I’ve always wanted to do something with dogs — I grew up with them and I’ve been around them all my life. I went to Puerto Rico a while ago and spent the entire holiday literally rescuing dogs, and I even brought two back with me. I flew them from Anwar to Los Angeles and then to Paris, and I muddled them in through the channel to London. And then, when my lovely companion animal Rose died, I promised that I would get another rescue dog from abroad. Historically, all of my dogs have come from Battersea, but if you Google ‘rescue dogs from abroad’ it’s like unleashing the gates of hell. That’s when you realise that there’s a global stray dog problem, which really needs addressing.
We have 600 million stray dogs in our world, who are not treated humanely or justly. When I discovered the scale of this, I started getting more involved with existing shelters in Spain and then Romania, and I decided that I could help by rehoming them. By then, I had six rescue dogs from all over the world, but I wanted to do more. Considering that my business had done reasonably well, I thought that I should give back, because I think that it’s incredibly important that we all give something. And, it doesn’t matter whether that is a smile, or saving the life of an animal or a person — whatever we can do, we should all do our bit. It was then that realised that I wanted to set up my foundation. However, I didn’t want it to be just another UK-dog focussed organisation — there are so many UKbased dog rescue charities, which are all incredible and doing amazing work and there can never be enough of them, but the principle behind the Wild At Heart, for me, was the bigger picture. I didn’t just want to rehome dogs, I wanted to help alleviate the global problem in the first place.