As rescued dog Nowzad ran towards me, I said: Did you think I would leave you to die in Afghanistan? No chance



By Pen Farthing
Is that a bullet hole?' I asked Dave, one of my corporals. 'Looks like a bullet hole to me, sergeant,' he replied as we stared at the dirt-splattered windscreen of the battered white minivan.

This was the vehicle arranged by our friend, the Afghan National Police commander, to transport five dogs and 14 puppies to a rescue centre 700 miles away in northern Afghanistan.

The dogs had been destined to die from starvation or in dog fights and we had been looking after them in our isolated outpost in Now Zad in Helmand.
Pen Farthing with Tali and Nowzad in Britain
One man and his dogs: Pen with Tali and Nowzad in Britain
We had been waiting for weeks and the vehicle had finally turned up at the 11th hour, on the day my Royal Marines unit was due to leave the town for another posting.

The van was dented and its dashboard was decorated with plastic flowers. The driver was a poorly dressed, middle-aged local.

I asked Harry, our interpreter, to tell him that we would bring the dogs' travel crates.

They engaged in a heated debate. Harry told me: 'The driver will not take the crates. If he is stopped, the Taliban will know it is for Westerners. He will only take the dogs as we would carry them. They must be tied  up.' There was no time to argue.

'John, find some heavy-duty string. Dave, can you get that tin box by the living compound?' I asked. 'We can use it to put Tali's pups in.'

I knew the journey would take several days. The plan was that the driver would get the dogs to Lashkar Gar and then the police would assist in transporting the dogs to a meeting point nearer Kandahar where people from the rescue centre would pick them up.

I had no idea how the Afghans at the changeover points would handle the dogs. And what about Nowzad, the earless fighting dog I'd rescued from his Afghan tormentors? He didn't like anybody else apart from me and even I had to be careful.

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We tied up Tali first. 'Sorry, Tali, but it is for the best,' I said as I lifted and rolled her on to her back so we could bind her front and rear legs together. I placed her on the front seat in the back of the van. She propped herself up and stared at me with a puzzled look.

We used a metal suitcase with the lid ripped off for Tali's six pups. Jena's eight pups were placed in an old wooden birdcage. We tied up Jena and two more dogs, RPG and AK, and put them in the back of the van.

It hurt to see the confusion in their eyes as I closed the rear door.

I went to fetch Nowzad. He bounded over to see me, his tail stump in a constant state of motion.

'All right buddy, time to go.' I made him sit as I tied his front legs together and then his rear legs.
He hobbled over to the van. The driver began shouting and pointing at him, sheer terror in his eyes. Harry translated: 'He says, "Fighting dog no good."'

'Tell him it's OK. I will tie the dog's mouth shut.'

I hated myself for doing it but I slipped a strip of tape around Nowzad's muzzle, leaving it loose enough to allow him to drink. I placed him alone on the van's middle seats. I made a loose-fitting collar from string and secured it to the rail inside the minivan. At least he would not be able to go for the driver.
Pen Farthing's Afghan dogs
Jena's pups, all of which became ill and died at the rescue centre

The dogs were staring out of the windows like something from a Walt Disney kids' cartoon about animals on a bus ride. It was bizarre.

'Tell him to look after them,' I told Harry. 'Do not leave the doors open if he stops or they'll escape. '

A cloud of diesel fumes exploded from the exhaust and the van lurched away. I turned to the two lads who, for the past three months, had given their time and energy to help me.

'Am I dreaming or did that just happen?' I said, offering my hand first to Dave and then John.

'Talk about cutting it fine,' Dave replied, grinning with relief.

Klaus, our resident Dutch reconstruction expert, was staying for another two weeks.

'If this trip works, can you put Dushka and Patches in the taxi for the next run?' I asked him. He agreed.

Dushka and Patches used to accompany us on patrol. They were the friendliest of the pack of strays that gathered outside the compound gate but I hadn't added them to our makeshift dog pound. We'd had more than enough to contend with.

Seven days later I was in the hospital at Camp Bastion, the main British concentration in Afghanistan, awaiting a flight back to Britain. My tour of Afghanistan had been cut short by six weeks after I had broken my ankle during an operation clearing deserted villages around the Kajaki Dam.

I rang my wife Lisa and she read me the email she had received from the rescue centre. 'It says, "Hi, we have two brown dogs and a white dog with 13 puppies."'

'That's definitely all it says?' I asked again. It was.
The white dog was Tali but Nowzad, RPG, Jena and AK were all a shade of brown. That meant only two of them had made it.

I feared one of the ones that hadn't would be Nowzad. If any of the three drivers had been forced to ditch a dog, I knew it would have been him. And we had sent 14 puppies. What had happened to the one that hadn't made it? I hated to think.

The following day I stared at the computer screen in the so-called 'Bastion Internet cafe', cunningly disguised as a Portakabin.
There were three emailed pictures of dogs in front of me. The message informed me: 'One of the female dogs is white with five puppies and the second female dog is dark brown with eight puppies and the male is with no ears and no tail.'

So Tali, Jena and Nowzad had made it to the rescue. RPG and AK hadn't. I tried to imagine what must have happened.

The puppies would have been in their containers, so Tali and Jena would have instinctively followed.

Nowzad had been attached to his string lead and wouldn't have had a chance to break away.

But if the driver had left the vehicle door open even for a second, RPG and AK would have bolted. The nightmare image of them abandoned, with legs still bound, on the side of the road filled my head.

Nowzad didn't look happy in his photo. He was chained to a wall.

I'd freed him to what I thought would be a better life. But was it really any better? And what sort of future had I given him?

'At least he's alive,' I thought. I knew, though, that the same couldn't be said for one of the dogs I had left behind in Now Zad.

The day before I had called Klaus at the compound to find out how they were doing. He had bad news.

One of the Army engineers new to the compound had gone to the rear gate in the evening to take the rubbish out to the burns pit. Of course, as soon as he had opened the gate Dushka had bounded over, probably thinking it was me. After all, hadn't I encouraged him to come over to me?

The young lad had panicked at the sight of a large fighting dog running towards him and had shot him. The gentle giant fell to the ground and died by the rear gate. Klaus had raced across but when he got there it was all over. He hadn't seen Patches since.

Out of pure frustration I had shouted at Klaus, asking for the lad's name. I wanted to kill him. Luckily for both our sakes, Klaus had refused.

A phrase that we Marines use popped into my head. 'At the end of the day it gets dark,' I said to myself.

There was nothing you could do about that. There was nothing I could do about what had happened.

A month after I had returned to Britain, an email arrived from the rescue centre telling us that 11 of the puppies had died from parvovirus. All of Jena's litter had died. Only two of Tali's puppies were still alive. I was devastated.

But then we had some good news. The American aid worker who had set up the rescue centre had seen our pictures of Jena and had fallen for her. And with that Jena was living a pampered pet's life in America.

It set me thinking. I was worried about Nowzad. I showed Lisa the email. Nowzad needed someone with patience to train him, I told her. I doubted there was anyone around who fitted that bill. Apart from me and Lisa, that was.

She gave me her 'whatever' smile. Then I convinced her that if we were going to take in one dog, we might as well take two.

The words 'You owe me, Farthing' will live with me for ever.

Over the following weeks, we sorted out the paperwork and the money needed to pay for two animal cargo flights to the UK for Nowzad and Tali. I had another brainwave. 'Why not launch a charity?' I suggested to Lisa.

'It's not like we have enough to do already,' she replied sarcastically.

And so we spent hours filling in the applications to form the charity we called Nowzad Dogs.

When donations started arriving we planned to use some of the money for one of Tali's two surviving puppies. We'd named him Helmand and we already had a home in the UK lined up for him.
Four months after I'd arrived back from Afghanistan, Nowzad and Tali arrived in Britain and we visited them at the quarantine centre.

Nowzad was curled up in the far end of the small enclosure. He wasn't barking like the rest of the dogs but when he heard my voice his stumpy tail wagged itself silly.

We hadn't seen each other for nearly five months but that didn't matter. He knew who I was. He buried his head under my armpit as I rubbed his head.

'What did you think? I'd leave you in Afghanistan? No chance.' The moment I appeared at the viewing grille Tali went berserk, running around and around in circles. She finally came to rest at Lisa's feet. They hit it off just like that.

We collected them from the quarantine six months later on Christmas Eve.

When the Afghan dogs met the dogs we already had, Fizz Dog and Beamer Boy, it was almost a non-event.

Both sets of dogs sniffed each other then lost interest. On Christmas Day, we took all four to the beach so that Nowzad and Tali could have their first outing.

After a 30-minute walk Nowzad finally stopped pulling on his lead and sat quietly by my side. This was the furthest he had walked in nearly 13 months, since he'd first crept into the compound and my life.

I stroked Nowzad along the back of his head. He turned his head towards me, his big brown eyes still looking sad, but now showing no hint of worry.

Later that day I checked my emails. The message from a soldier out in Helmand was simple: 'I am serving in Afghanistan and have befriended a young stray dog that lives in the military base where I am stationed. Can you help me rescue it? I can't just leave it here to starve.'

I smiled as I read it. I had another dog to save.

I really admire what the troops and charity are doing in such difficult situations, it helps restore your faith in human nature.


More about Nowzad animal rescue. 

Two great books that highlight setting up the charity and rescuing the dogs  whilst still serving as a Royal Marine in the British Army, and caring for and trying to rehabilitate the dogs the organisation also rescues stray cats.





One dog at a time book review.

ps. The Pet Bloggers Mall is opening in July loads of shops under one roof and you don't even need petrol money to get there., this Mall will be fantastic with a great team of volunteers working hard behind the scenes to get everything ready on time.

You can read all about what's going on at the Mall here http://petbloggermall.com/

Also there is a Blogville Community calendar to highlight what is happening in Blogville here http://bccalendar.blogspot.com/