Step By Step Change Is Coming

Dogs will have better lives

Sometimes the street dog problem can seem absolutely daunting with at least 500 million around the world.

When I was on the plane recently to America I remember flying over whole countries and thinking about all the dogs down there and all the help they’d need. I also thought about how hard it is just fixing one tiny part of Thailand that I am focused on now. The scale of the issue globally is daunting.

It could be easy to look at a problem like that and give up and just say “Whats the point in even trying", it’s just too big”.

I like to break things down into little bite sized pieces though and I can see real change coming. Both for individual dogs and their owners as well as the street dog population as a whole. Here are some examples…

1857 Dogs Sterilised In 4 Locations

Funding sterilising is at the core of what we want to do. This really is the only true way to fix the problem of stray dogs (alongside some great educational programmes). Some nice new milestones…

• We now fund sterilising with 4 partners in 2 countries

• We’re on track to do more dogs in November alone than all of 2022 with 300+

• From December we will be funding 1000+ dogs per month

Having the systems in place to make this scale makes me so excited. Looking at photos like the one below of dogs and people I’ve never met queuing to have their sterilisation thanks to our funding makes me so happy. Literally 10,000s of dogs lives are already being impacted.

5 New Homes Agreed For Dogs

It takes a lot of patience, time and paperwork to find forever homes for dogs. The good news is that we have confirmed homes for Stitch, Tommy, Kate Moss, Sophie Socks and Solo. They are all packing their little suitcases and learning how to be good in their travel crates. It will take another couple of months to get them fully cleared to travel in terms of all their documents but 5 dogs lives changed for the better. These are all dogs that would have died before we turned their lives around.

I’m happy to confirm that this adoption request for Stitch was a success. How could we possibly turn that one down?

Big Shaq Is Battling Hard

Shaq is a street dog who had a massive growth on his neck. We’ve been preparing him for a month for his operation and last week he had the incredibly risky procedure.

If you want to have a look at what came out of him and are not squeamish you can click here. His recovery has been very tricky and he continues to battle for what we are hoping will be a positive result.

Sometimes it can be just as important to save one life as it is to save 1000s. I find it great to have these cases to remember why I do this and to see the suffering first hand. It makes me more focused and determined. Without the operation Shaq would be dead.

Daily Life At Our Dog Sanctuary

People always have so many questions about the dogs at the land. We decided to make an epic behind the scenes video. I think you’ll love it. Some of the questions answered include…

• Are they all friends or do the dogs fight?

• What does a normal day look like?

• Do you find homes for the dogs?

• What do they eat and where does the water come from?

All the answer to those questions are in the video here. The main reason for making these videos is so kids and a younger generation can hopefully watch them. I believe educating the next generation is a way to have huge impact at scale. Somewhere out there there are hopefully kids watching this and thinking “Oh i’d like to be kind to dogs too”.

Cindy Crawford Fully Diagnosed And Crushing Her Goals

Cindy has been battling her heart out to get her weight down since arriving 7 weeks ago. She’s done incredibly well losing 5kg or 11.5 Lbs but her energy has been very low of late. We were delighted to get tests results this week confirming she has an under active thyroid and that it is totally treatable.

We managed to find her the right medicine and after just 6 days Cindy is acting like a completely different dog. She is full of energy, is back loving life and she follows us everywhere. She’ll have to take these tablets for like but the future looks incredibly bright for Cindy Crawford all of a sudden.

Cindy will be up for adoption soon.

I’m sitting here writing this as the monsoon rain hammers down and I’m worried about countless dogs and their various illnesses. There are so many hard battles and you can’t win them all. I’ve nearly had a couple of dogs die today and the pressure can feel immense at times. Anybody who has ever had a sick pet can relate I’m sure. Stressful.

I feel optimistic though. This isn’t an easy problem to tackle and my plan is to spend decades (if I am lucky enough to get that long to live) on making things better for dogs around the world.

I still get frustrated and annoyed with myself for not moving faster as the suffering and pain of the dogs is still happening right now on a daily basis. It’s up to me to figure out how to double down on the speed of what I do.

Thanks as always for supporting me as I go about figuring this out. It means the absolute world to me and the dogs. I hope some of these little updates give you as much hope and satisfaction as I get from them.

Big Love

Niall

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