Overcoming fear

Being used to strays since young and working with them today, I’m pretty used to watching them do their thing on the streets. Hence studying their body language and anticipating behaviours are also something that I’m used to. That being said, strays from different countries and regions tends to behave differently, this is due to the environment they live and grow up in. It also depends on whether or not people are involved, such as feeding them, giving them a place to sleep, or scaring them off whenever they see strays.

In this picture, I was in Hong Kong. These dogs were given a space beside the temple. They were all resting with relaxed body language, even though one was guarding the entrance, it was sleeping.

I was walking past this area after getting off from cable car, just decided to take a quick picture on my phone like what I usually do. It took about 2 seconds. For some reason the dog in the center woke up and lunged at me, I was about 7-8 meters away. One of the black dog suddenly appeared behind, followed the brown dog and both of them circled me. I turned my body to the side, slowly backed off looking at its direction and shouted “Hey” multiple times. I was prepared to be injured and was thinking which hand to use in the event of bites. They backed off after the longest 30 seconds of my life. Pretty lucky in a way the rest of the pack didn’t care. As this place is very much unavoidable after getting off the cable car, I looked up online to see if I can find anything. I saw a couple of reports about getting bitten with punctures and lacerations.

When I got back to hotel, I look through my phone for the first picture I took. I then notice the black dog walking over from the back, hidden behind the sign and shadows which I couldn’t see at the time, you may notice if you look at the picture again, right below the pink sign. It wasn’t the brown dog that was triggered by me, instead it was the black dog that saw me first, waking the brown dog, followed by the brown dog being the initiator in aggression. This sort of behaviour influence in pack dogs are not uncommon, but very difficult to predict as every pack’s experience towards people is different, hence their reaction after a trigger will be varied.