As I commented in an earlier post [1], the village where I live in Thailand has a serious problem with stray cats. There are plenty of stray dogs as well, but they appear better taken care of because of the deterrent role of dogs in dealing with burglars and trespassers. Since our property (as well as the property of a friendly Australian fellow who lives down the street) does not have a guard dog, it attracts a lot of stray cats looking for protection. As these cats are not cuddly nor very sanitary, and as we have not desired to have a guard dog for the premises yet, we have had to find other ways of combating the stray cats.

One of the solutions we have hit on that has, so far, shown uneven but not entirely unsatisfactory results, is placing a bounty on the head of the cats. This is not as macabre as one might first think. The Thais have a strong aversion to killing animals (not necessarily to eating meat, but to doing the slaughtering in the first place, a task they leave to the Muslims), so the initial idea someone had about using crossbows to hunt down the cats was nixed. Instead we got a cage to capture the cats, then we would bring the cage to a temple, where apparently it is common for abandoned animals (and probably children too, sadly) to be given to the temples. I suppose it is more meritorious in the eyes of the largely Buddhist Thais to outsource unpleasant tasks like taking care of unwanted animals to the temples than it is to develop an infrastructure of animal shelters as is more common in the West.

Even with the bounty, though, I have been a little disappointed in the lack of enterprising spirit among the students here. Most of the students here are Lahu. There are three types of Lahu (just like there are three parts of Gaul): Black Lahu, Red Lahu, and Yellow Lahu. I’m not quite sure how the three got to be different–it is hard to find good ethnographical information (in English) on the Lahu peoples and other hill tribes of Southeast Asia. A lot of the teachers here (myself included) have a bit of an inside joke of calling ourselves White Lahu. At any rate, the Lahu are world renowned for being excellent hunters, but I have to say that the hunting skills of most of the students are not overwhelmingly impressive when it comes to nabbing stray cats. So far the only student with any successful captures (I had one myself, about which I will shortly comment) was a Karen student from the refugee camps who is also our current Student of the Month (he is across the board an excellent student, a hard worker, and a quick learner), who caught two kittens himself by using a cleverly designed rope trap.

An additional problem that comes with a bounty is that it tends to encourage those who are enterprising enough to desire to collect money yet not interested in actually solving the problem to “capture” other kittens in the area and bring them to the cage and to attempt to collect the bounty. Our resident Kachin student from Burma did this yesterday (where she got the cat, I don’t know), and since the cat was not one of our usual strays (which are very skittish), the cat was sufficiently situationally unaware that I was able to grab it myself and capture it, and the student who brought it decided (wisely) to return it where she had gotten it. It was a cute little kitten, in a Little Orphan Annie or Oliver Twist ragamuffin kind of way. It was even mildly cuddly, for a stray, with a cute and endearing mew. At any rate, now our stray cat population has been cut roughly in half, which makes for a much more hygienic campus environment. We might not even need a guard dog after all, for now.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/we-are-siamese-if-you-dont-please/