I’m going to be real here. In the Philippines, GDP per capita is $3,800 a year. In the U.S. GDP per capita is 82,000 a year.
If I’m an American, and a dog snatches food from out of my son’s hand, it’s funny. If I’m a Filipino making less than $4k a year and the same thing happens, it might mean that my son doesn’t eat that day.
In the Philippines, outdoor food preparation is not unheard of. Instead of preparing food in a fully remodeled kitchen with a six burner stove, poor people might be cooking their food by burning scrap wood. Rather than filling up the indoors with smoke from burning scrap wood, doing it outdoors just makes sense.
At that point, having a stray dog come up and ‘steal food’ is a real, and undesirable possibility. If another stray dog came up and took the first dog’s food, what do you think the first dog would do? He’d bite the other dog. The Filipinos didn’t bite the dog, they poured boiling water on him. That’s what you do when you don’t have fangs, but you have hands with opposable thumbs.
There are numerous people in the Philippines whose standard of living is not much higher than that of a stray dog. Again, $3,800 a year GPD per capita. You can argue that people there aren’t staggeringly poor, but obviously they are. If someone poured boiling water on their own dog for taking the food, that’s stupid. If it wasn’t their dog, I give them leeway to take their own side in a fight over food with a dog.
“Animals there literally eat trash because most people just walk past them and ignore them instead of bothering to help.”
Numerous children in the Philippines are not significantly better off than those dogs. If you want to debate this, I can post thousands of photos illustrating my point. It’s weird to me (and possibly also WEIRD), that we’re even talking about the dogs.
What is it with Westerners who see a child and dog living in the same circumstances, and get more worried about how impoverished the dog is? Asking for a friend.
