MISSING! Have you seen this dog?

A crimewave has hit London, and the victims are the capital’s most petted and pampered pooches, who are being sold on and bred by unscrupulous gangsters intent on cashing in on the pedigree canine boom. Alex Clark looks for some leads

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Alex Clark

22 February 2013

You could almost have taken him for a toy, he was snoozing so peacefully; just the gentle, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest confirmed that the French bulldog snuggled up in his bed behind a thick pane of glass in Harrods’ Pet Kingdom was not, in fact, something you could pop into a carrier bag and take home.

For a start, you’d have to rustle up a cool £3,000; you would also have to provide a suitably glowing veterinarian or professional reference, and furnish the store with a copy of your tenancy agreement. Then you’d have to look over all the documentation that accompanied Rover (actually, you’d probably want to think up a suitably glamorous name to reflect the price tag): the details of his pedigree going back three generations, records of his vaccinations, flea and worm treatments, information about the microchip that will help you keep tabs on his where-abouts, contact details for his breeders, and two certificates giving him a clean bill of health, including one from Harrods’ own vet.

After all that, you might want to take your new best friend home in something a bit ritzier than a carrier. Luckily, Pet Kingdom has plenty of canine transportation devices to choose from: might I suggest something in a leopardskin pattern, trimmed with sequins and a pearl-embellished bow, a snip at £199. Don’t forget to pick up some Pup Corn in case he gets hungry on the way home, and a green and gold Harrods feeding bowl.

Over at the Pet Spa, I watch a sweet little thing being blow-dried into a tremendous ball of fluff and wonder whether the instant detangling lotion might work on me. As my eyes rest on a photograph of Gizmo, a three-year-old shih-tzu, which tells me that his (or possibly her) favourite treatment is a blueberry facial, the ball of fluff is reunited with his delighted owner. There is a lot of excited squealing. Some of it comes from the dog. You can’t imagine that there’s much the customers of Pet Kingdom wouldn’t do for their animals; no level of care or comfort that they would deem excessive. What, in this world of pampered pooches, could possibly go wrong?

To become attached to an animal involves, as many of us know from experience, accepting the possibility of future heartache; one day, in all probability, your pet will shuffle off this mortal coil. (Only recently, I asked a friend how her dogs were; one of them had been getting more and more frail for a while. There was a strained, sad pause. ‘Dog,’ she replied.) But dog abduction? Is that really something we have to worry about?

Apparently so. With a rise in the popularity of pedigree dogs that comes in part from a fascination with their celebrity owners — notably, for example, Kate and Wills, who acquired a black cocker spaniel called Lupo in 2011 — comes a rise in crime. And it’s precisely the kind of dogs sold by top-class breeders and through high-end retailers such as Harrods that are the object of the criminals’ unwanted attention.

There has long been an issue with the theft of working dogs — gun dogs, sheepdogs and those used, for example, in illegal hare coursing — but more recently spaniels and toy breeds such as pugs and Chihuahuas have become targets, and dog owners in the public eye, such as the actress Sheridan Smith, whose Shar-Pei, Enid, was stolen (and, thankfully, returned) have not proved immune to crime.

There are, of course, plenty of responsible and law-abiding prospective dog owners. But, says Nik Oakley, a spokesperson for the charity DogLost, which attempts to reunite lost and stolen dogs with their owners via its national database, there are also ‘people who aspire to have a pedigree dog but who don’t have the money’. What has followed is ‘a ready market for cut-price pedigree dogs’.

Hard-and-fast figures are difficult to establish, primarily because dog theft does not rank highly in the list of police priorities; in many cases, they will not even issue a crime reference number. Cuts across local government have also meant that the services provided by dog wardens have dwindled. But DogLost has seen about a ten per cent increase in thefts since last year, and about a third of the dogs it has reunited with their owners in that period were taken in what they call ‘suspicious circumstances’. And the incidents keep coming: last month, for example, the Evening Standard reported a ram-raiding incident at a pet shop in South East London in which two shih-tzus and two West Highland terriers were snatched.

Colin Butcher, the founder of The Pet Detectives, has first-hand experience of the surge in dognapping. A former detective inspector, he set up a private detective agency in 2002; over time, he began to get requests to investigate what he refers to as ‘crimes against animals’. Four years ago, he set up the animal-related arm of his agency as a business in its own right; it now boasts a core team of four investigators. Over the first two years, he says, they dealt with a comparatively even mixture of offences — thefts, of course, but also missing animals and disputed ownerships — but now he reckons that theft accounts for about 70 per cent of their activities. This time last year, they had two live cases on their books; this February, there are eight, five of which are thefts.

The picture he describes is horrible and complex, but also fascinating. Dog thefts, he explains, break down into three categories: breeding, resale and what he calls ‘theft by finding’, which is essentially what happens when someone comes across a lost dog and perhaps because they like the look of it, or perhaps because they scent the possibility of a handsome reward, make no serious attempt to reunite it with its owner.

One reason for an increase in crimes is fairly obvious: pedigree dogs are hugely in demand and, as Butcher succinctly puts it: ‘Where there’s a demand, there’s normally a supply.’ Getting hold of a dog from a legitimate breeder can take time; you have to wait for a litter to be born, for the puppies to be reared to a certain point. The whole process can take months and, for impatient would-be dog owners, there can be a temptation to go down less reputable routes. But perhaps even more significant is what he calls ‘crime displacement’; in other words, the theory that dog theft has become a more popular crime to commit. Here, it seems, the law of unintended consequences is at work, for Butcher believes that a recent clampdown on illegal cash trading in the scrap-metal industry has led criminals to look for a new way to make money. If the dog-nappers know that there is somewhere that they can sell dogs for cash and that the penalties are, in any case, comparatively light (custodial sentences for dog theft are extremely rare), then the black market in dogs becomes big business.

It’s the idea of breeding circuits that is particularly upsetting. As Butcher points out, the term ‘puppy farm’ is often used, but tends to conjure up images of rolling hills in Wales. In fact, he says, a ‘farm’ could be a mid-terrace in London with a small backyard into which three or four bitches, all with litters, are squeezed. And those selling on the puppies are canny, they will often have come by the bitches legitimately, so that they have requisite documentation to show potential buyers, but they will have mated them with illegally acquired dogs. The Kennel Club claims that almost one in five people may have bought a puppy from a puppy farm without even knowing it. Often, they are delivered direct to the door or collected from a neutral location such as a motorway service station. Their new owners remain ignorant of the conditions in which their new pet was born and unaware of its increased risk of developing serious health and behavioural problems.

There are, of course, other complexities in the murky world of dognapping. Sometimes, for example, cases of disputed ownership will involve the breakdown of a relationship, in which a pet is being used as a means to inflict pain and distress on an estranged partner. This, common sense tell us, has probably always gone on, but the growth of organised crime is a new development.

But something is coming down the line that might halt the dognappers in their tracks. From April 2016 it will be compulsory to have your dog microchipped. The charity Dogs Trust has been campaigning for this legislation since 2009, and the move has also been welcomed by bodies such as The Kennel Club, which runs the identification database Petlog. Dogs Trust, the Blue Cross and Battersea Dogs and Cats Home will provide free microchipping services at their centres, but even at the vet’s surgery, the procedure is inexpensive. Despite some scepticism about how effectively the system will be enforced, it is a significant step forward.

In the meantime, everyone I speak to has the same message: understand that your dog has a value and treat it accordingly. And one of the most important no-nos? Don’t, whatever you do, leave your dog tied up outside a shop, however quick you think you’re going to be. And that includes Harrods. ES

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