The Happy Pod: Saving Thailand's street dogs

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This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Wright, in this edition...
You're moving faster every day Tom Cruise. I can't keep up with you mister.
You're a flying machine. You're a flying machine.
Look at him go. I meet this man who's helped thousands of stray dogs in Thailand.
Two childhood sweethearts reunited after more than 85 years.

All these years have passed and then suddenly we got in touch again. And I looked at the text and

I thought to myself like history like what are you talking about? And then that's when it clicked

in my head for a second I was like okay maybe this is kind of a big deal. An historic moment

in college basketball. Meet the first player with one arm to score during a game.
We begin with the story of a man in Thailand who's become an online celebrity after sharing his stories of the abandoned street dogs he's fed, rehomed and treated. Niall Harbison lives on the island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand.
His story begins when he himself was in a bad place, recovering in hospital from alcohol poisoning. He decided to turn his life around and began to befriend some of the island's many stray dogs and that became his mission, to fix the global street dog problem.
At his rehabilitation centre on the island he works tirelessly to improve the dog's lives, feeding, grooming, treating and sterilising, which doesn't sound that pleasant but Niall says that will save many more dogs from being born on the street. While on holiday in Thailand myself last month I went to visit him and met some of his four-legged friends.
Oh, here he is. Hello, mister.
His tail is wagging, which is a good... That's my finger, mister.
You can see his back leg is really not doing fantastic. He's in a lot of pain.
We can fix you, mister. You're going to go to the doggy spa, a full health check-up, nice food.
What more could you want than that, mister? It's your lucky day. This is one of Niall Harbison's daily updates on his Instagram page about the trials and tribulations of his dog rescue centre on Koa Samui.
That dog he's just met, with very short legs and a big head, he's named Tom Cruise. When he was first found, he was covered in oil and blood-sucking ticks, with a back leg just hanging off his body.
Over the past three years, Niall has fed, treated and rehomed thousands of dogs. He picked me up from outside a supermarket in a truck emblazoned with his Happy Doggo logo and took me up Hope Avenue to what he calls the land.
So down here, we're just walking past out the dogs. They'll probably start barking.
I'm sure most people have been to a dog charity. It can be quite depressing.
It can feel like a prison where the dogs are going crazy and it's noisy. it's i wanted it to be the opposite of that if possible now dogs are still you know they'll bark and they'll fight a little bit but we wanted to make it nice for the dogs and for the people so yeah so it feels happy yeah and it is it's more like a rehabilitation center where we can get the dogs back on their feet i mean the thing is they come, they come in bad, but dogs have unbelievable spirit, as most people know.

They might be sick, but within a day or two,

we can turn their lives around.

We rely really on, you know, medicines and doctors and vets,

but actually a nice, safe place, food, love,

just a little bit of attention, that can fix an awful lot.

It's not going to fix, you know, cancer or a broken leg, but it does help an awful lot with the street dogs. He's looking forward to us.
Look at that tail wagging. That's one happy doggo.
Butterscotch is unbelievable. So Niall and I climbed into the pen with Big Mac and Butterscotch.
Hang on a minute, sorry. Big Mac is chewing the wire, Big Mac.
No, no, he's just rubbing, it's fine. I just needed to get all your light.
You can rub all your light. OK, let's go.
I was always an alcoholic and suffered from depression, but I moved to Thailand to get away really from the grey, cold English-Irish winters to try and help my health, but that sort of backfired because I ended up in hospital here from nearly drinking myself to death. But then I had a sort of epiphany.
I was like, I have to do something meaningful in my life, and that's when the street dogs came in. So I just started feeding one or two on my way home on the bike, and then it's grown into this.
It's just more and more dogs, and we sterilise dogs. We're building a hospital.
We sterilise 7,000 dogs every month. So I'm trying to make a difference for the street dog.
You have built up an enormous following on social media, on Instagram and Twitter. How does that make you feel that you've done that? Well, actually, people like a bit of good news, you know.
And that's hopefully why they're starting their day with that. Because there's quite a bombardment of bad news.
So, yeah, it's a little bit of hope in their day. What is your ultimate plan? The ultimate plan is ridiculous and I'll probably fail.
There's 500 million street dogs in the world and in my lifetime I want to half that. So that's 250 million street dogs.
So it's bonkers to try and do that but we're going to try and do it through sterilisation education and legislation so need to get government support we're on the way but there's there's just so much to do meanwhile remember tom cruise who came in with a completely useless back leg he looks almost unrecognizable clean tick-free and dressed in a colorful bandana and what's more he's, he's running. Boy, Mr Tom Cruise.
Look at that leg go, mister. It's back in action today.
It's back in action. You're moving faster every day, Tom Cruise.
I can't keep up with you, mister. You're a flying machine.
You're a flying machine. Look at him go.
If that's not the happiest dog in Thailand, I don't know who is. Look at that leg go.
Niall Harbison of Happy Doggo on the island of Koh Samui. To the Scottish borders for this next story.
Back in the late 1930s, Jim Dougal and Betty Davidson walked to school together, hand in hand. But they lost touch after Jim's family moved away.
These two childhood sweethearts have now been reunited after more than 85 years thanks to Jim's son Alistair and his efforts to trace all the children in his dad's old school photo. The pair met again recently and this is what Betty had to say about the encounter.
I used to knock on the door for him in the morning and or he knocked on mine and we used to walk up to school together. I was quite surprised actually and it was it was nice to get in touch after all these years.
My childhood sweetheart all these years has passed and then suddenly we got in touch again. And Jim was also thrilled to have reunited after all those years.
Well there's an opposite side of the road you see and I'm like we used to go to school together we used to play together and yeah something amazing really something that she's the last one standing really and so am I. It's just incredible really absolutely incredible.
It was a tiring couple of days but it was well worth it and she was she was fantastic and she still got that glint in her eye and a touch of the fair hair that i remember her by she really was she was terrific laura maxwell spoke to jim's son alistair dugall It was was absolutely incredible to witness. I think without wanting to sound like a cliché, in the moment at the end before we left, I took a photo of the two of them and they kind of re-enacted a photo that Betty had had from 1936 of the two of them and her sister you know in that instant it was like those

two children were back in the room 89 years later so uh absolutely incredible what inspired you to

try and track down everybody in the old school photograph in the first place well after my

mother died about a year ago and my brother ian and i we wanted to kind of give our dad

Thank you. Well, after my mother died about a year ago and my brother Ian and I, we wanted to kind of give our dad things to look forward to.
So the three of us went up to Ironmouth back in October last year. And as part of that, I'd arranged for a copy of the school photo to be published in a local newspaper.
Obviously, given his age, I kept joking about, I reckon you're the last one standing, Dad, and all the rest of it. And we kind of had this joke.
Then I, rather than joking about it, why don't I actually set out to find out? You're a braver man than I am, Alistair, because you wanted to cheer your dad up. It could have gone really badly wrong.
He could have been the last man standing. Well, he could have been.
You know, he's 96 going on 97. He sounds great, by the way.
He sounds really fit and strong and so does Betty. Yeah, they're incredible.
It's hard to believe that they are 96 years old. Very hard to believe.
Are they keeping in touch? Are they going to stay in touch? They are keeping in touch. I think, you know, they've spoken in the last couple of days, so they are going to keep in touch.
They certainly are. Now to a man whose childhood love of Japanese anime cartoons led to the creation of Pakistan's first hand-drawn animation studio.
Usman Riaz grew up in Karachi and never dreamed he could turn his passion into a career,

so instead focused on music,

winning a scholarship to Berkeley College in the US.

But after being invited to visit the famous Studio Ghibli in Tokyo,

he gave it all up to make The Glassworker,

a homage to the anime films of his childhood

that was long-listed for the 2025 Oscars. O.
Usman's been speaking to Mubeen Azhar. I walked into the administration office with a signed paper saying I'm dropping out and I had a full scholarship.
I felt a little scared, but also this is what is meant by a leap of faith. And when I walked out, I felt all of this weight lift off of me, and it felt like the universe saying, okay, now run.
The Glassworker is a coming-of-age story about two children from separate walks of life. One is an apprentice glassblower learning from his father in their artisan glass shop, and the other is a gifted violinist struggling to find her own unique voice on the instrument.
And the film follows both characters through their formative years as a growing threat of war strains their relationship. I wrote the film when I was 23.
So it's like a time capsule of the way I was thinking in the early 2010s. Ultimately, what I'm trying to say with the film is, and it's a naive approach, but I believe that war is not the answer to anything.
Ultimately, it's the people who are caught in the conflict that suffer, regardless of whoever the victor is. Usman didn't know it would take 10 whole years to bring that idea to life.
But before he could fully get to work on the film, he had to set up a hand-drawn animation studio in Pakistan. I think in order to do something that has never been done, you need to have a very, very strong vision.
I said, this is the film I want to make. This is exactly what it has to be like.
This is what I want to do, and I'm ready to go to the ends of the earth to achieve this. At the end of the day, I just felt like it needed to be made.
Apart from storyboarding the film, which was a lot of fun, I would say the most fun I ever

had was in the initial phases when I didn't know what it was when I was just sitting at

my desk and I had my upright piano behind my desk.

And as I would draw that, while I would wait for the paint to dry, I would turn around

and write a piece of music

that was inspired by the painting I had just made.

And actually, is it fair to say you drew every frame?

I drew 1,477 individual cuts.

Those are individual shots that you see in the film. And then within those shot compositions, I drew about 2,500 individual drawings for the film.
And then did a lot of the animation work alongside a brilliant team that we all trained ourselves. Nobody did animation in Pakistan, essentially, apart from a few enthusiasts that were just as excited to come onto the project.
But we kind of trained everybody else coming in. It took six years, really, to train everyone and get everything up and going.
Have you any idea if anyone at Studio Ghibli has ever seen it? Are you going to send it to them? I would love for them to see it,

just to understand what I've tried to do

and how much their work means to me.

But also, I'm absolutely terrified

of them watching it as well.

I'm not scared of anything.

I'm scared of that.

And you can hear more of Usman's story

on Outlook, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Now, here's a question. What noise does a shark make? Well, that, recorded for what's known to be the very first time, is the sound of a shark.
It was captured by scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The clicking is made by the shark's teeth.
Dr Lauren Smith is a marine biologist and a shark scientist and told us more. Historically, we've always thought that no, sharks don't make sounds and that's it.
They don't actually have sort of mechanisms by which they would normally be able to make sounds. With bony fish, teleosts, what they tend to do is they have morphological adaptations whereby they use their swim bladders to actually create a vibratory sound for various different reasons.
But sharks don't have those kind of physiological characteristics and they don't have swim bladders and they don't have any kind of morphological differences around their gill area or anything like that that could make them be able to create a sound either. So the fact that they have actually been recorded to make sounds is really interesting.
It sounds like they're literally making these sounds by sort of snapping their jaws together, but you know, absolutely just fascinating. And of course, the question will be, you know, are we then going to be able to record

the sounds being created by other shark species? To be honest, this discovery just highlights the

fact that how little we do know, and that there's plenty of surprises still out there in sharks and in the oceans. Shark scientist, Dr Lauren Smith.
coming up meet the womenising discos to help overcome grief.

There's a lot of guilt around grief and shame

and lots and lots of difficult emotions.

So we take that and we leave that on the dance floor.

We tell people to leave it on the dinosaur. All right, listen up, people.
We need to talk about something really important. Orgasms.
Yep, you heard me right. Orgasms.
If you're not making them a priority, PinkCherry.com is here to fix that. Orgasms can boost your mood, lower stress, and even help you sleep better.
And let's face it, with stress levels rising faster than everything else these days, we could all use a little release, if you know what I mean. So if you care about your sexual health, and seriously, who doesn't, head over to PinkCherry.com.
They've got everything you could ever imagine to help you get there. From the iconic magic wand to WeVibes collection of couples toys to the game-changing womanizer,

PinkCherry has a curated collection of hundreds of the best brands to make sure you're having the best time of your life.

Whether you're flying solo or inviting someone else to the party, make your sexual health a priority.

Head to PinkCherry.com, where pleasure is just a click away. If you know, you owe.
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You're listening to The Happy Pod, next to a determined athlete who's turned teenage rejection into a groundbreaking achievement. Bailey Cinnamon Daniel, who was born with one arm, developed a love of basketball and played for her high school team for three years.
Despite being dropped, she went on to play in college and has become the first player with one arm to score during a game in the third division of women's college basketball, the NCAA. Bailey, who's now 22, has been speaking to Shabnan Yunus-Jule.
Getting cut, it not only knocked down my confidence, but it knocked down how I thought of myself as a person, like as a human being in society and everything. Because, you know, having one arm, I've always wanted to find, like, my group, my community, my people who I can relate to.
And I never could relate to anybody growing up because, you know, I was in a predominantly white area. So, you know, being a black girl was a standout on its own.
And then on top of that, I also have one arm. So nobody is really going to relate to me, you know? So then when I started playing basketball, I have now gotten the chance to have my group of people.
So when he cut me in the moment, I thought, man, like I'm so out of place right now. A lot of my time was taken up with basketball and I made most of my friends do basketball.
And I felt safe when playing basketball because I never felt different because nobody ever treated me differently. I will say that it definitely did make me very upset, but I think I was more angry.
So then that anger kind of built to, oh, like, I have to prove this man wrong.

Well, fast forward three years and after sending her resume out to every university coach across America,

Bailey made history by scoring her first basket for Lesley University in a college game. In the game, I didn't realize how big of a deal the shot actually was because in my eyes, I just saw it as me shooting a basketball.
I didn't see it as, you know, a one-on basketball player shooting a basketball. So when the shot went in, my first thought was, okay, I just have to get back on defense now.
Like I thought the game was still going to go on. And then that's when our coach called a timeout and everybody was super happy.
Everybody was thrilled. I was personally very happy as well.
So I came back to my room and I got a text from my coach and he told me like, you know, I'm so proud of you. We've overcame so much this season.
And, you know, I'm happy that I got to witness history tonight. And I looked at the text and I thought to myself, like history, like, what are you talking about? And then that's when it clicked in my head for a second.
I was like, OK, maybe this is kind of a big deal. I don't look at it in a sense of, oh, I'm going to be the first person to do this.
I'm going to be the first. I was just doing it because that's something that I love.
And that's something that I've always loved to do. And I love playing basketball.
But it was, I guess, uncommon in the grand scheme of things to NCAA to, you know, have somebody with an arm be able to not only play but to also be able to make a basket in a game and do it twice and Bailey are you beginning to realize now that your impact and what you're doing right now is going beyond basketball and you're becoming a role model like you said that you didn't see people like yourself doing what you're doing now when you were growing up, but now there'll be other girls out there who are looking up to you. How does that make you feel? It's hard for me to still wrap my head around the whole concept of me being a role model.
I am super happy that I am able to contribute to, you know, not normalizing a concept that you have to look apart to play a sport. I think anybody who puts their mind to anything can really accomplish not just sports, but anything they really do put their mind to.
And I just hope that, you know, somebody who's going through somewhat of the same, either like mindset or physical disadvantages that I'm going through right now sees, you know, me playing basketball. I hope that they take, you know, the time to look at it and tell themselves, you know, if she's doing it, then maybe I can do it too.
And it doesn't even have to be, you know, sports, whatever you want to do. I say, do it because there were so many people who sat there and told me that I would not be able to make it as far as I have now.
And if it wasn't for me betting on myself and betting on my future and what I wanted it to become, I think also the switching my anger to now having that anger displaced into something that was actually workable to get to and that I actually was able to accomplish. So I'm happy that my story is out there.
And I'm happy if anybody who looks like me even watches me for a second, even and tells himself, you know what, if she's doing it, then I can too. And Bailey is planning to become a forensic psychologist and coach disability sports, but hasn't ruled out playing in the elite WNBA.
You can hear more inspiring athletes on Sports Hour wherever you get your BBC podcasts. For many countries, water scarcity is a big problem and can impact farming and food supplies.
But one small business in Tunisia believes it's found a solution. Omar Luzier and Aziz Kawesh are the founders of the start-up Duda and have created an animal feed from a type of beetle.
It's very high in protein and has a low environmental footprint. Omar and Aziz have been speaking to our reporter, Marion Straughan, about their hopes

for the future and began with the meaning behind their company name. First one, it means worm in

Tunisia and that's what we're breeding. We have an easy pronunciation that everyone pretty much

in the world can easily pronounce. How do you use the worms then? So we do the reproduction of the worms that later become beetles and you have either some dried mealworms, some protein powder, or even like hopefully having some pet food in the future as well.
Tell us what drove you to create this company? It's important for our society to do something about climate change. Our home country, Tunisia, is one of the countries that suffers most from a better scarcity.
We could witness more and more difficulties for the agriculture sector. Hunger and malnutrition with climate change, they cannot work hand in hand, like they cannot be disconnected.
If we look at agriculture and land use, they're responsible of like 15 to 20 percent of green gas emissions in the world. Especially cows and sheep produce a lot of methane through their digestion.
And so that has a big impact on the climate change and like the heating of the planet. If you look at Africa, a lot of people are starving because they cannot afford to buy these products.
So we're presenting here an alternative source of protein. And if we look at soybeans, for example, that is being used as a big source of protein in the world, it represents six to seven percent of global agricultural land.
And we're trying to replace that. We're trying to free up more space.
At the moment, this is for animal feed, but you hope it will also be for people in the future. Exactly.
Globally, we have more than 2 billion people that already eat insects. Asia, parts of Africa, even like in Latin America, a lot of people already eat insects.
I will now ask Aziz then, what have been your highs and lows in this process? I'd say that trying to set up an innovative company is an adventure. It's full of challenges.
You need to learn how to manage to bring innovation in a way that you advocate and promote for what's right and still make it happen with their current constraints. Really build a business that's sustainable from day one.
That was probably the difficult part. For me, the most important thing, you make sure that you always put your values at the forefront.
People are quite curious about these new things. And I think there is a willingness to learn about what's possible to do differently.
Omar Luzier and Aziz Kawesh, the founders of insect protein startup Duda. We've heard of dancing for joy, but how about dancing through grief? Here in the UK, two women have set up a grief disco, which proves so popular it's on to its third event.
Georgina Jones found comfort through dancing after the death of her baby son Oshan nearly two years ago

and she came together with her friend Leah Sian Davis who lost two of her siblings within weeks of each other 11 years ago. Through movement and dance music they found that there are others who also enjoy dancing through their grief.
Georgina and Leah spoke to Emma Barnett. It came to me really from what I needed very soon after Alshan died.
I just had this desire to dance. I had this need to be on a dance floor.
I've always loved music, house music. I'm a regular to Ibiza.
So I just had a desire to dance and me and Leah did that together. So we would go out, we would dance and I would feel lighter.
I would feel better and more human, more alive. And the idea, Leah, of bringing people together to do it, not just doing it with a friend, how's that been? And what was the first one like? Seeing people come together on the dance floor is a beautiful experience.
You know, the house music is about union and, yeah, people connecting beyond words, really, because sometimes people don't want to necessarily just talk about their grief. It's a really, you know, full body experience grief.
So having somewhere with other people together, connected, dancing is how we're supposed to be really as humans. I mean, we've done it for centuries.
That's where we belong. Georgina, tell us about the permission slip and the kind of structure of a grief disco that you've created.
We open with an opening ceremony. So we welcome everyone into the space and we actually give people a physical permission slip and on this permission slip it says you can be heartbroken and hopeful, joyful and sad, all is welcome on our dance floor and we talk about this duality, this sense of feeling heavy with grief, but also the benefits of dancing and what that can do to us.
And we can have grief and joy. We invite people to not feel guilty around it because there's a lot of guilt around grief and shame and lots and lots of difficult emotions.
So we take that and we leave that on the dance floor. We tell people to leave it on the dance floor and they do.
And it's just such a wonderful, that tends to really hit people the most, that permission for joy. And yeah, somebody said to me the other day, it's an event that I went to that I didn't know I needed because it fills it it helps us deal with all the heaviness and it's so difficult to maybe put into words as Leah said but having that opportunity to be in a place that's joyful as well to be in a place place where there's music, you can speak to people that totally get it, that know how you feel, especially because when you are grieving, sometimes the answer to how are you today isn't pretty, but we haven't got the, we haven't got the capacity sometimes to deal with that.
So you button up and you say, yeah, fine. But when you

come to the grief disco, you're invited to just say, yeah, this is how I feel.

Georgina Jones and Leah Sean Davis. Before we go, a couple of weeks ago, we covered the story of the

kindness of strangers. Well, we've received some emails from the listeners.
Here's one from Rebecca

from Colorado in the US that says,

I dropped my cell phone on the sidewalk one time.

This was before smartphones existed.

A stranger found it, dialed ICE in my context in case of emergency,

and he offered to mail me my phone.

I offered to pay him back for the postage, but he said no.

When I received the package, he had his return address on it, so I mailed him a cheque anyway. Thanks, Rebecca.
And that's all from the Happy Pod for now. We'd love to hear from you.
As ever, the address is globalpodcasts at bbc.co.uk. And you can now watch some of our interviews on YouTube.
Just search for

The Happy Pod. This edition was produced by Harry Bly and Rachel Bulkeley.
It was mixed by Adrian Bhargava. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Rachel Wright. Until next time, goodbye.
Bye.

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