Making Massive Change While Getting Punched In The Face

You just have to keep getting off the canvas

If you follow me on a day to day basis on social media you’ll see that we’ve been getting absolutely slammed with dog problems and chaotic situations in the last month.

It feels like every day I wake up and have some individual wins where we save dogs but then along comes a huge setback that feels like a punch in the face.

While there are some harsh truths about the reality we face on the ground this isn’t a downbeat or sad email. I want to…

• Share the problems

• Show what is working

• Offer up a big solution

Lets dive in…

Pedro And His Friends

One of our newest arrivals is Pedro. A wonderful dog who came into our lives a month ago and who was very down on his luck. We’ve been fixing him up and as you can see he is getting ready for the festive season. Pedro has had several operations and lots of medicines, rest, good food and love. We even have a home lined up for him for when he recovers. So far, so good.

But Pedro only has a smile on his face because he is lucky enough to be oblivious to what happened to his friends on the street…

Just a few days after Pedro came in to stay at Happy Doggo I got word that the 5 street dogs he lived with had been intentionally poisoned. An absolutely brutal reality of the life that street dogs face. Pedro only avoided death by the fact that he looked so sick and we took him in.

It’s very hard to explain what this does to the people who are kind to dogs and who try to make their lives better. It breaks our hearts.

Am I A Busy Fool?

With time being such a limited resouce, I have to question everything I do.

Theres a small migrant worker’s camp where I have been feeding dogs for 2 years. It’s home to about 30 workers who are incredibly poor and also a handful of free roaming dogs. In the last year in this area alone…

• I have adopted out Tommy to England

• Brought Snickers in for adoption

• Seen 5 puppies die with Parvovirus

• Served 1000s of meals

• Sterilised every single dog that appears

• Provided medical care for big and small injuries

Despite doing all that the local people just keep getting puppies. As soon as I get a dog adopted (a huge undertaking) the parents will get the kids a new puppy. It feels like a game of whack-a-mole. Talking to them hasn’t worked.

Just a week ago one of the dogs in the migrant camp called Rolo got smashed by a car. I found him screaming under one of the shacks. It required a huge operation that cost over $2000 and will involve 6 weeks of rehab.

You can see how although I feel we are helping so many dogs here it is also a never ending circle. I often feel like the dogs are treated like trash and we are just there to pick them up, fix them and save the odd life.

Flooding In Monsoon Season

Wet season in Thailand is especially tough. It typically lasts for about 6 weeks but it’s been tougher than usual this last week. The picture below was me on the road into Happy Doggo which was washed away. I made a video about it here.

It’s nothing that we can’t handle but the day to day can be exceptionally distracting and challenging especially when you are trying to build a hospital. During this weather it feels like we are treading water just to keep the show on the road and the dogs that we know safe. The bigger picture sort of goes out of the window.

Are We Really Winning?

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m all doom and gloom at the moment after reading this far. I’m actually the opposite. We have had an insane year by sheer numbers of dogs helped…

• 365,000 meals of fresh home cooked food served to dogs in 2024

• About 45,000 Sterilisation operations funded this year alone

• 90-95% of Koh Samui sterilised by October

• 45 dogs re-homed in 2024 alone

• Over 70 dogs lives directly saved with vet treatment and operations

• 1000s of preventative medicines handed out

Those numbers don’t lie. They are also expensive to achieve, massively challenging to deliver and done in record time.

What I am starting to think and believe is that there needs to be a different parrallel approach. We can’t just fix the mess that is the street dog problem. We can’t just go around mopping up the problems created by others. There is another way…

I Have The Solution

There isn’t a moment of the day that I am not thinking about the dogs and how to save more of them at scale. I think about it in the shower, on the moped, in bed at night and while eating every single meal. I’m obsessed.

I find it so incredibly hard that we have done so much good and implemented so much change only to repeatedly get knocked back with new puppies, poisonings, cruelty or dumped dogs. It’s one thing looking at positive numbers in a spreadsheet but another holding a dog with its leg hanging off.

This week I was in bed when something very clear dawned on me…

• Humans are the source of most of the problems for the dogs

• We can’t just mop up the mess that all humans make. We are busy fools doing that and will ultimately fail in our mission.

It suddenly became crystal clear that to change the dog problem around the world we don’t need to fix the dogs. We need to fix the humans. More specifically we need to change the hearts and minds of humans.

This might seem like a small change in mindset but it’s going to dictate so much of the thinking going forward. I can see it working on a tiny scale already locally but we need to ramp it up. I’ll elaborate more on this soon in an update before the end of the year!

Every Life Matters

The big problem with trying to fix the global street problem is that you can get down about it pretty easily. Constantly getting punched in the face does that to you. Lately I’ve been thinking that no matter what we do the problems keeping coming.

What is super important though is to remember that every life does matter.

Ask Britney, Super Mario or Butterscotch and they’d say they were very happy we do what we do after being close to death when we found them. So while we need to tweak the approach to change the hearts and minds of humans we cannot forget the dogs who need us the most on a daily basis.

It’s a weird feeling to get to the end of the year and have so much done but still also feel a little deflated and anxious about what hasn’t been done. The key is to keep doing what we do because it saves lives but also to try to affect bigger change by getting more humans involved in making that change with us.

As always thank you so much for your wonderful support. I wouldn’t be able to do even 1% of this without you all. Wherever you are in the world I hope you are ready for some relaxing times this holiday season.

Big love to you all

Niall

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