Stray Dog Follows Cyclist in Ukraine

Here is an interesting experience with a stray dog that a man on a bicycle tour had in Ukraine (see blog here). A young dog started following him and did so for a total of 50km over two days without him ever feeding it. As the cyclist explains, it was a big dilemma for him as giving it food would have encouraged it to keep tagging along, which would have been difficult over a 1,700km international tour with several border crossings, but not helping it beyond providing shelter from the rain at night was a difficult choice to make. (A contrasting story to the one (see here) where a stray dog followed Chinese cyclists over a similar distance to Tibet and ended up as their pet – in that case they did feed it).

I don’t pretend to be able to explain the dog’s behaviour but ideas of abandonment of an unwanted puppy spring to mind. The video is particularly interesting to me for showing some of the dog’s natural behaviour such as being silent except when the cyclist got too far ahead and creeping off to the side of the road to hide whenever he stopped. Again, I'm not going to try to interpret why it was like this but I think we can learn a lot about dogs' innate behaviour by looking beyond pets.

He eventually managed to shake it off and (optimistically) hoped it managed to fend for itself.

Learn more about the lives and issue of unowned dogs in my e-book ”A Stray View” available from Bangkok Books (readable as .pdf on any computer)