Why pets get better treatment than you

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OPINION

By Simon Kaheru

Among the international news bulletins I subscribe to is one, ‘ESG Spotlight’ by Reuters. I normally get deep insights from their reporting on ESG issues of global importance.

This week, the spotlight heading was, ‘Pets end up in LA shelters after owners detained in immigration raids’, and the story was exactly what you thought it was, reading that headline.

“From June 10, the county has taken in 28 animals, 22 of whom are dogs. Eleven dogs and two cats have been placed with homes since then,” it read.

I like pets, maybe a bit more than most people around me. Still, I felt it would be too much for me to read the story in full and use up any emotion about 28 domestic animals, 15,000 kilometres away in Los Angeles. So, I didn’t. I did sit up, though, because of the number of dead being at 22.

See, just hours earlier, I had read up on the riots in the Angolan capital a few days before this report about 22 dogs.

Al-Jazeera’s headline shouted: “At least 22 killed at Angola fuel price hike protests, authorities say”.

Now that was a story for me — an African living 3,500km away under fairly similar circumstances — to read.

Twenty-two of my fellow Africans died right here in our corner of the world while protesting a government decision to increase the price of diesel.

The civil action was led by minibus taxi associations there, spreading through seven provinces and attracting the lethal attention of the police and army.

This is even a small figure when compared to the number of other Africans dying elsewhere for reasons related to economics.

All this is about nothing else but economics.

Thinking this, I broke down a little bit and went back to the dead pets in California.

Sure enough, the pets over there are treated much better than many Africans simply because of economics.

The sad story about the pets is that as people are being deported from the US (Economics), they have to send their pets to shelters — transporting them in plastic cages and other carriers that sometimes look more comfortable than the Angolan minibuses (more Economics).

“While the dogs and cats wait to be placed in homes, the county will give pets a health check and have them groomed, if that is needed...” said one county official.

See? Economics.

Try to compare the health coverage statistics of Africans, in general, with how these pets are getting voluntary health checks and even grooming.

This is not funny at all.

Back to the 22 dead Africans, the Al Jazeera report said: “Angola has been gradually removing fuel subsidies since 2023, when a petrol price hike also triggered deadly protests, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund among others.” I presume that the IMF wasn’t encouraging the deadly protests, but the petrol price hike — as that would be more logical.

Why? Well, as we all know, we are not yet fully in charge of our economies on this continent.

Why? We seem not to understand the importance of being in charge of our economies from the bottom up.

There are economies out there making provisions at a government level for pets. And for us, what are we doing?

Every week, we have stories of migrants from Africa dying while trying to make their way to Europe. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reckons that at least 2,242 deaths of migrants happened in the Mediterranean Sea in 2024. That is not the total number of African migrants who died trying to make it to “better places”, they say.

Taking charge of our economies involves more than the top percentile becoming wealthy and living a life of luxury with their families surrounded by the poor.

Forget the pets in Los Angeles — even here on this continent, we have some pets living a more luxurious life than many Africans. Their owners can afford it, they are so rich, but cannot put that wealth to use for their relatives and neighbours in spite of Ubuntu — I am because you are, your well-being is my well-being, and so on and so forth.

Taking charge of our economies requires us to all be serious about each other, and Africa, so that we create wealth sensibly so it can go round and create a society that treats human beings better than some other societies treat their pets.

www.skaheru.com @skaheru