A tiny community living in isolation except for excursions into civilisation from their world apart, these people live in total squalor, living in the realms of mental illness and disorder.

A dilapidated 3 floored warehouse building with an equally squalid adjacent house is where a group of approximately 6 people live along with an uncounted number of cats, dogs and other wildlife that go hand in hand with this environment. Maybe a few years ago, this might have been the centre of recycling activity but ‘the corner shop verses the superstore’ syndrome has taken it’s toll here too.

We drove down the small paved roads leading away from busy Mae Rim Road, passing behind the hugely popular and successful Toyota (Lanna Branch) premises. Any cement track, turns to grass and that in turn reduces to a muddy wallow, aggravated by the tricycles these people depend on for their (livelihood?) lives. They make daily trips to roadside accumulations of rubbish and salvage as much material from their snatch and grab ventures as possible, bringing their treasured finds back to base and stock piling it in their home. Sorting, grouping and filling sacks with similar materials is their business and the byproduct is a filthy, smelly and quite unhygienic place to live in.

We met the 2 women who live nearby, who had called Care for Dogs about this situation, want to do something about the growing problem of multiplying dogs and in turn, offer help to the people living here.

Today, we returned to this ghastly place with a known objective. We had come with transportation cages to take away 5 dogs for sterilisation, to start the process of reducing the numbers of dogs, finding an existence here. The ladies had told us there were a couple of bitches in heat and another actually pregnant, these apparently were in the larger building ‘with the men’.

They introduced us to the matriarch, ‘Khun Yai’ or grandmother, who lives in the house, the one with no glass or wood in any opening of the damp and wrecked building, amongst piles of clothing, plastic, waterlogged paper and literally every other item that we have all seen in our waste bins, most of them, clinging to the wet bottom of the bin liner we have in our kitchen rubbish bins.

Khun Yai showed us here female dogs that all followed her up to the car in a line behind her, a bit like ‘the pied piper’ and trusted her implicitly when she walked them caringly towards the waiting cages. We selected 3 of them for today’s trip, letting her know we would do all of the females in due course. One of them, herself the grandmother of many of the others, khun Yai said she didn’t want to let us take, saying that she had not given birth for many years as she had always arranged a contraceptive injection for her.

All of this, written in a structured and in an almost novelist form, sounds straightforward and easily told. However, it is complied from a 2 - 3 & sometimes 4 way conversation going on in Thai and English, between people that have fears and anxiety about losing a loved and cherished dog, people with knowledge and experience of managing these types of situations and at the same time, there being a sense of extreme frustration.

On our last visit here a couple of months ago, we discovered that appalling conditions that so many dogs and puppies were living in. We removed several litters of puppies (15 in all) as we believed they would certainly die if not rescued and with our help, could find adopted homes and if any of them would survive, then at least we could start to reduce the uncontrolled growth of dog numbers at this awful place. We have since found all of those puppies good loving homes.

Knowing that there were 3 dogs in the warehouse that we would ideally like to take with us today, we approached cautiously, as the ankle deep mud, littered with shards of glass, plastic and metals and increasingly anxious because the ‘forward guard and pincer movement’ tactics were activated in the pack.

But we had been thwarted by the men who were obviously angry and vociferous that we wanted to take their dogs. Pride is a tremendous quality in mankind, despite living in theses conditions, became the single focus of their anger.

The boy-man who last time tossed puppies about using their heads as handles, today climbed a ladder to their loft on the second floor with the dogs they wanted to hide from us.

The growls from the dogs front, rear and side, were bad enough, but the growls from the wretched toothless recyclers, communicated the stress of the situation, the pressure upon us to leave and the threat that was present in the clenched fist and sticks in hand.

Retreating to relative safety of the house, we found 3 more of kh Yai’s dogs and after a little re-shuffling of who gets on with who in the cages, we loaded the truck to leave.

When we arrived to meet the ladies, they had been holding a small, skinny dog in their arms.

As we greeted, they explained that the men in the warehouse didn’t want her and asked if we could take her away.

Now very disappointed from our failure to help the 3 dogs in the larger building, we felt compelled to give this poor little mite a chance and from our first impressions, her temperament will help her find a home very soon.

We will sterilise the 6 females and return them to khun Yai’s home next week, cleaned, sprayed from ticks and fleas, vaccinated and of course, unable to grow the numbers anymore.

We will continue with other females she can get to us and maybe after the men see what we are able to do for them, they may reconsider.

We can only hope.

View location of these dogs with Google Maps here …