Taking the dog for a walk?

I'll continue on the dog subject that I started in the previous posting. I was very happy to find that here are a lot of dogs in Phnom Penh, and the majority of them seem to live good lives. Some of the dogs are kept as kind of watch dogs, walking around freely as they like, sleeping on the pavement outside the family shop. Other dogs are kept as pets, family dogs. And, this is the interesting part, they stay in the house - the whole time! My first day at the office, I started to discuss my favourite subject - pets - with a Cambodian colleague of mine who also adores pets and has three dogs and God knows how many cats at home. I asked her curiosly where she takes her dogs for a walk, as Phnom Penh don't have very many green areas, fields or forests to talk about. She just looked at me in a funny way as she didn't understand the question. "Well, when you get home from work or in the weekends, where do you take the dogs for some play and excersise?" I asked. "Walks? That we don't have time for" she answered. "They stay in the house. They can play in the livingroom. Sometimes I give them a ball, then they play a little more, that they like". Ok, this was a kind of unexpected answer to a Swedish dog owner, used to a constant bad concious the days my bull terrier is not taken for at the least three hour long walks.

The other day I spoke to my khmer teacher about dogs. "Oh, I would love to have a dog" he said. "So why don't you get one", I asked? (In English, of course, my khmer is not nearly that advanced yet). "I have had dogs before" he replied, "Three of them, one at a time. But everytime when the dog is approaching adult hood we have taken it back to the breeder. We just can't keep it". I asked him why. "Because it smells very bad when they poop on the floor" he said. "But why don't you train it to go outside to do that?" I asked him. "Because we are not used to train dogs. And beside from that, our garden is not covered by grass, but by concrete, so even if it poops outside, it smells terrible when the poop lays on the ground in the sun". "But don't you take the dog for a walk so it can do whatever a dog needs to do, somewhere else"? I asked. " Walk away with the dog from the house? No, why should I do that"? my teacher asked in a tone that suggested that now I was asking quite stupid questions. I didn't take this subject any further, I just pictured to myself how the neighbours probably would look at me, if I would do such a strange thing as taking a dog for a walk in this Phnom Penh neighbourhood, and in a Swedish way bending down to pick up the dog poop in a plastic bag - saving it for later.... :-)