Greetings from the Land of Smiles

The puppies are up for Adoption

This puppy named Grey is probably my favorite of the bunch. He’s the runt of the litter and an easy going guy

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was flying into a personal situation that was a mess in Thailand. Now that I’m here I’ll try to expand on it a bit.

Somebody cut the electric to our bungalow in Phuket and five other neighbors still living on this back block around February 4. Because I was in America at the time a lot of people speculated that maybe my jackass husband forgot to pay the power bill while I was gone. I would have been thrilled if that was the situation as our electric bill per month is only around 800 baht or about $20. It would have meant that I paid the power guy $60 or $70 in arears and everything went back to normal.

I can confirm now that is not the case. The land we stay on is under a por dor or por bor arrangement. This means that there might be competing claims on it, which could come from everything from the Thai militayr, the Thai government, or private developers. I happen to know that the most common way they try to force poor Thais off of land is by cutting electricity. There can be competing claims of squatters rights which my husband Ka was definitely angling for. Unfortunately we haven’t been here quite long enough for it.

I think if you are farang you should probably only be dealing in Chanote titles, which are usually marked with the Thai seal at the top filled in red ink. Although some backcountry types probably still live with their Thai girlfriend on some unmarked plot, the government has taken the attitude towards foreigners that if you want to be poor, do so in your home country. There’s always news stories about some farang living in some backwater area who was arrested and deported for overstaying his visa for five years.

The various lower titles on land claims are filled in with green ink on the seal or not filled in at all. We do have one chanote title on land, but it is not in Phuket, where land prices are sky high for Thailand. Kuhn Chef was just telling me this morning that friend of his sold a pretty small lot also in the Thai area of Thalang for one million baht, which is about $30,000 USD. Every valid land claim I’ve heard about in Phuket is well out of my price range.

Our chanote title is in Nakhom Phanom in Isaan, but it is only a rice paddy right now. I was thinking of building on that but Ka says he doesn’t feel any attachment to it. His family moved to Phuket when my husband was 7, though we have a lot of extended Sukwan family in that area. I’m still not sure what Ka’s brother is going to do either.

This would be a great time for my husband to get that visa to America after three years, am I right?

That leaves us with a lot of dogs and a lot of thinking to do. Thankfully I was planning on adopting the puppies out anyways. The three of them are six weeks old and at the height of cuteness. They are available for adoption now.

They are actually Shadow’s puppies, not Daisy’s. The mother and daughter dog look so much alike now that I could not tell on video chat before I got here.

I know I have some Thai expats who read my newsletter, but I’m not aware of any that have commented or subscribed that are in Phuket. But if you are in Thailand and want to make the trip to adopt a puppy, that would be great. Or perhaps you can share this with people who are in Phuket.

If you live in say Europe and want to pay the expenses to import one of these little guys, that would be great too. When I used to volunteer at Koh Samui’s dog rescue that happened sometimes. Unfortunately this does not apply to anyone living in America. The US CDC has extended it’s ban on bringing in dogs from Thailand and many other countries through July 31, 2023, supposedly to prevent rabies. This is despite the fact that said dogs have to be vaccinated against rabies before coming to America to begin with. Perhaps it really is turtles ALL the way down.

This little girl was named Mountain by Ka, a strange name which I like a lot. Something my husband had no way of knowing is that when my parents first moved to Las Vegas, they lived in a trailer park called Shadow Mountain. Since this is Shadow’s puppy, it just made sense to me. I have no idea why he pushed Sprout into the picture.

Something that might interest people who read this humble substack is that these puppies are at least fourth generation unvaccinated. It probably extends much further back than that as the longstanding practice by animal rescue charities dealing with soi (street) dogs, is to give them a rabies vaccine and surgically sterilize them. The fact that they had puppies at all is almost a testament that the entire line is remarkably unjabbed.

This is great grandmother dog Jungo, whose life I probably did save. I was going to smile in this picture but then she started licking my face and I did not want to be French kissed by a dog! She’s still alive and well and I’m glad

I consider that significant in this day and age. The vaccine schedule for pets has been just as steadily expanding as it has for human counterparts. Meanwhile most dogs and cats are pre emptively neutered and spayed on the basis of some flawed computer models which show that hypothetically they need to be sterilized so there's not this massive pet overpopulation problem. Every animal charity subscribes to this. Dog breeders proudly advertise that their pets are fully vaccinated and with all relevant papers. You wouldn't want to be an irresponsible pet owner, now would you?

Somewhere out there, with declining fertility rates across the board, you'd think that some institute of health somewhere would want to fund some animal testing. Are jabbed cats and dogs, or microchipped ones for that matter, really living longer than their unvaccinated counterparts,when controlling for obvious things like poverty? Is a single breeding pair of cats really going to produce 400,000 in 7 years like the models said? Could a constant assault of electromagnetic smog from 5g, pesticides and chemicals be to blame? Or is it other things?

Maybe we should try to control for just one variable of the ever expanding vaccine schedule and see what we have. But what am I thinking? That money is much better spent seeing how long it takes sand flies to eat through beagles brains.

For the love of dog…