The Verdict

ROBERT GARDNER

Daily Pilot columnist Joe Bell once mentioned the problem of stray

dogs in Tahiti. I guess stray dogs are a problem in many South Sea

islands.

They certainly were in Samoa. I don’t know what kind of stray dogs

there are in Tahiti, but the ones is Samoa are simply awful.

Stray dogs in China and Mexico are generally considered the very

bottom of the heap. Nonsense. Compared to the stray dogs in Samoa, the

stray dogs of Mexico and China look like best of breed at any dog show.

Samoa’s stray dogs run in packs. I never went out for a stroll in the

evening without carrying a 5-iron to ward them off.

Samoans take a very protective attitude toward their dogs. A dog

belonging to a good friend, High Talking Chief, bit me. When I

complained, his answer was brief and to the point: “He don’t like you.”

Samoa has an elaborate legal program for handling the problem of stray

dogs. Unfortunately, the program is completely ignored. All of which

rather laboriously brings me to the problem of Tweeter.

Tweeter was the name of a stray Samoan dog, although just how a stray

dog gets a name escapes me. Tweeter was set apart from the other dogs

because he bit small children. I don’t know how long he had been biting

small children, but it was common knowledge that he did.

Tweeter once bit the child of a non-Samoan who was an engineer

employed by the government. The bite was not too serious, so the parents

of the bitten child decided to respect Fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way of

life) and do nothing about it. Then old Tweeter bit the same child again,

a more serious bite.

This time, the parents said to hell with Fa’a Samoa and sued the

Samoan government for not doing anything about the problem of stray dogs

-- particularly Tweeter and his practice of biting small children.

I agreed with the parents of the child, and awarded them a hefty

judgment against the Samoan government. What did the government do about

the problem of stray dogs?

Absolutely nothing.

As for Tweeter, someone hired two Tongans to take care of him. They

apparently did not have the same lax attitude toward dogs as Samoans, and

beat him to death with clubs. Cruel, but it certainly took care of that

particular problem.

Fortunately, the South Sea islands are rabies-free. If a dog bites

you, you may bleed a little and have a disfiguring scar, but you aren’t

going to have rabies -- and that’s about the only pleasant aspect of

stray dogs in the islands of the South Sea.