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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: HOW DOGS FORGE A BOND WITH RIO’S HOMELESS THAT IS LIFE-SAVING FOR BOTH This article, which accompanies Heloisa Passos’ film “Birdie” for Field of Vision, is the first of a two-part series. The second part, accompanying the film “Karollyne,” will be published soon. AS IS TRUE OF SO MANY CITIES in the western world, there are thousands of homeless people living on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the second-largest city in Brazil. They include families, children, solitary men and women, the old and the young. Many have been homeless for years with little prospect of an exit, especially now that the country faces worsening economic distress, met with often-cruel austerity measures. Homeless people are abundant in most neighborhoods, including the upscale ones most frequented by tourists. Homelessness in Rio is, in many ways, virtually identical to how it manifests in other large cities: it entails unimaginable material and emotional deprivation, hopelessness, societal invisibility, and utter isolation. But one aspect of Rio’s homeless population stands out: a huge number of them have dogs that were previously living as desperate, unwanted strays on the street. Many have lived on the street with their dogs for years. They care for them as well as, and in many cases better than, the average middle-class family with a pet. The profound bond that forms between them is like nothing else one will find, and is thus deeply revealing. Birdie_pre1_play1 Watch Birdie, a movie about Rio’s homeless and their dogs, by Heloisa Passos. There’s a vast diversity to how the city’s homeless live with their dogs. Anderson Bernardes Carneiro (“Birdie”), the subject of today’s Field of Vision film (click play on the recorder above to watch and click here for an interview with the filmmaker), is a 35-year-old fruit vendor from the Amazon who spent 12 years in prison and now lives a largely solitary life on the Rio streets with his two dogs. Karollyne, the subject of this week’s other film from FOV, is a trans woman who is effectively the matriarch of an 8-person homeless encampment in the forest that collectively cares for 19 dogs (along with 4 cats), almost all of which have been abandoned by people who simply decided they no longer wanted them and so just dumped them out of their cars in the forest to starve to death. Some of the homeless people are couples who nurture their dogs like their children. Still others are protected by their dogs as they sleep in dangerous areas, while some put their dogs to work with them as they panhandle or put on shows for donations. But in all cases, the brutality of homelessness combines with the particular ways dogs relate to humans to create a remarkable emotional and psychological connection that is often literally life-saving for both. Rio, of course, is not the only city where people who live on the streets care for homeless dogs. Leslie Irvine is a Sociology Professor at the University of Colorado who has devoted much of her academic career to studying that unique relationship, including why so many homeless people credit their dogs with “having changed or saved their lives.” Her book on the subject, My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals (just released in paperback), documents how “homeless people report levels of attachment to their animals that may surpass those found among the domiciled public.” There’s a U.S.-based non-profit group “focused completely on feeding and providing emergency veterinary care to pets of the homeless,” and it estimates that at least between 5% to 10% of the U.S. homeless population live with pets; in some areas, it is as high as 25%. There are occasional U.S. media reports highlighting how many homeless people insist that “their animal companion is their best friend and oxygen without whom life wouldn’t be worth living.” But there’s much more to learn from it. To examine how the homeless form bonds with their dogs is to understand, as Irvine put it, “the unique relationships with their animals and unique stories of the self within those relationships.” Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
That is beautiful -- thanks, Ada. "all of which have been abandoned by people who simply decided they no longer wanted them and so just dumped them out of their cars in the forest to starve to death" -- that part's unbearable, of course. I just hate humanity. We don't deserve the things animals offer us -- they're BETTER THAN US even though they treat each other like humans do, even hummingbirds.
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