Mexico City… going to the dogs (and cats, goats, birds…)

2 April 2024

Mexfiles has recommended Mauricio Tenorrio-Trillo’s discursive, rambling, and thoroughly documented social history of Mexico City (“I Speak of the City”) before. Although his focus is the changes the city went through with the Revolution and its aftermath, Tenorio-Trillo does not completely overlook the non-human side of the city. While he devotes most of a chapter to some less “respectable” residents… rats and lice — and tends to overlook the still 50% of the city that is non-urban, but there is no way he could avoid writing about the most visible non-human residents of the city… dogs.

Dogs have always been part of the city, The Aztecs who also raised them for food, as necessary companions in life, but a guide to the after-life. Woe betide the soul of those who were mean to dogs: Xolotl… who would deny them entry into Mictlan. And, like other Aztec deities, Xolotl had a dual nature… god of thunder and of the disabled and deformed — though, giving the high regard in Aztec society, like the Romans and Greeks, on physical prowess and beauty, it makes sense in a way… dogs famously empathetic to even the least attactive of us (were humans to hold dogs to such standards!).

And, although throughout the colonial era and beyond (Viceroy revalligio ordered the dog population of the city to be “culled” in 1792, and the dog slaughter continued for another 300 years) there was always resistance.. less from the elites and their pampered pooches, but from their always faithful companions… the street people, the poor, those whose lives might have been said to have gone to the dogs.

Not only the dispossessed, the dogs were, and are, everywhere… wandering the markets, sometimes “infomrally” housed (years ago, a mostly Chow named Canello would join my daily walk with my own dog, Eva Perra, before heading to his next stop in his daily routine of sleeping in an apartment hallway where he received breakfast, accompanying a couple school kids in the morning, hanging out at the newsstand, going for his stroll with Eva, and stopping by in the evening at the corner Farmacia. Who “owned” hims? No one and everyone). And, of course, the starving street mutts.

Perhaps it was the Revolution, perhaps the “4th Transformation, perhaps just changing social attitudes, but with 70% of Mexican households including at least one animal in residence (and of those, 80% are dogs) when Mexico City wrote its new Constitution in 2017, Article 43 (on the habiitablity of the city), section B recognizes dogs, cats, and other animals as “sentient beings” and “therefore, they must be treated with dignity.”

While not specifically related to dogs (the article applies to livestock as well… and one needs to remember that the city still includes extenive agricultural lands and working farms) it does give the state the duty to safeguard the treatment of animals, including “the dignified and respectful treatment of animals”, to “promote a culture of responsible care and guardianship”, and. “Likewise . . . carry out actions to care for animals in abandonment.” Canello’s less fortunate compadres, at least will have a warm place to sleep, and regular meals… or as many as possible anyway.

What brought the up today was that among other new meaures going into effect the first of April, I had to enter Leah’s information in the RUAC database (Registro Unico de Animales Compañarios”) like my own CURP (Clave Única de Registro de Población)… something like my US Social Security Number, or just an acknowedgement that I’m a real, live sentient (human) being. Like the dog.