The Free Dogs of Paro

Jay's musings on the dogs:

We had been told in advance of the many wandering dogs in Bhutan, so we had expected random, roving dogs, and were not disappointed. Some reports were all about being careful about these vagabonds, and we are indeed careful. But thus far, each one seems to approach us with the question of, Are you a dog person or not a dog person? And a friendly response will send each on their way, or they will step aside for us to pass by, or just keep sleeping.

These are not dogs that grow up with stones being thrown at them. They appear to be just part of the fabric of life here, which makes sense for a seriously Buddhist country. But there is much more to learn about them, as there is much to learn about everything in this wonderful, gentle, and, at times, frustrating or confounding country.

We have a particularly happy dog dude that lives in our immediate neighborhood, or in our yard, or whereever, who does not ever appear in the company of a human, but was immediately curious about us when we moved in. A friendly, Hey buddy, sparked an ongoing friendship, and for lack of some other name, he is now “Buddy” to me.

Anyway, the dogs are definitely all over and everywhere. They appear to come from a number of specific tribes or ancestries. Like the short-haired, curled tailed, yellow dog tribe. Buddy is of the longer haired, brown with lots of black tribe. He quickly became friends and then parked in front of me one day for some sort of interaction, so I went with the head-pat. Which Buddy was astonished by and started panting and smiling. I imagine this was a new experience for him. It was like patting a piece of hard-packed dirt yard, which may come from his habit of sleeping much of the day on top of a big pile of sand or dirt in part of our yard, that doesn't seem to serve any purpose besides his perch.

Besides a once-in-a-while head-pat, Buddy mostly likes to just have friends around, so he will trot over for “a walk” if we are headed into town, peeling off from us as soon as we cross the busy road into town; the population of dogs seems to have evolved into a species of traffic-aware dogs, as their non-aware or, even worse, car-chasing brethren have passed on to other lives by now.

But the most dramatic dog element for us when we first arrived was the nightly concerts that the Free Dogs of Paro put on each night. It often will start with duets, or sometimes trios. Then the trio may experience an attempted quartet by the arrival of an intruder who may be brought into the performance or driven away. This goes on throughout the night until—it seems to me in the wee hours of the morning—there is often a choral presentation with seemingly dozens of dogs of all voices and tribes from all over our little town, joining together for a 10 or 15 minute concert.

The frequent conclusion of the evening is the Dog Lecture, or Dog Monologue, or whatever it is. Maybe an hour before the alarm is going off, a single dog, somewhere out there, stating his or her position in a dog monotone: bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark etc. For a very long time.

But we know we have begun to settle in—not quite yet, there is more to say about the challenges of “settling in”—by the fact that we sleep through this nightly performance now.

Buddy still greets us each day, though.

Buddy in his favorite tire