Turning A Ripple Into A Wave

Real change

Saving street dogs probably feels similar to being a vegetarian. Is cutting out a slice of ham in your sandwich going to make any difference when people are gorging on millions of pigs a year?

It also feels like recycling a plastic bottle. What difference will it make when the oceans are already swimming in plastic? Change at scale is incredibly hard and I know most of us feel tiny and insignificant in this world.

When we save a dog, I often think to myself how wonderful it is for that individual dog and for myself personally but also how possibly insignificant it is on a global level.

It’s an ongoing battle in my mind I am always trying to win…

Chained And Caged Dogs

Recently we’ve been trying to figure out the best solutions for many dogs who are chained up, confined and miserable.

Last week we stumbled upon 20 of them and managed to release 2. This week we told the story of little Momo and Coco (below) who provided us with huge logistical challenges.

This video explains the tough decisions after the owners refused to surrender them but we built a large enclosure and worked on educating their people. This felt like a seminal moment in my mind.

These cases hit me especially hard because I know there are 10,000s of other just like them that I’ll never be able to reach personally. That eats away at me daily. Luckily I think we are starting to see the start of some serious progress at scale…

A Positive List

There are some real tangible things we are going to help dogs. I know that these work and that they make a huge difference. Just a small sample…

• Sterilizing 6000 Dogs per month

• Will have funded the sterilizing of 70,000 dogs by the end of April

• Feeding 1250 dogs fresh food per day from Alba’s Kitchen

• Treating dogs at Tina’s new field hospital

• Saving dozens of lives like Big Mac, Maria, Panda, Kerry, Freckles and Pedro

• Handing out 1000s of preventative medicines to save lives

• We’ve re-homed close to 100 dogs now since starting

Our Thai team make all those things happen and a huge focus at the moment is embedding them into the community. Theres no point the message coming from the old bald Irish guy. Our team of community staff, a vet and animal care specialists are creating real change.

The image below comes from my Google Drive. It shows dogs that have been sterilized by our partners. Its a way for us to track and pay out our grants. There will be 6000+ images in there per month.

Sometimes when I forget what we are doing and the scale we work at I go in and scroll through the photos. We are now stopping 10,000s of dogs being born into suffering every single month. I’ll never meet any of these dogs personally which makes it hard even for me to grasp. After these operations they go back to live in the community.

Thai Content Is A Game Changer

You all read my updates in English but the biggest game changer recently has been launching Thai content. All the wonderful characters and dog stories now reach 200,000 Thai followers each month. Some things we see already…

• Offers of help from the community

• Kids coming up to the team who recognize them from online

• Requests for help from the Thai community with their dogs in need

• Offers of great homes for street dogs

We don’t see this as a fundraising channel. We see it as a way to change hearts and minds when it comes to street dogs. Everybody on this planet either rich or poor has a smartphone in their hand. That is how we will change their outlook on street dogs.

I find it a little harder to process because it is not saving a dog right there and then in the moment but I know this bigger approach is what creates change at scale. Hearts and minds.

Putting On A Brave Face

I wrote this week about lacking confidence and that is often how I feel about this mission. Ask anybody in animal rescue and they will tell you they feel the same.

I find it very easy to understand when I save one dog’s life in front of me. I find it a lot harder when working on the abstract stuff like education, marketing and building the funding needed to do this at scale.

Put simply I am very happy when I am with the dogs. It makes my heart feel good. From a selfish perspective and to have a happy life I’d just have about 20 dogs and do things on a much smaller scale. I’d certainly get more sleep, have less stress and not feel as burnt out.

But I see too much suffering. My entire life is going to be dedicated to this. I need to remind myself that as the next month will be spent traveling for the book launch, doing marketing events and raising awareness for the mission.

While I won’t be personally removing the padlock from a around a dog’s neck the work I will be doing will hopefully allow us to instead remove 100s of padlocks or inspire people not to put the padlock on in the first place.

Paying for everything I outlined above as well as a hospital and future growth is not cheap. It falls on my shoulders to bring more people into this mission to support it.

I think what I’m mainly trying to say here is that we have started to create a very small ripple with Happy Doggo building a mission to save street dogs. There is no doubt about that. It does often feel like pushing a boulder up a hill while constantly getting punched in the face with bad news and general sadness. The flip side though is that even saving the life of one dog makes me go to sleep with a huge smile on my face.

As someone very succinctly said to me today “it would be great if you put yourself out of business and had no more work to do”. That is exactly it. Nail on the head. My dream is to be so successful with the dog mission that there is nothing left for me to do. No dogs suffering. No abuse. No homeless dogs.

Of course that is utterly unrealistic and therein lies the problem. I’ll never be finished with this work. My best bet is to make it as big as possible and turn the ripple we currently have into a bigger wave with even more people involved and supporting. I have to always be looking for ways to scale this faster because the dogs are suffering.

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend wherever you are in the world.

Take care of yourselves.

Big Love

Niall

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