Published: 2015
Author: Pen Farthing
A heart-warming must read for animal lovers
The past few days has seen the annual Crufts Dog Show take place in Birmingham, I must admit that I have mixed feelings about the show. On one hand there’s many beautiful, well-loved and talented dogs being celebrated and that’s lovely to watch but on the other hand so many of the breed specifications cause problems for the dogs and there’s something a bit distasteful about celebrating the pedigrees and not the beautiful rescue mutts that I tend to prefer (I’m not even going to mention the mysterious case of the poisoned Setter). In fairness to the Kennel Club, there is a degree of recognition of this and they have established Scruffts, a competition for crossbreeds which now has its final at Crufts. The story of the 2014 Scruffts winner, Wylie, a dog rescued from Afghanistan is told in Pen Farthing’s book Wylie: The Brave Street Dog Who Never Gave Up
The hero of the story is stray dog Wylie, who was rescued from the streets of Kandahar by “Rebecca”, an Australian police officer serving with coalition forces training the new Afghan National Police Force. Close to death when found, with hacked off ears and tail and injuries from being used as a bait-dog, Wylie is nonetheless a loving dog with no sense of danger, which leads to further injury and risk. In an attempt to save Wylie from almost certain death in Afghanistan, Rebecca contacts Pen Farthing of Nowzad, a UK-based charity which specialises in rescuing animals from Afghanistan. Pen tells the story of Wylie’s rescue both before and after Nowzad’s involvement, giving the dog a fictional back-story before his rescue by Rebecca and charting his progress from danger-seeking stray to Scruffts 2014 winner.
I’m a sucker for a good animal story and this is certainly one which gripped me throughout. I had a vague awareness of coalition soldiers and Western contractors becoming attached to stray animals and rescuing them, but this book taught me much more about the subject. Perhaps a little more than I wanted to know, the revelation that locals deliberately attack and torture the animals that soldiers have become attached to just to cause upset was pretty horrific. It was, however, a necessary evil in the context of Wylie’s story. For me, this was where the book worked best – offering the reader an insight into the lives of the animals and humans in a warzone and how each offers a much needed comfort to the other.
More than the story of a dog, this is the story of some amazing people who dedicate themselves to animal welfare including volunteers and local staff in Afghanistan fighting against cultural expectations and volunteers in the UK battling bureaucracy and funding challenges. The animals that Nowzad care for are special, but the people that do the caring might just be that little more special.
There were a couple of disappointments in the book – for various reasons, we never really get to know Rebecca (not her real name) and I can’t help feeling that due to this we don’t get the full story of Wylie’s rescue. I also found the last couple of chapters very quick-moving compared to the rest of the book. After the long drawn out transportation and quarantine process, Wylie is adopted and almost immediately becomes a star. Perhaps Wylie’s British life really has been that charmed, but it did seem to me a search for a perfect happy ending.
The happy ending though was necessary, both in terms of bringing closure to Wylie’s story and encouraging us as readers to support the work of Nowzad. The book tugs at the heartstrings and offers a heartwarming story of survival against the odds which is the perfect read for any animal lover.