High demand for puppies has led to higher prices, black market breeding, poorly shaped animals, and disappointed owners.
He is an old racing greyhound named Laddie, with an illustrious record, white socks and white tail. He falls in love at first sight. ” Are you sure we can stay a greyhound in an apartment?”I nervously asked the director of the dog shelter, while my boyfriend Charlie hunted Laddie with love hearts emoji in his eyes. “Many greyhounds live in apartments,” he clarifies. Charlie and I posed for a photo with Laddie – we looked so satisfied at her, we could explode, and then we went home to wait for our home arrival, in a few weeks.
While we were waiting, I looked up the dog beds online, tried the pros and cons of the harnesses instead of the leashes, the food dried instead of the water. I called Laddie’s picture with a love center and texted it to my circle of family and friends. “He seems such a clever boy, ” answered a friend. ” Would you like to be godparents?”I presented kindly.
The day of the stopover arrived in the house, a formality, I had been assured. “They love us, don’t they?” I asked Charlie after the evaluator left. And then the phone call the next day: it was a no, said the shelter. Too many stairs, apparently. (We live on the first floor). Embarrassed, I canceled the sponsorship offer and got rid of the dog bed I had thoroughly determined in my online shopping cart. Laddie would never be ours.
Like many other young couples with no children living in the city after the closure of the coronavirus, our minds focused on having a dog. How could I not? A dog seemed to be a shiny way out of the darkness.
We were not alone. “What we’ve noticed since the beginning of the pandemic,” says RSPCA’s Dr. Samantha Gaines, “is a massive increase in the appeal and interest in dogs. ” Between March 1 and April 19, the RSPCA’s “Finding a Pet” search tool recorded 1,070,925 unique visits, compared to 834,456 at the same time in 2019. French bulldog puppies, a breed compatible with Instagram, on the Kennel Club online page increased by 225% in April and May 2020, compared to the same time in 2019.
But many were unsure of the complexity of the dog’s purchase process: “I’m a little surprised at how complicated itArray is,” says Jess Austin, a dog owner for the first time, a 31-year-old filmmaker from Brighton. puppy breeding. Austin bought his puppy, a cavapoo named Otis, in May. Jess married her boyfriend George in June, but had to cancel the wedding due to a coronavirus. “I looked for something positive to get out of the lock . . . Spending so much time thinking about your wedding, and annulment is a shock,” she says. Otis adorably filled the wedding-shaped void in 2020, even with a few more minor accidents.
On social media, the coronavirus closure was published, a drooling parade of legs and tongues through the new owners, as proud and involved as the parents of a newborn, and hardly less exhausted. But animal welfare organizations are alarmed by this trend. “We,” Gaines explains, “is if those other people have a conscious idea of what it really means to bring a puppy into their lives. When their way of life returns to normal, is it compatible with the duty of having a dog? “
Josh Seymour thinks so. The 31-year-old London theater director bought Barney, a digging puppy, from a breeder in June. Seeing his career plummet in the lockdown was overwhelming and a puppy seemed to be an explanation for why getting out of bed, getting dressed and leaving the house. “The total era before I got here to Barney was pretty much report,” he says. “I stayed up late and slept. ” Now Seymour has to “get up in the morning,” he says, “Barney is really smart for my intellectual health. “
But as the UK deals with the worst economic recession in human memory, what would happen if other people were fired?”They would probably be in a scenario where they still don’t have a choice to abandon their dogs,” Gaines says. enough to keep their jobs, what happens to finishing the paintings in the house when they have to go back to the workplace and leave the dogs at home?
“Most dogs have difficulty being alone,” Gaines says, adding that separation anxiety can cause behavioral problems, such as generalized anxiety and depression in dogs.
RSPCA Abandoned Dog Wave Clamps: According to a June Kennel Club survey of 2,622 dog owners, 15% of other people who bought puppies in the lockdown admitted they weren’t ready.
Britain has been a dog-loving nation, says John Bradshaw, writer of In Defense of Dogs: Why Dogs Need Our Understanding. “The other people who have lived in Britain for millennia have lived in them,” he says.
But the concept of dogs as a couple is more recent. Noble women of the 15th and 16th centuries had the little ones as pets (Anne Boleyn had a pocket dog called Purkoy), while greyhounds were favored by aristocratic men for hunting. a friend, who like a running animal, was something that was reserved only for the rich,” Bradshaw says.
This replaced in the 19th century with that of the middle classes. “They copied the behavior of the nobility, ” he said, “getting puppy dogs. “
With the advent of social media, came the third wave of dog ownership: the rise of Instagram-friendly breeds showing up to collect cache online, than for work or company. “Dogs have become two-dimensional ciphers,” says Bradshaw.
Lockdown accelerated this third wave of dog owners. It’s a trend that started between truth tv stars and influencers, metastasized on social media, and spread across the country. Celebrities such as Mark Wright and Gemma Collins of Towie, as well as Ollie Locke and Millie Mackintosh of Made in Chelsea have posed in line with their puppies (Mackintosh then repatriated his dogs).
In June, Love Island finalists Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury announced that their Pomeranian cub, Mr. Chai, had died of an epileptic seizure after only a week. Chai’s autopsy revealed he had fitness problems, adding a deformed skull with no white blood cell count.
It was later learned that Mr. Chai had been imported from Russia, where third-party breeders obtain their puppies, which is not illegal.
During the lockdown, the British trapped in the house toured the Internet in search of puppies, not knowing their origin, then surpassed the offer and looked at each other in a desperate frenzy. Puppy breeders have higher costs and an illegal network of puppy breeders has begun to impregnate breeding dogs to meet this increased demand.
And what many dog owners have not learned for the first time is that, according to Lucy’s law, which was passed in April this year, it is illegal to sell puppies through a third party: all animals will have to come directly from a breeder or rescue. center. . Licensed breeders must show puppies interacting with their mothers in their birth position.
The law aims to eliminate the practice of raising puppies, where animals are born off-site, unhealthy and unethical, and then sent to domestic homes for sale. Lucy’s law only applies in England, but ad breeders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland must be licensed.
With such frantic activity, it was inevitable that criminals would take action. There were 2925 reports of dog fraud under Action Fraud between March and July of this year, compared to 508 reports for the same period in 2019. total losses of 1. 2 million pounds, compared to 380,807 pounds for the same period consistent with the previous year.
For those who have not been scamming, the value has soared: the Dogs Trust reports that the average value of sausage dogs increased from 973 euros to 1838 euros between March and June, while the Chow Chows went from 1119 to 1872.
Stephanie Porter, from Liverpool, bought her bichon Frise puppy from a Kennel Club breeder for 1,800 euros. Originally, the breeder had announced the puppy at 1000 euros, but a few weeks before the scheduled pickup date, Porter raised the price. paralyzed: She had already told her daughter about the puppy and did not need to let her down, so she reluctantly agreed to pay the deductible.
Nadia, a 31-year-old administrative worker also from Liverpool, is suffering to settle for possibly buying her dog Joolie from a puppy farm and discovered the dog for sale for 1000 euros in June, desperate to have him before The customer overshooded, agreed to take the puppy to a residential space this afternoon.
“The woman told me that she had bought the puppy from someone else and that she didn’t have the papers, but that she would bring them to me,” Nadia recalls. The papers never came. When Nadia took Joolie to the vet, she was told that she was not a pug at all, but a type of cross. Nadia would possibly have fallen victim to a non-unusual scam in which puppy breeders rent precious houses to pretend to be valid breeders.
“If she is not allowed to see the mother and she may not give her the papers, then surely there is something questionable,” says Gaines of RSPCA.
Nadia’s thieves weren’t sophisticated. But not all unscrupulous breeders are so easy to spot. Claire, a 36-year-old instructor from Staffordshire, got the idea she bought from a reputable breeder when she bought Buddy, a cavapoochon, for $ 1,395. Higher standards.
But when she arrived to pick up Buddy, Claire felt uncomfortable. He was introduced to two puppies: he has not met his mother. “They looked pretty dirty,” Claire recalls of the puppies. “One had strange eyes. They were bulging in other directions. Within 20 minutes of Claire leaving the house, three more buyers arrived to buy puppies.
When Buddy got home, it became clear that he was not well, took him to a vet, who told him Buddy had giardia, a parasitic infection, swollen glands and an ear infection. When she contacted the salesman, they insisted that Buddy had to contract her ailments on her lawn once she was taken home.
The RSPCA urges buyers to investigate. ” Be sure to see the puppy several times,” Gaines says, “to know that the space you’re going to is the place where the puppy was raised. Check vaccination records. An ad breeder will also have to be approved through their local authority, and you will have to thoroughly monitor the mom and puppies interacting together».
To avoid falling victim to unscrupulous breeders, Gaines urges dog owners for the first time to fulfill a puppy contract with their breeder, who provides a checklist to confirm that the dog has been raised in a human manner and also makes them aware of their legal obligations as a dog. Owners. . . (In the UK, you must be over 16 years old to buy an animal and you must make sure your dog has microchip).
The pandemic has accelerated our madness for dogs, but it has also jeopardized the health, well-being and interests of our four-legged friends. For now, the parks are full of new dog owners walking their high-end puppies. “amount of dogs I see in my local park . . . “, laughs Porter. “Honestly, there are dogs everywhere!” It remains to be noted if they will turn out to be for life, not just to block.
And I don’t dare delete Laddie’s picture from my phone, it’s too definitive, but I had my ending satisfied. As I write this, my cat Larry is sitting next to me, I recommended it to a woman in my neighborhood who had to leave him. Occasionally, he rubs his face with the edge of my computer – he loves to do that – or rubs my forehead. I love him undeniably and I tell him every day. Turns out I’m more of a cat user after all.