Saving 6 Dogs

Their little lives matter

Britney and her puppies would be close to death by now were it not for the intervention last week. They would have been killed by either road traffic, poisoning, illness, a snake bite or any of the various other numerous dangers they faced.

Usually humans are the source of trouble for street dogs. It was humans who padlocked Britney somewhere and who dumped her in the jungle with her tick infested and malnourished puppies. You also can’t really blame people for not wanting 6 aggressive street dogs dumped on their land. The dogs had very low chances of survival. I wanted to share what is involved in a rescue like this…

The People Who Helped

Someone told me at the very start that you can’t do this on your own. Best advice I’ve ever been given. You need an army.

• 5 Different people on the ground (about 10 man hours total)

• The volunteer who initially found Britney and alerted me after getting bitten

• Vets for treating them

• People helping with driving and transport

• People helping me to cover 3 feeds a day to bulk them up

• People donating so I can just treat them without even thinking about the cost

• People sending useful and supportive messages

Without all that help the rescue could not have happened. I tried one day on my own to catch them all when everybody else was working but failed miserably.

The Costs

• $17 Per day food (they need expensive food and goat’s milk to bulk up)

• $50 Vaccinating all dogs

• $55 Flea and tick medicines (lasts 3 months)

• $250 Sterilising all 6 dogs to stop more puppies (in coming weeks)

If you keep the 6 dogs on the expensive food to catch up their growth for 30 days the total cost of saving them all after a month is about $850.

My Time

I’m not talking about my time in terms of money. I do this all for free and it’s my vocation. I wouldn’t want to do anything else. What I am talking about is the time it takes away from helping other dogs through sterilising or getting them care. I did a very rough guess and it has been approx 35 hours in the last 2 weeks spent saving these 6 and feeding them. That excludes hours thinking about solutions and general worry about them!

It was a fantastic result but that is also a lot of time to take away from tackling things at a higher level. There are only so many hours in a day.

The Future

They are of course still street dogs. The good news is that now as they grow and are sterilised the costs will decrease massively. The whole group can be looked after for a couple of dollars a day. It’s the puppy part and stopping more puppies that is expensive.

The dream scenario of course is to find them homes. They all have beautiful photos and the search is very much on. If keeping them alive is hard unfortunately finding the homes is every bit as challenging.

The Usual Question

I always ask myself should I ignore the puppies and just focus on sterilising? Save 600 instead of just 6 by thinking bigger and working on solutions rather than spending so much time, energy and money on one small part of the overall problem?

The answer is obviously yes that would be a better overall solution. But then you look at this picture of Britney and the change to those 6 little lives in a week. The answer is not easy but I’m slowly figuring it out.

I hope you are all having a wonderful week and as ever thanks for the support. I still pinch myself every day about that.

Big love

Niall

P.S I hear about so many kids following the dog stories via their parents that I decided to launch a Youtube Channel. It’s an easy way for people to follow along who are not on Twitter, TikTok or Instagram. If you click subscribe on Youtube here it would help a lot to get it started.