Whilst some volunteers focus their tireless efforts on the activities involved in operating the Care for Dogs shelter, others pull their hair out about funding and promotion, whilst some run around taking dogs to vets, catching dogs to be treated, there are others that help in an equally important and crucial way.

One such volunteer is Lek. She naturally speaks Thai and deals with many of the calls that come in to Care for Dogs and she also has her ear close the ground and therefore picks up on lots of situations involving dogs and cats in need of human assistance.

Today we were following up on one of these, taking us into a very unpleasant situation and reminded us that humanity and civilisation is something we take for granted all too easily.

Many of the team were working together on this day, when we had already visited Wat Pa Dara Phirom and made our way to the rear of the busy main road leading from the city out towards Mae Rim quite near to Toyota (Lanna Branch) and opposite Rama IX Park.

We were shown a derelict house with clothes piled on the window ledges, rubbish everywhere and a stench of rotting… everything and anything, in what can only be described as a bomb site. We came across dogs and cats, leaping out of windows like a cartoon film and making counting of numbers living there extremely difficult.

Lek who had been in contact with people living not far away and wanting to help, had suggested there were in the region of 40 - 60 dogs.

A women was said to live here and cared for her dogs like they were her children. Indeed there were many young pups in the house, still suckling their mothers milk whilst clambering over torn mattresses, glass bottles and the other contents of yours and my waste bins, dog feces and goodness knows what else in the puddles of rain water.

The ‘house’ was a mess but worse was to come.

Next door to this building we found a large industrial type building and this was in much the same state of disrepair as the house. No glass in the windows, parts of the roof missing, the area surrounding the building completely covered with waste rubbish and so many dogs. There was also another common factor, rows of plastic buckets along the outside walls, catching rain water to drink, it was certainly not used for anything else like washing, as we shortly found when we met the inhabitants.

There were several dirty, unhealthy looking (both mentally and physically) men, none with a shirt on and few had any teeth either. The dogs were running about everywhere, over piles of similar sized detergent bottles, mounds of soft drink tins, oil filters and all the other garbage that Chiang Mai residents had discarded. Behind a metre high screen, an old lady sat looking at photographs in a book and oblivious to the world around her.

Some of the older dogs were blind, some nodding from nerve damage and others quite wild. Our initial instinct was to rescue the younger dogs and then come back to sterilise the females on another visit. Lek and Soraya spoke with the men and persuaded them to allow us to help save the lives of the younger dogs and take them away to find them homes. We focused on collecting as many of the puppies as we could, trying to ignore the men and what they were saying and shouting. We picked pups from crevices in the rubbish, under broken motorbikes, inside of plastic bags or just sat wondering what just happened!

The youngest man amongst the group living here, frightened us all by tossing young puppies around using their heads as handles and constantly clenched one to his chest apparently his favourite. We tried to take the puppy from him but his wild and demonic eyes scared and intimidated us to leave with what we had in a basket we found in the rubbish.

The mess these dogs were living in was no place for a human to live. Yet here there were both, and it was quite distressing.

Back at the truck, away from the madness of the warehouse and back in the different world we had simply stepped back into, we discussed our experience and it was as if we were all suffering from shell shock.

We counted the puppies and found we had rescued 15 but the one favourite of the young man still remained clutched to his sweaty raving bare chest.

Lek will continue to keep in contact with the people that introduced us to this place and hopefully they will be able to persuade the men inside the warehouse and the old lady that lives in the house, to allow us to help them sterilise their female dogs to reduce the escalating population living in this dump.