Liftoff - Here We Go!

A huge amount of dogs now being helped

Regular readers might have thought last year was about helping individual dogs with their comebacks, writing a book, media appearance or other happy dog videos I share.

There certainly were a lot of those things but the real planning was happening in the background in terms of the mission to save millions of street dogs around the world. I’m happy to share some of the scale of what is now happening…

17th Match 2022 - The First Dog Sterilised…Mr Fox

To explain what is happening today we need to go back to the very first sterilisation (for those not familiar with the word it mean spaying / neutering) about 20 months ago.

I remember renting a car and going to sterilise Mr Fox. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and I picked him because he was super gentle, loved attention and always stayed in the same place. It was all about learning the process and how it worked. That involved…

• Picking him up in the jungle and driving him to his appointment

• Paying about $50 and seeing him get sedated and operated on in the vets

• Bringing him back to his spot in the jungle

• Giving him medicines daily to ensure it didn’t get infected

• Taking out his stitches (I literally had to learn on Youtube).

It was a scary process for both me and Mr Fox but we did it and he would never be responsible for making any puppies. Something clicked in that moment and I remember thinking “wow this is the solution to truly ending the suffering of street dogs”.

Sterilising Is Very Hard

I spent the first 6 months doing about 150 dogs myself and I did this because I wanted to learn the process. I can’t explain how hard it is. These are not household pets that you phone up and book an appointment for 2 weeks in advance at the local vet. These are wild street dogs who very often don’t even want to be touched by humans.

I was crawling under shacks, running through fields, getting bitten and generally having a very steep learning curve. Add in the fact that it is a different culture, the sterilisations all need to be paid for and the constant hard knocks and I could see it was going to be tough.

In 2022 I was able to do 302 dogs in total and although it felt like I had climbed Everest personally it was barely even a drop in the ocean in terms of ending suffering even locally on the small island I live on.

Finding Wonderful Partners

2023 was a big step up with 2000 dogs done in total which was a 7X increase year over year, but again to me it felt like a drop in the ocean.

Of course it’s an impressive number but when you see the daily suffering these dogs endure then I started thinking about how to have another 10X increase on numbers. Easy to say, harder to do.

2023 saw us working on establishing Happy Doggo as a charity that would allow us to start supporting organisations at a bigger scale. We’ll be able to sterilise at least 20,000 dogs in 2024 with the following wonderful partners…

• Soi Dog

• PACS

• Vet Van

• Rob’s Dogs

You can help a few dogs on your own but what I’ve quickly learnt is you need to work with others to help drive real meaningful change. Solving this problem will take an army of people around the world.

Pouring Petrol On What Works

All of the above is easy to write down but it hasn’t just happened overnight. There are literally about 100+ people needed to deliver this type of scale. I love the fact that we will deliver at least 20,000 sterilisations in 2024 but I’m also furiously thinking in the background about ways we could double that. Maybe even as early as the 2nd half of 2024.

When I wonder am I maybe thinking too big or trying to move too fast I just have to look at the photos on my phone of dogs like Tina and Shaq in agony. There are 500 million street dogs in the world. We could never possibly go around fixing all their injuries or finding them all homes so with so many suffering there is only one solution. Stop the flow of new dogs. Turn off the tap.

The only things that can slow me down are…

1. Lack of funding

2. Good partners and world class delivery on what we promise

3. Lack of ambition

I don’t think any of those will slow us down. Not easy but also given the stakes being so high for the dogs they are not insurmountable obstacles.

Sometimes I write things down that seem ludicrous and could never realistically happen. Here is one such thought I have in my head as I write this…

Thinking of ways that we could get to sterilising 1 million dogs per month around the world within the next couple of years.

To put that in some perspective we are going to do around 1500 in January. It would cost between $25-50 million dollars to do 1 million dogs per month. $300-600 million a year. Of course those are preposterous things to be thinking but the problem is so big and the suffering so great it needs radical thinking.

20 Months ago when I was nervously waiting for Mr Fox to finish his operation as the first dog I would have laughed in your face if you told me we’d be here funding 1500 dogs in January 2024. But here we are.

I’m nervous, excited and most of all immensely humble that people support me in this mission. I also always feel that I am just the one lucky enough to be doing what so many others would love to do. I don’t take that support and backing lightly.

Wherever you are starting 2024 I hope it can be a positive year for you.

Time for me to help some street dogs at scale.

Big love

Niall

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