True story.
It’s night. The street-lights do not quite reach this waste-ground that soaks up society's dregs. A dozen dogs live here. Earlier I watched them picking at discarded trash and then settling amongst the clumps of grass and rubble as dusk faded. But now I can no longer see them.
Stepping from the paved road I feel my way over the weedy dirt and loose stones with my feet. There are plenty of things here I wouldn’t want to fall on. The hum of traffic reaches us from two hundred metres away but I keep my eyes away from the orange glow. Dim but still blinding. My torch stays switched off in my pocket so the going is a bit slow. Each tense step has an edge of uncertainty. It almost feels like I have invented an extreme sport.
After twenty slow steps my peripheral vision picks up the movement of a low shadowy figure.
Imagine climbing over a fence into a stranger's garden at night and meeting their dogs. Growling, flashing teeth in a snarling, barking welcome that wakes up the neighborhood. If you are lucky there will be no attack just noise and intimidation. Invade their home and they will go wild to make you leave.
I am now encroaching on the home of a dozen dogs. Call them street dogs, stray dogs or feral dogs, they are ownerless and scrape a living behind a shopping mall on the outskirts of Bangkok. My eyes are just used to the dimness enough to know that I have reached them. I have watched them from a distance during the day but they do not know me by sight, sound or smell. How will they react? Am I reckless fool to want to find out? Well, I am writing this now so I survived.
As I walk I become aware of more movement. Dark dogs raising themselves as I get close, slinking off to the side, and slipping in behind me. Then lying down again. Absolutely soundless. I feel like a quiet boat sliding over a pond and pushing out a gentle wake of dogs. This is even better than I had hoped.
But one heavy sleeper doesn’t notice me coming and I fail to see it curled up in the grass. I am very close to stepping on it before it snaps from its slumber. Jumping up it barks and scampers away turning its head from side to side in panic. The other dogs watch it without reaction. You beauties! Within five meters this dog understands the situation and stops barking, stops running and stops panicking. It becomes another slinking form and slips behind me to continue its rest like the others.
Silently, I say thank you and leave.
How to explain this reaction? Why didn’t they challenge me? Why didn’t that brief bout of barking trigger the others to join in? That’s what dogs do, isn’t it? Why didn’t I get chased from their home and end up with a very different story to tell? I was a stranger in their night. Out of place and yet met with such softness. Dogs do not react like this.
Well, humanised dogs don't. And they are the ones we measure the rest by. But these dogs are not ours any more. They are their own.
Beaten into submission? Forcefully ground into the dirt to know their place as the lowest of the low? Dependant outcasts without the spirit to dare a challenge? No, that's our ego talking, give them credit, please.
With time, perhaps with generation, there is a reversion. What we instilled in them can be shaken away. They can be dogs and we can be people. The point is: that's not how our pets see things.
I do feel a little pride at what I did. To take a fresh look at a subject that we all think we know and then make the effort to give them the chance to reveal themselves. I am also proud of those dogs. They showed me their true nature through the gentlest, most silent howl imaginable. Listen really carefully and you can hear the echo.
These dark photos are of various Thai street dogs I have met over the years but not the ones I wrote about above. The two photographs below are. They were taken earlier that day on that piece of waste-ground, 20 years ago.
