2015 Run for the King

…And his Dog

There are a lot of so-called Soi Dogs in Bangkok. These are dogs that have been abandoned and have to fend for themselves. There are probably thousands of them in the city and almost everywhere else in Thailand. I plan to write more about Soi Dogs in some future entry, but for now I wanted to mention our Annual Run for the King marathon held every December 5th, the day of the King’s birthday. Over the years this has become one of the largest running/walking events in Thailand. Last year 8,000 people participated. It looks like there will be about 12,000 running and walking in the 2015 event. I have mentioned the marathon in past Bangkok Blog entries. For example, I wrote this entry in November 2013.

This year much of the money raised at the run will be donated to Project Street Dogs, an animal care shelter specifically for stray dogs in Hua Hin, a city on the southeast coast. Hua Hin is the current home of the King and has been the summer residence to the Royal Family for a many years.

The reason some of the money will be used to help the animal shelter is that dogs are very important to the King. In the late 1990’s the King was given a stray dog, which he called Tong Daeng, which means copper in Thai. He became totally enamoured with this dog, even writing a book in 2002 called “The Story of Tong Daeng.” It became an instant best seller and is today a prized book that is owned by tens of thousands of Thais. You can still get it at Amazon.com if you’d like to see what it has to say. The book became a parable of the King’s thoughts on Thai life and responsibilities.

In advance of the run, I have been seeing lots of evidence of the continuing importance of Tong Daeng to Thais. The most explicit and extreme is a gargantuan 1-1/2 storey statue of him at one of the local malls. It’s pretty clear that this dog has a huge place in the collective hearts of Thailand.  It could be that what has prompted all this interest in Tong Daeng now is a set of animated feature movies on the dog that are being released on December 3rd.  This trio of movies has gotten a lot of media attention and seeing as the King’s birthday is two days after their release, perhaps all of this attention has created the stir.  And because our Foundation has also decided to use some of the proceeds of the run for the dog shelter that is associated with the King, there has been even more stirring of the media pot.  At any rate, even our marketing department seems to have gotten caught up in this frenzy.  All of our posters have dogs running in the marathon as you will see in the slides above.

The run and walk will take place on December 5th. Lots of money will be raised by the Kluaynamthai Foundation and much of it will go to help other dogs not quite so lucky as Tong Daeng.

This year, the event should probably be called The Run for the King…and His Dog.