Friday 2 May 2014

The dog walking experience.

When a client contacted me and asked about the walking tour, I was happy to give him all the details he wanted. But then there was one thing, he said he wanted to come with his dog. I asked my self; "How are going to do this?".
I started thinking of all the routes that we could use which had less people and of which we could do the tour on day like Sunday because it is much easier to do the walking tour. But then the client said his dog would go any where, I didn't have to worry about changing the routes. The tour was actually done on a Saturday.  The dog was a beautiful Labrador of about two years and half called Zeus.

  
The seller playing with Zeus.


We started our tour quite well, we reached the first market and some people were wondering why we hada dog with us. Some people were agitated with this peaceful dog thinking it could harm them. The thing is, in Uganda dogs are mostly trained for security purposes and they are quite scary. So most people think all dogs are the same. But we kept convincing them the dog was friendly and peaceful and then they would try to touch Zeus to prove it. They fell in love with him once they realised he was actually cool and calm. We took a break at this market for a bit for him to take some water.

Zeus got himself a bright colored necklace.

  
 Cuddling Zeus. 
We continued our trip on Kampala streets and people kept giving us space to walk because of the fear of the dog. But this is one of the tours I have enjoyed, peoples' reactions and walking this wonderful and most behaved dog was great. It taught me a lot about how people think of animals or dogs. I think we need more pet culture in Uganda. We need to give more love to these animals.
When we passed in Owino market people thought we were selling. We got comments like; "Are you selling?", "How much can I give you?", "What a beautiful dog!", "What do you feed it on?", and so on. There were still some people who were agitated.
We later had another break for him to take some water. He was really tired.

Relaxing time.

Posing for a photo with Zeus.
 All in all, this was a good experience. Zeus was very strong than I expected, he gave me a good work out with my arms we kept switching him.
If you ever want to walk your dog, write to us. Lets find him/her a different route than yours to see Kampala. Dogs need to see their city, don't they?