Saving 100,000 Stellas

Fixing both ends of the spectrum

The problem we are trying to fix is a pretty huge one… Helping halve the number of street dogs around the world from 500 million to 250 million in my lifetime. Where do you even start?

There probably is no scientifically correct answer in how to tackle this as quickly as possible but I wanted to explain our approach using 2 significant events from the past week…

Event 1 - Saving Stella

If you follow me on social media you will no doubt have seen the case of little Stella who had a piece of string tied around her neck…

• Tied on her when she was a puppy

• It was getting tighter by the day and slowly strangling her to death

• We managed to catch her and get her sedated at the vets to get it cut off

• She was incredibly snappy and did not like humans. She tried to bite everybody (in self defence)

• We brought her to the land to help slowly rehab her. Stella is only 8 months old

We thought it was going to be a process that took several months. I explained that in this initial video with Stella but then the most miraculous recovery happened…

• Stella actually escaped her Kennel. Rather than run away she stayed around.

• She found her saviour in Rusty and Libby (who until recently had been chained up themselves) who taught her how to be a dog again and that humans were OK.

• Within 7 days of her arrival Stella was playing, accepting affection from humans and loving her life again.

• Her wound is healing up quickly.

Nothing is more rewarding than turning a life around and helping a dog like Stella. You can see the progress in-front of your eyes.

The problem is that there are 100s of cases like Stella on the island. Millions of dogs like her in Thailand and around the world. You can’t save them all. You can’t even come close.

Thats where the bigger picture work comes in…

Event 2 - The 10,000th Dog Has Been Sterilised

To say we are ramping up the sterilising part of out mission would be an understatement. We now have 7 partners in 3 countries and we are working on expanding those partnerships even further by providing funding to help as many dogs on the ground as possible.

One great example is the partnership we have with Soi Dog which is going so well that we have just agreed to triple it in size…

• You can read about the stats and the partnership here

• This one partnership alone will see us fund the sterilising of 23,000 dogs in 2024

• Increasing from 2 mobile units to 6 across Southern Thailand

As we ramp up we want to always try and share as much data as we can…

• You can see how many dogs we fund for sterilising with our partners here. (We now have 7 partners in 3 countries)

• You can see a visual map of all sterilisations we fund here

Each little dot on the map and each dog sterilised is one operation that will change a dog’s life forever. Way more important though is the future suffering each operation helps prevent.

Each operation is stopping a potential Stella situation from arising. Street dogs often have very tough and very short lives. Controlling the population is absolutely key to improving their wellbeing.

100,000 Stellas

What we are trying to do can feel very abstract and big when you see huge numbers like 10,000 written in an email or spreadsheet. Even I find it hard to grasp as I write this and I don’t see the procedures happening on a daily basis.

To make things very simple…

• We’ve now sterilised 10,000 dogs

• Each dog sterilised will stop at least 10 dogs being born into suffering (in reality it is a lot more but thats a good simple number to understand)

• Thats 100,000 dogs that we have stopped coming into this world

Thats 100,000 dogs who don’t have broken legs, who don’t get abused, who don’t get parvovirus and die or who don’t suffer on the streets alone scavenging for food.

The hardest part for me can be to understand the impact of what we do. I walked into the play area today and saw Stella there and thats when I thought of subject of this email. A great reminder of why we do what we do.

None of the above would be possible without the support from around the world. I’ve been struggling in the last 10 days with the sheer volume of things I have to get done mixed in with the stress of looking after dogs and trying to grow Happy Doggo at scale. I don’t mind admitting that because this mission is massively hard, gigantic in scale and it involves many life or death decisions for the dogs.

When I do feel tired, down or stressed, I’ll always see a message from somebody, A comment on these posts or some form of encouragement that reminds me why this is so important. I truly feel blessed to be in the position to do this and to have you supporting.

The really good news is it took just over 2 years to sterilise the first 10,000 dogs. If all goes to plan we should have the next 10,000 dogs done by early August. I’ll keep finding ways to speed that up even faster. All I have to do when tired is to close my eyes and think of that string on Stella’s neck and it reminds me that we can never move fast enough.

Have a wonderful weekend wherever you are.

Big Love

Niall

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