Life with Luci: Meeting Chile's Street Dogs

Hi, welcome to my blog! My name is Brooke. I’m a small-town girl who adopted a sweet and spunky little pooch named Lucia (Luci for short, pronounced “Lucy”) from Chile while on vacation with my family. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing with you my time traveling to Chile, how I met Luci, our adventures together, and if you’re interested, ways you can help with the stray dog problem.

You may be wondering, “what stray dog problem”? If you’re a dog lover like me, you might think that too many dogs could never be a problem. Let me start off by sharing my experience and then I can elaborate on the rest in the weeks to come. Forewarning: this blog won’t be all dandelions and roses in the beginning. There were some real eye-opening events that occurred that hurt my little heart as an animal lover, but I promise that following along to my story will be worth it.

My Trip to Chile

My mom was born in Chile, and it had always been her dream for all of us to travel there together to explore her native land, as well as to meet family for the first time. The experience was enlightening, to say the least. The country is absolutely beautiful, and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to meet aunts and uncles and cousins who I had never met before. One thing that my family hadn’t warned me about, however, was just how many street dogs there were in Chile.

Our first stop was in Santiago, the capital city of Chile. Two of our cousins took us out for a night on the town, so we headed down the main strip to check out a few spots. I was shocked, there were so many dogs! Every corner, every way you turned, there were dogs. That would be amazing! You might think so at first, but then realization hits and you think about how many of these dogs might be mistreated, don’t have a home to live in, or aren’t regularly fed as all good pups should be. Don’t worry, there’s good news: I can happily report that most of the dogs seemed to be in pretty good health. I was told not to pay too much attention to any of the dogs though, or else they would be following us around for the rest of the night. This was incredibly hard, I just wanted to give all of them a hug! They were pretty smart cookies, too. They would pay attention to traffic lights and knew when it was safe to cross the street, and seemed to know their way around the city. They would often be interacting with other people and getting some love while the locals were heading to their next destination. They were friendly, not overbearing, a little dirty, but they just wanted your snacks and some back scratches like all good dogs do.

I had reached out to my mom earlier today asking if she had any photos from our trip of how many street dogs roamed around (I lost all my photos unfortunately), but she didn’t. She did remind me of this video though, which was created by a couple of college students in Chile who tied balloons to street dogs with inspiring messages like “scratch my neck”, “give me love”, and more. The video gives you a glimpse of what life is like for the street dogs of Santiago (spoiler: watching makes me cry every time!).

In Chile, they refer to their street dogs as “community dogs”, which are defined as dogs without an owner, but are provided basic care by a group of people. I can confidently say that this was the case during the majority of my trip in Chile. Although the dogs are taken care of for the most part, it is still a big problem in Chile. There are an estimated 2.5 million stray dogs in Chile. There has recently been an approved budget to fund a project to relocate and sterilize over 100,000 stray dogs to help minimize the problem, which is promising, but will take time to take effect.

In my next blog post, I’m going to share our experience at the Cascada de Las Animas resort in the beautiful Maipo Valley, which is where I met Luci.