By T.R. Smith

When I finally leave our little island, I will always remember the city dogs -- those (mostly) four-legged little bastards that spend the night lurking in the empty lot below my apartment window.

They are my neighbors and my reluctant companions in this detached existence -- my fellow observers of this outpost of human civilization. While we are proud to be foreign to this city, we accept the city as a beggar might accept a crudely tossed coin. But, unlike us, the city dogs crave nothing more than to be left to themselves.

Half wild or stray, they are free and infinitely happy roaming the labyrinthine streets and junk-filled lots of these great Chinese cities, much happier than in some mythical ranch in the plains of America. This is not some dog Disneyland; these are the great alleyways of the wild.

You see, dogs are the descendants of wolves who discovered that going through caveman garbage piles was a better racket than chasing down mammoths, or whatever else they preyed on ten thousand years ago.
The dog is the ultimate opportunist.

He learnt that by dwelling in our wake he could make a better life for himself. But, don't fool yourself, he doesn't aspire to be human; he stubbornly endeavors to retain his separateness, his wolfishness, for no creature can cast his head down as he slinks past you on the street with greater pride than he.

What this dog does not want is the indignity of being cared for by the people his ancestors grudgingly came to depend on. He avoids this final submission more fiercely than he avoids death. Every half-wild dog quietly nurses the desire to tear out the heart of any human that stays out at the dump past dark.

To the enlightened Western animal lover: you have your pets, your pedicured poodles dressed in their little smoking jackets, your cats on leashes, and your intellectualizing snake-handlers on the cover of National Geographic. You've neutered enough of a once proud race of killers.

I ask with all humility: leave these once wild dogs alone. They would rather die on the street by motorcycle or by mange than be taken from their midnight brood to some sterile asylum full of tea drinking, makeup-caked old ladies. And they will be better for it. When the last humans expire, by our own doing or by nature's curse, those that lived on us will follow us into history. Those that remained aloof will live to hunt another day.