The Turtle House

I learned a lot from living in Bangkok for a few years and yet it wasn’t so much about people. I learned about dogs and The Wolf as ‘the great beginner of dogs’.

True, Thais do have a most remarkable culture and history that is rich and complex, and from this complexity, and indeed humanity, the Soi Dogs, the street dogs, of the cities and towns have a very different life to dogs we would call ‘ours’ here.

There are large numbers of dogs, mostly short haired brown dogs, usually in clans, who live, basically in the streets and they are, and yet are not, what we would call ‘wild dogs’. They are families with territories that include streets and roads and vacant land. People do feed them sometimes yet do not own them or look after them in the usual sense. People have a warm, yet disinterested, compassion about them as fellow beings.

The dogs are wise enough to hang around where there is food, at markets and shops etc, and also tend to make a direct journey to the doorway of shops especially on hot days when fans and air conditioners in the shops bring some cooling to the entrance and footpath outside the shop. Dogs, lying on their backs across the entrance to a 7/11, is a common sight and people just step over them.

The dogs seem to sleep a fair bit during the hot days and then congregate in clans at night and move around the streets, not threatening anyone, but rather doing the clan-social-thing that dogs do. Some are loners, but most are in extended families with kin and/or territorial agreements.

They are a long way from The Wolf archetype, yet are not pets of humans, nor owned by humans. They can forage and hunt a bit, and the life of a free-range chicken in the locality is a tenuous thing and many chickens tend to exhibit a realistic paranoia thus congregate high up when possible at night.

The entry of a real Wolf into the dog and human society does bring with it significant behavioural changes for all…for dogs, for people, for chickens, for water buffalo, and all the other characters that do actually live within the confines of the towns and cities. At the same time the changes have more to do with respect rather than with fear.

A Wolf, very old, took up living in the city, in a small street with the name of The First Street of General Happiness, in Bangkok. He was a very old, thin, and scarred wolf with a limp and with a variety of old cuts and patches of mange/baldness. His open smile, on a hot day, showed occasional bright teeth.

People from their small houses would come and leave food for the wolf in the street and someone built a small rain-cover for him out of wood and old galvanised iron. On the far side of the street from the houses were some trees and a wire fence separating the community from a field in which water buffalo were loosely corralled, in sight of the local fresh meat and vegetable market.

The first immediate effect of the ancient wolf taking up residence included all the water buffalo moving to the opposite extreme end of the vacant field in a huddled pack, all the time.

The second effect was that all the domesticated ‘owned’ dogs, behind their high gates, stopped barking.

The third effect was that the Soi Dogs no longer went anywhere in, or near, that narrow street.

As mentioned, the general effect was profound yet seemed to have far more to do with Respect, rather than Fear. The old Wolf, in his slow and limping state was, indeed, nothing to fear at all. A small kitten could, and did, sometimes approach the wolf and eat from the bowl the people had put food in for him, and the Wolf didn’t mind at all. The Wolf spent much of his time sleeping, out of the sun and rain, under the small structure someone had built him.

Whilst being a simple construction of some pieces of wood and a small roof, as time went by, it became a natural shrine of acknowledgment and, indeed, respectful gratitude for the Presence of the Wolf.

In my journey from where I lived to get to the corner shop for cigarettes and Bier Singha, even during the rebellion, with government snipers bunkered in concrete and embedded in the locale, with occasional water cannon, a small bomb here and there, gun shots, and the equally disturbing daily trail of monks seeking bowls of rice, The Wolf snoozed on, unconcerned. The world, coming to his shrine, in his street, had made peace with him.

“I went to see The Wolf today

and he was dreaming, miles away

I asked ‘Dear Wolf, can I be so free?’

And he said

‘Oh, that’s not up to me.’”

John Fitzpatrick, The Third Street of General Happiness, Harmony Highway, Krung Thep Mahanakorn…2012.