I said that people here are incredibly nice, and it really is true. If you ask someone for directions, they won’t just stop to tell you, they’ll leave whatever they were doing and take you there. People love it when you try to speak to them in Malagasy ,and will spend hours patiently coaching you through how thigs are said. They’ll also remember your name for days after they met you and seek you out to ask how you’re doing and whether you like Fort Dauphin. When I’ve played with the kids here, I’m amazed at how well they behave with each other; older kids are tolerant of younger siblings and include them in all the games. Adults rarely keep a toddler from participating fully in whatever is going on, letting them play with phones or serve themselves at the table. In other ways though they can be extremely cruel, at least by our standards. Although children are rarely scolded, when they are it often involves a menacing fist. Animals are treated according to their usefulness, and are rarely loved just as pets. Dogs here are considered dirty animals and are kept out of houses with yells and kicks; they are never pet and are used only as guard animals and waste disposal. The dog eats what the family doesn’t, and if there are no scraps the dogs get nothing. There are always some scraps though, because except for zebu (the local cow) most meat you’ll be eating comes to you as the whole animal, and is killed and cleaned right in the yard. Most animals, even the pets, are mangy and beat up, with an abundance of broken legs or missing ears. None of them are spayed or neutered of course, and none of them have had rabies shots, so we’ve all gotten practiced at grabbing stones to ward off the couple of town dogs who chase and bite people. There are a couple of bands of children who I’ve made friends with on the street who are used to hanging out with me and teaching me Malagasy; sometimes we play football together, and they love teasing me when I can’t pronounce words. I was hanging out with a bunch of them at the beach last weekend, and a couple were holding grasshoppers the size of your finger. I asked what they were for; I’d seen kids catching them before. They told me they were for playing with. They toss them up in the air, let them fly a ways, then run after them and catch them again. Once they get bored they pull the legs off slowly, then the wings, then toss them away and run after another one. They also brought me some crabs that they were playing with too. They yanked off the front claws, then tied strings around them and pretended to make them fight or whirled them around their heads like slings. The crabs were alive the whole time. Again, when they got bored they just tossed the animals off into the bushes and moved on to another game. I hadn’t realized up until then how inculcated I had been in the western concept that if it breathes and has eyes, it’s life is in some way sacred. While watching the little boy grin at me as he tried to force feed the declawed crab the still living grasshopper, I thought about how distanced American’s are from any form of harm to animals. Comparing the processed fish sticks I was used to to the fins and bones that had been mixed into my rice the night before, I wondered what had caused what. Were these kids so careless of animal life because they were used to animals as tools, not companions? Was I so much more shocked because in my life, animals as friends and as food had always been separated by a long supply chain, lots of food coloring, and a grocery store package? A few days after my experience with the grasshopper kids, another band of children I know accosted me on my way home. One of the boys had something in his hand, which he proudly showed me; a baby greenbul, too small too fly or care for itself. It was hard to tell the species at its side, but based on distribution maps it was certainly one of those that my bird book refers to as “uncommon or rare”. The kids didn’t speak more than a few words of French, but my friend and I managed to find out that the boy had shot it out of its nest with a slingshot and they were playing with it. They gave it to me as a present, assuring me that there were plenty more, though they wouldn’t or couldn’t understand to tell me where. In the end, my friend (who hunts doves in the states) ended up twisting its neck to kill it. Although at home her family hunts all their meat, she couldn’t stand the thought of the baby bird slowly starving or freezing to death on the seashore anymore than I could. And that’s the end of any western Pocahontas type delusions about the Malagasy and their incredible natural environment.
