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| The kids feeding Billy in the front garden |
The topic of dog ownership (or not) has been raised several times in our family over the last few years. I am the reluctant one, feeling like the responsibility would, in the end, rest with me and that having consciously stopped our family at 2 children, getting a dog would be like another child - but one that never grows up. Somehow, however, it had crept onto the agenda for when we returned home from Thailand.
Then a few days after we moved into our house - Baan Sunshine - the Italian/German owner Eddie, who lives on-and-off in the house behind, asked if we could feed his dog BIlly while we were here. He was off back to Europe for a few months.
There are lots of dogs around, many stray or semi-stray. Along our strip of beach, almost every residence or resort seems to have a dog or few. Each have their own clearly defined territory which they defend with growls, barks and the occasional fight if another dog should stray into it.
Some are well taken care of with vaccinations, food, flea and tick removal, while others are merely fed occasionally by a part-time owner, and yet others seem to be completely on their own scavenging from rubbish and whatever else they can find. It seems that people often get a dog and then move on, leaving the dog behind.
Eddie does not actually own Billy, but had more or less adopted him and feeds him because the houses are on Billy's 'patch'. So, Eddie has temporarily passed on this guardianship to us.
We found that the local supermarket sells dog food. (Yes there is a supermarket - it has only been open a couple of years but somehow the smell of it is so revolting it doesn't encourage us to shop there much - we tend to go to the open air fresh-market street or a wholesaler that supplies the resorts and has some Western foods.) And so we have been feeding Billy for the last month or so.
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| Billy hanging out with me today, while I blog |
However none of us want to touch him.
His long coat is flea-infested and when he lies down we can see a whole throng of ticks escaping from his coat into the surrounding area. I am now well versed in the art of tick identification, tick squashing and even what a tick biting/sucking down under your fingernail feels like. Yueeerk! For this reason we had dissuaded him from sitting on the patio when we are around.
One day last week Billy started looking even slower and was clearly having difficulty seeing. He nearly fell in to the swimming pool and kept walking into things in the garden. He also seemed to be almost crippled. I thought things were looking grim and that Billy's days were almost certainly numbered. I was running through scenarios in my head of how this might play out, and the reaction of the children. Was he just going to walk off and find a quiet hiding hole in which he felt safe and we would never see him again ? Or would we wake to find that he wasn't going to get up from the patio in the next morning or two ? The former scenario seemed more likely as he had already been absent for a day or so since I had last seen him looking in such a sorry state.
As a measure of the quickly developing responsibility and compassion I was already feeling for our newly acquired pet, I found myself worrying about him as I went to sleep, and in the middle of the night. This certainly wasn't something I had expected in our trip.
Our Spanish/Australian neighbor Jose has been a wealth of information on the dogs around here and their temperaments and histories. We often chat with him as he makes his twice daily walk up and down the beach with his own adopted dogs & picking up various bits of rubbish that have washed up on the beach. He suggested that Billy may have a tick borne parasite paralysis which they all get from time-to-time but is harder for the older dogs to survive. He gave us some antibiotics which he had had for his own dog and needed administering 12 hourly.
I knew the only way we were going to get antibiotics into Billy was disguised in his food. Billy wouldn't tolerate us interfering with him in anyway or forcing him to take anything he didn't want. So for the last 5 days I have been getting out of bed at the crack of dawn hoping to catch BIlly on our patio before he is disturbed and takes himself off somewhere. Hiding a small tablet in his canned meat seems to have been fairly successful, assuming he is hungry enough. Likewise we seem to be able to find him at some point during the evening.
And he is improving greatly. His appearance has become more predictable as he has become more well. He is wagging his tail once again. And we are moving back to feeding him once a day. We will try to get some tick medicine this weekend. Meanwhile he seems to have crept back to hanging out on the patio - it felt unfair to chase off a dog that could barely walk - and now we are just happy to see him looking healthy again
We are here for another month, then there are a few weeks after we leave and before Eddie returns. I'm not sure what this will mean for Billy. He is an old dog, in a country where dogs have shorter lifespans than when they are fully looked after by their owner.
Meanwhile our neighbor Jose is also leaving and taking one of his dogs with him, to Spain. And he has asked us to feed another dog - Spot !
Spot is younger and his territory is further up the beach at Jose 's house. He seems reluctant to eat at our place, possibly because he is not in his own patch, and can often be seen out near the rubbish bags of a neighboring resort. Jose has given us piles of food for Spot including some very expensive imported French dog food. However we have not been able to interest Spot in being fed by us, and Jose's house is now rented by someone else so we can't really go there to attempt it. Jose left a few days ago and we saw Spot today, looking pretty good and quite uninterested in us - I guess he is surviving by some other means.
It seems that by and large the dogs adopt their carers, rather than the other way around. Whether it be for a few days, weeks, months or years - if you are on their patch you are adopted ! Maybe this is the way it should be - it saves decision making, although dilutes responsibility.
The kids are still reasonably enthusiastic in their feeding duties. However, I do seem to be holding primary physical and emotional responsibility for them.
It is an interesting foot-in-the-water of dog ownership (albeit without the need for walks), and while Billy is an engaging animal, I can't say that I am any more persuaded than before we arrived that I want to commit to being a dog owner. That being said, I doubt it is the end of discussions in our family - it will be interesting to see!
PS (Pet Script) : We also have fish in an outdoors fish pond! The kids have fun trying to catch them periodically. We have discovered that these fish can jump - when caught in a small plastic container they jump out and commit suicide on the tiles in the process. So we don't do that any more. The loss of two fish didn't seem to effect us nearly so much as the potential loss of the dog.
One day last week Billy started looking even slower and was clearly having difficulty seeing. He nearly fell in to the swimming pool and kept walking into things in the garden. He also seemed to be almost crippled. I thought things were looking grim and that Billy's days were almost certainly numbered. I was running through scenarios in my head of how this might play out, and the reaction of the children. Was he just going to walk off and find a quiet hiding hole in which he felt safe and we would never see him again ? Or would we wake to find that he wasn't going to get up from the patio in the next morning or two ? The former scenario seemed more likely as he had already been absent for a day or so since I had last seen him looking in such a sorry state.
As a measure of the quickly developing responsibility and compassion I was already feeling for our newly acquired pet, I found myself worrying about him as I went to sleep, and in the middle of the night. This certainly wasn't something I had expected in our trip.
Our Spanish/Australian neighbor Jose has been a wealth of information on the dogs around here and their temperaments and histories. We often chat with him as he makes his twice daily walk up and down the beach with his own adopted dogs & picking up various bits of rubbish that have washed up on the beach. He suggested that Billy may have a tick borne parasite paralysis which they all get from time-to-time but is harder for the older dogs to survive. He gave us some antibiotics which he had had for his own dog and needed administering 12 hourly.
I knew the only way we were going to get antibiotics into Billy was disguised in his food. Billy wouldn't tolerate us interfering with him in anyway or forcing him to take anything he didn't want. So for the last 5 days I have been getting out of bed at the crack of dawn hoping to catch BIlly on our patio before he is disturbed and takes himself off somewhere. Hiding a small tablet in his canned meat seems to have been fairly successful, assuming he is hungry enough. Likewise we seem to be able to find him at some point during the evening.
And he is improving greatly. His appearance has become more predictable as he has become more well. He is wagging his tail once again. And we are moving back to feeding him once a day. We will try to get some tick medicine this weekend. Meanwhile he seems to have crept back to hanging out on the patio - it felt unfair to chase off a dog that could barely walk - and now we are just happy to see him looking healthy again
We are here for another month, then there are a few weeks after we leave and before Eddie returns. I'm not sure what this will mean for Billy. He is an old dog, in a country where dogs have shorter lifespans than when they are fully looked after by their owner.
Meanwhile our neighbor Jose is also leaving and taking one of his dogs with him, to Spain. And he has asked us to feed another dog - Spot !
Spot is younger and his territory is further up the beach at Jose 's house. He seems reluctant to eat at our place, possibly because he is not in his own patch, and can often be seen out near the rubbish bags of a neighboring resort. Jose has given us piles of food for Spot including some very expensive imported French dog food. However we have not been able to interest Spot in being fed by us, and Jose's house is now rented by someone else so we can't really go there to attempt it. Jose left a few days ago and we saw Spot today, looking pretty good and quite uninterested in us - I guess he is surviving by some other means.
It seems that by and large the dogs adopt their carers, rather than the other way around. Whether it be for a few days, weeks, months or years - if you are on their patch you are adopted ! Maybe this is the way it should be - it saves decision making, although dilutes responsibility.
The kids are still reasonably enthusiastic in their feeding duties. However, I do seem to be holding primary physical and emotional responsibility for them.
It is an interesting foot-in-the-water of dog ownership (albeit without the need for walks), and while Billy is an engaging animal, I can't say that I am any more persuaded than before we arrived that I want to commit to being a dog owner. That being said, I doubt it is the end of discussions in our family - it will be interesting to see!
PS (Pet Script) : We also have fish in an outdoors fish pond! The kids have fun trying to catch them periodically. We have discovered that these fish can jump - when caught in a small plastic container they jump out and commit suicide on the tiles in the process. So we don't do that any more. The loss of two fish didn't seem to effect us nearly so much as the potential loss of the dog.
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| A photo of the front of our house - Baan Sunshine. Billy just decided not to be in the photo ! |
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