There was an outrageous story printed on the internet yesterday about an 18-month old boy in India, who was married to the village bitch in order to avert a superstitious belief.  Can this possibly be a true story?  It surpasses my belief, so I think it must be a hoax.  Unless someone out there knows the full details and can convince me otherwise, I cannot imagine that someone thinks they can pull my leg with this one.

The story goes that the parents found a tooth growing on the upper gum and consulted the village witch doctor.  He was not happy with that and prophesied that this was a sign that the child would be killed by a tiger attack.  The only way to avoid this disaster was for him to marry a dog.  So, a full wedding ceremony with all the village rituals was performed between the boy and the village bitch.  It was stated that this will not affect his marriage to a human later in life.  I gathered from the story that the events took place amongst some primitive and remote tribe, where superstition is still very strong.  Well, if true, at least that would explain the ridiculousness of the entire incident.

But I still refuse to believe it was true.  First of all, a tooth growing in the upper gum at 18-months?  C’mon.  There is nothing extraordinary about that, and if they thought it was, then they must be completely crazy.  If it was present at birth (a rare, but known, occurrence) I might be led to believe that they could be superstitious about that.  And, how does marrying a dog avert a death threat?  Where would they come up with that?  Joke’s over.

OK.  I checked out the internet and there are multiple versions of this story.  Most have similar information, so they must have somehow used each other as sources.  But I did find at least one discrepancy.  Not all the articles named the boy and his family, but several did.  And there were at least two different names for the family, but the story was identical.  What gives?  One went on to say that the village had previously married two girls to animals, one a dog and one a snake.  And, the father of this boy had considered marrying him to a goat, but feared the goat’s owner might one day sell it to a butcher, leaving the boy a widower. (Sounds silly to me.)  Another made it more believable by saying that they were just trying to appease the tribal deities – sounds like they don’t actually believe but were being cautious.