Aroma Pets

Hot dogs: what soaring puppy thefts tell us about Britain today

Annie was – or, we can only hope, is – an uncommonly good dog. The three-year-old cocker spaniel is so calm, says her owner Darren Neal, that she is certified as a therapy dog. For hours, she would revel in the company of toddlers at the two nurseries Neal and his wife, Melissa Murfet, run near their home in Cambridgeshire.

Annie had formed an especially close bond with Neal’s youngest daughter, Beau, who is also three. They had become inseparable during the long weeks of lockdown. Beau enjoyed reading books to Annie. “She’s probably the most laid-back dog I’ve ever met,” Neal says. “She would just let you cradle her in your arms for as long as you needed.”

On the morning of 9 July, Murfet dropped Annie – as well as Betsy, the family’s cockapoo, and Storm, a golden retriever – at nearby kennels before the family headed to Norfolk for a few days by the sea. The animals had already enjoyed several holidays there.

Neal’s phone rang that evening. It was the owner of the kennels. Only hours after Murfet had left the dogs, thieves had crept in via a back road and fields, breaking padlocks and breaching fences. They stole 17 dogs, including Annie and Betsy. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Neal says now. “I just tried not to show too much emotion in front of the kids.”

Annie and Betsy – and the other dogs stolen that day, 13 of which were puppies – had become the latest victims of surging demand for canine pets. Just as little Beau had found comfort and distraction in her best friend while stuck at home, so thousands of us have sought the company of dogs.

From the start of lockdown in late March to the end of June, the Kennel Club, which runs a register of dogs, recorded a near tripling of searches for dogs via its “find a puppy” tool, compared with the same period last year. Classified sites and pet marketplaces such as Pets4Homes – the biggest in Britain – have noted a record increase in ads and sales. Breeders, as well as rehoming and rescue centres, are struggling to meet the demand.

Puppy prices have leapt higher than an excited collie. As I type, there are dozens of puppies on Pets4Homes priced at £5,000 or higher, including a £7,500 French bulldog. “They’re a good £2,000 over what they’d normally be,” says Wayne May, who runs Artisan Rare Breeds and Animal Rescue in Dartford, Kent. He has seen £600 dogs selling for more than £2,500.

The money in dogs, particularly voguish breeds such as French bulldogs, pugs and cockapoos, has given new lift to a crime wave that was already sweeping the country.

May also gives his time to DogLost, a lost-and-found website run by volunteers. Many of the pets it lists have run off and are eventually found. But others are stolen. “We used to get an alert about one dog theft a day and now it’s nine or 10 in England alone,” he says. “Just last weekend we had 30 or 40 dogs stolen.”

Data on dog thefts is scant, inconsistent and hard to come by. For a paper he published last year, Daniel Allen, a geography lecturer at Keele University and an expert on dog theft, requested dog theft data from police forces in England and Wales. Thefts went from just over 1,500 in 2015 to almost 1,900 – five a day – in 2017. May suspects the true level of theft is far higher. He says many owners, assuming police won’t treat thefts as a priority, don’t report the crime, preferring posters and Facebook appeals.

Jason Francis did call the police – not long before he called Neal. He and his wife had run Fiveways, the raided kennels in Suffolk, for 18 years without any threat to its security. Now it is shut indefinitely and Francis’s daughter is afraid to be alone in the garden. He believes would-be dog owners are less patient than they used to be. “I had my first dog 30 years ago and we had to wait two years to find the right match,” he says. “Now people look at it like buying a washing machine.”

Yet the reasons for the new demand are clear to anyone whose dog has given them vital emotional support during lockdown. Jo Stocks, 52, has lived alone since getting divorced six years ago. For the past two years, she has shared her home in Guildford, Surrey, with Maya, a black labrador. “I’ve cuddled up to her much more, as I went without any physical contact with another human for over three months,” she says. “A hug from Maya beats anything.”

Reference: The Guardian: Simon Usborne 1 day ago: 30th July 2020