Rosalie France resents natives that are scary, pesky or just plain barking.
Unless they're either very young, very old or very cute, I divide dogs into two general categories - annoying and scary. But that's at home, dogs abroad are a whole different species altogether.
I'm talking about the dogs that take the ethos of The Littlest Hobo and exploit it to the nth degree. They have no official owners and live an independent, indolent life more suited to a cat. These vagabonds are almost exclusively malnourished, mangy and pitifully thin. Alone, they pose to an adult almost no threat whatsoever, unlike some of the tough urban breeds we have here, owned by men with low self-esteem.
However, like teenagers, en masse they can be really quite frightening. Recently, friends of mine were walking down a rural road in Laos in search of a local landmark. A local dog fell in behind. No problem. Soon they became aware their entourage had grown to five or six, and they began feeling increasingly uncomfortable. A bit more of this intimidation and they abandoned all sightseeing, took refuge in the stall of an elderly peasant woman (causing an upset with her own retinue of beasts) and called a taxi for an expensive trip straight to the airport in Luang Prabang, pausing only to pick up their luggage.
This sort of thing has happened to me several times in Southeast Asia. The dogs in Rarotonga, though not so scary, are simply just too numerous and free-loving. Being provided with a constant fresh stream of air-freighted greenhorns on hired scooters just gagging to be chased must make these Raro dogs the envy of the canine world.
