March 2023 | Dedicated to all the dogs I have grown up&old with.
It’s pretty much a cultural thing, I’d say. I’ve had pets since I was a teenager, both in Laos and in the States.
I love them equally, but the way I treat them is totally different. In Laos, being a tropical country, we usually let our dogs live outside, and my home situation offers a lot of space for them to run around. They even hang out in the neighborhood themselves and come back when they get tired, sometimes with a few scrapes or covered in ticks and fleas. But they have a good “animal instinct” always manage to find their ways home, if not getting into an accident or captured by bad people(yes! there are people who steal dogs!). It’s pretty typical to see them hanging by their own out & about here in south-east Asia, not only in Laos particularly.
So, out of the blue, I started to wonder which dogs would be happier—those treated like humans but always on a leash and caged or locked-in all the time, or those who are free to roam in potentially dangerous places?
I guess all of them find happiness in their own way where they keep loyalty to their owners; just like all of us who are brought up differently but still manage to find our own version of contentment.