Inside the world’s largest rabies control drive – set up by British retirees
It’s 20 years since John Dalley and his late wife Gill swapped Leeds for Phuket, leaving their jobs at a bank and chemicals factory for early retirement in a tropical paradise.
But instead of unwinding on the beach, playing golf and scuba diving, the animal-lovers started an ad hoc programme to help the Thai island’s scrawny, disease-riddled stray dogs. Soon enough, their hopes for a quiet life were up in smoke.
“Something went drastically wrong, because I’ve never worked as hard in my life,” Mr Dalley told the Telegraph. “It became all consuming.”
At the turn of the millennium, some 70,000 dogs roamed Phuket. Many were emaciated and riddled with parasites, mange and sores. In an attempt to improve their welfare and reduce the overall population, the Dalleys joined forces with their friend Margot Homburg to launch a small programme, called Soi Dogs, to treat and sterilise strays.
The initiative snowballed. Twenty years later, the foundation set up by the trio employs some 470 staff, operates a major animal hospital, and has vaccinated and neutered more than one million dogs and cats across Thailand – making it the world’s largest rabies control programme.
“If you’d told me all this 20 years ago, I’d have said you were crazy,” said Mr Dalley. “In the first 15 months, we managed to sterilise just over 1,300 animals at mobile clinics – in schools, temples, under a tent in Margot’s house – with volunteers and sympathetic vets.
“To give you an idea of how much that’s grown; [October] was a record month, we sterilised and vaccinated nearly 23,000 animals. I find it amazing that we’ve got to this stage.”
‘We can’t be picky’
In a makeshift clinic based in a carpark on the outskirts of Bangkok, a team of vets battle a howling wind to swiftly and methodically treat the neighbourhood’s strays, which were rounded up by dog catchers earlier that day.
Step one, a medical examination. Step two, a shot to protect them from six diseases including rabies. Next, the animals are lifted by their legs to the next operating table, where they’re neutered. Finally step four – their ears are tattooed to prevent repeat operations.
Within 20 minutes, the process – which costs roughly £20 per animal – is complete. Over the course of a day, the vets will treat 40 to 45 strays on these metal operating tables, before releasing them back to their communities.
“It’s rudimentary and we can never make the area 100 per cent hygienic – I mean, look at the wind today,” said Dr Tuntikorn Rungpatana, head of Soi Dogs’ Catch, Neuter, Vaccinate, Return (CNVR) programme, gesturing around the temporary clinic.
“But we sterilise everything and monitor the dogs closely. We do our best but can’t be picky about where we operate – we work in the communities, in the areas they offer.”
The team will remain in the neighbourhood, known as Thawi Watthana, until at least 80 per cent of the area’s free roaming dogs have been covered. At a rate of 200 a week, Dr Rungpatana expects it will take a month. Then they’ll move to the next district.
“We have to be meticulous to ensure we hit the 80 per cent vaccination and sterilisation threshold,” said Dr Rungpatana, pointing to a map charting where each stray was found. “We move directly from one neighbourhood to another to ensure a vacuum of dogs doesn’t emerge as the population declines. Really it’s continuous, we will have to come back here.”
Across the globe, these CNVR programmes have become the gold standard to humanely control both stray populations and rabies – a horrible zoonotic disease found in 150 countries, which still kills close to 60,000 people a year, according to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The vast majority catch the highly fatal pathogen from dogs.
“Vaccination is critical, but you can’t control rabies without also sterilising dogs – otherwise the population just grows and grows, and it’s impossible to continuously vaccinate that many animals,” said Dr Rungpatana. “Reducing the overall population also improves the welfare of the dogs, there’s less competition for food and they’re seen as less of a pest by people.”
Skirting tragedy
The Dalleys’ Soi Dogs programme started with a malnourished, ill-treated canine. In 1996, the then-newlyweds became close to a stray roaming their Phuket hotel grounds. Then it disappeared.
“We found out that hotel security had come along and beaten the dog to death,” said Mr Dalley. “From there, we started paying more attention to the street dogs when we visited the island. It was clearly a problem that was getting bigger and bigger, and nobody was doing anything about it – other than randomly poisoning or killing dogs.”
When the couple eventually took early retirement and moved to Thailand seven years later, they met Ms Homburg – a Dutch expatriate and fellow animal-lover who was already taking sick dogs to the vets to be treated, vaccinated and sterilised.
“I could see exactly what she was trying to do,” said Mr Dalley. “To me that made sense – to sterilise dogs was the logical way to move forward in a country where, officially, euthanasia is not allowed because of Buddhist beliefs. So that’s how it started.”
But their small project was almost halted when two disasters hit in December 2004. Just before Christmas, Gill picked up a bacterial infection when rescuing a dog from a flooded water buffalo field, which descended into septicemia. She escaped with her life, but without her legs.
Days later, the Boxing Day tsunami hit – killing 8,000 people in Thailand, including Gill’s closest friend in Phuket.
“Gill could have turned around and said, no more, I’m done. But there was no way she was doing that,” said Mr Dalley. Instead the foundation – which was the only animal welfare organisation in the area – received a major grant as aid flooded in to help Thailand recover. The money helped them rapidly expand operations.
“Over the next three or four months, Gill put her recovery and getting prosthetic legs on hold to help manage Soi Dogs and the mobile clinics,” said Mr Dalley of his wife, who later died from cancer in 2017. “The tsunami did actually put us on the map … and it just grew and grew from there.”
Soi Dogs’ remit has also expanded. As well as the Phuket hospital, the foundation operates an international adoption scheme, and Mr Dalley, unusually for a foreigner, was heavily involved in drafting Thailand’s first animal cruelty prevention legislation in 2014. But population and disease control remains a priority.
Today, Soi Dogs operates 16 mobile clinics across Greater Bangkok and southern Thailand, including Phuket – where the organisation’s efforts have contributed to a 90 per cent fall in free-roaming dogs, from around 70,000 two decades ago, to 6,000 today.
Meanwhile, a recent study in Animals journal found the CNVR programme reduced the stray population of Greater Bangkok by 24.7 per cent over five years. There was also a 5.7 per cent drop in monthly rabies cases, and a survey with locals showed that attitudes towards dogs improved by 39 per cent annually.
Soi Dogs hopes their model could be exported to more regions, especially in northern Thailand, as the country pushes to wipe out rabies by the end of the decade. In the first half of 2023, 160 infections were detected in animals in the north, while four people died.
“CNVR has always been the main focus, [because] I strongly believe if you’re going to solve the problem of stray dogs you have to get to the underlying cause,” said Mr Dalley, speaking to the Telegraph from Yorkshire, having recently returned to the UK for health reasons.
“The underlying cause is simply too many dogs on the streets that are not sterilised,” he added. “When I first moved to Thailand, you would see manged, hairless, skeletal dogs just about surviving on every street corner. It was not a pretty site, there was an awful lot of suffering going on, as well as disease.
“But we’ve come a long way – and I really do believe that we can eradicate rabies and we can eradicate the stray dog problem in Thailand, with the right support.”
Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security
