Saving dogs isn’t always easy. It’s time-consuming, it’s tiring, it’s stressful, and it’s messy. It sometimes also makes you choose between your head and your heart.. And a perfect example of that is one of the dogs who came in this week…

Little Oreo came to the land this week suffering from severe anaemia. Severe to the point that he was literally hours from death. The people who look after him had been treating him with tablets from their vet but he’d taken a turn for the worse. When he came to us, we genuinely thought he had very little chance of making it.

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Enter Sybille

In a panic, Niall called Sybille, our resident human doctor and advice-giver who said Oreo could be saved. But he’d need a blood transfusion. Now, blood transfusions on Koh Samui aren’t cheap and cost around $1000, with no real guarantees. Oreo deserved a chance though so we decided to go for it.

It didn’t cure him… 

So we had to do another blood transfusion, at a further cost of $1000. Even then, he was still really sick. It was only a few days later that we were 100% sure that Oreo would make it.

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The rescuer's dilemma

It’s something that Niall considered carefully before each blood transfusion. Life is tough for many people right now and they give us their hard-earned money to help street dogs. We’re not just spending money of our own, we’re spending money that people have entrusted to us.

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That sounds like a terrible, callous thing to say but that $2000 could actually save the lives of many more dogs if we didn’t spend it on Oreo. But Oreo is right in front of us…

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Niall's dilemma

It’s something that Niall considered carefully before each blood transfusion. Life is tough for many people right now and they give us their hard-earned money to help street dogs. We’re not just spending money of our own, we’re spending money that people have entrusted to us. 

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So, what is the best use of this money? For $2000, we saved Oreo’s life. But it was genuinely 50/50 and that money could have been wasted (for want of a better word). But for that same amount of money, we could have sterilized 50 street dogs. If we think that each dog sterilized can stop around 5 dogs being born into suffering, that’s 250 dogs we could have saved from a really hard life - and potentially ending up in the same situation as Oreo.

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The dog in front of you or the bigger goal? 

Thankfully, someone paid for Oreo’s treatment so his situation wasn’t as much of a dilemma as others. But this scenario is one we face almost weekly. Do you save the dog sitting in front of you, begging to live, or do you focus on the bigger picture?

After all, there are literally millions of street dogs on Thailand alone. Many many of them die every single year through abuse, neglect, hunger, fights, and diseases. Sterilizing 50 dogs is a tiny amount, but imagine Oreo’s bill had been $10,000 or even $20,000? The more dogs we sterilize, the less suffering there is in the world. If we spent every single penny in donations on sterilizing, we’d make a difference to the lives of all dogs much faster.

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But he's right there!

That’s not what we do though. We’re all dog lovers and unless it’s a lost cause, it’s almost impossible to say that a dog is costing too much in medical expenses and isn’t worth the time or money. 

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The rescue stories are also a huge part of why people donate to us. They, like us, fall in love with each character and without these donations, we wouldn’t be able to do things like the sterilization.

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There's no "perfect" answer

Ultimately, there’s no right answer to this dilemma. Like the tram driver who can choose to keep going and kill 1 person or divert and kill 100, every scenario has ethical and moral considerations that it’s hard to feel equipped for. When we asked our followers what they thought, the majority said to save the dog every time. 

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For right now, that’s what we’re doing. But we’ll continue to judge each case separately and do what we think is right for the dog firstly, but also for our followers and our overall mission.

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Want to find out more about our overall mission? Check out our Our Work page