The dogs of Banglamung - Banglamung Wildlife Breeding Center in Thailand also provides shelter for stray dogs

Animals, Fall, 2002 by Sy Montgomery

Standing on his hind legs, Stripe, a 250-pound moon bear with yellowish eyes, is looking Gary Galbreath in the face through the partially closed window of the Jeep's passenger seat--a window that, he discovers with some dismay, is not easily rolled up. Meanwhile another bear, having chewed for some time on one of our tires, is attempting to remove the hubcap of a rear wheel with his claws.

Inside our vehicle, we are adrift among a sea of bears. Besides the 2 chewing and probing the Jeep, there are another 5 moon bears within 20 feet of us, and perhaps another 10 within sight. Some lounge in shallow pools, sitting upright with arms spread out like fat old men in the whirlpool bath at a health club. A few relax beneath trees, leaning their backs against the trunks. Some stand, watching us with benign, almost avuncular interest, while others lunch on rice mixed with dog biscuits.

I have never been to a Club Med, but this is how I imagine it might look--if all the guests were big, fat, black, and hairy.

But this is no resort. Nor is it a zoo. For these animals, as well as another 45 moon bears and 14 sun bears, 50 macaques, 30 gibbons, 10 crocodiles, 4 binturongs, and 200 dogs, Banglamung Wildlife Breeding Center is essentially a well-appointed refugee center.

Gary, an evolutionary biologist at Northwestern University, and I had heard about Banglamung shortly before we had left the United States. Located just outside the popular Thai resort city of Pattaya, 85 miles southeast of Bangkok, the center hosts some 60 moon bears--surely one of the largest concentrations of these animals in the world. It would be a good place, we figured, to check for the mysterious gold-furred bears we had come to investigate.

None of the animals here were born at Banglamung. The dogs are strays that had been dropped off at Wat Yan, a nearby Buddist temple. All the rest were once wild, captured by poachers, and then confiscated by the Thai Royal Forest Department.

The bears are refugees from the forest; the dogs are refugees from the streets. Just 50 yards from the door of the center's dorm live the dogs; the bears live on the other side in a one-and-a-half-acre outdoor enclosure.

When most of the dogs arrived here, they were mangy and covered with sores. Outside a terrible, fleshy, decaying smell comes from Pretty Pup. A gray mid-sized mongrel, he is entirely bald from mange, and bleeding from a festering sore on the side of one ear. He smiles and wags his scraggly tail whenever he sees a person approach. His testicles have shrunken to a single empty looking sac; he looks utterly naked and vulnerable. His toes are swollen from infection. When he was picked up a few days ago from the temple streets, he was given a shot of Ivermectin, which is already killing the mites, but the volunteer vet tech, Phil, tells us it will be months before his hair grows back.

A small pack of the sickest dogs--one with a bloody eye, another with a chewed ear--stays by the house. Twitch, a sweet black female with short hair, bounces when she walks because of neurological damage to her hindquarters. Both legs twitch constantly when she lies down, as if she is having a dream. Brains is a spotted puppy so named because half her skull was exposed from a wound when she was picked up from the temple. When the other dogs pick on her, she yelps piteously, and Gill Basnett, 23, a volunteer with a degree in resource and environmental management from Australia's National University in Canberra, rushes to comfort her.

No one here hesitates to cuddle even the sickest, smelliest, mangiest dog. One volunteer got mange herself, we were told, which I had not thought possible. The staff doesn't name any dog until it has survived a week, because otherwise their hearts would be broken again and again.

The volunteers who work here are the Mother Theresas of animals. Caring for the poorest of the poor, nursing the sick, they live for three or six months in this tiny house, cooled only by two electric fans, washing at two sinks and a bath they call The Swamp, and cooking food stored in a half-sized refrigerator on a hotplate. Reading material in the volunteers' library consists of volumes with names like Langur Behavior and Husbandry Notes, Mazuri Zoo Foods, Evaluation of Traditional Herbal Remedies for Thai Elephants. On the Things to Do blackboard today: castrate two pups; catch mange dog x 3; vaccine and deworm binturong; deworm macaques; deworm deer.

Among worms and mange and the homeless dogs, quite a number of the volunteers quickly turn around and go back home, according to Gary van Zuylen, director of the Thai Society for the Conservation of Wild Animals (TSCWA). "I can understand them wanting something for themselves," he said, "but that's not the sort of person we need here. You have to be in this for the animals." In fact, two of the new volunteers we meet here, having pledged three months, will be gone within a week.

Those who stay, though, come to see the world differently. "It's amazing," says Gill, blonde and sturdy and competent, her T-shirt smeared with muddy paw-prints. "Growing up in Canberra, I always wanted a dog. Though 200 is a bit much," she says. "Back home, most of these dogs would be put down."