Not here, doggie doggie

When we got our very expensive and (at least as far as I was concerned) mighty painful rabies shots (3 in the series), I worried that I was going to find it hard, as a dog-lover, to resist petting every dog I saw. I was quickly disabused of that idea. If you were here in Laos, or in fact any where in SE Asia, you'd be hard pressed to find a dog you would want to pat..and if you did find ever find one, the swarm of fleas surrounding it would warn you off. Most of the dogs are quite shy and rarely make any sort of contact. A very few bark as you walk by, but always from a distance. They skitter away and would prefer to root around in a garbage can and then take a nap in the middle of the street than have anything to do with humans. We've spotted a few three legged and lame mutts, so we assume that all the really dumb dogs, the ones that are not proficient in playing "dodge-em" with traffic, must be dead. The dogs here seem to come in four basic flavors: black, black with spots, tan with short hair and tan with long hair. All have short legs and long bodies. Somewhere there must be four sets of exhausted mama dogs and pappa dogs that are on procreational overdrive. There is a quartet that gathers every morning after the monks pass by and are hand fed any leftovers that this particular woman might have.

Another observation: this wouldn't go over well back home, but around here it seems to do the trick: