Flightster

Sweater Puppy and the Unknowables

• by Colin Wright
• on November 8th, 2010
• 2 Comments

Sweater Puppy

I live down a somewhat-unknown soi in Bangkok, and the walk from my apartment building to the hopping streets of the Victory Monument area leads me down a tight, alley-like road dominated by cars and scooters speeding along as vehicles tend to do when there’s no room for cops to lay in wait with speed guns.

At the end of this small road is a highway of sorts. Actually, it’s a road UNDER a highway, and you have to cross it to reach the main street in the area.

Crossing this road is at times treacherous and at others easy as hopscotch. The irregularity of it all is fascinating, and I haven’t been able to figure out a rhyme or reason to the periodic sparseness or the inconveniently sputtering wax and wane of activity that dominates the road.

It’s due to the influxes in traffic that I have become familiar with some of the local wildlife, however, and why I noticed when the resident wild dogs acquired some fashion sense.

The thing you need to understand about wild dogs in Bangkok is that they are nothing like wild dogs in other cities you might be thinking of.

In Buenos Aires, for example, the wild dogs are quite feral, running in packs and defending their turf, sometimes effectively closing down a whole street to foot traffic with their perked-up, horn-like ears and their warning growls. I found this to be the case in most Argentine cities, in fact: Ushuaia in the far south of the country had its own rag-tag collection of unavoidable mutts roaming the cityscape, as much as part of city life as the sidewalks or fire hydrants.

These Bangkokian dogs are lacking the confidence that South American canines seem to have, though, and the only word I can think of to describe them is – fittingly – ‘hangdog.’

As I walk by a stray dog in Thailand, I don’t get a growl or perked up hair or even aggressive begging. The response is instead a sort of physical and emotional pulling back, as if the dog is embarrassed to even be there while you’re walking by.

“I’m terribly sorry to inconvenience you with my presence,” it seems to say. “Please don’t beat me.”

When I first moved here I imagined that perhaps the stereotypes about Chinese restaurants using dog meat in some of their dishes is true in Thailand, and that stray dogs are living in fear that they’ll be picked up by some human and quickly turned into soup. I’ve seen no evidence for this presupposition, however, so there must be another explanation.

I finally decided that these dogs must simply be the dregs of animal society, seen but ignored, never fed or loved and only surviving because no one cares enough to come scoop them up and put them out of their misery.

It certainly seemed to fit with their cringing appearance, but then I was thrown a curveball that forced me to reconsider.

A week or so ago I was taking a brief jaunt ‘into town’ (some Missouri-isms never leave you, even when you live in the middle of a city with over 10 million people) and as I was crossing the under-highway street I glanced over to the corner where the street dogs congregate at night and stopped dead in my tracks.

One of the dogs was wearing a sweater.

Like, a little kid’s sweater that fit him quite snugly. It made him look a bit like a hipster with an ironic, second-hand, academic-looking sweater from some local university. All the pooch needed was some pins advertising bands that no one has ever heard of and some large, plastic-framed glasses and he would have fit right in on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

It was weird.

What was weirder is that he seemed to know that he was the dog with the sweater-bling.

The last time I saw this group of dogs together, he had been in the lower-caste of the group, obviously lower on the hound hierarchy than the largest of the bunch, which was some kind of german shepherd mix.

That night, though, this fashionista dog – this Sweater Puppy – was the cock of the rock. He KNEW he looked good and the other dogs fell into line behind him.

What happened here?! I stood and watched their internal social dynamics for a minute or two, and though they were still as boring as usual (spending most of their time sitting around, looking apologetic), there was a clear status shift taking place. I’d have to check back later and see how this evolved.

And it did evolve; oh how it evolved!

The next night I went back out with the expressed purpose of checking on the Sweater Puppy Clan and I was shocked: in addition to the sweatered-one, there were two dogs wearing tight children’s t-shirts, looking almost as confused as I felt about the whole situation.

What was going on here?! The dogs with shirts were literally on either side of Sweater Puppy, looking like they were some kind of uniformed bodyguards, protecting their kind.

Scenes from the book Animal Farm flashed through my head – the part where the pigs start to wear clothing, play poker and end up selling the horse to be made into glue – and I walked back home more confused than ever.

As I was leaving, this trio of decked-out doggies turned their heads to look at me, and rather than the sad, sniffly, scared expression I had seen before, they had taken on a slightly more regal bearing. Their eyes seemed to say “Welcome to my kingdom; you may pass by undisturbed so long as you do not make trouble. Run along now.”

The Unknowables

There are important questions worth asking and then there are the unknowables; the questions with answers that may show up, but probably aren’t worth spending your travel time figuring out.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who find themselves overseas on vacation spend a great deal of their time focusing on the Sweater Puppies of the country and learn a great deal of pointless facts, leaving anything that might change their perspective of the world or its people to the few who aren’t so easily distracted.

Dogs inexplicably wearing clothing is not the strangest thing I’ve seen on the road, nor is it particularly important that I find out exactly how it came to be. It might be interesting from a curiosity standpoint, but will it change my impression of the country? Probably not. Are there better ways to spend my time? Almost certainly.

I’d much rather analyze the social interactions between people and figuring out how the economic structure works. How are food regulations enforced? Who controls the military? Why the continued (and forced) obsession with the monarchy? How is it that a country such as this can still be so rundown and rife with conflict?

Everyone is different, of course, but these are the questions that are important to me. Very few people take trips intending to solve the mystery of the clothed street dogs, but that’s somehow what they end up doing.

I understand the appeal of the easy trip, and I understand that the Sweater Puppies of the world can seem to be real mysteries to figure out; real problems with real solutions.

In reality, though, they’re just dogs with shirts on, and how deep is that really? Will the photos you take be anything that people haven’t seen before? I doubt it.

Monuments and shrines and restaurants where the locals have to speak English are Sweater Puppies: casually entertaining, distracting and cute, but lacking substance and real purpose beyond simply being.

What’s more, most tourist-oriented countries encourage this, with whole industries bent on pointing foreigners toward the cute little dogs with shirts, their safest and least-confrontational monuments and any number of frickin’ shrines (okay, maybe that’s just here).

I’d like to issue a challenge to all the travelers out there, as someone who has encountered both puppies and really substantial questions: make the effort to get off the beaten trail and expand your world view beyond the whitewashed cleanliness of organized tourism.

In other words, pet the puppy and move on. You’ll be happy you did.

Colin Wright

Colin Wright is a minimalist, branding expert and serial entrepreneur. While running his blog Exile Lifestyle ,his branding studio Colin Is My Name and his e-publishing business ebookling. Colin travels the world (moving to a new country every 4 months), meeting up with amazing people, giving talks (to audiences ranging from tech industry professionals to college students to Catholic school girls) and hunting down new and interesting experiences.