The other day, I picked up my local newspaper (The News, International Edition, published in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, London, New York), and was treated to a rare sight: an article about a man in India who’d married his four-year-old daughter to a dog. The color photograph showed the girl and the dog, both with garlands of roses around their necks. "We don’t care if he wants to marry his daughter to a dog," said the smirking villagers, "We still get to enjoy a feast."

My first reaction was one of disbelief, then I confess to a sneaking moment where I wondered if the girl was actually better off than if she’d married a human male. Dogs may be overly hairy, messy eaters, and of lower intelligence levels than what you’d want in a life partner, but at least there are no dirty clothes to wash and very little complaining if you don’t cook dinner well enough.

Of course, South Asians being somewhat backwards and uneducated, the man had chosen his daughter’s mate poorly, if you ask me. I took a quick straw poll of people around me to see whether their opinions matched mine. "Look at this man, so stupid, he couldn’t find a nice, rich German shepherd? He had to go for a poor mongrel off the street? Foolish man," said one aunty. Another one said, "Tsk tsk. The dog is much shorter than the girl. It will give him a complex. He’ll end up cheating on her with a dachshund, mark my words."

In the article, the man seemed unrepentant for his mistakes. He claimed he’d consulted an astrologer, who told him that the girl, who suffered from frequent illness and accidents, was under the evil influence of the planet Saturn. The remedy was to marry the girl to a dog. The man thought this made a lot of sense, and I must admit when I realized there was a family tradition of marrying girls to dogs (his great grandmother had done the same thing many years ago), I agreed. After all, family traditions and values are a large part of what makes our South Asian culture so great.

However, one person I talked to said something along the lines of, "What a terrible, inhuman thing to do. Those Indians, they’re all barbarians. You know they like to roast their mothers and kill their daughters." I asked for this person’s thoughts on what they would do if this were their daughter. The answer, they told me, was simple. Take the girl to a shrine in the interior, where a world famous pir could look at the girl, consult his personal jinn, and prescribe a cure to exorcise the evil spirit. "The last person who was exorcised was beaten to within an inch of his life and had to spend six months in the hospital, but at least he had got rid of the evil eye!" I nodded, unable to argue with this logic.

Getting back to the dog issue, though, I wonder if this is a trend that might ever become popular in Pakistan. Will we start to see a marriage of the "Matrimonials" and the "Pets for Sale" columns in the newspaper? "Looking for suitable dog for my daughter. Must be well groomed, well bred, of distinctive pedigree. Must have up-to-date papers and all vaccinations record history. Fair, light-skinned dogs only, no mongrels or half-breeds need apply."

The police, according to the article, made no move to stop the man from going ahead with the religious ceremony. "There’s nothing in the law that says he can’t get his daughter married to a dog if he wants to," stated one officer of the law at the scene. Yes, but can you imagine the legalities? How would the dog sign the marriage certificate? Would the dog simply have to bark three times to signify a divorce? And should the dog come down with rabies and attempt to bite the girl, will she be charged with murder if she kills it, or can she plead self-defense? This is one for the legal pundits to scratch their heads over, as I admit to being deficient in this area.

The downside, though, is the psychological effect this is going to have on the girl. Her thoughtless father has robbed her of any of the delights of being a bride: no mendhi ceremony, no jewelry or clothes from the dog’s side (though he has saved a lot of money in that he only had to give a bunch of bones as a dowry). And just think of the communication problems between her and the in-laws. Her mother-in-law will make the most unreasonable demands on her, too. In six months, you’ll see, it’ll be the girl that’s fetching the dog its slippers and pipe every evening when it comes home from a hard day of scavenging on the street and howling at the mailman.

There is one bright side to this incident. And that is that at least South Asia will go up in the eyes of the world with regard to the treatment of animals. We’ve always been castigated and ostracized for our cruel treatment of animals: our slaughtering methods are cruel, we pump cattle up with illegal steroids and hormones; we display chickens in cages that rob them of their dignity. With this historical wedding ceremony, we have a golden opportunity to reverse all of that, to show the world that we do treat animals as well as we do humans. Perhaps PETA will even give that man an international award. In this part of the world, anything’s possible...