Our poor and their dogs
At around eight in the morning, along Bayan-Bayanan Avenue in Marikina, the city is already awake. Jeepneys cough. Motorcycles thread the traffic. Vendors rinse plastic basins with recycled water. And almost every day, if you look carefully, you will see an old woman pushing a cart piled high with cardboard, dented pails, twisted iron rods, and plastic bottles tied with fraying rope. Around the cart move seven dogs of different sizes and ages—one limping slightly, another alert and upright, a small one weaving between wheels. They are tied loosely to the cart, but they move like a unit.
Elsewhere, under the harsh shadow of Aurora Boulevard, I once saw an emaciated old dog with claws so long they curved awkwardly toward the pavement. She moved slowly, like an animal that had known confinement. A few meters away, a street dweller lay on flattened cardboard, one arm draped over a brown mongrel. The dog’s body pressed into the human chest, their breathing almost synchronized.
During a fire in Pasig in 2025, residents evacuated to the Barangay Manggahan multipurpose center. Some refused to move in unless there was space for their pets. The barangay opened the ground floor. Dogs were put in cages, tied to chair legs, fed from improvised bowls, watched over by women and children who had lost everything else that night.
These scenes are anecdotal. They are scattered across cities and barangays. But taken together, they reveal something systematic: in conditions of social marginalization, animals become emotional anchors.
For the poorest of the poor, dogs are not accessories. They are protection. A bark in the night can mean the difference between sleep and danger. They are companionship in a society that often renders the informal worker invisible. They are emotional regulation in environments saturated with stress. When you have little control over wages, landlords, or disasters, the warm weight of a dog’s body beside you is a form of stability.
This is what we might call poverty-linked compassion. It is not sentimental excess. It is reciprocal survival. The recycler in Marikina does not have a veterinary budget. She may not have vaccination cards in plastic sleeves. But every morning, she ties her dogs carefully before pushing her cart. She stops when one lags. She scolds gently. She shares scraps. In return, they walk beside her through heat and rain. There is no monetized exchange. No Instagram caption. Just shared endurance.
Sociologically, this points to alternative kinship structures. When formal institutions—employment, housing, insurance—are fragile or absent, people build networks of attachment elsewhere. Dogs become part of the household even when the “household” is a sidewalk or a makeshift dwelling. The bond is not mediated by wealth; it is mediated by proximity and mutual need.
This complicates the easy narrative that poverty equals neglect. Yes, there are cases of cruelty and abandonment across all classes. But it is also true that some of the most consistent feeders of semi-owned dogs are those who have the least. Informal settlers will leave out rice mixed with fish bones at dusk. Street vendors will pour water into cracked basins. A watchman will allow a stray to sleep near the gate because “pareho kaming nagbabantay” (we guard together).
The paradox of our cities is this: compassion often rises from the margins, while structure lags at the center. Middle-class neighborhoods may have pedigree breeds behind gates, complete with grooming schedules and birthday cakes. Yet it is in the alleyways and underpasses where one sees the raw form of attachment—less polished, less documented, but deeply felt.
None of this means we should leave semi-owned street animals in limbo. Affection without vaccination still leaves a dog vulnerable to rabies. Loyalty without sterilization still produces litters that no one can sustain. Poverty-linked compassion must be recognized as a bottom-line resource.
Building on it, barangays can identify informal caregivers, provide free vaccination days, offer low-cost spay and neuter services, and include pets in evacuation protocols. Business establishments in transport terminals can coordinate with local veterinarians to tag and monitor community dogs, instead of ignoring them. Citizens can move from random feeding to organized stewardship.
In the end, how we treat semi-owned animals is not just about dogs. It is about how we organize care in our society. The poorest have demonstrated that shared vulnerability can produce shared protection. What remains is to give that protection a structure worthy of their example.
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