Dogs, cats and 5-0

Although the Thai does not really differ much from the average Dutch person, you sometimes experience something in Thailand that you will not easily experience in the Netherlands. That's what the following stories are about. Today: Dogs, cats and 5-0.

We have never bought cats or dogs, but we now have three dogs and more than twenty cats in Thailand.

We got one dog from my brother-in-law; the second belonged to the neighbors across the street but was more with us than with his boss and that boss said at one point that we had better keep him.

A third we found as a puppy in a corner of our property and had apparently been put over the fence by the owner because the poor animal couldn't walk far on its shaky legs.

And cats? Years ago we found young cats just outside our property that had apparently been dumped in the expectation that we would find and care for them. They apparently thought that was a better solution than taking them to the temple. When that had happened a few times and we already had about ten cats, my wife went to the kamnan to say that this had to come to an end, after which the kanman announced this on his public address system. That helped. But not 100% because sometimes a pregnant cat walks by, which then, for example, seeks temporary shelter in the residence of "grandma" and then gives birth.

What do we do with those three dogs? My wife does not allow them to leave our property because they may lose out when they come into contact with other packs. Moreover, they can be hit by cars, after all we live on a main road. And most importantly, they could overturn motorcyclists. All three of them have a dog house and at least once a day – early in the morning – they are allowed to run on our property. In addition, they are also walked a few times a day on a leash. In the past they sometimes managed to escape, but after an intervention by the vet that is a thing of the past. The urge to visit females has clearly diminished.

Most of our cats are permanently locked up in a large pen with play facilities. This has the background that one cat became a traffic victim on our own property because, like all cats, she liked to lie down under a parked car. A second cat fell victim to hungry dogs while exploring outside our property. So now they're in. That is also better for our bird and lizard population. Inside they have a wheelbarrow filled with sand as a litter box so that the excrement can easily be used as fertilizer for the plants. Every now and then a truck comes to bring a new load of sand.

My wife has always taken good care of animals. For example, in the Netherlands we had a nest of blue tits in our garden. At a certain point the parents stopped coming and my wife took them in. I later made an aviary so that they could learn to fly, but not a single blue tit has mastered that art, so we did not dare to release them. One blue tit lived to be about 15 years old and suffered from all kinds of aging symptoms such as cataracts.

Back to Thailand and the cats: one day one of the cats bit my brother-in-law's toe on a day when there was supposed to be a lottery draw and he reacted a little angry. And because a foot has five toes and being angry in Thailand is coded for zero, my wife told anyone who would listen that there would be a prize of 50. However, no one bought a lottery ticket – not even my wife – but there was indeed that day. up a price. Since that day that cat has been called ha-sun, five-zero.