Love Or Hunger?

Which would we choose to satisfy first if we were starving?

love

OR

hunger

The thing that striked me most about my daily visits to Chuyia/AhFa was a ritual she established- to put it more accurately, she shaped my behaviour with her! Despite her emaciated condition and the obvious that she was always ravenous, she was determined to engage me in spending substantial time indulging in affectionate play before even giving the warm home-cooked food I’d prepared a sniff. To me, at first this seemed ridiculous. How could anyone ignore their screaming hungry stomach and the yummy smells coming from the doggy picnic bag. It took me awhile to figure out what I think might have been going on for her.

To her, love or perhaps more accurately, bonding was more important for her survival. It makes sense for a pack animal that spending time on affiliating activity and bonding with a pack will ensure better chances of survival. Consequently, bonding activities are high on the priority list before fulfilling hunger needs, as basic as hunger might seem. She did however always end up enthusiastically gobbling the home-prepared brown rice with chicken and liver mixed with dried food.

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-deprivation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in the early stages of primate development.

Harlow separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, and offered them a choice between two surrogate "mothers," one fashioned with terrycloth, the other with wire.

In the first group, the terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, the terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether it provided them with food or not, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.

When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogates, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they would occasionally return to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They would freeze in fear and cry, crouch down, or suck their thumbs. Some of the monkeys would even run from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys without their cloth mother.

The importance of bonding and contact can hardly be undermined in influencing behaviour and holistic well-being.

I have since received help from an independent animal rescue group in the first steps to re-homing our Little Flower. Her owners were very willing to give her up as they already have an additional 2 puppies from her first litter and were not willing to part with the expenses required for her sterilization. Then the perennial dilemma of whether she was better off re-homed, as that did not always ensure a safer and better future for the animal, or was it better for her psychological well-being that she continued her free-ranging life on the streets.

The situation was such- she was not going to be sterilised by her owners and should she conceive again, she lacked the nutrition to sustain a healthy state and would probably pose a burden to her owners who didn’t want any more dogs. She was free-ranging in a dangerous, constantly busy street intersection. If she ever needed any medical attention, it seemed unlikely that she would get it. On the other hand she was used to roaming free and occasionally restrainedH. How would she take to being re-homed and confined in her new home? We decided to take one step at a time and get her sterilized first. Not knowing anybody in the city still new to us, I was touched when the animal rescue vet took the effort to drive an hour from her clinic in the suburbs, arriving at 10pm that night, and whisked Ah Fa off on the return one hour journey back.

Since my only friend in the city moved away, it has left me a little void accentuated by worry. She’s boarding at the vet’s as we found out she’s pregnant! So she’ll stay put, have her puppies, wean them and then be sterilized and re-homed. It all seems like a long, new journey to me and I wonder what she thinks. We have since made several visits to Ah Fa. She insists on our routine of overjoyed jumping and nuzzling, eloquent kisses and shy requests for strokes.

On my first visit, my heart broke to see her lying quietly in a cage, a fraction of the space she had before. I wondered constantly, with shades of guilt, about what the artificial, caged space was doing to her. Time told us her story. She holds her tail up now, ears picked up and inquisitive, no longer holding her body close to the ground and skulking like she did before. She vocalises her joy at seeing us and barks! She’s no longer in survival mode! When I sit with her on the sidewalk outside the vet’s, she curiously sniffs at passers by when before she used to startle easily and run off to hide when strangers passed by.

Despite being in a confined space, her confidence has grown. There is no doubt of her psychological well-being and it shows in her posture and vocalisations. She has the assurance of two square meals a day, a safe space and kind vet assistants nearby.