The dog, the cat and the sunburn.

Was it the cat or the dog that left me sunburned, dizzy and nursing a headache? Anyone who knows me will immediately say “definitely the cat”, despite the fact I don’t actually own one. The cat in question being Top Cat, a catamaran on which I have spent many a hot summer’s day drinking copious rum cocktails. 

Well, despite the day island hopping last Sunday, it was in fact the dog that resulted in mild sunstroke on Monday. Lola herself is not to blame, but rather a new law requiring all dogs to be microchipped and registered with hefty fines for non-compliance. She is already microchipped but there has never been a central registration database. I am not entirely sure there is one now given the process involved, an alarming number of paper forms and, as this is Mauritius, an even more alarming queue. Queuing for several hours seems to be a prerequisite of anything remotely connected to government bureaucracy.   

The intention is good — responsible dog ownership is vital in a country with a huge stray dog problem — but this is a great idea, poorly executed. Instead of accepting information from local veterinary practices, owners must take their dogs (chipped or not) to a mobile registration day at their local police station. This is, believe it or not, an improvement on the first proposal: requiring every dog owner on the island to report to the Mauritius Society for Animal Welfare’s (MSAW) main office — a two-hour trip for many, assuming you could find a bus or taxi willing to take a dog. Just imagine that queue, with an estimated 250,000 owned dogs on the island!

So, I, and many other responsible owners duly turned up with our dog(s), identity cards, proof of address and 350 Mauritian rupees at the police station. My heart sank when I was given queue number 147 upon arrival around midday. 2.5 hours later, after sitting in the blazing sun, Lola was finally legal, and I was burned to a crisp and very dehydrated. A few positives: the staff and vets from MSAW were remarkably cheerful and patient as were the police officers on queue control, plastic chairs were provided, dogs already microchipped were scanned and the existing chip accepted. The downsides; no water, no shade, paper forms (I thought carbon paper was a thing of the past), ID documents were photocopied in duplicate rather than scanned. 

Before anyone berates me for keeping Lola in the sun for hours, rest assured she was rescued after about 10 minutes once she had been scanned. Her daddy whisked her off to the beach, one with a bar! No harm came to the animal, one of the humans had a great time, the other human made herself worse and discovered, too late, that beer is not a cure for dehydration, however welcome it is at the time.