Cappadocia, Turkey
I had paid for the tour. The hot-air balloons were minutes from lifting when I saw him: a puppy, about a month old, dying in the street.
I cancelled the whole thing. I lost the money. I picked him up.
His belly was swollen with worms, bigger than the rest of him was. He would not open his eyes. People walked past him while I was standing there holding him. When I asked locals what I should do, some of them laughed. Not cruelly, exactly — it is simply an ordinary sight there. A dying puppy in the street is Tuesday.
That Sunday
It was a Sunday. Everything was closed. I did not know a single vet in the country and I was holding an animal who was running out of hours.
Our hotel called its own veterinary hospital. The vets opened it just for us.
They told me a few more hours and he would have been gone.
They gave him antibiotics and fluids and I sat with him.
A couple of hours later
He decided to live. That is the only way I know how to describe it.
Over the next days he started to drink, and then he started to eat. The hotel let us stay three or four days while he recovered, which was not something they had to do.
I named him Doccio, after Cappadocia.
Istanbul, before all of this
Before Cappadocia I had been in Istanbul, and every day I fed the street dogs near my hotel. I brought them toys. It was not a plan. It was just the thing I did each morning.
That is how I met a woman who was doing exactly the same thing — food and medicine, every day, out of her own pocket. No organization behind her. No one paying her back.
The six-month rule
A puppy cannot fly to the United States until he is six months old. Doccio was one month. So that woman in Istanbul kept him for me.
While he was with her he caught parvovirus. He spent weeks in hospital. He nearly died a second time, and this time I was in Miami and could not sit with him. I paid for all of it from here, watching updates on a phone.
Spain, then Miami
Months later he was driven to Spain. I flew there to collect him and we waited another month or two, until he was finally six months old, and then I brought him home.
Doccio now lives in a large garden in Miami with another dog I rescued from a Miami shelter. He is completely, boringly fine. He has no idea any of it happened.
What it became
Twenty-one more dogs came out of Turkey in the same period as Doccio. In the past year, about a thousand have been rescued.
About five thousand street dogs still need homes in the areas we work.
All of it, so far, has been funded by me, from the proceeds of a business I closed and largely gave away. We have never run a public fundraising campaign. Not one.
Why I am asking now
Istanbul is punishing in both directions. Very hot, and then very cold. Puppies catch parvovirus every season, and treating it takes weeks of hospital care per dog.
The medication costs more than the people caring for these dogs on the ground can absorb out of their own wages. They are already giving everything they have.
And what we call the shelter is not a shelter. It is built out of boxes.
I have funded this myself. I can no longer carry it alone.
If you can take a dog, take one. If you cannot, help pay for the ones who are waiting. Both of those are the same kindness.
