Niall Harbison is very slightly late for our Zoom chat, but is full of apologies all the same. “I’m never late,” he insists, talking to me from his cottage in the middle of the Koh Samui jungle. “I got caught up in a dog drama. And now I’m pigging out on chocolate,” he says, waving a Kinder bar wrapper in the air. “It’s been a tough morning.”
He’d received a text from a local person warning him that seven puppies were about to be killed – either by being crushed by a bulldozer or poisoned by site workers. The litter was living among rubble on a building site, the mother nowhere to be seen; the building work was starting first thing the next morning.
“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. He’d made a promise to himself: no more puppy rescues.
There are thousands of street dogs on Koh Samui, an island off Thailand, itself home to 8m strays. By 2021, Harbison had encountered his fill of sick or maimed stray puppies. “I wanted to get to the root of the problem.” Working with local vets who taught him the neutering procedure, he began sterilising the dogs to curtail the stray population, saving them from hardship and suffering, and paying for their vaccinations. The attitude to dogs on the island varies from hatred to love, with the vast majority being indifferent. Rescuing puppies “without changing hearts and minds is like sticking a plaster on a heart attack. But it’s not my culture, I’m a foreigner, so I have to be cautious,” he says.
A man who “dreams big”, Harbison, 43, has pledged, eventually, to be able to sterilise 10,000 dogs a month. In his first year, he managed 1,200 dogs. “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. Harbison weaves in updates on his own mental health, which encourages others to share their own mental health struggles. “Most people hide it. There’s still a big stigma about mental health.”
That morning, Harbison was due to spend an hour sterilising 100 street dogs, as he does every morning. Stray dogs are in heat twice a year and can give birth to an average of seven puppies each time. An hour’s neutering means preventing the potential birth of 1,400 puppies – which are frequently poisoned, attacked or used for constant breeding. Minutes later, against his better judgment, Harbison was heading across the island in his Jeep to the building site. It took him and three other volunteers more than an hour to catch the puppies. Harbison was bitten in the process. They then had to be taken to the vet and checked for canine parvovirus (a contagious virus that can cause fatal gastrointestinal illness), vaccinated and then found homes “very, very quickly – as soon as they get past puppy stage, people aren’t interested.”
There are around 300 dogs in shelters on the island already, says Harbison, “so I am just really loathe to gather up dogs”. He does have a dog sanctuary, comprising two containers on an acre of land gifted to him for a nominal rent by a dog-loving islander who “wanted to give back to Buddha, as she says, and do some good”, but it serves primarily as a sterilisation centre – it is not a dog shelter and only has 10 kennels. For now, the building site puppies are with Harbison, himself a survivor against the odds, and now a rescuer.
He was in a “dark place” when he went to live in Thailand in December 2018. For a man with undiagnosed ADHD who’d been a prize prankster at school and expelled at 17 with no qualifications, he’d already done exceptionally well. He had several successful online food businesses under his belt, money in the bank and a devoted rescue dog, Snoop. Except Harbison suffered from depression and anxiety. And he was an addict. But he had yet to put the two together.
An only child, he’d got a taste for beer soon after his mother left the family home in Brussels when he was 13, no warning, just the slamming of the front door one Christmas evening. He was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, to Catholic parents. Shortly afterwards, to escape the Troubles, his father, a civil servant, took a job in Brussels. Home in a middle-class suburb was “magical,” he writes in his new memoir, Hope: How Street Dogs Taught Me the Meaning of Life.
“She’s coming back later though, right, Dad?” Niall said after his mother left the house. “No, son,” his dad replied. “She’s not coming back.”
His “idyllic childhood” was over. Already a socially anxious child, he did meet up with his mother a few weeks later, when she apologised, tried to explain, said “she loved me very much”. Today, they have a great relationship, but back then he started acting out, got his first taste of gambling, liked it, liked beer and cider, too. To compensate for the marriage breakdown, his father was “generous with his pocket money”. Increasingly disruptive at school, Harbison was dispatched to a stricter school, boarding this time; it was full of privileged “misfits” like himself.
He often cooked with his dad, who encouraged him to go to catering college in Dublin. He got a job working 18-hour days doing “grunt work” in a top Dublin kitchen frequented by Ronan Keating and Mariah Carey, and spent the remaining waking hours drinking, harder than his mates. A chef introduced him to cocaine, so he took that, and other drugs, too.
During his 20s he was hospitalised for chest pains, arm pains and shortness of breath. He’d never heard the term “panic attack” before and he thought he had a weak heart. He carried on partying. Girlfriends jumped ship. He worked as a chef in ski chalets and on super yachts – to the delight of his “drink demons” – before becoming a successful online food entrepreneur, even appearing on Dragon’s Den. When his company, Simply Zesty, was bought out for €2m, he had it all: the house in Dublin, the Mercedes, the addictions. He was a “train wreck”.
But there was one merciful ingredient in his otherwise deadly lifestyle cocktail: his dog Snoop.
Harbison has never wanted children, partly out of fear of not being able to hold down a marriage. “I’ve learned through hard-lived experience that I push away those people who love me and try to get close to me,” he writes. But he’d always wanted a dog and so, in 2012, he went to the ISPCA – Ireland’s equivalent of the RSPCA – and locked eyes with a young black Labrador cross-breed “with sad brown eyes”. We were “meant for each other,” says Harbison. Then and now, Snoop is happy as long as he is by his side; for Harbison, Snoop is “like another limb”.
In the early days, at least, Snoop provided the “uncomplicated buzz” Harbison had never got from drugs and alcohol. But both won him over again in the years that followed as he set up another food business, which expanded beyond Dublin to Dubai and Manchester. Harbison was spinning out. He moved to the rainy city in an attempt at clean-living, his own bank balance now down to a few euros, thanks to his gambling. He got sober for a whole year. But he was miserable, his depression so debilitating he couldn’t get out of bed on some days. Except to let Snoop out.
One day, the rain and the depression got too much and so, on a whim in late 2018, aged 39, he left for Thailand, first to travel with his girlfriend at the time, and then to make a “forever” home. Snoop soon joined them. The girlfriend left during the pandemic, unable to bear his drinking any longer. It was December 2020. Harbison was “secretly glad”. Now he could drink in peace.
He went on a “particularly ferocious” bender, which he only now recognises was part of a mental breakdown. “I was trying to drink myself to death,” he says. On New Year’s Eve 2020, when Harbison was “completely unable to function”, a friend came and got Snoop and he admitted himself to hospital. He was in ICU for two and a half days. “It was just horrific.”
“I was hyper anxious and hyper paranoid. They were bringing in needles, putting me on drips, all the toxins going out of me, my hands turned into claws from the anxiety – I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I thought, stay alive for 10 more seconds, and I did. Then it would be, maybe I can make the next 10 seconds.”
Having reached rockbottom, he was now on the ascent. “After I got through the first day, thinking I was going to die, I thought, what have you achieved? You’ve just moved a few spreadsheets around, sent a lot of emails, done some videos – wow! I got clarity. I definitely didn’t want to die. I was going to change. A switch had been flicked.”
He did cold turkey for a year, with no professional support. “It was grim.” Harbison has now been sober for two and a half years. “I just relied on willpower.”
Where did that willpower came from? “Snoop. It came from Snoop. I’ve loved him my whole life and he was old at that stage, he was 10, and I thought, he’s still here. I can’t just disappear. It would break his whole world,” he says, using almost the same words he uses to describe his mother’s departure when he was a teenager. “He’d been with me through all the dark days, all the hard depression. I was like, right, it’s my time. I need to stand up and be here for Snoop.”
It’s only in writing the book that Harbison has made the connection between being there for the island’s dogs – imperilled, unwanted strays – and the deep feeling of childhood abandonment. “I could probably get that out of a therapist in 20 sessions, but I brushed it all under the carpet with alcohol for more than 20 years. It’s only now that I’ve hit it head on.
“I don’t think you need to be a genius to see that as long as you give them food and love and a safe place, dogs will be loyal to you forever – they’re not going to run away from you. They’re going to give you their whole heart.”
Harbison and Snoop took in Jumbo next as a permanent resident, a small dog with balloon-sized swollen legs and a kidney infection. He was 10 and Harbison didn’t have the heart to send him back on to the street. As for Tina, a golden retriever found shackled to a chain, sitting in her own excrement, “I saw myself in her,” says Harbison, “her soul, and her body, were broken. But there was still a sparkle there. She was like, I’ve got a chance here, and I’d felt the exact same way when I was in hospital.
“Tina follows me everywhere now, and I am telling her, ‘Look at the two of us, Tina, how lucky are we to be walking in the jungle with the sun on our back? We’re not meant to be here.’”
After leaving hospital in January 2021, Harbison spent the next year “just walking and trying to live and figuring out how to do something meaningful. I was on my way home from playing football one day, still sober, and I stopped and fed some dogs in the jungle. But then I realised, who’s gonna feed them tomorrow?”
He went back – of course he did – with a small bag of food, and more dogs came and then, within a month, he was feeding 20 dogs a day, and that quickly turned into 40 dogs a day. Today, supported by a close community of friends and volunteers, Harbison feeds 800 dogs each day on fresh, homemade food, and treats them for fleas, ticks and wounds. Once caught, dogs are brought to the sanctuary to be sterilised, vaccinated and treated with antibiotics, before being released back to the jungle or the street.
This month sees the launch of his new foundation, Happy Doggo, for mass dog sterilisation, a UK charity that funds organisations to provide sterilisations and emergency medical care for stray animals. While the funding is currently limited to Thailand, Happy Doggo has longterm global targets. “I’m looking at the big picture,” says Harbison. “There are 500m street dogs in the world. I want to halve that to 250m in my lifetime. It’s going to take an army of people to do it. I know they are out there – people are passionate. They want to help.”
Meanwhile, there’s the question posed by the rescue of the seven puppies. Harbison likens it to the philosophical dilemma of whether to save the many by sacrificing the one. “I should really not have got those puppies. I should let nature take care of itself and focus on sterilising more dogs. But those little puppies are alive now. How do you ignore that?”
Hope: How Street Dogs Taught Me the Meaning of Life by Niall Harbison (£18.99, Harper Element) is out on 31 August. Buy it for £16.71 at guardianbookshop.com. For more information and to donate to his charity, go to happydoggo.com
