Ectoparasites
As I approached the gate of the house in Negombo, a black-and-brown furry blur rushed at me, accompanied by fierce flashing teeth and the sound of mad barking. Evidently the neighbours’ dog, the one I had shouted at during the ill-fated Night of the Lost Pocket Knife, had joined our growing menagerie. As soon as John emerged to unlock the gate (the lazy buggers had not been out of the house all day), the dog calmed down and started wagging his tail. But it was not until later in the evening that he felt entirely at ease in my presence.
“The neighbours kept him in chains,” S growled:” with no water and no shade!”
“He’s called Gamini,” John chimed in: “He now looks after our house.”
“Yeah, I can see that!” I laughed.
While gazing at us with pricked ears, Gamini would occasionally turn to gnaw at his fur, briefly and furiously. Intermittendly he sat down to scratch his ears, interrupted when a sudden itch in his tail caught his attention. The poor dog was torn as to which of his many itches he should attend to first. It was obvious that he was riddled with ticks and fleas.
All the dogs in Sri Lanka seem plagued by skin diseases and parasites; many are almost naked with mange. But it was sad to see the poor thing’s misery from up close. My back started to itch in sympathy.
“You should have bought some flea powder”, I grumbled.
A said she had hosed the dog down and brushed his fur just a short while ago, but apparently it did no good.
We were sitting in the lounge after dinner and I was telling everyone about my trip when I noticed a dark speck half-way up the wall which had not been there earlier. It was a tick, its blood-distended abdomen swollen to the size of a lentil. When I squashed it, it left an ugly red stain on the wall.
“That must have fallen off after finishing its meal,” I said. Then my gaze fell onto the wall behind the settee where the guys were sitting.
“Er, turn around, you lot…”
We looked up at the wall. A and I stepped closer. Sure enough; the dozens of tiny black spots which had appeared were ticks, slowly making their way up towards the ceiling. After the dog had been washed and had his fur combed, the ticks had staged a mass-exodus. I shuddered at the thought of the things raining down on us from the ceiling, carrying horrible diseases with them. We spent the next half an hour or so checking out every little speck and repeatedly swept the floor. Each tick, even the tiny ones, left a splattering of blood as we dispatched it. It looked as if there had been a fight in the room.
The neighbours appeared not long after that to re-claim their dog. They were not the owners of the prawn-hatchery but the neighbours on the other side of the house, people A hardly knew. We handed him over and soon Gamini was once again chained to the wall. We could hear him howling in the night.
“That is it”, S said, standing up,”I’m going to cut him lose!”
I was worried because I could easily picture the situation turning ugly. Nearly every day the papers carried news about neighbourly disputes. One disgruntled guy had shot dead four youngsters for letting off crackers on Christmas eve and a group of men had burned down a hamlet and hospitalized nine people after a minor disagreement over shared land.
“Careful now,” I said: “I mean, the neighbours might be armed…”
A was worried for different reasons.
“You get snake-bitten!” she cried. But there was nothing to it, so in the end we all went.
Gamini was chained to a wall which separated our property from the neibous’, next to a canal which ran past our back garden. It was easy to step around the wall and reach the dog. There was no movement from the house as S slipped the chain over his neck.
Gamini kept us company until John evicted him when he got to bed at his customary late, or rather early, hour. Eventually the dog must have returned to his owners.
The following morning, I went to the pharmacy and bought Bolfo flea- and tick-powder (‘ectoparasiticide’ sounded good to me) and a worming tablet for good measure. I also picked up some chicken gizzards to disguise the pill in.
This time, I liberated Gamini myself. After A had given them a talking-to, the neighbours had at least provided a bowl of water for him, but there was no wind behind the wall and no shade. When he came into the garden, Gamini immediately sought the shade of a tree and dug a hole to lie down in, cooled by the moist soil.
“He is smart”, John said: “but I guess it isn’t good for the garden.”
I didn’t care, people should not keep dogs with long, dark fur in the tropics or, if they do, be prepared for the consequences.
I lured Gamini inside with the chicken gizzards and we liberately powdered him with Bolfo while he was wolfing down the first morsel. To my disgust, he managed to leave the worm pill behind. I had expected him to swallow his rare treat in one go but even though he ate with gusto, he first sniffed and licked his food carefully. A reckoned he was not used to uncooked meat, being fed mainly on leftover curry. I broke up the pill into tiny pieces and embedded them thoroughly in the remaining chicken. The taste clearly did not agree with Gamini. Despite being hungry, he took an excruciatingly long time to finish the chicken, but eventually he did. All the while, we had a job keeping Gizmo at bay. The dog and cat actually shared food with each other, A reckoned they had grown up together, but the worming pill was not formulated for cats and might have been dangerous. Besides, Gizmo did not look as if he had worms. In the time I had been away, he had grown visibly fatter.
By the time we had finished, the floor was covered with powder like a dusting of freshly fallen snow. Sniffing around for any remaining bits of chicken, Gamini hovered a couple of tidy lines up his nostrils. It didn’t even make him sneeze. We hustled him through the door to lose his parasites outside in the garden.
Covering him in flea powder had felt strangely satisfying and we happily anticipated that, once he was allowed back inside, he would stretch out under the table and sleep — content and free of itches probably for the first time in his life. But we were to be disappointed. The treatment had made no difference. When he came back in, Gamini was scratching himself just as fiercly as before. As he was gnawing his paws, I caught a glimpse of ticks lined up in rows between his toes. They were impervious to chemical warfare.
We treated Gizmo for good measure, but he appeared to be practically free from ectoparasites. Cats are so much better at taking care of themselves.
Tags: The Whales of Trincomalee, Tag Index
Denni