Thanksgiving Thoughts

Of Dogs and Men

I don’t have a tagline or identifying feature, really. It would probably help if I could shout out to the void or give blessings to all of the warriors or something. It would be great if I had my own or even an affiliated merchant line. The cult of personality goes a long way and I don’t really have one.

I’m just a gal in Thailand with a crazy life. My laptop stopped working two days ago and I last posted about one of our dogs getting poisoned. I discovered that the substack app from a smartphone does not post, well, posts. At least it does not do that for me, from my smartphone. There is a way to post on notes and chats, but this really bothered me because I used to be able to post actual posts on my smartphone before the substack app became the only way to access the system! So what is the use of it? If I try to use the non app system it always needs me to download the app and…the app doesn’t work for most things I need it to do. Is anybody else having this problem?

That said I am thankful for many things. For one thing both Daisy and Shadow the dogs are still alive. Thus far so is Feisty the cat, though I am worried about her. We were all able to walk 10 miles two days ago to Nai Yang beach. I had chosen this location and the winding long route for several reasons. The first was that although we have been offered very kind assistance in the past from some people regarding the “I don’t want to get my dogs poisoned” situation, i.e. from Wat Muang Mai, anywhere which was close enough for the dogs to find their way back to our bungalow from they would do so and had. In short I needed somewhere far enough away from home that they could not easily track back, preferably down an unfamiliar, never travelled road, where I had calculated a better than 80% chance that poison would not be laying out for them.

I had done this based on several things that I know about dogs. Keep in mind that wolves and wild dogs are extremely territorial to the point that their territories rarely even overlap. Now domestic dogs, especially well travelled ones, often revert to treating YOU, the pack leader, as their primary territory. Because you, pack leader, know what you are doing when you lead them to the promised land, a dog’s behavior is different when travelling. If they are protecting anything it is you because what else is there? The dog’s behavior towards both other people and other dogs will usually be less aggressive unless they are getting mixed up signals otherwise. They are travelling with their pack leader.

Now imagine what happens if their pack leader abandons them on the road. First off the dog or dogs have no established territory there. At best they will stay close to the area where the pack leader was last found in hopes that they return. In many situations they will try to find their original territory, even if this is foolhardy for reasons dogs do not understand. So the dogs wander aimlessly, picking through trash, getting into fights with others dogs, or perhaps otherwise causing trouble, in neighborhoods which are not their own.

In this way, however, it is not too different then an old legal adage known as “possession is 9/10ths of the law.” Dogs don’t understand legal works, but they know if they are not in their territory. This is similar on all sides to the way a person can have a legal document claiming that they own this motor vehicle, but if the motor vehicle is not there for their use or resale, the document itself becomes almost meaningless. The difference between a house which has been laid to ashes or rubble or cinder versus a house in which occupants can live in freely is at least 9/10ths not contained in the legal documents they hold therein: whether they paid their mortgage on time or were years behind or owned the house free and clear or had enveloped it as part of some charity trustee LLC is meaningless when one cannot live there. Those things will all work their ways through the courts, of course, at an excruciatingly slow rate of speed. But the difference between your spouse being dead and your spouse lying next to you in bed is quite large in that 9/10ths law thing. The law likes to claim that their part is bigger than it is.

I’ve been contemplating the poisoned land which I mean figuratively and literally. There’s a feeling that the place I stay on is not viable. My younger daughter exclaimed it yesterday well: “Wow Mom we had like a gazillion pets! What happened?”

In 2021 I was feeding eight cats and at our height we had around 25 chickens along with two dogs already. We now have three chickens: a mother hen and two baby chicks hatched in late August. I have exactly one cat, as of this morning, that being Feisty. Both of my surviving dogs are staying at the beach.

We came back to our bungalow last night and learned that two other dogs in our area had been poisoned to death. We found a dead cat next door, not one of mine or one of the feral cats I used to feed who all disappeared, but an orange male tom I think was the father of Feisty’s two kittens. I keep on wondering how long this poison takes to work through the system. How many rodents or lizards eat it which feed up the food chain through cats and possibly even dogs? The weirdest thing is chickens eat all of that stuff too. Considering poison was put out ostensibly to stop dogs from eating chickens it seems counterproductive.

I drank too much and illuminated all on my insane stories, which would be all the more insane if most of them understood much English. I went on about witchcraft and poisoned land and how the chickens were probably dying from 5G because they didn’t seem to be producing eggs and/or eggs that hatched into viable chicks anymore. Remarkably most seem to be treating me as slightly less of a crazy lady now than before.

I can do a count in the area. In late 2020 there were about 45 structures inhabited by people, which includes little tiny corrugated tin one room bungalows all the way up to pretty nice two story houses with pretty outside paint such as you might find in any respectable city or town on Earth. Now the number is down to about 30. People only move out, not in, and the back block closest to the military barracks has been especially hard hit: I can think of 11 people or families that moved out (only one was a single man, the rest as families). Before this poison was left out Sunday night there were 13 dogs in our area and I know exactly who they were. Now three are dead and my other two dogs I took out. Feisty had the only baby kittens I have seen in the area in all of 2023. I don’t know what happened to the two of them but I hope they were adopted and are well!

I suspect that we are as a human species going into a degrowth era, and I think people need to really consider the ramifications of it. For now though, I am thankful for many things:
1: I am thankful for mine and my family’s good health

2: I am thankful for having a nice, albeit basic, Thanksgiving dinner tonight

3: I am thankful for being able to communicate with my family

In that possession is 9/10ths of the law thing, always remember what you should be most thankful; for….

Here’s to fighting for another day. Perhaps the thing I was most thankful for this Thanksgiving was that it was a normal business day here in Thailand! It’s been busy on all fronts but at least the substack app lets me post responses!

Buy me a ko-fi