You may remember past scenes of puppy mauling from our photo stream. For Colin at least, this one here was the last. After taking a day-off-dogs on the 1st, we discovered we couldn’t just close the door and be rid of them anymore. They live here now.

We’ve stopped feeding them treats since Newyears, and stopped paying attention to them except to boot them off the deck, but still they persist that this is their new home, and we are their chew toys. Colin is depressed and angry about not being able to control the buggers. At 2 or 3 months old they may be starting to teethe but haven’t learned any manners yet. They chew on things and bark at night, run inside if the door is open and jump up on us when we leave the house.

We still like Brave; the original, whussy Momma’s boy (the one with the black muzzle in most of our pictures), but his brother and sister are complete terrors. You toss them down the stairs and they scamper right back up again. You yell and point at them and they run through your legs. Whereas Brave cowers and whines even when you aren’t mad at him, and stays where you put him. I hope we can find a way to keep him around; if any of them actually needs our attention it’s probably him.

So far the puppies (even Brave) haven’t been too put out by our putting them out, but Momma is. She’s been living with us for awhile now, and I guess she’s got anxiety problems. When we finally emerged from our hungover state on the 2nd, she was so excited to see us again that she started panting very fast and loud and shaking all over. Her eyes went wide and her ears back in what I would call ‘a dog freaking out’. She desperatly licked our hands and faces (she’d never done that before) until we edged back to the door and escaped inside.

Then she whined and scratched at the door (which she’d also never done) until we closed the curtain. Still hyperventillating, she ran all around the house looking for a way in. At one point she made it to the other side of the deck railing and was confused about how to get back, then she tried to sit down on the two inches of clearance and fell off with a yelp (we checked that she was okay, then laughed our asses off). Ten minutes later I heard more scrabbling and hysterical wheezing at the bike under another window. I peeked out again, and when she saw me she lept from where she’d been balancing on the bike seat and smashed her face into the closed window between us (I think that one did hurt her).

We shut all the drapes that night and hid from this horror-movie stalker. I had nightmares.

Colin has their long-term survival in mind when he tries to chase them off. What if the neighbours stop feeding them because they’ve moved in with us? What if they become dependant on us, and we move away in a few months? What do we do if Momma’s suitor (still lurking around) gets her in the family way?

I would love for the answer to be “it’s not our problem”. If the people (our landlords actually) who feed these dogs don’t think it’s a big deal then why should we care? The puppies will get run over or poisoned eventually, and until then we can play with them and make their little lives happy… Except they are our problem, because they’re chewing up our things being pains in the ass every time we go outside. The lady next door called them ‘Bad news’ and probably blames us for enticing them from across the street. Well, I guess we did, but we’d like to send them back now, please.

I’ve been in touch with the animal clinic on the island. They are tiny and underfunded but spay a few dogs every month, and they agreed to get Momma on the list for next round. If we can get her on a Songthaew without her freaking out again and jumping off the back – am interesting supposition.

No really, this is interesting:

So Momma the dog seems to have a boyfriend. He’s been following her around patiently and very intently, waiting for her to put her guard down. When she does, he immediatly tries to mount her and gets a very upset Mama barking and snapping at his face. She sits with her butt to the wall now.

Her suitor does look a lot like the puppies and they don’t seem to mind him around, so maybe he is Papa. I was pretty surprised he’d be here for another round so soon with the puppies only recently off the teat, until I read that dogs can have two litters a year (of up to 10 puppies!).

So now I’m thinking, no wonder dog overpopulation is a problem here. Apparently people here deal with the problem by occasionally poisoning the strays. Back in the day they used to shoot them, but upset tourists started to complain, so now they stab them with a poisoned dart on a bamboo pole, or (worse) leave out poisoned food. Either way it is a painful and slow death. :(

There is an animal clinic on the island that brings in a vet once a month to spay dogs. It doesn’t seem like our place to take Momma in when we’ve only known her a few months and she still spends a lot of time at the neighbor’s across the street. But if we get a chance to talk to them about it we will.

Also, Momma has (at least) four puppies, not just three as we’d believed. The one we call Timmy that was alternately super shy or super licky is in fact two dogs. We’ve dubbed the super licky one, a girl doggy it turns out, Ivy. Ivy enjoys nothing more than to jump on my back when I’m sitting and chew my hair.

The lot of them seem to be pretty comfortable with us now. We kick them out at night but Momma and Brave sleep on the deck outside. The others spend most of their time across the street but come around (excepting Timmy) every day to cause puppy havoc. I don’t know if they are teething or what but they chew every damn thing they can get in their mouths, including (and particularly) fingers, skirts, our doormat and their siblings ears. We bought them some rawhide sticks which they go to great lengths to steal and guard from eachother.

The puppies have been locked outside today due to horrendous newyears-related hangovers and low tolerance for fast-moving objects. I’ve spent the whole day reading blogs and writing journal entries in the comfort of cranked air conditioning. Not that it’s hot out today, but it just feels nice, like a special treat.

Robes is in Japan!

http://pierreallec.livejournal.com/

Deli’s we miss you!Oh, totally unrelated to the last post, but last night we met a nice guy named Kelly who works at Deli’s South in Nanaimo. Small goddamn world indeed! He told us of the latest developments with the giant hole in the downtown core and we commiserated on the terrible lack of city planning.

Now I really, really want a Deli’s wrap.

We visited an excellent mexican restaurant in Thongsala last week called Ando Loco’s. I had a real beef enchilada with amazingly yum fresh salsa, and a delicious drink called a Caipirinha made with actual Brazilian Cachasa (which I’d never had before – I thought it tasted like something between white rum and tequila).

Like the sushi on Samui, the meal reminded us both of home and Victoria’s incredible selection of restaurants. The Brits up the street can keep their custard and mushy peas; I’ll have a taco, some kimchi, dolmades, ooh or an indian curry…

We ended up at a small housewarming/new years gettogether last night instead of the big party we were originally going to. The excuse being that Colin has a cold, but really it was just more our style. We’re planning to go to full moon in a few days so we’ll still get our drunken revelry in, no doubt.

Anyway we were hanging out in the kitchen and a few people were watching TV when the announcer said something to the effect of “…and there you have it, another wonderful new years celebration in Thailand and another great year soon to come. Also two more bombings in Bangkok. Goodnight everybody!”. I guess this is pretty typical reporting; they didn’t want to worry people or bring the party down or whatever. Turns out there had been bombs going off all evening and the festivities in Bangkok and Chiang Mai were cancelled, which explained why they’d been showing footage from Taipei and Sydney instead.

There was a total of eight bombs (maybe nine?) that went off, killing two people and blowing various bits off Thais and unlucky farangs. They targeted malls and restaurants as well as police booths; really horrible business. There has been a lot of this going on in the southern provinces but this is the first time it’s happened in Bangkok.

Since we moved here, I’ve tried to follow what has been going on with the southern insurgency and the aftermath of the coup. To put it plainly, I suck at politics, and I hope I don’t offend anyone with these naive statements that I’m only backing up with my feelings.

So I think I grasp the basics. One of the reasons behind the coup was that the former government was doing a shitty job of dealing with those angry Muslims in the south. Their approaches consisted of pretending it wasn’t happening, making empty promises, and sending soldiers down there to kill people. The attacks have gotten worse over the last five years; escalating from driveby shootings on police to bombing schools and public places. The insurgents are being funded but noone seems to know from where (or think it’s from selling soup??).

One thing I’ve never understood about the whole thing – about a lot of terrorism everywhere – is that nobody takes credit for the attacks. They don’t say why they are doing it. They don’t release statements or lists of demands. They don’t even want people to know who is responsible. How is anyone supposed to fix the problem in the south if they don’t even know what it is??

Not that it isn’t obvious what the problem is in a general sense; it’s a clash of cultures with a long history of government suppression and disproportionatly violent responses. But what can the government do to fix that? What would make these people happy? Their own country? Respect for their culture? Expulsion of all the Buddhists? Jobs? Money? By not taking responsibility, it seems to me their only goals are to undermine the government and chase off all the tourists.

So after the military coup, the new leaders decided to take a different approach: negotiate with the insurgents; maybe even let them govern themselves by Muslim law and officially speak their own language. And the response to this? Even more violence than before, and now in the capitol. WTF do these people want?

Admittedly the negotiation idea was flawed, because still nobody knows who is doing the bombings and whoever it is refuses to come forward to talk. I’ve been thinking about it and I guess I can think of a few reasons to not come forward:

1) They believe (probably correctly) that the moment the Thai government can identify and target them, they’ll mount a serious offence and wipe the buggers out, US-style.

2) I gather the idea of terrorism (and yes I think that is the right word for it after all), is to get everyone all excited and confused and upset: to create unrest. If people understood why they were being blown up on the way home from work and who was doing it, it probably wouldn’t be as terrifying.

So I guess unlike the showy, no-innocents-got-hurt bombings in V for Vendetta, it’s not about making regular voting Thais wake up and take notice of what their government has been doing to the poor Malays in the south. It’s about freaking people out sufficiently that they blame the government for not protecting them. Then the government will have to act, or be… well… kicked out and replaced by the military.

Okay, maybe this has been obvious to you all along, but I’m catching up here.

Back to the bombing in Bangkok last night. Not surprisingly, it was anonymous once again. What is surprising is that the government isn’t blaming it on southern insurgents this time; they’re pointing fingers at supporters of the old premier, Thaksin (pronounced Taxxin – thank you totally unphonetic Thai spelling).

This seems completely baseless to me, or at least I don’t understand the reasoning. I can think of a few reasons for the new government to claim it even if it isn’t true:

1) If there are Thaksin supporters out there who were thinking of stirring up trouble, the military can now toss them in jail preemptively

2) Thaksin is one rich mutha, and now they can seize his assets with the claim of cutting off terrorism funding.

3) If people believed the insurgents did it, it wouldn’t reflect well on the new government. After all, dealing with the south was one of the platforms, if you can call it that, for supporting the coup.

So what do the Thai people think? Well, we’ll never freaking know, because talking politics is even worse than wearing tank tops around here. Writing about it is probably some kind of terrible heresy that could get me shunned in my favorite restaurants. So I hope they don’t find out. But like the clothes thing it’s something I have a hard time agreeing with and one of the reasons I like hanging out with the expats on the island. The guys we met last night had some really interesting things to say about living here and fitting in to Thai culture (or not).