But really what made it all worth it was to get to know this little ball of fuzziness.
Meet Dakota. Here she is with her new mommy, and one of my best China friends, Melissa. Dakota was rescued a few weeks ago from a garbage can where she was abandoned and with cuts on her belly. A caring person took her to the vet. Her cuts were fixed and she stayed at the vet until Melissa learned about her and adopted her. She is almost 3 months old and is a big ball of spazzy puppy energy. She runs and is always looking for attention. Although she's not very loud, I named her Da Kou Ta (大口她) Her Big Mouth in Chinese because it sounds like Dakota.Now she is living the luxury life of a classy Beijing puppy. She goes on multiple walks a day, eats good doggy food meals, gets plenty of treats, plays with dog (and cat) toys, and is bathed at least once a week to keep her white fur white in a dusty city.
She takes the whole bath thing pretty well for a puppy.
She is a mixed puppy. I think she is actually a puppy-kitten hybrid. Melissa thinks she's a lion cub. We think she has some teddy bear in her, too. Regardless of what she is, she's CUTE. And I look forward to more trips to Beijing to play with her.
2 comments:
I love dogs, and my mom was really surprised/happy to hear that Chinese people don't view dogs as just another source of food anymore (though I know your friend is not Chinese, that there are vets and caring Chinese people who will get the dog out of the dumpster in the first place is a step in a more humane direction).
Changing subjects, have your ideas changed a whole lot from when you first came up with the topic of rice?
The dog culture in Harbin fascinates me. I love getting up early and walking on the HIT campus (or any neighborhood really) and seeing old people gathering as their dogs run around and play. It reminds me of where I used to live in Sichuan when grandparents would gather outside holding their small children. The way people dress their dogs up here (its unusual to see a dog without clothes and booties here in the winter unless its a stray), its like dogs have replaced grandchildren in families whose children have moved away. Also, Harbin families seem to have bigger dogs and not just all the little yappy things you see everywhere in Beijing and other cities.
Anyway, there is still a lot of work to do here with the treatment of stray dogs and puppy factories. But it is hopeful.
And to address your next question, yeah I could write pages and pages on how my ideas have changed. But the constant in all of it are rice and the transformations of rice production and consumption in the midst of industrial agricultural change. My short response is that the ways in which I have approached rice have changed, but always with this larger idea remaining the same.
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