How do you solve a problem like Marie?

There's a bit of drama going down in Volunteer Land this week. First a little reminder on the back story of Marie, our dog. Marie is a stray who wandered into NPH several years ago. She made her way down to the volunteer houses and made herself out to be the most well-behaved dog to ever grace the streets of Guatemala. She wouldn't beg for food, she was quiet and she kept to herself. She made herself a little bed in front of one of the homes and became a cute new addition to the volunteers' lives. Really it worked out perfectly for her; she found a group of 24 people who were lonely and homesick who also happened to really hate the cafeteria food. Needless to say, Marie has been well loved and well fed ever since.

This year a new Marie has started to develop. You may recall that at the beginning of my time here, Marie jumped up and bit me for no apparent reason. Unfortunately that was not an isolated incident. She and I have made our peace and now we're great friends; I always come home to an excited dog. Sadly, she's become extremely territorial, specifically against men. When a guy tries to come down the stairs, she starts barking and growling and eventually will run up and bite them. She's gotten the priest twice and has gone after a few of the kids too. Twice in the last two weeks she's also gone after girls. She's definitely getting worse and it's a huge liability. If volunteers are home and we hear her growling, we have to run out and break it up. All of us worry about what's going to happen if we're not home and she goes after a kid or visitor.

The director heard what was going on and decided that the dog needed to be put down. I didn't argue because if this was happening in the states, she would have already been put down a long time ago. I also feel like we've done what we could to help. We've taken her outside the perimeter fence countless times but she always digs her way back in. I knew that we had given her a good few years here, far better than what she would have gotten being a stray, so while I felt sad about the situation I knew that it had to be done to protect the kids (and also NPH).

My feelings changed dramatically when Suzie, the lady in charge of the farm, came down our stairs with a machete to "take care of the dog". Yep, putting Marie down was apparently to be done by viciously hacking her to pieces. Luckily Nate, one of the old volunteers who is now a full time employee here, caught wind of the plan and let us all know. Marie was smart enough to high-tail it into the woods and Suzie was unable to complete her awful task. The volunteers spent the rest of the day freaking out, waiting to hear Marie crying out from a machete blow. Luckily, she made it through the day without running into Suzie.

While all this is going on, we start talking about Marie's possible pregnancy. She went into heat several months ago and we had to deal with a constant stream of beaus here courting her. Once that passed we started speculating as to whether she was knocked up or not (wasn't she slightly fatter? Aren't her teats a little bigger than before?). She ended up disappearing for five days which really got our radars up, but when she came back we never saw a puppy. She still hung out a lot at the houses, but she started sleeping somewhere else at night. A few of us went into the woods a few times to try to find her nest, but we never did. Now that we knew she would be killed any day, finding the puppies took on a new importance. We might not be able to do much to help her, but we certainly didn't want her babies starving to death afterwards. A few of the volunteers took to the woods again and this time Marie led them to her den. Some thorough searching led us to her little puppy! He was immediately kidnapped and brought to our house to live. Marie seemed happy about it. Here they are living on our front porch together.

So now Marie has a puppy, a puppy that's still dependent on her for milk. That certainly complicates things. I hadn't planned on talking to Suzie, but I happened to run into her that afternoon. She immediately became defensive and explained that she had been ordered to kill Marie, it wasn't her choice. She explained that Marie was a huge liability and started listing reasons why she needed to be killed. I told her that I wasn't there to argue for her life, I just wanted a reprieve until the puppy could live on it's own. She agreed to wait one more week, but then she'd have to kill her. I asked if there was a more humane way to put the dog down since none of us wanted her to suffer a brutal death. She explained that she had anesthesia for doing minor surgies on the farm animals. She could give Marie an overdose which would stop her heart, but Marie wouldn't let her get close enough. I told her that Marie would let me do it. So that's how it came to be that I'm putting the dog down. Le sigh. While "murdering my pet" is an experience I could have done without here, if it means giving her a more peaceful passing, I think I need to put my own feelings aside and do that for her.

Mark and a few of the volunteers are trying hard to find a back up plan, something that would get her out of here and allow her to live out the rest of her life while saving the orphanage. It's caused a bit of a rift here as some of the volunteers feel it's less cruel for her to be put down than to throw her on the streets and make her fend for herself for the first time in years. We'll have a better idea of what's going to happen later this week. We all hope the story will have a happy ending. For now though, we can let her enjoy some time with her baby, Osito (Little Bear).

The two bears together