Pictures from my recent winter trip to Sri Lanka...
Never been there before... Just spent three weeks driving a rented Tuktuk around the central and southern parts of the island (about 1000Km driven)... From cities to country rice fields to mountain tea plantations and coastal tourist surfing spots.
Overall, its a nice place and to all intents and purposes its the "next Bali"... Though its got a far more European tourist population than Australian (which still dominates a lot of Bali).
About the title...
There are lots of street dogs all over the country... you see them everywhere you go and they are usually very mangy and very skinny... The lucky few have collars and thus some sort of "owner"... These ones are usually less mangey but just as skinny as the others.
Anyway, you see them absolutely everywhere bat they are all very docile... Normally when you see these types of dogs in other places like Latin America for example, you need to be very careful around them because they are want to suddenly turn aggressive for little apparent reason... Its a defensive type aggression rather than predatory though, but that doesnt really matter if you are about to get bitten!
Anyway, thats just not the case in SriLanka... They are all incredibly docile.
I had my own theory about this in that I figured with so many dogs about and so many young children about in the same spaces, if any dog did start biting then the local community would deal with the dog (like permanently!) very quickly, and that therefore the aggressive dogs get weeded out fast and all tht is left are the docile ones.
So I asked a local about the dogs and my theory...
They said no... Its actually because virtually all of the island (certainly the areas that I was in) are very strongly Buddhist... and that means they are very passive toward animals (though they do seem to still eat quite a few of them)... and that because the people are so non aggressive toward the animals, the dogs dont get beaten on virtually at all (they do get shooed off in various circumstances but not hit or harmed)... And so the dogs dont need to live in fear of people all the time... and so they are not aggressive... I believe the story... you learn something new every day.
On the flip side, the Buddhist belif is also very non interventional in the street dogs breeding, so that is why you see so damn many of them everywhere and they are leading non violent lives but they are starving and mangey as bad as anywhere Ive seen... You win some and you lose some I guess.
On a different note... whoever designed the dogs chose a very poor battery for them... The dogs are all active in the early mornings till about 9am... after that their batteries all seem to run out at the same time and by 10am they are all laying absolutely flat all over the roads everywhere and the only thing they will move out of the way for is the large aggressive public transport busses... they are quite the traffic obstacle course :)
Anyway, here are a load of pictures...
Pictures are actually in reverse chronological order but I dont think it matters much :)
