Casual, everyday gang rape

It’s late morning on a Thursday in mid-December in a sleepy middle-aged suburb on the edges of Metro Manila, Philippines.

A hundred birds chirp cheerfully at the overcast sky. It’s not too hot to be out and about. A typhoon is brewing off the coast of Leyte, first stop on the tour along the Philippine typhoon belt.

A heavy, humid breeze sways the trees lining potholed streets of two-, three-storey houses with oversized garages and mini-gardens. Not different to how the rest of the middle-upper classes live in urban Global South.

A high-pitched yelp punches the calm.

It’s a white-coated short-haired female dog, sporting a pink collar. She’s been in heat for a couple days, somehow wandering the streets in the suburb, unclaimed, unshielded by her humans.

She yelps in pain as she is roughly penetrated by a larger brown male dog who lives at one of the houses up the street.

He too wears a collar. He too has been wandering the streets for a couple days, hounding her constantly, alongside two other stray males who are smaller than he. Trapped between the three of them, she can’t take a single step in any direction without being cut off on one end and exposed on the other.

She’s tired, sore, bleeding.