In Thailand there are stray dogs just about everywhere but in some places the government turns a blind eye to it, which is disappointing. What is worse though is when they don't turn a blind eye because while there is no official policy about this, the government's method of dealing with a stray dog population is nearly completely lacking in humanity because if the dogs become problematic, there is no effort to house them or relocate them. The officials simply come under cover of darkness and the next day the dogs are all gone. I have no physical proof of this but there is no denying that multiple times since I have lived here that one day there are a half dozen dogs all in the same area of a beach and the next day they are all gone. There are rumors that the officials use tranquilizer guns or even blow darts and then the dogs are disposed of where no one can see this. Why all the mystery? Well because Thailand is a Buddhist country and the killing of animals in this way is seen as a massive violation of the tenets of Buddhism.
This country makes a ton of money off of tourism though so if the dogs on the beach start to be a nuisance, the killing of said dogs is the eventuality. Our organization has been promised that the beach dogs here will not be dealt with in this way but this has proven to be an idle promise as since those days there have been multiple disappearances. Therefore, we have teamed up with local businesses for them to make us aware of dogs, especially problematic ones and we will at least have a chance to save them before they are culled.
We received a report from local beachfront restaurants about a young female dog that is in pretty rough shape and while the restaurants do give the dog food, it needs more than that. You can tell even from the above photo that this lady is in bad shape but when we were able to get closer, which wasn't easy, it turns out that things were much worse than we thought.
While not aggressive, she was very apprehensive about us approaching her so unfortunately we had to capture her using nets. We do everything we can to insure that she is not harmed but as you might expect, dogs do not like being captured in nets. We tried all the usual methods of attempting to lure her in with food but it wasn't working. So we were forced to go to plan-B
Once she was in the net she almost immediately stopped the struggle and just went kind of limp. When we transferred her to the cage she had completely given up the struggle. It was kind of nice that at this point she was not trying to bite any of us and we found that she bonded with us rather rapidly. This poor little thing has been through a rough life for sure and along with the usual parasites and mange, she also had some wounds that appear as though she was attacked either by other dogs or by humans that were trying to get her away from their business.
You can see that I am touching her paw there at the bottom but I want to remind everyone that I do this for a living. I do NOT recommend that anyone approach or try to pet dogs that you do not know, especially if they are strays. Sure they might seem like your childhood pup friend but almost all dogs are capable of causing you great harm especially if they are frightened. After years of doing this I am a pretty good judge of whether a dog is calm or not and this one, thankfully, was calm.
When we transported her in the crate to our medical facilities she still remained calm but didn't want to leave the cage. I think this poor little number has kind of given up on life. We are going to treat all of her wounds, get her some decent food, and treat her for parasites as well as sterilize her. Given her friendly nature we are going to see if there is somewhere else that we can keep her because we can't simply return her to the beach area where she will just end up in the same state as she is in now.
Hopefully once she has recovered and the hair that is missing grows back we can get her a home with someone. She has a wonderful temperament and has clearly been around people a lot in her life. I think that she was probably treated quite well by the tourists and business owners but all it takes is a couple of people to complain about a dog on a beach area for things to change very quickly for the animal. Now our focus is shifted to seeing if there are other dogs here because while young, she is no pup. There is a good chance that there are other dogs around this area as well and hopefully we can find them before the government operatives do.
This is the tragic nature of this country and a large part of the reason why our organization exists at all.
if you would like to see how you can help out or simply spread the word, please visit our website at
http://krabianimalwelfare.org
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