Rabid

by Monica Murphy

  Into this horror story stepped an unlikely demon slayer. In 1973, fresh out of the University of Oregon, Janice Girardi relocated to Bali and began making and selling her own jewelry. By 2007, this operation had swelled to become a multinational business, furnishing pieces to shops and large department stores around the world, and the income allowed Girardi to start a group called Bali Animal Welfare Association (BAWA). BAWA makes its headquarters in the same building in Ubud—the cultural heart of Bali, and a popular destination for the less surf-inclined tourist—that houses the jewelry business. Over the years it has gradually grown to incorporate a fully staffed shelter and veterinary clinic, a twenty-four-hour animal ambulance, a mobile sterilization clinic, a school-based education program, a puppy and kitten adoption program, and a continually expanding range of community programs funded through local and international donations.

  The clinic, in particular, stands as a visible monument to Girardi’s dedication. Situated in front of lush rice paddies on Ubud’s outskirts, it’s a graceful two-story building with wooden doors carved in the typical Indonesian style, elaborate hand-cut reliefs of flowers and vines with human and animal figures festooned throughout. The clinic’s hallways and terraces are packed full of wire kennels housing softly bedded puppies, which fill the air with their desperate murmurings; ever since rabies came to Bali, the clinic has quarantined all incoming puppies and kittens for one month or more, in order to screen them for signs of rabies. From deeper inside the clinic, the low and earnest barking of more mature dogs adds a subtle baritone to the chorus. BAWA staff move cheerfully about, freshening up cage linens and water bowls and doling out dog food—a mix of rice, carrots, egg, and commercial dog kibble that looks almost appetizing to the human visitor.

  In late 2009, after rabies on Bali had started to claim human lives and the mass extermination of dogs had begun, Girardi felt moved to get involved. “At the beginning,” she recalls, “I went to meetings where there were hundreds of people clapping when they talked about shooting the dogs or strychnining the dogs. And I’m the only one in the room saying, ‘Let’s vaccinate!’” A manic talker, Girardi unself-consciously reenacts the scene in her quick staccato, with a chipper grin plastered on her face and her hand stretched high in pantomime of an eager schoolgirl. After some persistence, she persuaded the government to allow BAWA to establish its own vaccination pilot program across the Gianyar regency, which encompasses Ubud and stretches down to greet the island’s southeastern shore. Unlike the government, Girardi proposed to use only long-acting foreign vaccines and to kill only those animals that had already demonstrated clear signs of disease. Based on the advice of international rabies experts—from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, the World Health Organization in Geneva, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—she argued that the vaccination would need to cover 70 percent of Gianyar’s dogs in order to curb the disease. The campaign proved Girardi correct: such a prevalence of immune dogs, or “warrior dogs,” as she later took to calling them, saw the incidence of rabies decline notably in the region.

  Despite this success, Girardi had surprising difficulty in convincing the government to extend this campaign island-wide. BAWA played host to a series of international rabies conferences, bringing together Balinese government officials and the world’s top rabies scientists; without fail, the latter cited overwhelming evidence in favor of a long-acting vaccine-based strategy for eliminating rabies from Bali, as opposed to large-scale culling. The organization even secured major funding for the larger campaign from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), a U.K.-based alliance, and the necessary vaccine from AusAID, the Australian government’s foreign-aid program. Still, months of negotiation were required to convince Bali’s governor to sign a document approving the plan. In October 2010, more than two years after the first human death from rabies on Bali, the island-wide vaccination effort finally got under way.

  The entire campaign was to be coordinated out of BAWA’s headquarters in Ubud, a boxy, two-story office structure whose upstairs conference room soon became commandeered as a sort of vaccination war room. There, Girardi and a handful of her BAWA staff—sometimes with Elly Hiby, the London-based head of the Companion Animals Programmes Department for WSPA—could be found in a constant succession of logistical meetings, often huddled over a hand-sketched map of Bali’s nine regencies. Into each regency they penciled the numbers of vaccine and surveillance staff required, along with the projected dates. Arrows displayed how the teams would move from regency to regency in pursuit of that 70 percent vaccination rate. This difficult, dangerous work would have to be accomplished neighborhood by neighborhood, compound by compound, dog by dog.

  In November 2010, a few weeks into the campaign, the vaccine teams were finishing up the Jembrana regency in rural west Bali, far from the tourist centers of the southern part of the island. Unlike the winding, urban maze of Ubud—where the streets, with their rows of sturdy old family compounds, often feel like fortified lines of walled keeps—Jembrana is more spacious, more agricultural. Some compounds are lined with open metal fencing, so the traveler can catch a glimpse inside; others are hardly fenced at all. The family temples, which in Ubud are graceful concrete structures with elaborately thatched roofs, in Jembrana can sometimes be more ad hoc affairs: piles of bricks, even, with a piece of tin perched on top.

  “We are BAWA, here to vaccinate your animals for rabies!” This was the usual exclamation with which the team members entered a family compound. The shouting was necessary in order to be heard above the urgent barking of countless dogs, as the family dogs joined voices with those outside the compound walls: a piercing dissonance of woofs and wails. Made Suwana, BAWA’s director of educational outreach, wound up screaming himself as he translated the vaccine team’s shouts.

  Each vaccine team was made up of four net-wielding dogcatchers; a veterinarian, in charge of drawing up and administering each rabies vaccine; and a record keeper, who noted details about every vaccine recipient on a clipboard. During most of their field excursions, the vaccine team was accompanied by the local klian banjar, or elected community leader, who smilingly reassured families of the benign nature of the intrusion. Upon entering each compound, the team asked the residents whether they could handle their own dogs during the injection. The large majority could not. Although the dogs live peacefully among the humans—eating the plentiful remains of the religious offerings laid out daily by the observant women of the family, drowsing comfortably below the bale bengong (a sort of gazebo), where the family lounges together during the humid afternoons, or following eagerly at the master’s heels as he walks across the road to converse with a neighbor tinkering with his motorbike—the dogs do not approach the family members directly for caresses or for morsels of food, and the family members do not regularly have occasion to lay a hand on the dogs. Indeed, they are usually afraid to do so. As the vaccine team worked, many owners seemed to derive a thrill from watching their semi-wild dogs get unprecedentedly manhandled.

  Except in those unusual cases where owners could hold their dogs for the injection, the dogs had to be ensnared in nets. It was a remarkable ballet. As the dogcatchers entered a compound, they fanned out slowly, preparing to corral each dog in turn. A capture was made when one catcher startled a dog toward the other catchers’ nets. Except, that is, when the catchers missed: on occasion a net scooped only air, as a wily dog scampered to one side and then sprinted off to some distant corner. Worse, many of the dogs proved capable of breaching the compound fence, escaping into a neighbor’s yard or, farther off still, to the impossible catching grounds of a palm forest or rice paddy.

  Once a dog was in a net, the net was twirled, such that the dog was left at the net’s bottom, twisted into a knot of quivering muscle, fur, and teeth. The dogcatcher then pressed the hoop, with the net now spiraled taut across it, down over the enmeshed dog on the ground. Only then could the veterinarian, working warily through the tangle of ropes, ad
minister the injection of rabies vaccine into the shuddering back muscles of the shrieking animal. Before the dog was released, two measures were taken to identify it as vaccinated. First, by means of long forceps, a red ribbon collar was woven through the net and knotted carefully around the dog’s neck. Second, red spray paint was applied generously to the dog’s back.

  In their demeanor the dogcatchers, generally married men in their early twenties, strived for a nonchalant badassery. They wore their paw print–emblazoned BAWA T-shirts with pants that were either very tight or very loose, along with such rocker accessories as spiked bracelets or bandannas. Most had visible tattoos. During breaks they smoked cigarettes, consumed sweets bought liberally from the ubiquitous household storefronts, and hooted at attractive girls whenever they passed by. When they were engaged in the thrill of the catch, though, the young men’s swagger gave way to a quick and purposeful gait; their expressions, coolly bored a moment before, brightened to an alert apprehension.

  The most dangerous step, they explained, was the liberation of the dog, which at that moment was often inclined—perhaps understandably—to reel around on its captor, teeth bared. Standard procedure for the release was to hold the hoop at maximum arm’s length, with the dog hanging in the net as it gradually untwisted. The dog writhed and snarled in the loose net until a quick flip, judiciously timed, deposited it on the ground. As soon as the dog disentangled its legs, it would be up and sprinting. The only question was, which way? The catcher held up his hoop like a shield until he could be sure the dog was running away from, and not toward, him.

  While the catchers demonstrated their derring-do, the record keeper stood beside each owner, earnestly scribbling down the official data—the name of the owner, the sex of the dog, the dog’s name, the dog’s age, and the color of the dog’s coat—on his clipboard. Not every Balinese dog has a name, but the list of names from one Jembrana community tended toward the punchy and masculine: Kiki, Jos, Boi, Boss, Lupi, Bobo, Inul, Bruno. The sex of more than 80 percent of Balinese dogs is male, due to a common practice of abandoning young female puppies. Some of them survive as strays, but most of them seem to vanish from the island; this practice, though a bit barbaric, has served Bali as a crude form of population control.

  A mongrel breed reportedly related to Australia’s dingo, the “Bali dog” comes in a variety of colors, from brown to brindle to mottled white. It ranges in size from that of a large beagle to that of a small retriever, with a more or less consistent short stiff coat, erect ears, conical muzzle, and a lean, muscular body. The recent documentary Bali: Island of the Dogs, written and hosted by Dr. Lawrence Blair, a garrulous British expat in an eye patch, marshals an impressive group of scholars to testify to the Bali dog’s genetic uniqueness. One geneticist at the University of California at Davis, Niels Pedersen, even gives some credence to the legend that one group of wild Balinese dogs, the Kintamani of the interior highlands, is descended from a retinue of chow chows that was imported by an eleventh-century Chinese princess. As the geneticist demonstrates on a “family tree,” the Kintamani is very closely related to the chow chow—though he also holds out the possibility that the chow chow might have evolved from the Kintamani, rather than the other way around. Regardless, the Balinese seem convinced that their dogs are noble not merely in temperament but in bloodline.

  Among locals, the Bali dog is held to possess nearly sacred properties. In addition to supplying owners with protection—including a sense for metaphysical danger that owners tout as a “magic alarm”—Bali dogs are believed, according to a paper coauthored by Dr. Agung of the DIC, to “cure certain diseases” and more generally to “avert calamity.” Sometimes they are given a role in religious ceremonies. Their apparent ability to survive on rice, the primary foodstuff of the ubiquitous animistic Hindu offering, is frequently cited as evidence of their pluck and fortitude.

  Such superstitions are enough to make Putu Ernawati, the smiley young veterinarian on the vaccine team in Jembrana, cautious in predicting the outcome of the island-wide effort. “It is hard to make the village people understand how important the rabies vaccine is,” she cautioned. But all around her, there seemed to be a growing awareness of the benefits. On seeing BAWA enter a nearby compound, neighbors would call and wave to make sure they would get visited, too. A few even tried to catch their own dogs in advance of BAWA’s arrival—and, having caught them, would advance toward the team with the thrashing, howling dogs in arms, presenting them proudly for injection. One local, Putu Widiasmadi, stood near the front of his compound, clearly enjoying the spectacle of the dogcatchers’ exertions. The team record keeper, who was helping to round up dogs, had entrusted his clipboard to two of Widiasmadi’s daughters, who laughed uproariously at the names the neighbors had given their pets; apparently, the names of their own dogs, Fred and Ricky, seemed thoroughly reasonable to them by comparison. “I think it’s good the government is responding this way to rabies,” Widiasmadi said. “Balinese families want to have a dog for protection.”

  According to one klian banjar, the government dog exterminators had come through the village just weeks beforehand. The community still teemed with freewheeling Bali dogs, but soon it became obvious that their owners were steeled to shield them from harm. At one compound, an owner came running at the catchers wielding a large knife and shouting: “No, no, stop! Don’t kill my dogs!” At another, a little boy who saw the advancing team ran ahead to the community temple, in order to pray for his dogs’ survival.

  The dogs themselves kept barking and barking: advancing and barking, retreating and barking; barking as they saw the vaccine team approaching; and barking just as emphatically at the backs of the team as it moved on to the next compound. (One could understand why the Balinese are so supremely confident in the dogs’ abilities as protectors; the dogs will bark at anything.) BAWA’s teams would provoke a similar din in several more Jembrana communities that same day, and scores more that week. They would need to carry that on week after week, month after month, community after community, regency after regency—until the whole island had barked itself hoarse.

  Back at headquarters, on a brilliantly sunny Wednesday, Girardi and her team were strategizing in the war room. In addition to Gianyar, vaccinated during the pilot program, Jembrana was now nearly finished; but the remainder of the island’s dogs awaited protection. And while many more teams were currently in training, none were as yet ready to deploy. On a crude hand-drawn map, chopped into rough approximations of the regencies, the team played with numbers. What if they had two teams here, and six teams here? And then, by the next month, ten additional teams?

  Deny Gunawan, BAWA’s emergency response coordinator, interrupted the meeting to tell Girardi about a call from the clinic. A vicious young dog, which reportedly bit both its owner and its owner’s son without provocation, had just been dropped off for examination.

  “Was the dog vaccinated?” asked Girardi.

  “Not yet,” replied Gunawan. He went on to detail two ominous observations that had been made by clinic staff. First, when the dog was caught, it had tried to bite the net. Second, it had run fearfully from the water offered it.

  Girardi was unimpressed. These behaviors were typical of a Bali dog when captured and confined. Rather than order the dog’s immediate euthanasia, Girardi instructed that it be placed in isolation and monitored for additional symptoms of rabies.

  “The dog bit the owner and the son,” Gunawan repeated, to be sure that the gravity of the situation had impressed itself on his boss. Girardi, in response, repeated herself as well. The dog was to go into isolation. Girardi wanted to obtain a more complete history from the owner regarding the circumstances of the bites. “Sometimes when you talk to them,” she explained to us after Gunawan had gone, “the story will turn out to be, the child was trying to take the toy from the dog and then the dad walked in”—that is, sometimes a biting dog is just being a normal Bali dog, not a mad dog. Besides, she continued, there wasn’t anyone
in the clinic right now who could properly evaluate the dog.

  Girardi returned her attention to the map. Her original plan, which made the most sense from an epidemiological point of view, had been to carry out an organized sweep of the island, starting in Jembrana on the narrow western end and then slowly moving across from west to east, gaining new teams as the island widened. It had become clear, though, that this methodical plan would not be tenable politically. Whenever a new human death or cluster of deaths occurred in some regency, she was immediately pressured to focus her eradication efforts there.

  Irrational as those requests were, she was forced to comply. Doing so was necessary not just to keep her good standing with the government; it also was crucial to the animals’ welfare. “If we don’t get people in there,” she pointed out, “they’re going to start killing dogs.” So an organized eastward campaign across the island had instead given way to something that mapped more like nuclear war: teams would drop in targeted spots and then spread like fallout from the epicenters, until the whole island was consumed.

  For all the terror of rabies, for all the superstitions that still attach to the disease (and to the dogs that carry it), and for all the individual intransigence and bureaucratic ineptitude that can mar any response to disease, the theory of vaccination should work: given the right math, and enough vaccine, this most ancient of killers will eventually submit and roll over. But getting the formula right takes patience and political will. BAWA’s first pass at vaccinating the island would eventually succeed, essentially as planned. The full array of teams would deploy within a month, and by March 2011 they would hit their target of 70 percent vaccination. The government would eventually fund a second pass, beginning two months later—a crucial step, given Bali’s staggering canine turnover rate, with 47 percent of dogs under two years of age. But following several human deaths, apparently from bites that had occurred prior to the BAWA campaign, the government’s confidence in vaccination seemed to waver. The culling of healthy dogs resumed, particularly near the recent rabies cases, even though most of the dogs in those communities had already been vaccinated; this once again lowered the overall canine vaccination rate. In May 2011, government officials announced they were abandoning the goal of eradicating rabies on the island by 2012 in favor of the significantly less ambitious deadline of 2015. If Bali recommits itself to building and sustaining its army of “warrior dogs,” in Girardi’s noble phrasing, then peace should return to this island paradise by then.