Webequirk 15

Today’s Webequirk is dog drama.

Today my co-worked aptly referred to a giant dog fight as “dog drama” and it truly is a dramatic event. Most of the dogs here are “owned” in one way or another by someone on the island, with varying degrees of care giving actually happening. All of the teachers up here are caring, warm-hearted individuals when it comes to animals and thus, most of us have adopted our own or cared for the stray(ish) dogs at one time or another.

There are two basic packs of dogs: the teacher dogs- basically the ones owned by the teachers or the dogs that have been temporarily taken on/are cared for by the teachers and the other pack. The teacher dogs tend to stay on teacher street while the other dogs stay over where the locals live. When the teacher pack of dogs enters the neighbourhood of the other dogs, the pack mindedness engages and there is often a lot of barking and growling. Most times we can run them off and it ends there. Sometimes though, the other pack will choose a dog and attack. It has happened to almost every dog here at one time or another and it’s quite hard to avoid since most of the dogs roam free here. I think it would make for an extremely interesting sociological study to have an academic well-versed in pack behaviour to come up and study the dogs like they do with apes and elephants. For now though, the teachers do their best to help care for the dogs, and take as many off the island with us as we can when we leave. I know I will not see these large packs of dogs or basically any dogs at all in Abu Dhabi, as they are generally disliked and banned from most places. I will miss these pups!