Stray dogs are in heat twice a year and can give birth to an average of seven puppies each time. That morning, Harbison was due to be feeding about 100 street dogs, as he does every morning. ‘We’re lucky to be walking in the jungle with the sun on our backs’: Harbison at home in Thailand, with some of the stray dogs he has saved. There’s still a big stigma about mental health.” Harbison weaves in updates on his own mental health, which encourages others to share their own mental health struggles. “It’s a tiny drop in the ocean.” He raises funds on social media, his 579,000 Instagram followers checking in on the dogs he has treated or saved, including his own three rescue dogs, Snoop, Jumbo and Tina. In his first year, he managed 1,200 dogs. But it’s not my culture, I’m a foreigner, so I have to be cautious,” he says.Ī man who “dreams big”, Harbison, 43, has pledged, eventually, to be able to pay for 10,000 dogs a month to be sterilised. Rescuing puppies “without changing hearts and minds is like sticking a plaster on a heart attack. The attitude to dogs on the island varies from hatred to love, with the vast majority being indifferent. “I wanted to get to the root of the problem.” Working with local vets, he began funding the sterilisation of the dogs to curtail the stray population, saving them from hardship and suffering, and paying for their vaccinations. By 2021, Harbison had encountered his fill of sick or maimed stray puppies. There are thousands of street dogs on Koh Samui, an island off Thailand, itself home to 8 million strays. He’d made a promise to himself: no more puppy rescues. “I’m looking at the photograph of the seven of them and I’m thinking, I can’t just ignore them.” But he knew that’s what he should do.
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