The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

The audacity of these official ruffians knows no limits. A lady of our acquaintance was out driving with her little daughter in their private carriage one afternoon and had allowed their pet Pomeranian to take a little exercise by running on the sidewalk beside the carriage. Suddenly the daughter heard the children in the street shouting that the dog-catchers were coming—for it is to the credit of the youngsters everywhere that they run ahead of the dog-catching van to warn people to secure their dogs—and, stopping the carriage, she leapt to the pavement to secure her pet, but in the very act of lifting it, the dog was lassoed and torn from her grasp. No appeal to the policeman at the corner could restore it to her, until that evening when her father could attend at the depot and go through the usual formalities and part with the usual bribe.

This disgusting abuse of a most necessary sanitary measure leads Buenos Ayres to be overrun with mangy curs, some of which, as I remember them, were more like horrid creatures of a nightmare than “the companion of man.” In particular I recall a large Borzoi, from which, owing to starvation and disease, every single hair had departed. Its back was arched like a bow pulled taut, and its legs, once so straight and handsome, were bent and pithless. Yet this poor brute, an object of pitiful horror, with its red-rimmed, mournful eyes, looking reproachfully at the passers-by, was to be seen slinking about the crowded and congested thoroughfares day after day. This creature, which was not an old dog, and perhaps had been as handsome as those rendered popular in England by Queen Alexandra’s affection for the breed, had probably been lost to his original owners, and months of wandering and starving must have elapsed to bring him into the appalling state in which I saw him. Seldom was an eye of pity bent upon him; nay, I have seen boys kicking him with the full approval of the policeman.

Another I recall, in much the same condition, had been at one time a fashionable French poodle of the large black variety, but his skin, to which only a few scraps of hair still adhered, was a mass of sores, his ribs so prominent that they threatened to cut through, and the animal altogether so exhausted that as he walked along the busy pavements of Maipú, he had every now and again to sit down and lean against the wall. Yet another, I noticed on a wet and bitter winter day. It was a little silky spaniel, and my attention was attracted to him making efforts to jump on the step at the door of a grocer’s shop. He fell back several times in trying this, and then I noticed that one of his hind legs had been cut off a little above the foot, and the same accident had evidently sliced off a portion of his tail. He had thus a bad start for the jump, but when I came nearer I found a bright little boy inside the shop door who had evidently kicked the little dog each time it jumped up, and presently it continued on its hopeless way along the Calle Viamonte.

The happiest dogs I saw in Buenos Ayres were those lying dead in the gutter. Every day dogs are killed or maimed by the reckless motor cars, as there is no room for them to run freely on the pavement, and still less for them in the roadway. It is little short of a crime to allow a dog to be at large in Buenos Ayres, yet so perverse is fate that such creatures as I have just described, maimed and diseased, linger on unkilled, while healthy animals, probably well cared for, meet swift fate beneath some of the myriad motor wheels.

Withal I would not have you suppose the Argentine is essentially and invariably cruel to his dog. It is the weakness of all Latin races either to be too cruel or too kind. There are many dogs in Buenos Ayres that suffer more from kindness than from cruelty, just as an Argentine who takes a real interest in his horses will probably spoil them by over-feeding and under-working. That well-balanced average of good treatment which, on the whole, is more characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons than of the Latins, is lacking. At bottom we find the old innate carelessness and indifference of the race. On one occasion I went to inspect a large number of dogs and puppies for sale in a well-known mart in the Calle San Martín. Among a group of some ten or twelve beautiful terrier puppies, was one in a very bad state of distemper. The attendants of the place were either too ignorant of the fact, or so utterly indifferent, that they were making not the slightest effort to prevent the whole group from developing that highly contagious fever. There must be, I think, a considerable amount of ignorance to add to the carelessness, for I was informed by a native that his landlord had that day sold for fifty pesos a valuable Great Dane because it was developing rabies! The man was an Italian, and he scouted the suggestion that he had done anything wrong in getting rid of the dog in that condition. That was entirely a matter for the purchaser to find out.

In the matter of animal disease, it came with something of a shock to me to see prize cattle at the Buenos Ayres Agricultural Show suffering from foot and mouth disease, or aftosa, as it is known in the Argentine. Shall I be believed when I state that prize bulls, so far gone with the disease that they could scarcely crawl round the paddock, were sold at auction for substantial sums? Yet when I got to know that it is the custom in South America to nurse the animals affected by this fever back to health, and that those sold in that condition were only disposed of subject to their recovery, I began to wonder why in England they take such stringent methods of elimination? It is a subject on which I possess not a particle of expert knowledge, but surely it cannot be right in one country ruthlessly to destroy every animal that shows signs of foot and mouth disease, while in another it is possible to sell prize animals while suffering from it. The explanation of this I must leave to my bucolic friends.

Turning now to the question of the horse and his treatment, I have from time to time in preceding chapters been forced to pass some strictures on this subject, and to mention specific instances. Probably the most remarkable and suggestive case reported in the press during my stay was the following: A one-horse coach was passing along one of the narrow streets to the south of the Avenida de Mayo—Peru, I think—when the animal fell in the mud, and no efforts of the driver could get it to its feet again. It was a bitter day of blinding rain, and while the poor creature lay struggling in the slush, blocking the traffic of the narrow thoroughfare, it gave birth to a foal. The newcomer was placed in the coach, the mare eventually raised to her feet and harnessed once more to the shafts, the driver taking his seat and thrashing her off to the stables as though nothing unusual had happened! I wonder what the good folk of the R.S.P.C.A. would have to say to that.

To describe one tithe of the cases of cruelty, either personally witnessed or coming to my knowledge during my eight months in Buenos Ayres, would occupy many pages of this book, and I shall limit myself to one more in particular. It happened in the Calle Bartolomé Mitre, one of the most congested thoroughfares in the city. It was again a rainy day, when horses may be seen falling in every street, owing to the absurd regulation which prohibits the use of heel pieces on their shoes (perhaps—ye gods!—it is thought these might injure the roads). When I came on the scene, this horse was lying in a helpless condition on the asphalt with sand all around him. The sand had been brought so that he might find a foothold in his struggles to rise, but the poor brute was far beyond struggling. Everywhere that the harness had touched him he was marked with raw flesh. Under his collar was a ring of raw flesh around his neck; the saddle, which had fallen loose from him, disclosed great patches of bleeding skin; the girths wherever they had touched him, left bloody traces, and every movement the poor thing made peeled off the skin where it touched the ground. A more loathsome spectacle of inhumanity I have not seen. This horse should have been shot months before. His skin was positively rotten, and in places green-moulded. Yet the little Indian policeman from the corner was helping the driver to raise the animal to its feet. This they were attempting by making a loop of the reins around its neck, the policeman pulling on this with all his might, so that by partially choking the horse it might be tempted to struggle to its feet, while the driver stood and thrashed it with his whip in the most unmerciful manner, every stroke breaking the skin. All to no purpose; it was too lifeless to struggle, and lay with a mute appeal in its eyes to be put out of its agony.

I personally protested to the policeman against his endeavouring to raise the animal, which was clearly past all service, and he frankly told me to mind my own business, as he was there to get the street cleared. A young native, however, at this juncture, came along, and seeming the only person other than myself who was in the least interested in the fate of the horse, I explained to him what had taken place while I stood there, and he, producing a card of membership of the Sarmiento Society, which is endeavouring to sow humanitarianism in the stony soil of the Argentine nature, insisted that no further effort should be made to raise the horse by thrashing it or partially choking it, and that it ought to be destroyed immediately. The policeman was disposed to listen to him, as, thanks to this society, considerable sums of money have been distributed among the police in accordance with the number of convictions they have secured against persons ill-treating animals. When I passed the spot some hours later, there was only the sand and some clots of blood to be seen, and I know not what had become of the horse; but the picture of it, bleeding and hopeless, haunted me for weeks, and remains vivid in my mind’s eye still.