THE WILD DOGS OF NAURU
WRITTEN IN JULY 2018
“They bite, they bite, you need to carry a stick around with you and be extra vigilant,” a random man yells in the distance with a pack of stray dogs walking carelessly between both of us. “Who owns the dogs?” I ask. “Nobody, we have a stray dog epidemic all over the island and they usually travel around the island together, looking for food and water and sometimes they attack.” “That’s nice to know” I reply, as I’m about to go to the nearest petrol station to buy some snacks and whatever they stock.
“You should carry some rocks in your pocket as well, just in case the stick doesn’t work,” my last bit of advice from one of the Nauru locals looking disappointed in the distance, with another large number of strays lurking in the bushes and some monitoring my every move like a hawk.
“Great, nice to have made it to another tropical island, though I really wish that someone would have warned me about the hundreds of stray dogs, all across the island. So nobody owns them?” I now turn my attention to the shopkeeper who has another collection of sticks, some bamboo sticks, some larger, and even points out that the stray dog problem all over the island has gotten completely out of control, mostly around Meneng, the most populated part of the island.
“That’s overly annoying,” I’ll try my best to get on with it.” “People don’t walk here, you either take a motorbike or rent a car, it’s too hot to walk anywhere anyway, tourists usually stay around the hotels and enjoy some of the performances and activities organized by the hotel.” “Great, thanks for the heads up, I’ll avoid walking around the island, luckily I have the opportunity to rent a motorbike, only $40 a day.” “Choose the safer option” he advises, “there have been lots of fierce and deadly attacks lately, the dogs have quadrupled in numbers, and lots of them don’t have enough food to feed one another, and they attacked and killed a girl on the beach not so long ago, they even seriously injured a group of government officials recently.” “That’s insane’” I reply, “what a mess, hopefully this gets sorted out relatively soon, how are tourists going to be able to visit the island and enjoy their vacation?” “Not many tourists come here, only a few hundred a year, it’s too far away, people usually go to Fiji or Samoa instead, this island is too small with very limited flights to and from Nauru, so this problem doesn’t really exist in other parts of the Pacific.”
The days pass with relative ease. The weather is perfect and the beach is only across the road from where I’m staying. It’s nice to have gotten to know some locals and I usually stop for a morning chat with the local shopkeeper. He is very informative and is always delighted to chat away, sometimes for hours. “People have been struggling a lot here lately, our phosphate mining industry has almost collapsed and we only really have the refugee centers here and they keep the economy rolling. We don’t really have anything to export and our tourist industry is very limited. Our country is the smallest in the Pacific, and one of the smallest in the world. There are not a lot of positive things to say about our country, but I feel like things may get really bad, really soon. We had other problems on the island, recently we had a severe food shortage, some of us went days and days without proper access to food, you could only imagine the difficulties that we had to overcome recently and a lot of things, in particular the refugee crisis, has been and continues to be sheltered from the western media.
Journalists aren’t really allowed here and it’s becoming more and more difficult to get to the island because of the long distance from Australia.” “Well, I hope that this situation will get resolved soon, maybe even over the next few months,” as I try to offer some more support. “Are the government doing anything to tackle into the stay dog issues?”I continue to ask the local shopkeeper, trying to get as much information as possible about this insane problem. “Not really, most of the dogs are really sick, all suffering from different viruses, and it would cost too much money to care for all of them, some of the medication isn’t even available on the island and they would need to go to Australia, or Fiji. It’s a mess, and we are all being affected almost every day, I don’t even want to take my eyes off my children, not even for a split second, occasionally the dogs will try to enter our back garden looking for food and going through the trash.” “It’s unfortunate, it’s difficult to give a detailed opinion and the situation sounds too difficult to resolve without government assistance.” “The situation has gotten too bad, it may even be beyond fixing.”
It only takes 20 minutes to drive around the entire island on my rented motorbike, and the dogs, most of them, are carelessly wandering around, some close to shops, others hiding in bushes ready to attack. Luckily I have rented a motorbike, so I’m safe, though I can only imagine the struggles that I’d have without the bike. Anibare, Yaren, Nibok, Aiwo, regardless of the district, the dogs are still in clear view. I’ve seen more dogs than locals over the past week and that’s a scary fact!
As I depart for Kiribati, I get one more glimpse of Nauru from the plane. It’s nice looking down on the tiny island, though I really wonder what it’s going to take to clean up the island and provide the locals and the tourists with a safer environment. Could take longer than expected, though I will certainly be keeping an eye on the news and I will always remember my trip to Nauru, mostly the stray dog problem.
