Dominic Dyer

I am not, in truth, expecting to like Dominic Dyer. I gather he has a reputation for pugnacious, defiant interviews, and I worry we are going to argue. I know him only from his role assisting Pen Farthing in the famous (or, depending on your perspective, infamous) evacuation of cats and dogs from Afghanistan in August 2021, and nothing I saw of that episode I liked at all. The story captured the hearts of millions and repelled millions of others. Farthing, an ex-Royal Marine commando and founder of the Nowzad animal welfare charity, dominated last summer’s news agenda during one of the greatest foreign policy crises of this century. After the Afghan government fell and the Taliban seized power, he successfully evacuated 173 cats and dogs to Britain in a private plane paid for by a rich American donor, assisted by UK military personnel. Thousands of desperate Afghans left stranded outside the airport watched the animals pass them.

To Farthing’s supporters, it was a courageous story of defeating formidable odds to rescue defenceless animals. To his detractors, it represented an unforgivable subordination of brown human lives. At the time, I considered the whole episode a damning indictment not simply of this country’s attitude to the Afghan people, but of a peculiarly British compassion which in its fervency exposed the exact opposite. The words of an Afghan interpreter to the MP Tom Tugendhat – “why is my five-year-old worth less than your dog?” – enraged me for fifteen months.

Until, that is, I meet Dyer. A long-time lobbyist and animal rights activist, he worked alongside Farthing helping to arrange and lobby for the airline, and became most famous for informing journalists on the record that then-prime minister Boris Johnson had personally authorised the evacuation – contrary to what the entire government insisted. Over a zoom link from his house in Milton Keynes, Dyer tells me the entire story, which turns out to be rather more nuanced than the “humans vs animals” trope established by the media. Contrary to what I feared, he is charismatic, likeable and instantly disarming.

“The trouble is that with the whole nightmare of getting people into that airport, we couldn’t get the people through a Taliban checkpoint. They should have been on that plane”

I try to get the awkwardness out of the way and address the controversy head-on. How does he justify the Nowzad operation?

Far from pushing any tribal or dogmatic argument, Dyer immediately concedes the complexity. “The controversy over Nowzad was, well, should the dogs and cats have come out at all? People can argue that point. But ultimately, we chartered an aeroplane, a billionaire gave us half a million quid, so all we needed was the authorisation to put it on the runway and we were only on the runway in Kabul when everyone else was out. So we weren’t getting in the way of the UK operation. But yes, those dogs and cats came out on an aeroplane when there were lots of people on the other side of those gates that couldn’t get out of that country. That’s a moral dilemma, isn’t it?”

So he does accept that is what happened, I push. Animals were rescued at the expense of people.

“People were to come as well though, Jonathan. The trouble is that with the whole nightmare of getting people into that airport, we couldn’t get the people through a Taliban checkpoint. They should have been on that plane in the seats. The idea was that the hold would be taken up by the animals because no-one could go into the hold of that aircraft. But ultimately what happened was the plane went empty of seats and the hold was full of animals. That wasn’t the way we wanted it to be.” He emphasises that Nowzad employees did, in the end, manage to leave Afghanistan.

But surely he made mistakes, I say. “I was trying to help a friend. I don’t think any of us understood how this story was going to play out. Ultimately my priority was to take the vets and vet nurses and their families and to make a case to the British government they should come out as a priority, because particularly the women were at risk if they stayed, and they couldn’t continue to carry out veterinary medicine, which they were qualified to do. So it was all about people. The animals were just there – if we could get them out, we’d take them.”

Dyer’s story unfolds alternately as action adventure, political thriller and outright farce against the backdrop of devastating turmoil. There’s a breathless excitement as he recounts events. He talks fast, packs in details and breaks into frequent tangents. Indeed, he has an irresistible habit of both directly answering my question and pivoting to things I haven’t asked about at all. All of it makes the discussion both gripping and bracing, even if I occasionally struggle to keep up.

I hear the bit where the US billionaire speaks on the phone for twenty minutes and says “Go get them”; how Dyer uses his contacts with famous animal-lover Carrie Johnson to secure her husband’s approval; how ministers are initially happy to help. Dyer suggests that Johnson was swayed by the optics of rescuing the vets.

Then came the pushback from the Ministry of Defence, specifically from defence secretary Ben Wallace.

Characteristically, I find, Dyer aims to understand his opponents and why they took different positions. “I think they were looking at this thinking, ‘We’ve got an absolutely nightmare. We’ve got tens of thousands of people that we’re not going to be able to get out. We’ve got soldiers putting their lives on the line. Then we’ve got these bloody dogs and cats and this former marine sergeant in Kabul on the airwaves every day and his bloody partner in crime, Dominic Dyer, this bloody animal welfare activist.’ And I think Wallace panicked with it really.”

Dyer explains that it then turned into a confrontation between him and Farthing on one side and the Ministry of Defence on the other, with rapidly growing media interest inflaming both camps

Dyer says that Wallace decided to “go after him”, taking the unusual step for a minister of naming a lobbyist in broadcast interviews. “I think Wallace decided, ‘see if we can paint him as an extremist with an animal rights campaign that’s influencing Pen Farthing.’ I remember sort of seven days in I had people contacting me like, ‘Ben Wallace is on Sky News, mentioning your name. He’s on LBC and he’s calling you out.’ What the hell is he doing that for? Why is he spending a whole day of his time, bearing in mind what he was dealing with, coming after me? But he made a conscious decision that I’m going to try and deal with this Dyer guy, neutralise him, break him away from Pen Farthing and end this operation. And I suppose that was a bit of a red flag to me. Fine, if you want to have that in the media, we’ll play that game.”

Dyer explains that it then turned into a confrontation between him and Farthing on one side and the Ministry of Defence on the other, with rapidly growing media interest inflaming both camps. Dyer blames Wallace for not reaching out to him and suggesting a compromise, but again makes a point of expressing his sympathy for his position. “I know they were under a huge amount of pressure. I didn’t know how many people were going to be left behind. I could understand the anger of what we were doing. But ultimately we had an objective.”

For Dyer, this was a matter of good faith. The government had promised something and it was morally bound to deliver. “Was this an allocation of government resources? Yes. Did it take other resources away? Absolutely. But we had a commitment from the British government for us to do it. I didn’t force them to do it. They came to us saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ And that came from the prime minister down.”

I reaffirm the basic point that this still meant that the government was devoting resources to helping animals instead of people.

“Absolutely,” he says. “But we were in a battle of wills. I was doing what I could do to pressurise them all. You either go through with this, or you take a massive PR disaster on. This is dead dogs on a runway, you let us down. In Whitehall they were telling us to shut it down and we couldn’t shut it down. It was just going mental. Every time I did a little video piece in my kitchen downstairs, half a million people would be on it and sharing it and firing it back at Downing Street. And I think Johnson being Johnson, he was just, ‘fucking sort that out, get the visas.’ And that’s when Wallace backed off. But I fully understand the priority, I never denied it, I was fully open about that.”

Then, of course, came the attempted cover-up. After ministers had promised to help, then U-turned, then U-turned again, there was a need to deny responsibility – particularly Johnson’s.

“People wanted to bury it,” says Dyer, “but I wasn’t going to play that game.” He claims that Wallace lied in order to protect the prime minister, and the prime minister lied when he said he had not personally authorised the operation – effectively accusing Dyer himself of lying. Dyer points out that the Foreign Affairs select committee report concluded that Johnson was directly involved.

Why would Johnson lie though, if he was actually trying to help vets and other staff over dogs and cats? Dyer claims that Wallace’s special adviser deliberately spun the narrative of “pets before people”. Indeed, he almost admires the skill behind it. “I think that was very clever actually. If I was him I would have done exactly the same because he created this toxic nature to the story. He took away the humanitarian element that Johnson had been brought into and understood. But you create the pets before people angle, you create the misuse of resources, you create this idea that you were moving animals because you were trying to pacify his wife. And by then it was so toxic, Johnson just didn’t want to touch it anymore. I think if Johnson had come out earlier and taken ownership over it, I think he would have come out pretty well. I think a lot of people would have said, ‘that was one of the better things he did when he was prime minister.’”

Dyer is being much more frank and engaging than I had anticipated, but I still don’t feel as though I have got to the bottom of what happened and what went wrong. What mistakes were made?

Dyer again insists that it wasn’t a matter of pitting people against animals and he didn’t appreciate how bad the situation was. “I had no idea that there were tens of thousands of emails going into the Foreign Office not being opened. That is heart-breaking. The thought that there were interpreters and military who couldn’t get out when I had contact in to the prime minister’s wife. But that’s how that government under Boris Johnson was working. It was WhatsApp, it was who you knew. And to be quite honest, I threw the kitchen sink at it because I knew we had a way to do it and that’s what I did. And my priority was those 67 men, women and children and yeah, if we could get the animals out, we’d do it. Afterwards there’s a moral maze about whether it was right to use those resources. I think the head of the NATO fleet in the Mediterranean said he spent a whole day on the matter, which is crazy.”

I ask again if he would do anything differently. He says that he regrets the row with Wallace’s adviser, and some of his emotive language, and how heated things became. “I am not proud of the people left behind, I’m not proud of the suffering,” he says. He confesses to being uncomfortable at certain times – such as when the donor said he was “not really interested in the people, I’m interested in the animals.” And yet, Dyer’s conclusion is clear: “I think we did change lives because of what we did.”

He relates an anecdote about some diners approaching him in a restaurant. “I thought they were going say, ‘You’ve ruined our lunch.’ And they said, ‘We’ve been following you, don’t let the buggers get you down,’ and wanted to buy us drinks and a meal. I remember I sort of swelled up emotionally.”

Dyer says the whole experience drained him emotionally and exposed him politically. “It took its toll. Actually, the immediate aftermath wasn’t so bad because lots of people were really sympathetic to what we did. I just threw the kitchen sink at it, defending what we did and why we did it. And I got that out of my system and almost was ready to part with it. But it got a lot worse in January. I felt I had it all on my shoulders. I felt that Pen had mistrusted me because I was speaking in the media about what had gone on politically. The Foreign Affairs select committee was going hell for leather with it. Everyone else was constantly contacting me. I had relationships with charities and organisations, and I’m having run-ins with people, the prime minister, the defence secretary, that it’s getting difficult for everyone. To me that was when I suddenly felt, you know, am I risking everything to expose the truth? This is real whistle-blowing territory, isn’t it?”

“The immediate aftermath wasn’t so bad because lots of people were really sympathetic to what we did. I just threw the kitchen sink at it, defending what we did”

I am intrigued by the aftershocks following such a political earthquake. Dyer says that he has not had any contact with Carrie Johnson, but “would like to sit down with her at some point.” Relations have also been strained with Farthing. “We’ve had some contact since, but it’s been difficult.”

It’s clear he still carries a lot of emotion – and has a greater understanding of its political impact “I didn’t realise how powerful social media could be until that point. I didn’t quite realise how our emotive way of speaking could capture people. So if you’re upset, if you’re angry, if you’re crying, like I did a couple of times on Good Morning Britain, the reaction from the country was that they were coming with you.”

Animals are clearly bound up with that emotion. Dyer tells me about his first encounter with Nowzad, when he met the parents of a marine who had died in Afghanistan. “His pet dog came back with the dead son and the animal lived with them. And I remember speaking to the father about the fact that was the connection with his dead son, and the emotion that brought. And Pen had moved mountains to get that done. And that’s what made that charity special. That’s why I did what I did for him, to be honest.”

What about the political lessons? “It made me think that trust and integrity in politics is terribly important. It made me think that we have to get Johnson out of Downing Street. And I suppose the one thing I learned was to stick to my guns.” But of course there was wreckage too. Dyer agrees that the incident has made him more cynical. “The fact that Johnson would make a decision and then lie about it and then everyone would lie to cover up for him, and ultimately the whole stack of cards came apart because they were all lying so much.”

Dyer tells me he is campaigning against the Turkish government’s policy of killing rescue dogs and has worked hard on the issue of Ukrainian refugees bringing their pets over to Britain

I am expecting Dyer to have been bruised by the Nowzad experience, but he discusses several projects that have kept him busy in the last year. He tells me he is campaigning against the Turkish government’s policy of killing rescue dogs and has worked hard on the issue of Ukrainian refugees bringing their pets over to Britain. He observes that pets became an effective propaganda tool for Kyiv, and in both the Turkish and Ukrainian cases animals had prompted support for people too. He remarks with disdain that the government has treated white refugees’ pets better than it treated brown refugees, and in some cases has expended more time and resources on them.

It’s not just about things happening far away, either. Dyer says he is working on the link between animal welfare and the cost-of-living crisis, and the mental health impact on vets.

How did Dyer become such an effective lobbyist? “I think you’ve really got to believe in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. I gave up a corporate career where I was being paid well to effectively say things that I didn’t believe for business and companies. They’d pay me a six-figure salary just to massage a message. It just broke my soul in the end. I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

This passion dovetailed with strategic thinking and a love of the political machine. Dyer is not immodest about his ambition. “I’m getting to an age where I think every day really matters. I know it’s a cliché but I look at the world and I think, shit, it is really getting pretty bad and we’re putting off very tough decisions, and I want people to remember me for the things I said and believed and did. It’s not about money and stuff, it’s not about career anymore, it’s more about a belief.” His tactics are also evolving: “Rather than just shouting about things, I am trying to bring people together a bit more.”

Animal rights seem like a good vehicle for approaching wider problems. Bluntly, they are also simpler. Dyer tells me he has tried, unsuccessfully, to bring more Afghan refugees to Britain, and it has ended in failure, partly as a result of the British government’s attitudes to immigration. “I have been sort of brought into that human rights debate but I feel quite scarred by it, and almost to a point where I think I don’t want to go there again. I want to go back to the animals.” He notes that animals “don’t get angry with you and go on social media saying you’ve betrayed them because you can’t help them anymore”.

That leads us, in effect, to the grand theme of our discussion: the inseparability of human and animal rights. I have never opposed animal rights – far from it, I have always loved and felt instinctively protective towards them – but I have still vaguely believed that they represent an alternative to (or distraction from) helping human beings. What Dyer asserts repeatedly is that human and animal rights are not a zero-sum game, but reinforce and consolidate one another. He campaigns for animal rights not just for the animals themselves, but as a means of improving human rights. “Some of what we’re talking about here is increasingly human rights and animal rights coming together. And that’s something that maybe we don’t quite connect, or we’re beginning to understand. I feel, in a way, humanitarian, I feel I’m someone who wants to do things for animals and the natural world, but combined.”

Dyer discusses this symbiosis more deeply than I have heard before. “I think the opportunity for us to remove animal suffering and the suffering of the planet is combined. And a driver for that to a degree is the animal suffering. Whatever human civilisation turns into, I think a key driver will be our relationship with the natural world forcing us to come to terms with the complexities and the weaknesses of the planet that we’re on. Technology and innovation to produce cell-based food production and all the plant-based foods that we’re seeing, or insect-based protein, which are all going to be driven forward on a massive scale, are going to be the future of what we do. And to me that’s crucially important. And that could save this planet. And if that comes about, Jonathan, because our relationship with animals was that change, then actually it saved us.”

It’s not just the prospect of salvation, either. Dyer argues that if we do not pay more attention to animal suffering we will suffer as a direct consequence. “I think if we don’t break that cycle of violence and exploitation of animals, we destroy ourselves. We eat so many billions of chickens in this country. We just can’t continue to do that. And the Christmas turkey business is giving us bird flu, that is decimating wild bird populations.” He turns to the great disaster of this decade. “We’ll never know probably how Covid-19 emerged, but we can all be certain it was from animals to humans. That’s going to continue to happen if we exploit and destroy. And we were lucky with Covid-19. If this had been SARS, it would have devastated the world if it had spread as fast as Covid-19. So we dodged that bullet but we’re not necessarily going to dodge the next one. So, again, you’re looking at it from two sides here. You’re looking at it from climate change, world’s resources, you’re looking at it from pandemics, but all of it is based upon our exploitation of animals.”

Of course, not everyone shares his belief that humans are more important than animals.

There are people – many of them in England and, Dyer says, MAGA Republicans in the US – who really don’t care about other human beings but care very much for animals and pets. And sometimes their interests will be diametrically opposed to his. Dyer bemoans the environmental impact of pet food (which he says takes up 25% of all intensive livestock production), and suggests that we should in fact have fewer pets. It’s not just about the conflict between domestic animals and the natural world: it’s philosophical too. “Some people say to me that actually having a pet is a form of slavery in an animal.”

All of which brings us to the strange question of the British. We leave far more in our wills to animal than human charities (particularly donkey sanctuaries), and MPs frequently report more interest in animal welfare than any other subject. Do we have a unique relationship with animals?

Dyer notes the complexity of the issue and says that countries around the world have strong animal rights. “Is Britain different, distinct? I think we are. We have a tradition like the RSPCA that came out of the William Wilberforce anti-slavery movement, compassion in world farming, WWF, Born Free, organisations that distinctly started here and are all part of a global system.”

There is also a huge inconsistency, he says. “Tory MPs go on about how terrible it is that we’re shooting lions and shooting elephants and rhinos and it should all stop. Not that they care about British wildlife, they’re happy to kill foxes and badgers.” We discuss the fact that endangered species hardly receive any UK bequests relative to donkeys, cats and dogs. In other words, the British are interested in the animals they know, not animals per se – still less conservation or the natural world.

“There are movements to say that animals should be given legal status. It’s part of the whole sentience debate we’ve been having in Britain about where you draw that line on animal suffering”

There is, however, a fascinating question we haven’t yet addressed. We both agree that humans take precedence over animals, but why? Is there any intrinsic reason why animals should be subordinate to us?

He ponders for a moment. “There are movements to say that animals should be given legal status. It’s part of the whole sentience debate we’ve been having in Britain about where you draw that line on animal suffering. You get into species territory, between a cockroach and blue whale, there are huge differences between these animals and their lifespan and complexity. There are some people that would scream at me, ‘They’re all the same.’ In my view, for what it’s worth, that’s nonsense. There are some animals on this planet that are hanging on by their fingertips because of the complexity of their lives and the ecological systems that they operate, that we push to the verge of extinction. And then there are other animals from which we can easily produce food, but their exploitation is going to cause more suffering and destruction with climate change and pandemics. So you’re looking at these issues in different ways.”

I realise that we have been talking for over an hour and a half and we both appear exhilarated. I approached the interview with half-dread and leave with a full-on intellectual crush. It has been one of those conversations that not only inspired me but almost fully changed my mind. It seems the most obvious thing in the world that, just as we need to pour our resources into tackling climate change for the sake of the planet and ourselves, we need to do the same for animals – not just for their sake but ours as well.

Are you an adrenaline junkie, I ask, as we say our goodbyes. “I get tired sometimes,” he replies. “There are times when I have a lot of energy. We just don’t have these types of discussions enough; we don’t explore these complexities of life. And you know what? We need to do that so much more. I love animals but I love people. And without loving people, how the hell can you ever make anything different for animals?”

Dominic Dyer is a leading British wildlife protection and animal welfare campaigner, writer and broadcaster, and Policy Advisor & Wildlife Advocate for the Born Free Foundation

Jonathan Lis s a political journalist and commentator and broadcaster