Page 15 - MN

15
Mr. Clueless and His Animal Friends
At breakfast, Jintana and I talked about how her nieces are teenagers now and the fun part is over. Texting is far more important than we are and basically we're just drivers, people they say hello to on the way to and from school. When they were young, Kadjang and Awee would build a fort of pillows on the bed and then Kadjang would say, "You have to be the monster". Who could resist a role like that? I would growl and attack the fort and they would scream. I think it was my greatest role, academy award stuff.
Their dad, Chaipon, got a puppy at one point and this was problematic because the kids were really scared of dogs. This is logical because Thailand is filled with Soi (street) dogs and they are feral. They run wild and they can be dangerous. The puppy was named Thungnun, which translates as "MoneyPocket" and he was a handful. He was basically a soi dog and he grew up to be loud, scary, and a danger to the neighborhood. A few times I would walk out to the street to find terrified people standing there with Thungnun barking ferociously at them. He'd also chase motorbikes, most of them driven by kids, and try to bite the riders. Scary stuff.
We have a big yard and tried to keep him inside because we were afraid he would attack one of the village kids. Also, he would bark all night. We tried everything. I Googled, YouTubed, and tried every method of curing a vicious dog who barked all night.
One night we had a barbecue in the yard and he chased Kadjang (she was probably about eight at the time) around the yard. I tried to catch either her or the dog, but I couldn't and it was awful. She was really scared. We finally got the dog stopped.
Jintana's sister, Maew, lives with her husband, Ole, in Denmark and they love dogs, so when they came to visit they loved Thungnun and Ole built a dog house for him. Thungnun never set foot in it and became more and more unruly. One day he slipped out of his collar (he was a genius at that) and I tried to put it back on. He was twitchy and I tried to calm him down but then he bit my hand. It swelled up about double size and I had to go for rabies shots. When Maew and Ole came back for another visit, he bit Maew quite badly on the arm and was vicious, even with them. It was time to put him to sleep before he killed some little kid. They took him to the vet and got some pills. They didn't work. They took him back to the vet to put him to sleep and he still survived. He was a fighter, but two days after he got home, he lay down on the steps and died.