Puppies!

I found a local animal shelter in Koh Samui to volunteer at for a day since it is something I have wanted to do on this trip. I went to the shelter's smaller location, aka the owner's house, which turned out to be a swedish couple. This was surprising because foreigners are not allowed to work in Thailand. I asked how they opened the shelter, and they said since they are non-profit, and are giving free vet services to all the animals on the island, the police look the other way. They employ all thai people though and foreigners can only volunteer. The house itself was filled with cats and smaller dogs, which they said we either blind or couldn't make it at the bigger location. Their yard was filled with diseased dogs, most looked they had severe cases of mange and many were missing limbs. These dogs were strays from around the area that locals had brought in because they didn't want to look at them anymore. Their mission isn't to necessarily get these dogs adopted (this would be near impossible since dogs aren't really valued in Thailand). They just try to give the dogs medicine and vaccines, along with neutering them to control the population. Once they are deemed healthy they are released back out to the streets. It's kind of sad, but they are doing the best they can, and they give all the medicine for free (who would pay anyways?).

I hopped in the minivan with some of the workers, all male, and we drove to the bigger location on the other side of the island. Some of the workers spoke very broken english, but they immediately pointed me to the puppy house. I couldn't argue with that.. There were 5 rooms with litters of puppies, and a room full of individual cages to house sick puppies that were dropped off at their door. They were almost all full. Some of the puppies were so young that they hadn't even opened their eyes yet. Since they leave the puppies in there the whole day, they have no choice to poo and pee in those rooms. The first item on the agenda was to clean out the rooms. They gave me a hose, and scrub brush with a long handle, bleach and a squeegie and set me to work. Cleaning those rooms took up most of the morning. After that, I watched one of the workers examine the sick puppies in their cages and tried to give them some love too.

We went to lunch at an authentic Thai hole-in-the-wall (or rather, shack on the side of the road) restaurant and they ordered me what looked and tasted like top ramen. We sat silent since none of them could speak very good english and I only know about 2 words in Thai.

After lunch, I ventured to the cat house which housed at least 80 cats and had an inside and outside. I cleaned their beds and swept the floor and then sat down to snuggle with some of the cats. It seemed as though the cats yearned for love too since I had a bunch rubbing themselves against me and trying to get me to pet them.

Besides the puppy and cat houses, there were 10 sections that the shelter was split into. Each section had about 30 dogs which seemed to be in various stages of recovery. About 90% looked to have mange, but were getting help. Dogfights broke out maybe every 20 minutes, but there were always workers there to quickly break it up. Usually a yell would stop them in their tracks, sometimes there needed to be more intervention. There were also other volunteers giving baths to the dogs, but some dogs just didn't want to get in the bath water.. One volunteer was bit and it drew blood. He seemed to be ok but they didn't end up bathing that particular dog.

After that, it was about time to go. The workers all piled in the car and we headed back to the house so I could meet Hbf. On the way home, they stopped for some whiskey and let it flow in the car.. So much so that they made a second stop to buy more whiskey since they had ran through a bottle so quickly. Once the drinks were flowing (I did not partake, of course) the boys started trying to talk to me. They knew a surprising amount of english, and they asked me all sorts of questions about USA. They also started asking me out and asking me to marry them. I told them Hbf would hurt them and that seemed to settle things. It was all good fun and we laughed together the whole time.

It was a really good experience, but definitely so different from the shelters in San Diego. I'm going to keep looking for shelters to volunteer at as we move on to different places because at the end of the day, I felt really good. :)