How Thais Treat Dogs
All my neighbours have dogs. Fon has five. Generally, Thais won’t neuter their pets. A government initiative, in collaboration with European veterinary surgeons, has not been as successful as was hoped. UK vets get disillusioned with the slow spaying and castrating speed of local vets. They begin to get bored and lose interest in helping in a voluntary capacity in a cultural climate that does not believe in sterilisation.
Dogs are principally kept to guard property. Usually chained during the day or kept in cages, they are released at night to roam freely in the compound as a deterrent against the kamoey, the petty thieves that one finds in every community. There is no redress on the owner if a dog bites or injures a thief or indeed anyone else on your own property.
If you are attacked on the road it may be difficult to prove who the dogs’ owners are and more difficult still to get any compensation for hospital costs. Dogs running in packs may well be feral and rabid. They scrounge for food from neighbours and the monks at the temples. Ordinary folk may shoo them away but the monks will feed them. You’ll see many dogs at the wats. They are discouraged from going inside temple buildings though they are free to go anywhere else in the temple precincts. Theoretically, Buddhists will not kill or harm any animal. That also explains the reluctance to sterilise.
Although most Thais won’t harm dogs, there is a minority that will kill the animal if it is misbehaving or no longer wanted. I recall hearing gun shots on one occasion and, looking down the soi, saw a man dragging away a dog by its hind legs. Where he took it I do not know and the next morning everyone denied a dog had been killed.
