Man's Best Friend

Today's Sunday Star story about Lucky and Flo (see above photo), a couple of dogs brought into the country to help 'sniff' out pirated CDs and DVDs makes fascinating reading. Apparently the dogs have struck fear in the hearts of local movie pirates over the past month, and pirates will be further aggrieved to learn that as far as the two canine crusaders are concerned, sniffing out hidden contraband stashes of optical discs are all in a day's work. They help bust pirated goods to the tune of millions of ringgit and the desperate pirates have now placed a bounty of RM50,000 on their heads!

I have never had any experience with dogs and have never owned one, but my wife's family (her late father was a senior police officer) kept a guard dog at their Aida Street bungalow in Singapore in the mid 60's. There was once a fearsome neighbourhood mongrel called Blackie which somehow never got used to me and chased me on my bicycle almost every day when I was a schoolboy in Seremban. It became the bane of my existence. Many years later I was to find out that the little boy who owned the pesky mutt grew up to become a colleague of mine in the port and together we laughed over this for some years thereafter.

When I started greenfield port operations as general manager of the new West Port in Pulau Indah, Port Klang with a few officers and a skeleton staff in August 1994, the island was quite deserted then. The connecting bridge to the mainland had just been completed and our cars and motorbikes were the very first to be seen on the island. We had almost daily encounters with alligators, ant eaters and what looked like panther tracks outside our makeshift office cabins. Everyday at dusk on my way home during the first few days was especially a terrifying experience for me, having to walk to my car surrounded by a large howling and growling pack of wild dogs. It struck me then that the island's wild dogs' strange fascination for my old Proton Saga must surely be for the simple fact that they have never seen any cars before! True enough, they all appeared to lose interest, completely ignored me and stopped chasing my car after about a week or so.

I much prefer cats actually, and we have recently lost our beloved Koko in his sleep a few months ago which completely devastated my entire family. But thats another story ...