Little noses in the bin
The sweet smell of garbage has its own danger
IT’S SO early morning, my neighbours aren’t even awake, but as I look out over my little soi from an upper balcony of the townhouse, I see an old friend.
Readers may remember Seua, the soi dog who is really an “owned” dog, the one who constantly escapes from his home about a kilometre away to drop by our soi, where people feed him around meal time.
I haven’t seen him for awhile. Perhaps his owner has figured out how to fix his fence so that the dog can’t escape. If so, the repair work is unsuccessful. Seua is back on the soi.
He happily trots up and down the street, but suddenly, he stops and begins nosing around.
On our soi, the rubbish isn’t collected every day. Since garbage trucks cannot enter such a small soi, in a kind of entrepreneurial spirit, “semi” garbage guys come by in pushcarts and pick up our trash two or three times a week and bring the collection to a larger soi, where it is eventually loaded onto garbage trucks.
The semi-guys haven’t picked up the trash for several days, and my neighbours have left their garbage outside their gates. The piles are, well, piling up, and although my neighbours have carefully tied up each sack, Seua can’t resist the allure of their rotting smells.
Myself, I can’t smell a thing, but Seua’s much keener sense tells him that there are riches in those plastic bags. It doesn’t matter that he’s obviously well-fed and healthy. Food smells mean potential treats, and he begins pulling at the bags.
Supermarkets in Bangkok have now started changing to biodegradable bags, a welcome adjustment that is sure to help the environment. Alas. Biodegradable or not, bags are still dangerous. They are not toys for babies or children or even animals.
Seua begins chewing at the bags, spilling the contents all over the street. In his excitement, he eats both plastic and discarded food, not a good combination for any animal. That plastic can get caught in the gut and cause all sorts of digestive problems that may lead to terrible pain, if not death.
One of my box turtles is, in fact, addicted to plastic bags, and when there’s no turtle food, she heads for the nearest bit of plastic for sustenance.
Luckily for Seua, he pulls apart one bag with metal things inside. The resulting bang-bang-bang alerts the homeowners inside to the little thief. They scream, and the dog scampers away.
Then, to my horror, I see my soi boys Thep and Thong come wandering by the sacks. The two cats, who consider my house their personal hotel, can have as much food as they wish in my “cat restaurant”, but the smells from the bags that Seua has opened are too attractive to ignore.
You’d think they’d be too choosy to eat rubbish, but Thong has decided that some skewers left from grilled pork are really delicious. Luckily, they’re too big for him to swallow, but he chews on them, extracting the last bit of juice from the wood.
Yes, there are splinters. Yes, he tries to swallow them, and I don’t need to tell you, do I, how deadly a sharp object (no matter how small) can be inside the oesophagus, stomach and intestines. I doubt that he’s really successful, but I rush downstairs and call the boys inside before Thong can finish his “breakfast”.
In one short morning, two cats and a dog have given me three good reasons for using containers for storing your rubbish.
