The Times Magazine 37en Farthing is commandeering
items on his desk to illustrate the
layout of Kabul airport as it was
in those chaotic final days in
August when the Afghan capital
fell and he was evacuated along
with his rescue animals. The corner
of my laptop is the passenger
terminal. An envelope addressed
to one of his Nowzad charity
donors is Abbey Gate, where a suicide bomb
was detonated killing some 200 people. Two
gold poppy lapel pins are his flatbed trucks
carrying 94 dogs and 68 cats stacked in crates
heading for the flight he’d chartered to get
them out.
“So, this is all Taliban controlled here,”
he says, drawing a line with his finger on the
edge of the table. “And when you get to the
passenger terminal, there was razor wire here,
and on that side was the British military.” He
taps his finger. “I handed my passport to the
British officer there and said, ‘Pen Farthing,’
and he went, ‘Oh, we’ve been expecting you.’ ”
Outside the airport, British passport
holders were among the crowds pressed
against the fences, desperate to leave. They’d
stood for days in sewage and 45C heat, at risk
of being blown up or shelled. Among them
were a Birmingham taxi driver and his family
whom Farthing met on his way in. Farthing,
a former Royal Marine, says he doesn’t
understand why British officials didn’t
facilitate the paperwork for these dual-
national families. Or for former army
interpreters or embassy staff.
He believes that the defence secretary,
Ben Wallace – who characterised Farthing’s
Operation Ark mission as “pets over people”- started a briefing war to distract from the
government’s own balls-up. “All this crap
from Wallace that the British military ‘put
their lives at risk to get Pen Farthing out’
was just rubbish,” he says. “And where did
I waste military resources? It was the American
military who helped me load those cats and
dogs onto the plane, not the British. I’ve got
video of it. I suppose it was a fabulous tagline
for them, wasn’t it? ‘Pets over people.’ ”
Farthing’s wife, Kaisa Markhus, a Norwegian
NGO worker whom he met in Kabul, brings
him a plate of lunch which she sets down on
the table where the runway is supposed to be.
Once the plane’s cargo hold was loaded with
his animals, he continues, forking his tofu, he
buckled up in the passenger area above with
Ewok, his rescue pomeranian, on his lap. How
did it feel to be surrounded by rows upon row
of empty seats when people, just metres away,
were unable to leave? “I mean, it was awful,”
he says. “It was so frustrating.”
The cost of chartering this plane and
quarantining 162 animals came to £750,000
and was raised from a flood of donations to
his Nowzad charity (“There was a certain
cachet to having one of the Nowzad rescues”).
The evacuation of 67 staff and their families
over the border with Pakistan was a further
£250,000. Among his supporters were the
former BBC presenter Jan Leeming, the actor
Peter Egan and American film producer Marc
Abraham. Dominic Dyer, the animal welfare
campaigning friend of Carrie Johnson, wife
of the prime minister, appeared sobbing on
Good Morning Britain at the thought that
Operation Ark wouldn’t make it. Reports
circulated that Carrie Johnson cheered them
on too, although Farthing insists he had no
direct contact – “Hand on heart, I wouldn’t
even know what she looks like.”
As the situation intensified in Kabul,
Farthing’s animal rescue efforts were playing
out to a divided UK. The bin-fire withdrawal
of British troops from Afghanistan, where they
had been stationed for 20 years fighting the
very Taliban they were now handing power
to, was already triggering a sense of national
shame. It appeared to expose contradictions
in our attitude to the developing world. Did
we want congratulations for, say, aiding the
education of Afghan girls, or did we want to
cut overseas budget and turn inward? Farthing
became a fulcrum for this anger and anxiety.
What did prioritising dogs and cats say about
our national misanthropy and latent racism?
Were we really a country with a greater
affinity to animals than people, especially
brown people? One Afghan interpreter
put this succinctly to Tom Tugendhat, the
Conservative MP and former soldier: “Why is
my five-year-old worth less than your dog?”
Farthing rejects all this criticism, plus the
landslide of abuse from people “using their
keyboard to send crappy messages”. Butit doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about it.
He tells me about an angry letter he once
received claiming that, faced with a baby in
need and a puppy, people like Farthing would
always save the puppy. “Obviously, as CEO
of the charity, I’m not allowed to respond to
emails like that any more,” he says. “But back
then I emailed, ‘No, I am a Royal Marines
commando, so I’d actually pick up the baby
in one arm and the puppy in the other.’ ” He
seems pleased with this defence. I’m reminded
of the YouGov poll commissioned on the back
of his mission in August, which showed that
40 per cent of Britons thought human life
was worth “the same as” an animal life.
Ewok comes over and Farthing scoops
him up. “You’re the most famous pomeranian
in the world, aren’t you?” he says, stroking
Ewok’s frizzy fur. With us are two of his other
rescues, Cora and Ragnar, whose enormous
size and heavy panting seem to shrink the
Farthing sitting room here in Exeter. Their
claws on the laminate floor sound like needles
dropping. Ragnar is so prone to growling that
Farthing has to interrupt himself every few
sentences: “Ragnar: no! Ragnar: stop! Ragnar:
enough!” Cora, a big white labrador cross,
tries to clamber up onto Markhus’ knee.
“Cora: down!” Ewok wraps his front legs
around my ankle and starts frotting. “EWOK!”
Later, the back door has to be opened when
Ewok lets off a smell.
I ask Farthing how much it cost to run
Nowzad and I’m surprised when he says
“roughly £1 million a year”. It sounds a lot given
the average annual Afghan salary is around
£7,500. But war zone animal rescue is a big
deal. They’ve helped more than 1,700 soldiers
all over the world reunite with dogs and cats
they’ve adopted in theatre. Where do theyP
2006 With Nowzad, the stray that inspired the charity 2021 With one of the charity’s animals in August
‘BEN WALLACE SAYING BRITISH LIVES WERE PUT AT
RISK... IT WAS AMERICAN TROOPS WHO HELPED ME’
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