Domestic Animals

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A cousin to the wild boar, Bali’s famous pigs are weighted to collapse with their loads of pork, their backbones sagging as if broken and their enormously heavy pink bellies dragging through the dust. Pigs are the property of the woman of the house and any money she earns from them belongs to her. A great Balinese delicacy not to be missed is suckling pig (’be guling’ in Balinese, ‘babi guling’ in Indonesian) roasted on a spit.

The ducks of Bali, kept as family pets, rank among the island’s most prominent citizens. Squads of them are taken from the family ‘kampung’ by the herders each day to feed in the rice fields, marching in formation under flags on long poles from which they never stray. In the irrigation channels between the rows of plants these comics act like up-tailed, web-footed vacuum cleaners, loosening old roots, nosing through the mud grubbing for worms, snails, frogs, insect pests, and leftover grains of rice.

At day’s end, the chattering flock gathers around the duck herder’s pole to be taken home again. Ducks are much better behaved and more complacent than bothersome chickens, well-suited for the communal living of the Balinese domestic compounds. Duck meat, as in the strongly spiced dish ‘bebek betutu’, makes for some of the finest eating on the island.

The Balinese goose-swan, the nearest thing on the island to a true swan, is the sacred mount of Dewi Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the arts. They make excellent watch geese. Fighting cocks can be seen preening in bamboo cages on the sides of Bali’s roads. Compared to their Western cousins, these birds are wild and supernatural, able to fly up to and perch on rooftops.

The flesh of pugilist rooster tastes and has the texture of lizard hide. Loops of sound seem to follow flocks of pigeons circling the sky; each is hung with small bells on its feet and bamboo whistles on its tail feathers. Turtle doves and other pet birds are hoisted in their cages high on bamboo poles to enjoy the view and provide fluting and cooing music for the villagers below.

Cattle, hung with sweet melodic wooden bells, leap from banks with the lithe grace of an antelope. These amiable, beautiful creatures with long eyelashes, delicate features, dew eyes, manicured velvet coats, slender necks, trim bodies, slim legs, and short tails look more like fawns than cattle. Like most cows in the tropics, they give no milk. Unlike the Hindus of India the Balinese don’t consider cattle as sacred; they are bred for their meat and exported to other islands. Nevertheless, cows live a privileged life on Bali, lovingly bathed in village streams, billeted in cozy hay-strewn mangers, let loose on village lawns to feed.

The largest cattle markets in Bali are in Beringkit, 20 kilometers south of Mengwi, and in Bebandem (Karangasem), and a scene out of medieval Bali.

Domesticated water buffalo (kerbau) with thick curving horns are used for plowing the rice fields. A special event in Jembrana Regency is the Makepung buffalo races in which two ‘kerbau’ pull a jockey in a wheeled carriage. The animals are specially bred and trained, a process that has produced a healthier strain of cattle more resistant to the diseases prevalent in other Balinese cattle.

The same district has developed Magembeng, in which cows carry big wooden musical bells (gembeng) around their necks. As they walk, their slow and graceful swaying causes the instruments to sound and form haunting music. The cows take part in competitions in which posture, beauty in the head and tail, and the precision and softness of their music is fastidiously evaluated.

Balinese cats are scrawny, unbelievably loud and raucous creatures with truncated tails and unpleasant dispositions. Scavengers like dogs, they are omnivorous and eat among other things ants and mangoes. Bali’s miserable ‘anjing’ (dogs) abound-mangy, flea-bitten bags of skin, bones, and open sores.

There are an estimated 600,000 on the island. The mongrelized Balinese dog has a short pointed muzzle, a piggy tail, weighs about 30 pounds, births one litter per year, and is an expert at survival. Colin McPhee, in his A House in Bali, wrote of Bali’s infamous dogs, “gray, starved and tottering, on walls, in doorways, the dogs infested the villages. They were so anemic they could hardly drag themselves off the road. We drove along, knocking them to one side with a thud.”

Little has changed since those words were written in 1945. In the West dogs bark too, but somehow their barking isn’t as stubborn or as irritating as that of the dogs of Bali. Most dogs are ill-kept pets; the tens of thousands of strays who roam the island are not destroyed because of the Hindu/Buddhist taboo against killing living things.

The traditional island belief is that dogs contain the souls of reincarnated thieves. They do serve a useful purpose by scaring away both corporeal intruders and the evil spirits which haunt the Balinese. They provide a free morning wakeup call. They clean up the trash, and seldom actually bite anyone. Though few are rabid, none are wo/man’s best friend. Look upon them as rats, or pigeons with teeth, and you’ll have no problem with them.

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