My Privileged Dog

My privileged dog.

Well as some of you may or may not know.  I had a dog while volunteering in Burkina Faso.  Not terribly surprising.  Lots of volunteers have dogs, gets lonely out there and dogs are undeniably awesome when it comes to dealing with loneliness.  But having lived with a dog for a few years I found out that they are quite good at a lot of things other than dealing with loneliness. 

My dog taught me how to teach while being taught at the same time.  Helped me understand the Burkinabé views on life and its cyclic nature.  How to hold on to something you know you will inevitably lose.  And most surprisingly of all, my dog taught me about some of the unintended consequences of privilege. 

So back to the beginning.  I got my lil pup around my third week in village because upon arriving in town and realizing nobody was planning to talk to me for at least the first month I started putting it out there that I would really like a dog.  Preferably a boy dog because that would allow me to avoid the eventual complication of all the stray dogs in Burkina hounding my house for a month while my little lady was in heat.  But at the end of the day I just wanted a dog.  My neighbor managed to procure a litter of puppies and they were all girls, but I was lonely and these little suckers were tiny and adorable and only three weeks old and I had to have one.  Well I took my lil pup home and called her Manchu.  A name which translates to “bear” in the language of the Ponca Native Americans, a Midwest tribe near Omaha.  I did this partly because I liked thinking of her as my little bear (I often called her chu-bear), but also it helped me start small conversations about how white people were not in fact the first people in America and in fact there were hundreds of diverse people already living here and the white colonizers had taken their land.  I figured if I was going to be responsible for portraying America to my small village I should try my best to include everything.

But back to Manchu.  Well I had this tiny little animal in my house now and I wanted to raise her how I had always raised dogs.  In America dogs are part of the family and get well fed and can get on the furniture and get hugs and toys all that good stuff.  Eventually I would have to have to find a balance between my American attitudes towards dogs and the Burkinabé attitudes towards dogs.  But that could wait for now, I had to get her all dogged up. 

 LOOK HOW LITTLE SHE IS

So I contacted home and had my parents send me a blue dog collar and a leash and a dog toy and a book about training dogs.  I filled my freetime with the training of Manchu.  We got into all sorts of mischief, she picked up on my body language and moods and was always there for me if sometimes everything seemed like too much.  I even taught her how to open and close my courtyard doors as well as climb the walls so as to better perform her dogly duties of protecting the estate.  And as all of this went on and I began to feel like I was living underneath a microscope of communal observation I became more and more Burkinabé about raising my dog.  She was still allowed to get on my lounge chair, but if she refused to eat that days beans she just didn’t eat.  There was no more worriedly finding something she liked better.  And if she broke the rules?  Well she got popped on the noggin.  Because in Burkina dogs get hit and a dog that isn’t scared of getting hit is labeled as a broken dog and is swiftly eliminated by the community, no questions asked.  And I definitely didn’t want Manchu to be eliminated, although I had to constantly remind myself every day that it might happen despite my best efforts.

The reason I started making all of these changes in the way that I raised Manchu was because as I spent more time in my village I came to realize that my house wasn’t really an island and my life wasn’t entirely my own.  Anything I did was carefully scrutinized and how I chose to lead my life affected those around me whether I liked it not.  Just in being observed you can change how someone behaves or makes decisions.  This concept became abundantly clear with Manchu because she, like all dogs in Burkina, was a wanderer.  All the dogs were free to roam as they please and both the individual and the community had the responsibility of making sure their animal behaved in an acceptable manner.  So if Manchu wandered off and started breaking communal doggy rules that was partly my fault.  I couldn’t angrily tell my neighbors to mind their own damn business and how I raised my dog was none of their concern, because in Burkina, it kind of is their business.  Seeing as it affects them.

Well about a year into my service I found out that privilege runs two ways and it takes a group working together to deal with it.  I was given this realization in the form of a giant dead sheep’s head courtesy of Manchu.  I was in my courtyard working on something…or just staring at my plants wondering if you could watch Moringa trees grow to pass an afternoon.  And I hear my courtyard door bang open and closed (remember I, in my infinite wisdom, had taught Manchu how to operate this most ingenious of devises) and I looked up to see my little lady with blood smeared on her face holding an entire sheep’s head. 

 How many times has your dog brought you one of these?

Well damnit.  This can’t end well.

Leading up to this point I had been told, with slightly increasing frequency, that Manchu was a bad little doggy. 

People would say, “oh that dog is a bandit” or “oh that dog is broken”

To which I would invariably respond, “oh no she’s not, she’s a good dog” blinded as I was by her adorable little bear face.

Well I still mulled this news over.  Manchu was stealing.  Probably food, maybe if I just fed her more this problem would go away.  So I proceeded to feed her extra helpings of beans and rice.  I was worried that if she went full bandit on me then somebody would definitely kill her so I decided to invest the additional 15 cents a day to keep her extra fed so that she wouldn’t feel the need to steal food anymore.   So I was quite literally feeding the problem.  And surprise surprise, turns out that doesn’t work.  Because I was doing it every day leading up to the whole stolen sheep head incident.

So back to dead sheep face.  Well there I was, with a half eaten dead sheep face, a now undeniably bad bandit dog, and an angry villager waiting in the wings somewhere.  At this point I’m not going to make much progress fixing whatever inherent problem has made Manchu a thieving little bugger in the short term.  Short term goals were focused more around mitigating sheep head problem as this was kind of uncharted cultural waters for me and oddly enough I had yet to learn the phrase “I’m sorry my dog stole your sheep’s head” in Mooré.

So I go about scruffing Manchu who is intent on protecting her “kill” so I have to rough her up a bit to remind her that the Alpha gets their pick of the meal first.  She backs away from said “kill” and I put dead sheep face out of reach and start planning my explanation.

Enter angry villager

Well on of the local butchers comes storming up.

“Nassara!”

“Oui?”

“A dog stole my sheeps head while my back was turned and everyone told me it was your dog because of that collar she wears”

Damn collar.

“You know, I am really sorry.  Here is the sheep’s head if that helps”

*Looks at gnawed sheep’s head*

“No, I don’t want it back now.  Just acknowledge that she stole it”

*I pause to contemplate in confusion this request*

“…Yes, she stole it”

“Ok, that’s all.”

“Wait, that’s it?”

“Ya, I just wanted you to acknowledge that it was your dog’s fault and that you were sorry.  Also she’s a thief because of that collar.  Everyone knows she’s yours.”

*Walks away*

Well that left me with quite a bit to puzzle over.  First of all, what an interesting demand.  And also the butcher’s closing comment had a ring of truth to it.  I decided it was a problem for my counterpart, Christophe, and biked over to his place after giving the sheep’s head to my neighbor and leaving Manchu at home.  I get to his bar and go through my usual routine of shouting greetings to anyone and everyone, hand shakes, inquiries about children, about the students, about our work, about the sun, about the rain, about whatever we felt was funny on that particular day, a round of beers, and now it was time to talk.  No reason to rush anything in Burkina.  I ask Christophe about if he’d known Manchu was a bandit and he said of course he knew.  Everyone know’s that she is “Nassara baga”, “white person’s dog”, “different/protected”.  And so I asked him to clarify what all that implied.  And I learned that the villagers didn’t want to hit my dog because they knew how important she was to me and they were worried if they hit her they’d get in trouble.  I later ran this by some of my courtyard kids Aimé and Etienne and they told me the same thing.  Because I had put that collar on Manchu everyone knew she was the Nassara’s dog and they treated her differently.  Not always drastically different.  But different enough.  And it wasn’t just a few people, it was everybody.  Everybody treated her subtly differently in the same way on a consistent basis and the end result was a dead sheep’s head in my courtyard.

It was interesting, everyone and everything in Burkina works in groups and I had accidently made my dog an individual.  Dogs weren’t normally treated differently, they were seen as one equal group and all treated the same.  A dog comes sniffing around your house looking for scraps you clock it with a rock.  You don’t think “who’s dog is that?”  You simply think “there is a dog doing what a dog shouldn’t do”.  So for all of the other dogs the community defines their space and they are forced to operate within this space and by a certain set of rules.  Except for Manchu.  The community provided her with greater space within which to work, a different set of rules under which to operate, privilege. 

Now obviously Manchu was unaware that her situation was different than other dogs around her because, well, she’s a dog and dogs don’t pay attention to that kind of stuff.  She was simply provided a situation, provided a space, and went about filling that space.  She was given more room to experiment and so she experimented.  She was given license to go places other dogs couldn’t go, and so she went there.  And eventually she was implicitly taught by society that she could get away with certain things without punishments and so she did them.  She was not aware of all these things happening to her and even if she were a sentient being capable of rational thought I doubt that she would have at any point sat back and reflected about the apparent advantages that she seemed to be enjoying.  I think this because oftentimes humans (the debatably rational member of the human-dog relationship) don’t even step back and try to identify moments of privilege in their own lives.  Not because humans are inherently bad people, more because that is just one of the sneaky ways in which privilege works as is shown in a clever little buzzfeed sketch found by me via the internets.

We are creatures dependant upon systems and we tend to fill whatever space a system provides us without question..much like a fluid.  Now the end results will always vary.  Knowing what I now know can I definitively state, if you put a collar on your dog in a village in Burkina Faso then your dog will steal a sheep’s head from a butcher?  No, I cannot.  At least not without some careful research and data collection and I doubt that I would be able to find someone to finance that research project.  So for now we remain in the realm of thought experiment.  So if I can’t say that giving a dog “collar privilege” causes them to steal sheep’s heads, what can I say?

Well here I can say that privilege obviously exists and that it has consequences.  Not always the same consequences.  But when privilege mixes with ignorance those consequences can become either problematic or dangerous and the responsibility of that doesn’t fall on any one individual, it’s the responsibility of the group and the individual together.  And seeing as I am in the middle of a thought experiment lets imagine the scenario carried to it’s conclusion and imagine how varied and diverse the consequences could be.  We’ve already seen that Manchu’s collar privilege lead her to become a bandit because the system never taught her that was wrong.  But what if all the other dogs noticed this treatment and realized that they aren’t valued as simply dogs and start saving up their doggy income and purchasing their own collars.  They don’t understand why the collar is significant in the first place and putting them on doesn’t make them necessarily feel any different.  But it labels them as a different group and opens them to some of the privileges of that group.  The system sees this and naturally responds by offering collars of varying quality and style so that if the dogs have a higher doggy income they can purchase collars of higher and higher quality so as to inform the group that they are worth more.  And when this is established the dogs who sell the high end collars will start coming up with new collar styles that they change each season so that the privilege seeking doggies feel the need to buy new and better collars every season so as to remain part of this group and because they feel that happiness is just one more collar away.  

Now that was merely one possible chain of events resulting from “collar privilege”, we already know that stealing a sheep’s head is another resulting chain of events, and we can assume there are hundreds of other possibilities stemming from the existence of this particular form of privilege.

And so we arrive at a dangerous privilege cycle via what can only be described as a massive slippery slope logical fallacy.  I apologize.  But I feel that it got my point across.  Because while the thought of some sort of dog based economy centered around collar acquisition is ridiculous.  Sometimes joking about the exaggerated or impossibly ridiculous helps bring attention to the subtler versions that actually do happen every day.  Which I believe is the role of comedy in these kinds of conversations, a view I at least partially share with Eddie Murphy.

Privilege crops up everywhere and in everything and there is no one answer of how to deal with it.  No single example that can fully encompass all aspects of it.  It’s why we need multiple solutions, we need diverse stories, varied perspectives, open and honest dialogue, and an introspective population that is willing to receive criticism and grow.  Just as I hope to receive criticism for this article, we should all hope to receive criticism for any opinion that we voice.  In this scenario seemingly innocuous societal privilege given to an individual led to that individual developing into a broken member of society, a breaker of rules.  Makes you wonder how often this kind of thing happens within our own societies. (hint: a lot).  So let’s look for the Manchus out there and fix the problems at their roots rather than playing the blame game every time something goes wrong.

So I am sure many of you are wondering.  And by “many” I mean at least 5 out of the 10 people who will probably read this.  What did I end up doing about Manchu?  The little bandit.  Well for starters you can notice that I didn’t try to blame the sheep’s head for being all bloody and delicious.  Bloody and delicious that sheep face may have been.  But, this was both Manchu’s fault and mine.  In addition she didn’t get her extra helpings of beans anymore, quite apparent that that wasn’t working.  And I started putting it out there in village that, yes, definitely hit my dog if she’s being bad.  See her sneaking around your food stall at the market?  Give her a wallop, dogs shouldn’t be there.  See her stealthily approaching a table with raw meat on it?  Throw a rock, dogs shouldn’t be stalking that meat.  I didn’t take the collar off because in the short term that would have most surely lead to her death.  Yes the collar is what turned her into a thief, but it was also the only thing keeping her alive at this point.  Take it off before she’s had a chance to learn how to be a well-behaved dog again and she dies, simple as that.  So I instead opted for the “tell my village to throw rocks at her” approach, and to my knowledge, it worked reasonably well. 

Also for those of you who haven’t gotten your fill of reading yet feel free to peruse these Wikipedia pages and learn a bit about the Ponca Tribe and Manchu’s namesake.