When a father kills, eats the family dog Manny Pacquiao
Manny Pacquiao

Manny Pacquiao

Ignatius Mabasa Shelling the Nuts
It is often the case that the tall, by virtue of their height advantage, will eat that which is meant for the short ones. And they don’t expect the short ones to raise their voices!

The Shona people don’t eat dogs, but there is one common idiomatic expression they use which makes reference to eating a dog in a positive way.

It says, “If you decide to eat a dog, you must eat a male one!”

This expression means if you decide to do something with drastic consequences, then you must do it without apology or limits.

But there is a type of “eating dog or dog eating” that disturbed my peace and quiet.

I was repulsed to hear that boxing champion Manny Pacquiao’s father killed and ate his dog when he was a teenager!

The story says, “One night his father came home drunk. The two argued, and Pacquiao’s enraged father allegedly killed his dog. Even worse, Pacquiao then watched, powerless, as his father ate his pet.”

Whether you think it was because he was drunk, that kind of violence is typical of the violence most male adults perpetrate against women and children. Manny was young to defend his puppy or even himself against his drunk father.

To me, although the father killed the boy’s dog, the attack was not on the dog, but on the boy and the family. And as a result, the boy left home.

“He killed my dog,” Pacquiao wrote in his autobiography. “He took the puppy I found and killed it.”

“To a young boy, that was unforgivable — it was stealing something I loved, which is far more terrible than stealing money.”

Here in Zimbabwe, I have read of several cases where drunk fathers either killed, raped or did other unimaginable things.

Suddenly, these weak men feel that they must demonstrate their macho power to vulnerable women, children and objects.

The truth of the matter is that most men are like Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo in the novel “Things Fall Apart”.

The reason why Okonkwo was cruel and ruled his household with a heavy hand such that his wives and children lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper is because as Achebe asserts, “Perhaps deep down in his heart, Okonkwo was not a cruel man, but his life was ruled by a fear of failure and weakness.”

The act by Pacquiao’s father of killing and eating the puppy is just a means to an end.

It is a way of pretending to be on top of the situation, of saying I am the man!

There are a lot of young boys and girls out there who are victims like Manny Pacquiao.

One such boy found his father in bed with the maid. The poor young boy was shocked, saddened and pained beyond words. That was one of the greatest betrayals he had experienced at the age of 11. When the father realised that he had been caught on the wrong side of morality, he tried to cover up his misdemeanour by bribing the boy with some cash.

That act alone of bribing your own child not to speak evil can be the beginning of his or her own demise and the demise of a healthy parent-child relationship. Naturally, a father is supposed to guide a child, to be his teacher and mentor. Children look up to their parents as the best role models.

And if a father “kills and eats his relationship with his child” and then uses money to avoid explaining himself to the child, he is turning that child into a criminal and prostitute.

The child will grow up with a lot of dark, dangerous secrets and terrible emotional scars.

He will not be able to respect the father and the father will forever be unable to stamp his authority and control the child.

The child will grow up thinking that paying your way out of situations is acceptable and right.

Yet, the worst crime that fathers commit when they come home drunk is to argue, fight and say unprintable words to the mother and the children.

I have seen men beating up their wives and children so bad that one can tell it is nothing to do with discipline.

In any case, I am one person who does not believe a man should discipline his wife by beating her, because the act of beating her alone is a big act of indiscipline on his part.

It is unfortunate that there are men who believe that when they are drunk, that is when they become very wise and capable of teaching about any subject under the sun.

They will do sickening stuff like the drunk Mutare man who bit off flesh from a child and later blamed his behaviour on evil spirits.

Adults tend to think that the evil things that they do to children will be forgotten and pushed out as the children grow. But there are terrible things that happened to people when they were young that tend to resurface years later to haunt them.

Children have minds that keep and remember details of things that adults may think are insignificant. Childhood experiences — especially bad ones — tend to deeply etch the wall of the mind and heart.

Usually bad things that were said and done to children refuse to shut their mouths.

They will whisper to the victim when the incident is long forgotten by many, and that is a sign that such a person needs to confront that problem. Writing about trauma in Spirit Unbroken: Abby’s Story, Jeanne McElvaney says, “Dissociated trauma memories don’t reveal themselves like ordinary memories. Like pieces of a puzzle, they escape the primitive part of our brain where the trauma has been stored without words. These starkly vivid and detailed images are defined by our five senses and emotions, but there is no ‘story.’ So we are left trying to comprehend the incomprehensible while trying to describe what doesn’t make sense. Healing is about collecting as many pieces as possible. It’s finding words for what we are seeing and feeling – even when it sounds crazy. It’s daring to speak our truth until it makes sense.”

Even when I was growing up, I had people who “killed and ate my dogs” on many occasions.

I experienced a lot of things and being a child, I did not understand all of them.

Even up to today, I am still puzzled by some events and I have a lot of pieces of the puzzle that are missing. When my parents divorced, I was very young but I could tell that something was terribly wrong. When they separated, I felt like a wound that gaps and bleeds looking for the skin that once covered it. I became like a book with missing pages whose story doesn’t flow and make sense. Even though I was young, adults denied me the opportunity to ask questions so that I could understand the happenings.

After my mother had gone back to her people, I developed serious sleeping problems like Shakespeare’s Macbeth who lost the ability to rest after he had committed murder. Actually, it was more than just sleeping problems. Whenever I closed my eyes to sleep, my spirit would start running and flying searching for my mother. At the same time, I also imagined masked beings trying to catch me with long and thin hands like the talons of a bird. Although I was just five years old, I still recall some of the incidents that happened when my father sent my mother away, when he killed and ate my dog like Pacquiao’s father.

Writing in her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman says, “Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. They approach the task of early adulthood — establishing independence and intimacy — burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. They are still a prisoner of their childhood; attempting to create a new life, they re-encounter the trauma.”

If we kill and eat our children’s dogs, we have eaten a family member!

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