Road Cows and Road Dogs - An Ecology of its Own

So, the other morning I woke up to find "Bessy" sitting just outside he door of the place I'm staying. Now, the thing is, it's not all that interesting, it's just the first time I've seen one of these cows just chilling out. I've seen a fair number of cows munching on random garbage and food leftovers.

There are also a lot of random "road dogs" as I call them (and Bessy was a "road cow") because well, they pretty much wander around the roads. I'm curious who they belong to. I mean, I can accept stray dogs mentally, but not really stray cows. I have not seen any stray cats, though I thought I heard a cat in heat behind the building a night or two ago.

The interesting thing about these road animals are their ecology. The garbage collection infrastructure here is not so hot, so you wind up with a lot of garbage just being dumped along the side of the road, or over walls of discarded buildings, or fences that were put there for some reason or another. Garbage gets tossed into/onto these different areas, and it collects. But that's not to say it just sits there. First the road cows seem to get first pick (assuming they're around). What the cows don't eat, the dogs get a crack at. Just the other day I saw a road rat, which I suspect is what gets to eat once the dogs are through.

A day or two ago, on my way towards the office, I encountered the Bangalorian equi sewer rat. However, there largely isn't rain water drainage system, but there are rather large troughs dug out (and often even reinforced with stone, and some are then even covered with stones as well (water can then run through the cracks down below). Well, this rat (who wasn't far from a food vendors regular spot...smart rat) had set up home invalent of a one of these drainage ditches. He was attempting to snag some food as I approached, but got nervous and scurried into his hole. He then poked his head out to watch me pass.

Tomorrow I'm going out on a little trip for a gathering of the SILK mailing list members. It should be a fun trip, and I'll get to see parts of the area surrounding Bangalore that I would not have been able to otherwise. The camera is going to join me. I'm trying to get a little less shy about using it. Sitting around with a notebook/laptop is one thing, the camera is a whole other ball of wax.

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