IT’S TOTALLY SICKENING...
Irish breeders smuggle ill pups overseas
HUGE numbers of sick and dying puppies are being smuggled from Ireland to Scotland as cruel dealers sell them for thousands.
Designer dogs farmed here are passing away within hours of being placed in the arms of new owners in a distressing pandemic phenomenon.
It is estimated thousands of puppies are trafficked into ports such as Cairnryan from here and the North every year from large-scale producers.
With prices for breeds like cockapoo, pug and chihuahua crosses surging to upwards of €2,000, Scottish charities are fielding unprecedented numbers of calls relating to sick and dying puppies.
And in a new departure, Irish dealers are hiring Airbnb homes in towns across the water as a front to sell to owners answering ads on websites.
An undercover inspector from the Scottish SPCA’S Special
One woman bought a cockapoo and within four hours it as dying SCOTTISH SPCA INSPECTOR YESTERDAY
Investigations Unit said: “People go to the Airbnb thinking this is a nice home and then they get a pup from somebody, they’re nearly always Irish, and the next thing that pup is ill or dead.
“One woman I spoke to had bought a cockapoo and within four hours it was dying. That is really, really common.
“They have all sorts of tricks to dupe people, one of the big things now is, ‘You can’t come into my house because of Covid19’. What they are getting is £500 of vet bills or a dead pup – that’s the harsh reality.
“There are hundreds of pups coming into the country every week through ports from Ireland.
“It’s both sides of the Irish border. A lot of the time, they travel to the south to stock up, if you like.
“Some of them will just put them in the back of a van in a crate, some of them will secrete them in the boots, we’ve seen them in big solid toolboxes with holes cut out for the air in the corner.” Puppy smuggling has
been running to Britain for years due to bigger profits, but it has hugely escalated in the last year due to soaring prices over lockdown demand.
The majority of the trading is suspected to be linked to two
families in Ireland. The inspector said: “It’s two family groups who are involved in crime, we tend to see a trend of two separate names but all different first names.
“They have been historically
FILTHY Dogs in cages
brought in from Ireland daily, but the prices are now astronomical. It is a multi, multi-million pound business.
“During lockdown, the demand for pups went through the roof. You couldn’t keep up
with calls from people buying pups that were dying or ill.
“We actually had a chap from Ireland two years ago caught trying to throw pups in the River Clyde in Glasgow as they were starting to show the bad effects of parvo. We’d caught him a few times before. Three of the four pups had to be euthanised within half an hour.
“They are loaded with health problems. Campylobacter, parvovirus, so many different parasitic infections.
“They will start having body diarrhoea and vomit and whine in pain. There is no care, a lot of these bacterial infections are picked up simply because of dirty conditions.”