What to do when you encounter abandoned puppies
I write this now because it wasn't that long ago that someone came to our kennels with a box of 3 puppies that they had found on the side of the road a bus stop. The puppies were behind it and wandering around a bit - so they said - and thankfully they were able to tell us exactly which bus stop it was. We appreciated the population attempting to help out with our efforts to ease the suffering of the dog and cat community here in Krabi, but this is not really the correct way to go about it, as I will demonstrate in our follow-up with this situation.
The thing is, unless you are intimately familiar with the area, your Good Samaritan acts may actually end up being traumatizing to the animals. In this particular situation the puppies hadn't actually been abandoned, this is just where they and their mother set up as a home for the time being. It is easy to understand why a mother would do this because these bus stations are a great place for her to find food handouts from people that are waiting for the bus. While Thailand doesn't have any sort of official animal control or animal welfare system in place, the Thai people are usually quite compassionate when it comes to homeless dogs and will hand out food to them when they see them. This is why the dogs tend to gravitate towards markets, near restaurants or in this situation, a bus stop.
When we brought the dogs back and waited around for a while, the mother actually returned. It turns out that she was just out looking for food for herself and was always going to come back to the pups.
As an animal lover, I can completely understand why someone would feel compelled to reach out to these two and try to "save them" but unfortunately in this particular situation this was the wrong thing to do. Imagine the heartache that the mother felt when she returned only to discover that her babies were no longer there. She likely spent a lot of time running around frantically looking for her offspring and when we returned and hung out for a while with the puppies with us, she came running back with her tail wagging. I regret that I didn't get a photo of that because it was so endearing but the moment was something that I wanted to just witness, not just document.
Once the puppies were reunited we gave all of them some food and then set out to checking out Mom (carefully, because we don't know her and she doesn't know us) and also the babies. We then transported the group together to the clinic to make sure everyone is treated with vaccinations and mom has been scheduled to be sterilized.
We will be keeping all of them together during this entire process because while pups will quickly recover emotionally from being separated from their mother, the mothers do not. There have been instances I have witnessed of mother dogs becoming completely depressed and refusing to do so much as eat. They lose all motivation to live in some instances. All dogs are different though and this is not to say that it is always like this.
We do appreciate the couple who brought the dogs in to our clinic but it would have been far more productive if they had just called us or looked us up online. We put a sticker with our information and QR code at this very bus stop. Once the community becomes more familiar with us we will be better able to help everyone.
So the lesson here for everyone out there is this: Unless you are intimately familiar with the area that you discover seemingly abandoned puppies in, it is better to just leave them there for a time. If you are concerned enough perhaps check back on them several days in a row to see if a mother is there. ONLY once it has been determined that a mother is definitely not in the picture should the puppies be taken away from the location. Don't worry about this taking a long time since mother dogs tend to spend about 90% of the day with their pups and only leave when they need to seek out food or water for themselves.
Unfortunately, the only option that we have at this point with this particular family is to return them to this area once they have all been treated. We do not have any ability to find them homes at the moment and our kennels are beyond full, we have nowhere to put them. Hopefully they have a safe area that they can stay out here and that people will continue to feed them. In the meantime our team will be personally stopping by to check on them once they are returned to ensure they are safe.
I wish we could do more but this is all we are able to do for them at this time.
If you would like to see how you can help out or simply spread the word, please visit our website at
http://krabianimalwelfare.org
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