Saving one abused dog at a time in Thailand | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Following the loss of his rescue dog, a sweet golden retriever named after the legendary Tina Turner, Niall Harbison set out on a personal mission: to rescue and rehabilitate abused street dogs in his adopted country of Thailand. Niall captures the story of Tina and his dog rescue journey in his new book "Tina: The Dog who Changed the World." Niall joins The Excerpt to discuss Tina’s legacy and what’s next in the fight to save even more dogs while bringing about a fix to this persistent global issue. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, May 11th, 2025. Niall's new book, Tina: The Dog Who Changed the World is on bookshelves now. In it, he documents Tina's legacy and what's next in the fight to save even more dogs or bringing about a fix to this persistent global issue. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Niall.
Niall Harbison:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Niall, you're really about hitting what's known as rock bottom as the entry point to your rescue work. Can you share more about that turning point for you?
Niall Harbison:
Yeah, I started my life in the corporate world and I actually escaped to Thailand. When I sold my business, I wanted to sort of lie on the beach and relax, but unfortunately, I actually was an alcoholic and I nearly drank myself to death. So I ended up in ICU, in hospital, really rock bottom, literally, nearly drank myself to death, and I had to rethink my life completely when I was lying in that hospital bed. And I decided that my mission would become to save dogs if I was lucky enough to survive, and I did survive, and that's what I've gone on to do.
Dana Taylor:
Let's turn to the namesake of your latest book. How did Tina come into your life and what was her rehabilitation like? Then you say she started a movement. How did that come about?
Niall Harbison:
Well, when I got out of hospital, I actually just started feeding one dog, two dogs, literally on a very small scale, and it quickly grew then to a stage where I was feeding 80 or a hundred street dogs myself. And we now actually feed 1,200 every single day with fresh food, but we also rescued dogs. And one day I came across a beautiful dog, Tina. She was on a chain. She wasn't beautiful when I first saw her. She was chained up. She'd been used for breeding, terribly malnourished, and she was close to death. So she kind of reminded me of myself and I rescued her, which was tricky, but she blossomed back into the most beautiful golden retriever you could ever imagine.
And unfortunately it wasn't straightforward. The damage had been done already with Tina and her kidneys were really bad. So she actually only lived for six months. But in those six months, she inspired me by not living in the past, and she really just had this magnificent outlook on life and was a wonderful, wonderful creature. She inspired me to go on and do wonderful work in her name. And we're building a hospital. We sterilize, which is neutering or spaying 7,000 dogs every single month, and we obviously rehabilitate more dogs. So a lot of that has been done in Tina's name.
Dana Taylor:
You mentioned commenters on social media who often say, "Niall, take that one home with you," but that you couldn't possibly take them all because it would distract from your mission and just the numbers that you're talking about that just wouldn't be possible. When did you know that Tina was going to live with you and be your dog?
Niall Harbison:
Pretty much straight away. I brought her home the first night and we had this incident where she was incredibly skinny because she hadn't been fed and it's actually a thing called refeeding syndrome. So I thought the best thing to do for a skinny dog would be to give her a big wholesome meal. Turns out that's the worst thing to do. I nearly killed her because her stomach expanded with gas and really, really dangerous. So I made a mistake. She was in my apartment and she nearly died two days after saving her. So from that very, very early day, she was with me and we had a very, very close bond. And she survived luckily. And we went on to have loads of time together, but not enough. I still miss her on a daily basis, but her being and just her presence has inspired me to go on and help so many other dogs.
Dana Taylor:
How's the rescue operation impacted the communities that you work in?
Niall Harbison:
There's so much work to do. So in Thailand where I am, there are eight to 10 million street dogs. So it's a very hard number to process. It's huge. If you go to your local gas station, if you go to your local food mart, there'll be eight, 10 dogs outside everywhere, and they're not owned. They're part of the community. So it's a real battle between the community and the dogs. Not everybody wants 10 street dogs outside their house ripping up the trash. So I have to find a way that is not just rescuing one individual dogs, but it's all about trying to change legislation, trying to do the sterilization, trying to educate the kids and really create a movement that will help dogs at massive scale. There's no point in me going... I could go around and find another Tina 10 times a day, but that's not going to fix the core problem. So I used Tina's memory to... I remember burying her, and I remember saying, "Okay, your life is not going to be in vain. I'm going to make change that is impactful in your name."
Dana Taylor:
Now, once the animals have recovered, how do they go to new homes or be released back to where they were living? Can you share the process you've created here?
Niall Harbison:
Yeah, sometimes we rehome them locally, so we find some brilliant owners. Sometimes we rehome them abroad. Very lucky to have a big social media following, and people love the little characters. So we have dogs in England, we have dogs in America. Mr. Fox is one of the dogs. He's in Montana. We have Brad Pitt who are rehomed. He's in Long Beach. Snickers is in Washington, so we rehome a few, but the rehoming is never going to fix the problem. And I'm well aware that there's plenty of shelter dogs in America, for example. But what the rehoming does for us is it helps us sort of educate the world about these wonderful street dogs, that they are, in fact, just like the pets that a lot of people have. They're dogs who just need a home. So the storytelling around rehoming the dogs is really educational, but again, it's not going to fix the problem by rehoming a few dogs. It's part of the much bigger educational program.
Dana Taylor:
You mentioned some of the other dogs that you've rescued. Tell us about Whacker.
Niall Harbison:
His name for a start is quite funny because when you go to the vets, they ask you for a name and I might arrive at the vets five times a day with a new dog. So I arrived with this dog in my arms who member of the public had called me about, and his head was split open. If you look on the internet, you'll find a picture. I'm not joking, you could nearly see into his brains that somebody had hit him with a pickaxe straight down the middle. They'd obviously tried to kill him, and I held him, brought him to the vets. The vets told me that they'd missed by a millimeter, one more millimeter, and he was gone. So the Thai lady asked me, "Okay, what's his name?" And I couldn't think of anything. I just thought he'd had a whack on the head. So I just said, "Look, Whacker, his name's Whacker." So I wrote that down on the piece of paper.
Once he recovered, he started behaving quite regally and he was quite proud of himself as he walked around. So he became King Whacker. So King Whacker now recovered, took about six months, and he's now king Whacker of Scotland. He lives in Scotland with his family, and he has a wonderful life there. So I think it's just part of the storytelling, and I think that's my favorite name out of all of them.
Dana Taylor:
This work is moving, but I know that it can also be harrowing. How do you find resilience on very hard days.
Niall Harbison:
I'm not going to lie and say, I've got it figured out and it's easy, it's not. It's really, really hard. We see dogs who've been shot. I've seen quite a few dogs poisoned, and seeing a dog poisoned is incredibly traumatizing. You see them taking their last breaths, their legs are kicking. To see something like that is horrible, but you just have to push on. And things like Tina helped me push on and the success stories, the Whackers, the Brad Pitts, the dogs that we've adopted, I just simply get home broken some nights, but I look at them on my phone and the pictures of them, and it shows me that, look, you can't save all the lives, but you can definitely have a positive impact.
Dana Taylor:
Now, you described Tina's death in your book with these words. "It was by far the most profound moment in my life that I'd ever experienced." How did her passing change you and influence your work?
Niall Harbison:
That's a good question. I was really broken when it happened because it sort of lasted for about a month, and I had three dogs die at the same time. My own pet, Snoop, Tina and another dog called Derek. And I buried her. I have to stay strong for the dogs themselves because when they're dying, you have to be there for them. I buried her myself, and I remember screaming. It's in the middle of the jungle, but I padded the ground. I remember just sort of screaming into the air being like, "I'm going to effing do something in your name." And just really just had a sort of a guttural scream that I was just like, I'm going to turn this negative into something really, really positive. And that's what started the acceleration of everything I do.
Dana Taylor:
Niall, the dog rescue and care organization you founded is called Happy Doggo. How is it different from other animal rescue and care facilities?
Niall Harbison:
The thing is, with animal care facilities, I love anybody who's working in charity. I love anybody who's trying to help animals. One person adopting a dog is my hero because they're saving one dog's life, a medium-sized charity, large charities, we should all be working together because it's a common goal. I'm not going to be able to fix it on my own. I think we do things a little differently. In Happy Doggo, we're trying to tackle the root problem and get at the cause of it and really make change in my lifetime for these dogs. But I have so much respect for everybody who helps any type of animals, and the more we can work together and change opinions and harass friends into adopting dogs rather than buying special dogs, it's a real team effort to change the welfare of dogs around the world.
Dana Taylor:
You mentioned that it's your mission to rescue a million or more dogs. Is it achievable and what will it take?
Niall Harbison:
Yeah, I think it's achievable. I think that numbers need to up it because we sterilize between five and 8,000 every month now. So that's a huge amount. Each one of those is an operation where you have to sedate them, the vets operate on them, and that means that mothers like Tina won't have... she probably had 40, 50 puppies in her lifetime that were sold, but each operation stops that happening to 40 or 50 dogs coming into the world. So we're doing five to 8,000 of those every month. So that adds up to nearly a hundred thousand dogs stopped coming into the world every month because of sterilizing. So I think a million is conservative. I think we can speed things up. Obviously it takes marketing, funding, logistics, really tough things like that. But I'll do it in Tina's name.
Dana Taylor:
Niall, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Niall Harbison:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green, and Kaely Monahan for their production assistant, our executive producers Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.