"Dog-Lover is Swindled" Topic

A DOG lover fears she has been conned out of £7,000.00 GBP which she spent trying to save an abandoned pooch she fell for online.

Jirral Darmoise, 45, flew to Bangkok in Thailand on Sunday after a costly year-long battle to adopt a St. Bernard called Balloon.

The Oxford artist sold her possessions to pay to keep the homeless dog alive, before flying to collect him from his Thai "rescuer"…

link

Person swindled by internet scam.

Not really news is it. But the dog is novel.

My understanding is that the scams are usually so transparent in order to engage the truly gullible. This one looks positively cunning in comparison!

JohnG

Wouldnt a St Bernard feed a Thai family of four for a month or more?

My understanding is that the scams are usually so transparent in order to engage the truly gullible.

Being outrageously ridiculous is an approach scams to limit the people you deal with to the very easy ones to manipulate. So some, not all scams; the approach is inclusive of, but not exclusive to scams affected through the Internet.

Wouldnt a St Bernard feed a Thai family of four for a month or more?

Depends on what you mean. If you tried to eat it, with the organ meat included (not common, but not unheard of), it probably wouldn't stretch for a month. You could most likely stretch the fat for cooking over several months (but that doesn't give you nutrition).

Given a St. Bernie probably costs about ~$1K, it's sale is roughly equivalent to the Thai average family wage for three months.

BTW, a family of four is not an average Thai family. Family size has decreased to about three kids since WWII, but still routinely includes what Westerners would call a multi-generational extended family with a couple main wage earners and eight to ten supplemental incomes. Especially when you get outside Bangkok and Chang Mai.

Not related to the scam but i pitty some of the "fur dogs" in South East Asia. To keep say the siberian husky in full clean coats. They live inside all year in air conditioned roons…

I had an Alaskan Malamute and could only let him five minutes at a time out for logistics reasons in July and August in southern Virginia. I shudder to think about such a dog in Thailand.

On the flip side, I had one of my new neighbours in Maryland call animal control about him when he was outside at night in February in 30F weather (intermittent slushy flurries). He was curled up in the middle of the yard (as opposed to on or under the porch, next to a tree or bamboo patch, or other available shelter) enjoying it. When I had called him in two hours earlier he had just stood there and looked at me like, "Come in? Now? Are you nuts?"

"Wouldnt a St Bernard feed a Thai family of four for a month or more?"

Thais don't eat dogs. They believe in "Tom di dai di"-- do good, get good. So they feed stray dogs and cats, although many don't treat them as pets.

Thais don't eat dogs.

Close. It's illegal (since the 60's, I think) to eat dog in Thailand. There's also a significant law enforcement effort in place to stop it from happening, especially in the northeast.

Some people say that eating dog is not a historically founded practice in Thailand, but really, the concept of a "historically founded practice" in this reaches back in time beyond the modern borders of what we now call Thailand. While eating dog is pretty much certainly not a part of long reaching traditional culture along the coast (where you normally had reasonable access to lots of fish pretty much all the time), the Khmer Empire certainly stretched into areas where it was a common practice.