Food For Thought

Thinking Big

For this project to succeed and to actually help improve the lives of 10,000 dogs it needs big radical solutions. I’m learning on the job and working on the sterilising of dogs is the top priority as that is the only way to truly end the suffering.

There are however other parts of the puzzle that I think can be improved. The food the stray dogs eat is one that I want to tackle now…

The Problems To Solve

• 1000s of dogs to feed

• Dry food is very low quality

• The cost

• The dogs don’t even enjoy the food (they eat it out of necessity)

• No nutritional value leading to health issues which are expensive to treat

A Quarter Of A Tonne (250kg)

I went out today and bought 250kg of dog food and distributed it to volunteers who feed the dogs on a daily basis. That will help feed about 400 dogs for a week (depending on how the volunteers mix it). That cost about 11,500 Baht or $300.

I obviously get a discount on it by buying in bulk so more dogs will get fed as a result. This is a good step in the right direction but I think it is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done…

The Amazing Volunteers

At the moment people are cooking rice and mixing it with the dry food. They are adding leftovers donated by restaurants, bones, stock or their own personal touches to make it tastier and to bulk it out. They all do this individually with passion and love but it is labour intensive and doubles the time it takes to look after the dogs.

The good news is the dogs love their cooking much more than the dried food on it’s own. They devour it.

The Solutions

I went out and got the dried food today to really visualise the problem and understand it. To see the issues and the scale. Staring at that 250kg of food I started thinking about…

• A central kitchen to cook up 500-1000kg of food per day

• A recipe that is agreed on by all and that is super healthy for the dogs

• Taste tasted with a range of dogs to ensure they love it

• Bulk buying ingredients to reduce costs

• Central location for daily volunteer pick up

• Cut overall costs for everybody freeing up $$$ to focus on medicines and other care the dogs need

• What if the recipe was so good that pet owners could buy it too? Could that help fund the food for the stray dogs?

• With veggies, meat, rice and other nutrients will this drastically improve the overall health of the dogs?

• Make it easy to replicate in other parts of the country

It sure makes a lot of sense to do this. There are logistical issues, storage concerns and plenty of other elements to work out but I’m going to tackle this and tackle it very quickly.

It seems like something that will cut costs, improve the dog’s lives and save time. Sometimes you can only learn by doing and that truck full of dry food opened my eyes to all this today.

Niall

P.S Jumbo helped me come up with a lot of this thinking today while we were on the beach. He was feeling unwell this week so I took him out for a very special day out which you can read about here.