The one thing we have learned from living our lives with and alongside Bali Street Dogs, maybe the only thing we have taken notice of in regard to their teachings, is to mind your own business.  As supposedly intelligent and highly evolved as we like to regard ourselves to be, we have this egotistical developmental flaw that still see’s us sticking our limited range of senses into everything and everybody else’s business.

Bali Street Dogs don’t do that, probably because they are just too damn busy, just trying to survive in what has become a human dominated jungle, a brutal reality were narcissism in its most malignant manifestation has reached epidemic proportions, a new age religion for the masses.

With a Bali Street Dog you see what you get and you get what you see, if you look closely enough.   

There are those who purport to see and arrogantly know what is best about all things, but if you scrape and dare to dig a bit deeper, a much clearer and disturbing truth will emerge from the depths of layered faces, a mass of distraction covering the truth of human hubris and fake performance.  There are those who have the best interests of Bali Street Dogs up and at you and they are genuine.  They are usually those financially limited beings who really do suffer the daily reality and worrying unease about the plight of a fellow sentient being, those who are at risk of ruin, mind and emotionally wise, not to mention money wise.  However there are those who regard their Mother Theresa efforts as nothing more than self serving, a performance of cloaked philanthropy sold to an unsuspecting and foolishly gullible gaggle who swallow the act in bucketfuls.

You live and you learn, sometimes.  What we have learned from Bali Street Dogs and what can be imparted is fairly simple really.

Mind your own business, have respect for yourself and do no harm.  At the very human risk of applying anthropomorphism to the teaching of Bali Street Dogs, maybe just maybe they are furry Buddhists in disguise and maybe just maybe we can be so very thankful they are not simian by nature.

To those who are struggling to uphold the welfare of all ‘lower’ sentient beings, all that can be said is that your genuine efforts are being directed outwardly and not in a mindset of doing it simply, to make yourself feel better.

  

It’s so very easy to judge, we all do it, its part of the human condition.  Everything changes, so much quicker than our sophisticated brains can really fathom.  We are hardwired to survive and like any dying entity with a nervous system, our grey matter is designed to jettison all other bodily functions in order to hold on until the final moment.

In a rapidly and increasingly shifting real world reality, the changes are coming at us in tsunami like waves and we are unloading extraneous baggage at a spin out of control level that is unavoidably apparent, even to our selfish instinct to survive at all costs.

When you take on the responsibility for the care and or guardianship of another sentient being, it is a commitment not only to that life but for the duration of that life, no matter the duration or quality.  Circumstances change but the commitment and durability at whatever cost that may entail must not, otherwise we are nothing more than yet another failed bunch of cellular muck that didn’t quite make the grade in evolutionary terms.

The rate of canine carnage in dumpage terms globally is unfathomable and even with records that mirror the exposure in levels that make the queasiness in guttural aspects sickening, species extermination is now an accepted norm.  A position that is comforting in a cognitive dissonance stanch, a level that is astounding in the extreme.

The amount of Bali Street Dogs that are dumped and run out of existence is in itself a reflection of where humanity has reached.  Well meaning foreigners who have a thirst for the unknown are certainly responsible for the act, local people who crave the new and trendy play their part.  Yet underpinning all of this is an unquenchable need for self gratification and a yearning to consume and possess the latest fashion, a plethora of satisfying and endless soup laden lumpfuls, for the needy.

Bali Street Dogs are not fashionable, that title is reserved for their cousins, the domesticated dog.  The dog of all dogs, the proto dog, the link and bridge between wild and furbaby is so valuably unique, that it and they are what they simply are.  It just is.

Having lived with, spent time with and learned from a conscious being that is still pure in its presence, has been a privilege that no money can buy and no passing fad can match.