Could your pet be the next victim of ruthless dog napping gangs?
It’s a sinister new crime wave – five dogs a day brazenly stolen from homes, gardens and parks to be sold to puppy farms. Here devastated owners tell their shocking stories
RACHAEL and Alex Wootton had just sat down for dinner in a Spanish restaurant overlooking a square in Marbella’s Old Town when they received a text message to urgently call home. They had been enjoying a romantic, sun-kissed holiday to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. But it was the sort of text to make anyone’s blood freeze.
There had been a burglary at Rachael’s parents’ house in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. Mercifully, everyone was shocked and upset but otherwise OK. But what the burglars had taken sent the couple into blind panic. Herbie, their ten-month-old beloved pug puppy, had been deliberately targeted and stolen. The couple abandoned their meal and caught the next flight home.
Even for those who aren’t dog lovers like the Woottons, the tale sounds extraordinary. Why would anyone want to steal a dog?
Yet dognapping incidents like this are becoming worryingly common. Five dogs are reported stolen every day according to the latest figures, with 1,774 dog thefts reported to police last year. This is up 19 per cent from 2014, when 1,491 thefts were reported.
However, the actual number is thought to be as much as double this, as many owners do not report the thefts to police.
The puppy trade is worth up to £300 million and stolen ‘ designer dogs’ like Herbie can fetch up to £1,000 when sold online. Sadly, only one in five dogs is ever returned to their bereft owners.
So what happens to these dogs? While many will be sold online, others will spend the rest of their lives in abject misery on puppy farms in backstreet breeding dens. And in some appalling cases they are used as bait in dog fights.
Rachael, a tax adviser, and Alex, an accounts manager, who are both 31, were lucky. On Monday, three agonising weeks after Herbie was stolen, he was found half- starved in a field more than 100 miles away in Somerset. He is now back at their home in Stourbridge in the West Midlands.
Relieved doesn’t even begin to describe how they feel. ‘We have had Herbie since he was six weeks old. We don’t have children, so he’s our baby. He’s irreplaceable,’ says Rachael.
The burglary happened as her parents — retired HR manager Lynn, 61 and engineer Pete Banks, 62 — had popped out for a few hours. They returned to find four doors and a window had been broken in the burglars’ determination to get to the dog — the only thing stolen. With chilling professionalism, the burglars wiped everything they touched with bleach.
‘There are no words for how terrible the people who did this are,’ says Rachael. ‘To violate the privacy of my parents’ home and steal our beloved Herbie — it’s so cruel.
‘When you lose a pet through old age, as painful as it is, you can start to grieve, but when they’re stolen, it’s just awful. The emotions you go through, every single day, are overwhelming. Where is he? What’s happening to him? Is he scared, alone? Are they hurting him?’
Rachael and Alex spent the weeks he was missing putting up posters, travelling across the country to check out possible sightings, publicising his theft and scouring websites that sell dogs.
He was eventually found by a man in Shepton Mallet, running in a field next to a travellers’ site, and taken to a vet. Thankfully, his microchip details were up-to-date, meaning that Rachael was contacted immediately.
‘It was just so amazing to see him again. He’d lost a lot of weight and he’s not quite the happy soul he was. We will never know what happened to him, but we are so thankful to the man who handed him in and to everyone who helped us publicise our search.’
Although no one knows why Herbie was abandoned, Rachael thinks maybe he became a liability after the campaign, or simply escaped.
Alex adds: ‘We are spoiling him and want to do everything we can to help him adjust and protect him. It’s been the most unbearable three weeks of our lives.’
However, there are many dog owners who are still desperately searching for answers.
Jacqui Millson, 53, and her partner 52-year-old Steve Anderson’s two dogs Zala, a six-year-old husky, and Zeus, a three-year-old whitehaired German shepherd, were stolen from their home in a village near Barnsley, in December, three days before Christmas. Like half of all dogs taken, they were taken from the back garden.
The couple, who are civil servants, have spent the past six months tirelessly searching.
At the time, mother- of-three Jacqui had just popped out and, having always felt safe in her rural home, and left the back door open so the dogs could have the run of the garden. ‘ The garden is surrounded by a high fence and has a locked gate. Whoever took them came prepared,’ says Jacqui. ‘They are softies but are powerful. They must have lured them with treats.
‘When I came home and saw they weren’t there I just panicked. I ran up and down the street calling for them, screaming their names.
‘I have printed 130,000 flyers offering a £4,000 reward, which have been put up around the country and online. I search the internet for them for hours each day.’
Through tears, she adds: ‘Whoever has them, please, I just want you to bring them back. It’s been six months now. I cannot stop looking for them, I cannot imagine ever being able to stop. Our lives are on hold. They are our family.’
Jacqui says although she phoned the police, no one came to see her as there were no obvious signs of a break-in — a common complaint from anyone whose pet is stolen.
Although a dog may be an adored member of the family, the crime of stealing them is viewed as merely theft of property. Any sentence is determined by the value of the item stolen, so the punishment for anyone caught stealing a mongrel, which may be worthless in monetary terms, but priceless to its owners, would be negligible.
This is something animal charities urgently want changed. Blue Cross pet bereavement officer Diane James says: ‘ We want the Government to change the law and recognise a dog is not a possession, it’s part of your family.’
So prolific is the problem that there are now agencies set up to help find missing animals. Nik Oakley, of pet- finding organisation DogLost, set up 14 years ago, thinks the number of dogs stolen is higher than the statistics released.
‘The figures are wildly inaccurate and could be double. Often dognapping is not reported or recorded properly by police.
‘The theft of a dog is viewed as the same as a phone being stolen, and it can be hard to be taken seriously by the police unless you can prove there was a burglary and that your dog has not just run off.’
She says dog theft started to go through the roof after a change in scrap metal laws in 2013, which meant anyone caught selling or buying stolen metal for cash faces a £5,000 fine. ‘It may seem like a strange correlation,’ she explains, ‘but as this law came into force, dog theft numbers rocketed.
‘ When DogLost began, dogs were stolen by opportunists and sold at the pub for £50. Now it’s organised crime.
‘There’s big money to be made from selling pedigree dogs and backstreet breeding, particularly in breeds like French bulldogs, which can sell for thousands. We’re campaigning for tougher sentencing guidelines and for it to be classed as a separate offence.
‘Although the law was changed to mean all dogs must be microchipped, we want compulsory
‘We don’t have kids, so Herbie is our baby’ ‘I cannot stop searching. Our lives are on hold’
microchip scanning when a dog is taken to the vet for the first time.’
So who is committing this heartless crime and how can you prevent your dog from being stolen?
Nik says organised criminal gangs are behind the thefts, which in many cases have links to the travelling community. She says to keep a dog safe, never leave them unattended in a garden or outside a shop.
For Vanessa Meskimmon, 34, a health care assistant from Halifax, this is a lesson she learned the hard way after her dog Dolly, a Boston terrier, was snatched from outside a sweet shop nearly two years ago.
Her partner Darren Kerr, 35, left Dolly for mere minutes, after taking their daughter Isla in for ice cream. When they came out, she’d gone.
‘It was awful,’ she says. ‘I was angry with Darren for leaving her outside.
‘Not knowing what had happened to her was the worst thing. She’s blind, what would they do when they realised and she’s of no use? I couldn’t bear to think about how frightened she would be.’
The family campaigned to find her, with Isla, now nine, featuring in the national press after writing a heartbreaking letter pleading with Santa that all she wanted for Christmas was Dolly back.
Five days later, their prayers were answered when a member of the public phoned to say they had found Dolly in a park.
‘I think the publicity made her too hot to handle,’ says Vanessa. ‘It was the worst thing I have ever been through.’
Yet sometimes dogs are snatched by audacious thieves literally under their owners’ noses. This is what happened to Nicola Shepherd, who was out with her pet chihuahuas, father and son Winston and Bentley, in a North London park in October 2014.
Nicola, a 39-year- old decorator from Watford, Herts, describes the awful moment. ‘Winston was running around when this man came along and just picked him up.
‘I thought “Oh, my God, what are you doing?” I chased after him, sobbing and pleading, “Please don’t take him, please put him down, please let me have him back”, but he kept on running.’
Nicola says she contacted police but got a ‘ nonchalant’ response, so took matters into her own hands. She posted thousands of posters across London offering a £1,000 reward.
‘There wasn’t a tree or lamppost in or near that park which didn’t have a poster. ‘One of the hardest things was for two-year-old Bentley; he’d never been away from his dad his whole life. He was absolutely distraught. I was, too.’
Two weeks later, her efforts paid off when a stranger who saw her posters phoned to say she knew who had her dog. Thanks to this, she managed to track down the man. They arranged to meet in a car park where she was to hand over a ransom demand of £300.
‘He had a blue IKEA bag and inside was Winston; he looked so tiny and scared. He’d lost a lot of weight. I scooped him out. The man said he wanted more money and would shoot me and kill my dog. I got away. I told the police, but nothing ever happened.
‘Winston was very subdued for a year, but he’s all right now. The main thing is I got him back.’
But Gemma Robinson and her partner Chris Anderson were not so lucky. In a most distressing case, two-year-old chocolate labrador Tilly was stolen after Chris left him outside a supermarket for ten minutes in February 2014.
Estate agent Gemma, 31, and Chris, 44, who works in manufacturing, launched an appeal to find her, but 46 days later they had devastating news that Tilly’s body had been found in the Trent and Mersey Canal not far from their home in Congleton, Cheshire.
Her legs were broken and a breeze block had been tied around her neck. She was identified via her microchip by the RSPCA.
Gemma says: ‘ She was like my baby and slept under the duvet in our bed. She was only two when she was killed. We had just had our son Leo and Tilly used to cuddle up to him, she was protective of him. She had a playful, angelic nature. She was part of the family and went everywhere with us.’
Gemma believes she was stolen by ‘evil people’ as bait for dog fighting and is angry that the police ‘did not seem interested’.
‘They logged it as an incident, but told me they could not treat it as a theft. If somebody takes your bike it’s a theft though, isn’t it?’
Choking back tears, she adds: ‘The hardest thing was thinking somebody hurt her. I can’t bear the thought of someone putting her in pain while she was alone.’
The couple, who do not feel able to get a new dog, had Tilly cremated and kept her ashes.
‘We could not bear to let go of them. There will always be a gap in the family. The law must be changed to protect dogs like Tilly and prevent anyone else going through the heartache we have.’
‘He threatened to shoot me and my dog’