“It’s sad that they don’t have a home.”
Samuel, on the dogsIn almost every country Samuel cycles through he stops at a local animal shelter, and in some cities more than one. Fifty-six along the whole route, from Morocco to Cambodia to America. He films one dog, learns their name, and tells their story in his own words.
The list of shelters grows because people send us ones they know. Not the ones with a marketing department. The ones somebody in the neighbourhood keeps going.
Donations are not the point. Adoptions are. Samuel hopes the dogs he films end up somewhere warm with people who wanted them. Money helps a shelter keep going. A home changes everything.
No money for the dogs ever passes through us. Whatever anyone gives goes straight to the people looking after that dog, in their own country and their own currency.
“Nobody wants her because she is missing a leg.”
Samuel, on why he chose her
Before a single kilometre had been ridden, Samuel walked into a shelter in Málaga and asked for one dog by name. He had already chosen her.
Pandora is four years old. She was rescued from the pound two years ago and her front leg could not be saved. She has been waiting for a home ever since. She runs anyway.
She does not count towards the fifty-six on the route. She is the one who came before all of them.
She can be adopted from outside Spain. The shelter confirmed it.
Every story about shelter dogs ends the same way. You see the dog behind the fence, you feel something, and then it stops. You never find out what happened.
Did you adopt a dog you first saw in one of these films? Send us a photo. Where they sleep now, what they are like once they stop being scared, what you ended up calling them. By then we will be three countries further down the road, so we cannot come and see for ourselves.
We will share it with everyone who watched that dog wait. One photo from a living room says more than anything we could film ourselves.
Every dog also gets a place on The Dogs, a page that fills up one dog at a time. Adopted ones get their sofa photo next to the shelter photo. The rest keep waiting there until somebody turns up.
A healthy dog gets noticed. A dog that gets noticed gets adopted. That is the chain, and it starts with somebody seeing them at all.
We are riding from Málaga through Morocco, Europe, Turkey, Indonesia, Southeast Asia and America, looking for shelters along that road. Not the biggest ones. The ones nobody films.
If you look after dogs anywhere on that route, write to us. Tell us where you are and what you need. We cannot promise every shelter a visit, but we read every message, and we would rather be invited than turn up unannounced.