Happy Doggo

My mission to save millions of street dogs around the world

Over 133,000 subscribers

Today Is Our Most Important Day Of The Year

Saving millions of dogs

Niall Harbison
Jun 17, 2026

Just over 4 years ago I wrote about starting a mission to help street dogs. I had about 1000 followers online at the time and had just started feeding dogs dry kibble from my moped.

I didn’t have a clue what I was doing but as soon as I saw their pain I knew I had to help the suffering of these poor voiceless creatures.

The mission quickly evolved into “ halving the number of street dogs suffering globally during my lifetime” and regular readers have seen the progress we’ve been making.

I wanted to explain how today is a day where we hope to take another huge step forward on this mission. But we need your help…

A Very Different Approach - What We Don’t Do

I never could have imagined running a charity back then and just how incredibly challenging and onerous it is. What we’ve tried to do at Happy Doggo is flip the model with unconventional thinking…

• We have never had a penny in government funding.
• We have never had a penny in grant funding from large backers.
• We don’t spend one single penny on outside marketing campaigns.
• No TV advertising, no billboards and no spending with social networks.
• Despite a huge audience and constant offers I’ve never done any ads or sponsored content.

Everything we do is focused on the street dogs and the way we fund our operations is via our community of dog lovers. I’ve always wanted to keep our focus “pure” and not be tainted by outside influences (like brands or advertisers). All we care about at Happy Doggo are the dogs and the overall mission. It’s why our team work among the dogs from shipping containers. We like to be close to the problem and remember what we are trying to achieve.

What We Do - Helping Street Dogs At Phenomenal Scale

What I saw in the early days helping street dogs appalled me. There was so much pain, suffering, cruelty, disease and death. I decided I couldn’t do something small and instead would dedicate my whole life to finding scalable solutions to fix the problem once and for all. Some of the things we currently do…

• Fund over 170,000 sterilization operations in 3 countries.
• That work has stopped over 2 million puppies being born into suffering
• Run a field hospital and 2 mobile clinics treating 1000 dogs a month
• Provide freshly cooked food for 1300 dogs per day
• We fund 14 dog organizations in 3 countries in South East Asia
• Re-homed over 150 street dogs around the world
• Provide life saving daily operations and treatments in our hospital

What We Are Trying To Do

If I’m honest the sheer scale of everything we are trying to do right now is incredibly scary for me. Hiring the team, working on legalities and raising the money to make it all happen is daunting. In the pipeline at the moment we have…

• Building work advancing on a large hospital for street dogs. Will open March 2027
• More mobile vet trucks on the road in August and early 2027
• Fund the sterilizing of 10,000s more dogs via our partners.
• Deepen government partnerships and roll out our educational programs
• Hire team to start working on prosecuting animal cruelty cases

There isn’t one minute of my day where I am not thinking about how we can do it faster, bigger and more efficiently. The need for speed comes from the suffering I see daily and the fact there are 500 million street dogs in the world to help.

A Big Ask For You Today

When setting up Happy Doggo I wanted to do things very differently for fundraising. There were 3 core principles I had…

• Show a clear plan to fix problems
• Be super transparent
• Don’t ask for money constantly with sad stories

That is why we came up with donation day which is today.

It’s a day once a year where we ask people to donate if they can. What really helps us the most is a monthly recurring donation. It can be big or small but whatever the amount it helps us plan in advance to help even more dogs.

We can do the work on the ground but with your donation we can do so much more.

If you’ve followed me long enough you know I hate asking for donations. I never do it but luckily people are kind enough to always support us. The normal happy content will resume tomorrow and you won’t hear from me again until next year!

The next 6 months are going to be incredibly hard work for myself and the team. I look at what we have planned and wonder how on earth we will do it but I can promise you we will.

I think people like donating because they are dog lovers and they would love to be doing what we get to do. I’m acutely aware of that and never take the support and backing of this mission for granted.

If you do support us today (or just share it if you’d rather sit it out) I thank you so much in advance. I feel like this is a team effort and that the tide is changing for street dogs thanks to your support.

Big Love

Niall

P.S You can support the mission by just subscribing to this newsletter or donating to Happy Doggo here.