Not all street dogs (soi dogs) are equal. Some of them have such a pleasant demeanor that the neighborhood that they occupy tends to have lots of residents that look after them. This fella, whose name eludes me (sorry, but it was an odd and difficult to remember Thai name) is well up there in years and according to the neighborhood he makes "the rounds" every day going by to say hello to everyone and he gets plenty of food and water.
This is possible for him fortunately, but a lot of street dogs are not so pleasant and in worse situations are very territorial and dangerous. I don't know what it is about some animals as opposed to others, but this guy just seems to be wandering, tail a waggin' all over the neighborhood.
Then one day someone noticed that he was hobbling and not using one of his front legs to walk at all.
Despite this obvious problem, he would still approach anyone as quickly as he could and I have got to admire the resiliency of animals because he wasn't just lying down in a corner complaining like I am sure most humans would - he went about his day the best he could. We were alerted about this problem and went and picked him up and even though he had never met us before, we were able to approach him as if we had known him his entire life.
We still muzzled him when we picked him up though because even the most pleasant dogs can turn on you if they think you are hurting them. We didn't know the severity of his injury until we got him to the vet for some x-rays.
Turns out that his leg was broken in 3 different places. We have no idea how this happened but normally, this is because he was hit by a car or perhaps even driven over one that he was sleeping under. Either way, it is almost certain, given the lack of any other sort of noticeable injury, that there was a vehicle involved.
Thankfully, surgery was not needed as the vets were able to set the bone and put him in a little doggie cast... which is just adorable.
He didn't seem to mind so much, but after having the cast put on he wouldn't walk around for a bit and that is understandable. However, after just a day or so he was so curious about his surroundings (our facilities) that he hobbled around the same as before but at least now if his foot did make contact with the ground, it wasn't going to result in massive amounts of pain.
We have been taking him for walks and he is still in our care. The neighbors have informed us that they will definitely look after him an extra amount and some of them have even offered to let them stay inside the gate of their yard while he recovers. We offered to provide the food during this transitional period. It takes a lot less time for a dog's bone to heal than a human's (or so I have been told by the vet) so this should only take a month or so before this old fella can be back to his roaming ways saying hello to all the neighbors on his daily strolls.
If only all street dogs were so fortunate, right?
But then again, this brings about the overlying problem as far as stray animals are concerned in Thailand. The reason why not all of them are looked after like this is not because of a lack of compassion on the part of the Thai people (if anything they are more compassionate towards stray animals than people in the West) but because there are simply too many of them for this to happen. In the community that this guy is in, there are almost no other stray dogs at all and this is why he is looked after so well.
This is why sterilization is our first and foremost priority. We realize that we will not be able to completely eradicate the issue with dogs replicating as fast as they possibly can, but we simply want to get it under control as much as possible. Once we have achieved that, the idea is that all the remaining dogs will end up like this guy.... Still homeless, but looked after. That is our ultimate objective and we realize that it is going to take us many years to get there..... but we love what we do so we are definitely up for the task.
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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