Take care of the dogs
By: Patrick O’Heffernan
Semanario Laguna has been covering the attempts by the Chapala government to deal with the stray and abandoned dogs in the municipality through two administrations. Our reporters and editors have sat in meetings with government officials and the various parties that were both on and off the record; we have obtained and analyzed a copy of the lawsuit currently driving the process; we have toured the SOS facility in West Ajijic and carefully studied the video of the new facility in East Chapala; and we have interviewed everyone involved, including people volunteering at the SOS shelter (see story below), to make sure we understand the Gordian knot that humans have tied around stray dogs in Chapala.
We are still digging for facts. The new shelter now under construction by the Aguirre administration in East Chapala has a number of questions around it: does the municipality have the budget and staff to handle a large number of dogs, what is the waste removal system on the new site, what happens when the lease is up and the next administration takes over, and who will manage it?
As of now the answers to these questions have not been forthcoming (Note: at press time, our reporter Sophia Medeles obtained a quote from Chapala President Aguirre that he is talking to a group of Expats about managing the new shelter. No details yet, but it is a start).
It is possible that the answer to all of them is “we don’t yet, but we are working on it”. Given the Aguirre Administration’s penchant for solving problems, that would be an acceptable answer – no government always knows all the answers before it starts a project. As a reporter, former government staff and political scientist I have learned to look at the trajectory of an administration’s intentions and actions more closely than I do at their statements. “We don’t know yet but we are working on it” is an acceptable answer in many cases if it is accompanied by information about what is going on. It is certainly much better than “no answer”, which invites misinformation and rumors.
So here we are. Locally, we have a new shelter under construction by the current administration which appears to really want to solve the problem handed to them by the last administration and build and operate a dog shelter that is good for the dogs. We have a well – managed SOS dog shelter in West Ajijic that won’t move until it feels the conditions for the dogs are right. We have a homeowners alliance that has run out of patience over the 24/7 noise of the dogs in that shelter and filed a lawsuit, but understands and supports the need for the dogs to be well cared for no matter what happens.
Our reporters and editors have requested information and documents from the government to answer the questions surrounding this situation. We are pushing for those interviews and documents from the municipality to continue our effort to piece together a full and accurate picture of a situation. And to counter the misinformation and rumors.
But as one of the reporters who has followed this story for 2 years and interviewed many of the parties involved, I want to assure my readers that, while not everything we have been told checks out, all the parties involved seem genuinely to have the health and welfare of the dogs top on their list. That seems to be the one thing everyone agrees on – take care of the dogs, which is where I stand. Let’s go from there.
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