forgot my wallet and Ale was away making rain through the power of dance and my housemate was competing in Roller Derby and my landlord was visiting a relative, I would get hungry. 

Dog's don't have this problem. The streets of Guadalajara offer an abundance of calories if you are willing to eat off the ground and out of Garbage bags. The climate is also friendly to homelessness this time of year. 

Factoring in as much as I can to the limits of my imagination, the outcome of a lost dog story in Guadalajara is: Random. Once you lose control, it is reasonable to do what you can and maintain hope.

It might seem then, that the story is much the same in Australia. The thing is, somewhere between every week and every month in my Mexican neighborhood new 'Se Busca/Have you seen' posters go up for missing dogs. It was a rarity when I lived in Kew, between one and three a year. 

I speculate that the 'have you seen' posters in a city like Melbourne have a much lower ratio of happy endings. Once it comes to the putting up posters stage, things are not looking good. (You still should though, during the lockdowns a local music store had their cat disappear, he was returned after three months, don't know what the story was, I never have a reason to go in there.)

But that's because I would also speculate that 1) your dog isn't on the streets all day everyday to begin with. 2) your dog is not going to be confused with a street dog and paid no mind. 3) if a local doesn't take an interest in the unescorted dog in their street, the council will.

So most dog escapes in Melbourne, Australia are resolved very quickly, maybe before you've even had a chance to notice your dog was missing. 

Before the fact of your dog going missing, you'd probably rather be a dog owner in Australia. After the fact, it's probably better to be a dog owner in Mexico. In Mexico you've probably got a 50/50 shot of finding your dog after days or even weeks. It's just instead of the dual efficiencies of the rarity of stray dogs making them conspicuous and having a bunch of council workers regularly driving through your local streets, it's probably going to get into the system and back to you.

An Australian might widen their search parameters by visiting an ever increasing diameter of animal shelters, Max's family had to widen the net through like, actual detective work, following leads until they stumbled on rumors he'd been spotted in our suburb, and then checked our neighborhood's facebook page.

Mexico is how things work in a libertarian worldview.

So we run into the shortfalls of not requiring a dog-ownership license. Mexico has a dog culture that I imagine Australia hasn't had since the 50s or 60s (including racist dog names). Our household is on the frontier of the new school of 'pets as surrogate children' model that dominates Australian urban dog ownership. 

Plenty of owners clearly mentally categorize dogs as distinct from family members, something I now struggle to comprehend. They are something between house plant and family member. It's likely many dogs in Mexico are owned first and foremost as home security measures and secondarily as domestic pets.

Max is a family member, but I'm guessing he gets carried a lot, picked up a lot. Of course he's a lapdog, but I feel Usma is less vulnerable to winding up in a strange neighborhood 5km away. (Though clearly more vulnerable to having her amygdala seize control of her control levers and running her straight under a vehicle).

Because there's a spectrum of dog ownership, rather than a binary. I feel dog owners need to think of their dogs as selectively bred captives. You have a moral obligation to look after their mental health, not to thrust that upon them because you wanted a dog but feel they need to appreciate the realities of the modern gig economy.

Dog's don't quite get the recent innovation of cars. They probably had horses figured out as a trampling hazard, but even born after the advent of TikTok dog's are slow adopters of technology. They need mental and physical stimulation through regular walks along novel routes. The added perk of this is that they will know how to get home.

My first dog Lil was too smart for her own good, that and my dad was not smart enough to weld a Lil proof latch on our backyard gate. She was able to push it open with her nose and regularly not so much 'escaped' as 'took herself for walks' she only went missing once and was found the next day. My friend Hayden conveyed that news to me at school. 

But usually we would get reports from neighbours of seeing her sitting waiting for it to be safe to cross the road to Lake Wendouree. 

Anyway, the point is dogs can learn, and perhaps most controversially, learn to cope somewhat with independence. They can learn their neighbourhoods and learn to walk off leash. In Australia, most councils are able if not obliged to fine you for not having your dog on the leash, but in 15 years of owning Bess I got one warning despite walking her off-leash every day.

I approve of the law though as a deterrent, the best argument being that no driver can be expected to know my dog isn't going to run out into its path and if they don't fancy killing a dog; are forced to slow down just by being in proximity. And there are no dog licenses, so there's no way anyone can reasonably expect any dog owner to have any control over or instill any discipline in their dogs. Giving council workers discretionary powers to issue fines based on the behaviors of dogs and owners is probably the ideal arrangement.

Again, I feel that Max's owners are loving, doting owners as evidenced by the efforts they went to to track Max down. They did their necessary part to recover Max. I also don't know the lap-dog/toy breed too well in terms of temperament and what not. 

So in no way shape or form do I want to confuse or conflate Max's owners with what I want to touch on next, which is what I will call the 'Narcissistic Owner'.

I use the weighty term 'Narcissistic' deliberately, with the plague Narcissists are upon the economy. People defined specifically to be hyper sensitive to and motivated by esteem, with little to no sensitivity to their cognitive or affective empathy.

To clarify what I, and potentially only I (because I'm not a qualified psychotherapist), mean by the prefix 'narcissistic' is that it is the plague of people who want to be a supervisor, a team leader, a manager, a C-suite executive, a CEO, a doctor, a surgeon, a founder, an entrepreneur, an influencer without wanting to deliver any of the value (do the work) those positions entail. They just want the good table at the restaurant, the attention, adulation, the salary, the perks etc.

And for a narcissistic owner, they want a dog, they don't want to pick up after it, take it for regular walks, take it for novel walks, take it for sufficient walks, take it to the vet, pay the vet bills etc.

Again Max's owners, are not the kid from 'The Puppy That Lost It's Way' they near tirelessly sleuthed and hit the pavements and the socials to find Max. 

However, this is a problem for dogs worldwide. Narcissistic owners disregard the interests and incomprehension of their pets in the same was as narcissistic employees disregard the interests of their subordinates, their managers, the shareholders and the community.

I do think given dogs capacity to learn, that owners have a responsibility to educate them just as they do with a child. 

I've already mentioned my suspicion that the influence of Catholicism might have something to do with why so many street dogs aren't spade or nuetred here. Paradoxically, I'm also thinking the influence of Catholicism may have something to do with the culture of dogs in general - in Mexico I feel people empathize less with dogs. 

There are certainly dog lovers and enthusiasts, but there also appears numerous people who regard dogs as meat machines, rather than thinking, feeling creatures. Australian philosopher Peter Singer talks about an expanding circle of empathy, that we as a species should continue to care about people on the other side of the world, and maybe one day care about people that will live in the future, and eventually all animals.

I suspect Mexico has a slightly more contracted circle of empathy, where dogs are just another beast God gave those he made in his image dominion over. 

It was nice to see Max's howls mobilize our street to attempt to feed him, take care of him and find his or a suitable home for him. A country like Australia has largely legislated and regulated empathy for dogs in, such that our largest concern are likely Narcissistic owners. 

Anyway, after Max was safely off back home, Alejandra and I celebrated a rare double high five, so Max's story was a win. Our neighbors three doors up, did say 'see you next time.' when they said goodbye to Max. So this story might have a sequel, and that sequel might suck. But I think it will be quite some time before Max's owners get anywhere near complacent. 

As for the dickwad that kicked Max. Well, your story can't be going that well if you are kicking a dog minding its own business.