60/ 100 Grass Mat Dogs
Anything Can be a Bed
Today is the 60th dog photograph I’ve posted from my trips to India and, although they are all different, there are definitely two noticeable things about them all.
- Most of the dogs are asleep, or at least resting.
- Most of them are laying on a makeshift bed.
If you look hard at the photograph above you’ll see that there actually is a plastic grass mat underneath the five dogs. Admittedly two of the pups might only have the tips of their feet touching it, but the idea is there.
In India the top-tier bed seemed to be the sturdy and enclosed interior of a Tuk Tuk, closely followed by the seat or floor of a scooter. Really, though, they seemed to prefer anything at all to simply sleeping on the floor. A pile of litter, an old fire pit full of ash, a dirty sack or a plastic bag. In villages around the outskirts of Pushkar, where the ground is all hard-packed earth, dogs would make holes to sleep in and even these would frequently have a bit of plastic in them, or a scrap of paper.
My own dog, Chip, is exactly the same. He frequently comes to lay outside the bathroom when I’m having a shower and will make a nest on the carpet out of my t-shirt or even a single sock. It surely can’t offer much in the way of extra comfort so why does he do it, especially since he must know after doing it every day for the past 9 years that he is going to be ousted off of it after a few minutes?
