Cats and Dogs (Chooks and Pigs)

Cats and Dogs (Chooks and Pigs)

Dogs are everywhere on Funafuti.  It was always a bit of a worry cycling around, that a dog might try to take a bite out of your leg.  Mostly they were OK, just barking a lot, but sometimes they would run after you.  Shane’s solution is to turn your wheel towards them, rather than cycle away from them – probably works OK for him.  Of course the other worry was that you would crash into a scurrying dog.   It is not clear that anyone actually feeds the dogs, but they tend to hang around houses where there is a higher probability of finding scraps.  There are also cats on Funafuti, but the dogs dominate the place.  There was a mother cat with a batch of kittens on the roof next door to our house in Funafuti – she was a bit of a careless mother and would drop a kitten down on the ground occasionally – Hadley is the softie who would come to the rescue and throw the kitten back up on the roof.

There are no dogs on Nanumea – the story is that they were eliminated at some stage.  So the cats dominate.  Again, it is not clear that anyone feeds them, and I assume they are tolerated because they control the rats and mice.  But they will also have an impact on the native fauna.  So scraps are also important to the cats.  We had been keeping our scraps in a bucket in the house, with the aim of getting them to our landlady’s pigs – but, of course, the cats find them first.  With louvered windows and flaps everywhere, there are many accesses to the house for cats, and so they invade the house after we have all gone to bed (and sometimes even before).  Shane has used some of his spare thinking power trying to devise ways of scaring the cats sufficiently to discourage any return visits – there has also been discussion about trying to set traps to catch them.  Heather’s solution is to put the bucket of pig feed in the freezer for the night – this seems to work well.

Pigs are a major source of food on both Funafuti and Nanumea.  On Funafuti there is a main piggery area on the far side of the runway, beside the one natural lagoon on the island (the rest are borrow pits):

The unfortunate result is that this lagoon is totally contaminated by the runoff from these pig pens – doubly unfortunate, because the pig manure, combined with mulched greenery, can be made into excellent compost (as demonstrated by the Taiwanese nursery):

On Nanumea the pigs are mostly over the far side of the island, where there is little habitation.  The pigs are in nicer surrounds here, either living in pens out in the jungle:

Or roaming free in the jungle:

It is unclear if all these pigs are “owned”, or of some are wild, and need to be trapped in order to get on the dinner plate.

There are chickens everywhere on both Funafuti and Nanumea, roaming wild - here is one at our back door:

They are a source of puzzlement to us all.  In general there seems to be little attempt to keep them in pens and feed them up for the dinner table – although there is one chook pen on Nanumea, just between the solar panel array area and the lagoon:

Chickens are a major food item, but for us they need to be sourced from Fiji, and shipped to Tuvalu in refrigerated containers.  Of course, containers can not be delivered to the outer islands, so the frozen chicken has to be manhandled to shore – it is difficult to ascertain how many times the chicken gets melted on the dock, and re-frozen.  So why are there no enterprising Tuvaluans with battery hens being fattened up for the local market?  Maybe it has something to do with the artificial economy of the islands.  As far as I can see, the supply ships are funded by the Tuvalu government, and all food travels free, on both the supply ship from Fiji, and the ferries to the islands.  Would an enterprising chicken farmer on Tuvalu be charged to ship chicken feed to his chickens, rendering him uncompetitive to the imported product?  Or maybe the concept of subsistence farming is too ingrained into the culture – each family just living off their own chooks, with no concept of commercialising chicken production?  This is most likely the situation on the outer islands, where there are very few outsiders like us, and therefore no real market for chooks – but on Funafuti the chickens are indeed imported from Fiji, so there is obviously a market for them there.

We are similarly baffled by the lack of local egg production.  Well actually, there must be local egg production, with all these hens and cocks running around – its just that no one is harvesting them and selling them on the local market.  Once again, all eggs for human consumption appear to be imported from Fiji.  I assume many of the local eggs are eaten by rats, which in turn feed the cats, etc.  In order to harvest the eggs, the hens would have to be kept in rat-proof pens, and fed – so the same questions arise as above.  Although some eggs must survive long enough to hatch, because there are plenty baby chicks running around, following mum:

I guess the hens and cocks must get killed for food at some stage, despite their scrawny appearance – else why would the locals put up with the cocks crowing at an hour that even beats the local church bell at 5:00am.

Anyway, here is another way of having fun at the end of a hard day's work: