Many years ago, Agus, a Torajan girl, was preparing to celebrate her birthday. She wanted to slaughter an animal to feed her friends, but she couldn’t choose the right one. As she walked to the animal market, she considered her options.
“Perhaps I will slaughter a buffalo,” she thought. “But buffalo are too big. My friends will not be able to eat all of it, and it will be too expensive for me. I cannot afford to spend tens of millions of rupiah (thousands of dollars) for my birthday.”
“Maybe I can serve chicken,” she thought next. “But chicken are too small. I would have to slaughter many chickens to feed all of my friends. By the time I prepare all of those chickens, it will already be tomorrow. I need another option.”
Just as Agus was lamenting her difficult situation, she ran into her friend Budi. He was so preoccupied with his own problems that he did not even ask her “Mau ke mana = where do you want to go”. “I am so worried,” said Budi. “Dog mating season has begun, and I am worried my dog will have free sex (note: free sex=sex before marriage). How can I protect my dog’s morality? Also, I cannot afford for my dog to get pregnant. What would I do with all its children?”
The two friends stood, moping in silence. All seemed lost until, in a moment of clarity, genius struck Alice. “I have a great idea,” she announced. “We should kill your dog. Then it cannot get pregnant. Also, then I can serve it for my birthday. It is just the right size.”
“Brilliant,” Budi responded, sipping from the Guiness that magically appeared in his hand (Budi was Christian). “Your plan will enable us to kill two dogs with one whack!”
The two friends strode to Budi’s house, excited to have solved both of their problems. As they approached his house, however, clouds began to cover the sky, as they are wont to do in the rainy season during the afternoon. When they arrived and saw Budi’s dog, their enthusiasm wore off. They realized that killing a dog would not be easy; if you cut the dog’s neck, it might bight you. How to kill the dog without getting injured?
Luckily, Agus, the “alpha dog” of this story, had another solution. “Let’s put the dog in a bag. The dog will not be able to bite us since it will be trapped in the bag.”
Budi, not too easily won over, realized the flaw. “If we cut the dog’s neck while it is in the bag, then we will have to cut a hole in the bag. Then, the dog can escape and bite us.”
Coming to the rescue again, Agus had her third clever solution of the day. “We don’t need to kill the dog by cutting its neck. Instead, let’s take the dog and whack it against a wall repeatedly. We won’t even have to worry about the blood getting everywhere, since the bag will keep that contained too!”
As the sun set, the two friends immersed themselves in the beauty of the moment by slamming Budi’s dog against the wall until the only body parts left moving in the room were the sides of their mouths, which floated upward until the radiance of Agus and Budi’s smiles replaced the radiation of the setting sun.
Later, as they ate the birthday dog together, Alice reflected, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Epilogue: I decided to become a vegetarian.
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To be fair:
For the sake of telling a good story and leading up to my new vegitarianism, I was not at all fair. I was also factually inaccurate at times. Here are some notes on fairness and accuracy:
(1) Most Indonesians do not eat dog. Muslims would consider dogs unclean, so presumably most or all Muslims do not eat dog. Some Torajans do eat dog, but only occasionally (for birthdays). I believe some other non-muslims throughout the archipelago also eat dogs (either on special occasions or (maybe?) on normal days, depending on the region).
(2) With the exception of those who get joy from animal cruelty (these people exist everywhere), I don't think Torajans or other Indonesians actually enjoy killing dogs. I just thought that made for a better story and emphasized my shift to caring more about treatment of animals.
(3) The students at my school (and Torajans generally, I think) do tend to serve each other dog on birthdays.
(4) Some Torajans do sometimes kill dogs by putting them in bags and slamming them against the wall or the ground.
(5) The person from whom I learned about this does not eat dog. When she was in high school, her dog bit someone else. The dog had to die so that it would not bite others. The victim's father chose to kill the dog by beating it (not using the bag technique) since he was understandably not very happy with the dog. Not using a bag was a poor plan, since the dog, head bleeding, ran away and hid under my friend's bed.
(6) Torajans (maybe other Indonesians?) do greet each other with "Mau ke mana?"
(7) Indonesians do refer to sex before marriage as "free sex"
(8) I have heard of someone killing a dog to prevent it from mating.
(9) The story, is of course, fiction, with small glimmers of truth as mentioned in previous notes.
Addendum: I don't think of eating a dog as morally any more wrong than eating another animal. The classification of some animals as meat animals and some animals as pets is morally arbitrary. Even though it seems more weird to me to eat a dog than say, a cow, that's just because I come from a culture where we keep dogs as pets (and dog isn't kosher). All that being said, whacking an animal against a wall to kill it does seem pretty cruel (although, as the story explains, the normal alternative does not really work).
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