Field Notes: The Media School Travel Blog

There are a lot of dogs roaming Ecuador. From the city to the mountainside to the country, there seems to be a never-ending supply of strays exercising their right of movement. According to our guide, dogs are a staple part of many standard Ecuadorian families, meaning pet ownership is above average for South America. The reason there are so many strays is that the government only relatively recently instituted a policy mandating that pets be spayed or neutered. Given my experiences with so many dogs here, I’m tempted to say that policy hasn’t had the desired effect.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the strays are a negative influence or that the locals even seem to have a lot of antipathy toward them. Apparently, while feral dogs can be dangerous and they can sometimes make sanitation work difficult, they also keep vermin populations down, and are only rarely aggressive. So many of these dogs are genuinely sweet, even if they were only looking for food. I had the pleasure of seeing a mother golden retriever playing with her offspring in the road before steering clear of a starting car and the group’s tour bus. With the density of strays, I would expect to see more roadkill, but what that mother and dozens of other dogs have demonstrated is that they know how to look both ways before crossing the street.

Going against the advice we’d been given and some tenets of common sense, several members of our group (including me) have engaged with some of the canines we’ve encountered. One that’s stayed in the back of my mind was a playful adolescent that approached us openly at a city park. The little guy was rambunctious and full of energy but seemed to not quite be able to contain himself. He started getting nippy before we had to shoo him away. All told, he was a very good boy who just needed to be more polite.

The moral of this story is that dogs are, just, so great, and if the laws regarding transport of animals were different, I would absolutely take some of them home with me.