The nights were eerily quiet in Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I couldn’t understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country has no dogs? I started to keep watch in the markets, in the streets, in the countryside, in churchyards, schoolyards, farmyards, graveyards, junkyards, and the flowering yards of fine villas. Once, far out in the hills, I thought I spotted a boy leading a dog on a tether down a dirt lane. But it was a goat at the end of the rope. Village life without dogs? Children without dogs? Poverty without dogs? There were plenty of cats–the first pets to disappear in a famine, but famine was not Rwanda’s problem–and I began to wonder whether, in Rwanda, cats had won their eternal war with dog-kind.

During my first three months in the country, between May and August of 1995, I kept a list of the dogs I saw: A Belgian lady at the Hôtel des Milles Collines had a pair of toy poodles that trotted beside her on her morning strolls through the garden around the swimming pool; the French landlady of a Dutch aid worker I knew had a fat golden retriever; a team of American and Belgian sappers had some German shepherds who assisted them in land-mine removal… Studying this list, you might conclude that dog ownership corresponded to skin color: white people had dogs and Africans did not. But Africans are generally as fond of dogs as the rest of humanity, so the impressive doglessness of Rwanda perplexed me. 

I made inquiries, and I learned that right through the genocide dogs had been plentiful in Rwanda. The words people used to describe the dog population back then were “many” and “normal.” But as the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] fighters had advanced through the country, moving down from the northeast, they had shot all the dogs. 

What did the RPF have against dogs? Everyone I asked gave the same answer: the dogs were eating the dead. “It’s on film,” someone told me, and I have since seen more Rwandan dogs on video monitors than I ever saw in Rwanda–crouched in the distinctive red dirt of the country, over the distinctive body piles of that time, in the distinctive feeding position of their kind. 

I was told about an Englishwoman from a medical relief organization who got very upset when she saw RPF men shooting the dogs that were feeding off a hallful of corpses at the great cathedral center and bishopric of Kabgayi, which had served as a death camp in central Rwanda. “You can’t shoot dogs,” the Englishwoman told the soldier. She was wrong. Even the blue-helmeted soldiers UNAMIR were shooting dogs on sight in the late summer of 1994. After months, during which Rwandans had been left to wonder whether the UN troops knew how to shoot, because they never used their excellent weapons to stop the extermination of civilians, it turned out that the peacekeepers were very good shots. 

The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.