The story of a stylish, modern-day canine mom

 

Bhuro is a brown and white rotund bitch in the village street. She looks replete with self-care, in complete contrast to other maternally worn out hassled female canines in the locality. She eats only warm buttered chapattis. She doesn’t give much trouble to her lungs by unnecessary barking like the rest of her ilk. I have seen many famished, worn- and worked-out female dogs due to the heavy burden of puppy rearing. But in comparison Bhuro seems a glamorous, narcissistic post-modern girl. I have never seen her attending her maternal duties. Then the secret comes out. She eats all of her newborn puppies to maintain her youth, glamor and figure. Of course there must be some very significant reason to account for her weird behavior. Mysteries of nature is all I can reckon in this regard.

Her meaning of life is in stark contrast to an old black bitch I remember from my young days. She would embarrass even the human mothers in taking care of her newborns. Once her sole surviving puppy also died. But she won’t allow anyone to take it away for burial. She kept licking and tending to the corpse for many days. Of course, love cannot stop a corpse from rotting. I shooed her away using a feigned demonic show of waving sticks, shouting angry words and stomping gestures. Then I hurriedly buried the carcass, secured the tiny grave with a big stone and many thorny boughs of keekars lest the mother in her digs out the dead from the grave. To her canine sense of motherhood I was the murderer of her puppy, and for weeks it would howl whenever she saw me. It would leave me very guilty.

There was another sweet canine mom who had such a liking for her kids that she would steal others’ puppies and rear them as her own. In comparison to these puppy-loving moms, Bhuro stands at the opposite end of earth in temperament and philosophy of life.