Mass Castration

As I mentioned before, there is an almost one-to-one dog to person ratio here at Casita del Carmen. We managed to get rid of all the puppies that appeared in September, but until recently, there was always the possibility that more dogs would materialize and tip the balance. This is because, for reasons I don’t understand, the Spanish don’t believe in neutering their animals. They just let little Pedro Perrito run wild, knocking up any female he happens to sniff twice. The result is both an over-population of canines and some of the most hideous mixed-breed dogs anyone has ever seen. They make the US Ugliest Dog winner look like a canine version of Brad Pitt.

For most dog owners, the willy-nilly impregnation would be someone else’s problem, since the majority of Spaniards prefer male dogs. Not us, though, since we have two males and three females. One male (Sultan) and one female (Laila) were already fixed but Chester, Violetta, and Lily were still very much sexually active. (Apparently, the fact that he was shagging his mother and sister mattered less to Chester than getting his rocks off.) 

After months of cursing and locking up whichever female was in heat, Ruyman and I finally convinced Carmen it was time for the whole crew to go under the knife. The hope was that without certain bits of anatomy, behaviors like territorial urination, the nightly karaoke howl-along, and Lily’s tragically one-sided love affair with the floor mat would come to an end, to say nothing of the humping.

C-Day came and went. The vet kept the patients overnight and the family enjoyed an hitherto unknown peace with just Laila and Sultan. The other dogs returned the next day, sore and sheepish. Violetta, in particular, kept looking around like she had misplaced something important and spent days hidden in the corner behind a broken motorbike. (During her procedure, it came out that Violetta was not only pregnant, but carrying NINE puppies. I felt bad for her, but seriously, there was no way we could’ve survived such an invasion.)

So have things quieted down on the canine front? Not quite. At dawn this morning, as the howling started up and we heard the liquid sounds of Chester peeing on our bedroom door, I had to remind myself that, if nothing else, at least we’re holding steady at five. That’s gotta be worth something, right?