Adopt a Pet | Find Your New Best Friend

It’s best to keep a safe distance from stray dogs, and if you come into contact with their fur, wash your hands and skin as soon as possible. Stray dogs will often approach tourists and dwellers in the hope of food and do so in a friendly manner. But if you want to feed a stray dog, do it away from restaurants, hotels, and other dogs.

Koh Phangan Animal Care for Strays – PACs is a charitable veterinary organization dedicated to controlling the stray dog population in Thailand. They launched a widespread sterilization initiative on the island that has stretched to Koh Tao and Koh Samui shores. Founded by Irish Vet Sevaun Gallwey in 2001, the charity wants to put an end to the rabies epidemic in Thailand. Koh Lanta Animal Welfare – Lanta Welfare is a non-profit dedicated to reducing the suffering of dogs and cats in Koh Lanta and beyond. The organization rehabilitates sick or endangered animals and takes on regular volunteers for two to eight week periods. If you can’t offer your services, you can turn up and play with the cats or even take select dogs out for walks around the island.

Now it’s not for financial reward, but for the ‘job satisfaction’ of ending suffering for millions of neglected and abused animals. Ginger lost her sight from a cobra bite about two years ago. If Gill comes to the beach when the dogs are running, Ginger sacrifices her walk so she can sit by Gill’s side. Today Gill’s wheelchair is gathering dust in the attic and her day-to-day work is much the same as before the accident. Even though she can’t catch difficult dogs like she used to, she’s still very hands on. Sitting in a wheelchair and being miserable for the rest of her life wasn’t an option for Gill.

Can you adopt a stray dog from Thailand?

This special girl was dealt a bad hand in life, but it is clear that she is a fighter. And we are sure that, when Weewy is healthy enough, someone, somewhere will give this brave and beautiful girl the love and life she deserves. Although she was extremely lucky to survive the first eight weeks of life, adorable Weewy had no future out there on the streets. She was born with only one eye and a deformed right front leg. When she was picked up by Soi Dog, she was infested with fleas and ticks and was anaemic. This unique girl had parvovirus – a highly contagious infection which kills the vast majority of puppies who get it.

Based in Phuket, the non-profit foundation aims to help animals in all kinds of conditions. Diseases like parvovirus truly create so much misery and unnecessarily end lives far too early. Without animal lovers like you, Weewy and many more helpless animals are destined for short and miserable lives on the street. With no government funding for our work, your donations truly are the difference between life and death for animals like her. Phuket Soi Dog Foundation – Soi Dog is southeast Asia’s largest rescue organization for vulnerable dogs.

So make sure you never scare, confuse, or aggravate stray dogs. Just a mention of Thailand is usually enough to conjure images of impossibly white sands, craggy limestone cliffs, gold-glimmering Buddhist shrines, and uber-friendly people. Every morning dog catchers go out to an area that’s been designated in advance. They capture them and take them to the place where sterilizations and vaccinations are carried out. Some strays of course will be less than happy about this, and tranquillizer darts will be needed.

When my wife Gill and I moved to Phuket in 2003, we never dreamt how much caring people like you would help us achieve for the dogs and cats here. Wherever there’s garbage there are dogs to be found, living off scraps of food. Thanks to lovely people like you, I am a practically new dog today. The old, pitiful Madahva is just a sad memory, thank goodness. I now get all the medical treatment and other care I could ever need. But I do have ongoing health issues, which make it unlikely anyone would be willing to adopt me.

Many are battling life-threatening injuries and malnourishment. What’s more, a large number are also fighting oftenfatal illnesses such as distemper and parvovirus. Esmé is an English literature graduate and freelance writer. Originally from London, Esmé is lucky enough to call Bali home.

It’s A Dog’s Life – Soi Dog is solving the stray dog crisis on Samui in the most compassionate way.

Your gift of sponsorship is used to help your sponsored dog or cat and all the other animals Soi Dog cares for to provide shelter, food & medicine and veterinary care. Dog bites account for as much as 95 percent of all human rabies-related deaths in Thailand. Dogs can also spread rabies to other species like cows and cats, with which the Thai population interacts regularly. In fact, rabies cases have more than doubled in Thailand in the last three years, and that’s largely down to the stray dog population.

She knew she’d have to learn to walk again, even though it’s a very painful and difficult process with two prosthetics. It also wasn’t helped by the tropical climate, which made Gill’s stumps blister badly. You’re now a part of our history, and are crucial to the future of dogs here. That’s why I wanted to tell you a bit more about Gill and I, and what we went through in the early days of Soi Dog’s operations. If you would like to be excluded from updates, please click here. When a youngster catches an infectious illness like parvovirus or distemper, it is effectively a death sentence.

Soi Dog is determined to eradicate the stray dog problem, and it’s a tough task. Naturally it’s possible to make donations through their website, and many people like to visit the Soi Dog centre in Phuket in order to learn about the organisation. For many visitors it’s the highlight of their holiday – they come into contact with dogs and cats that have been rescued and are in the process of transitioning to brand new lives. Soi Dog also is active in ending the Asian dog meat trade and training vets in Cambodia and Vietnam. While many Thais are compassionate animal lovers, and some even go out of their way to feed street dogs, this often doesn’t lead to adoption. It’s easy in Thai culture to turn a blind eye to the homeless dog population as they appear to live in harmony with society.

Still, many street dogs face miserable fates and die of starvation or disease on Thailand’s streets. They can also attack other dogs and humans and spread disease. And that’s become a problem on the island – there are simply more and more dogs around. If you’ve been here for any length of time, you’ll have noticed the increase in stray dogs.

A lot has happened since that day in 2004, when Gill waded through a flooded water buffalo field after a stray dog. I thought it was odd that Gill went to bed early at my birthday party a few days later. But I wasn’t really worried until we ended up in hospital, watching her arms and legs turn from pink to grey. This site is run by people living in the tropical paradise of Koh Samui. We love our island and we use samuiholiday.com to tell the world all we know about Koh Samui and Thai culture.