We were careful, but were still duped by a ‘friendly’ granny who farmed puppies
RTÉ’s Eoghan McDermott posted a snap of new pup Rua online to discover his ‘family-born’ pet was bred for prof it
WHEN RTÉ presenter Eoghan McDermott put a picture on his Instagram holding the puppy he had recently bought, the backlash was swift and furious.
Critics were concerned that posting a picture of a cute puppy bought online would only encourage followers to search for a similar dog and fuel Ireland’s puppy trade.
The 2FM Breakfast Show host said he bought the dog after a yearlong search of shelters failed to find him and partner Aoife Melia a pet.
And Eoghan said, after posting a picture of Rua, he was disappointed to learn, too late, that he had been duped by a ‘friendly grandmother’ who passed off a puppy-farmed dog as a family-born pet and who passed all of the ‘tells’ he was advised to watch out for.
‘It was pre the “Covid dogexplosion” and I had moved to breakfast [radio]. I had a good chunk of the day free and have been looking to get a dog for years,’ McDermott told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
The couple visited a number of rescues, with McDermott saying: ‘I am very conscious of the “adopt don’t shop” mantra. So we looked at about eight or nine different dogs over the year, but we fell down on some of their criteria.’
Eoghan found Rua on the Dogs.ie website advertised as reared by a family ‘who had puppies in need of a home’ and paid €1,500 for the mixed-breed pup.
‘In the meantime, we really wanted a dog so we found a dog on Dogs.ie and they proclaimed loud and proud that they don’t take ads from puppy farmers and they give some of their profits to charity,’ he said. ‘So we took that as good and we found a dog that was advertised as a familyborn dog.’
Dogs.ie is owned by Paul Savage, who displays a Cork phone number and address but confirmed to the
MoS that he lives in Boston. He charges €50 an ad for dogs for sale and €80 for ads for stud dogs.
‘I’m happy to look into the ad to see if the information the seller provided was accurate,’ he told the MoS.
‘Since yesterday a number of people have contacted me saying that I am enabling puppy farms. I updated the page today to say: “Dogs.ie has been created with an aim to make sure that buying a dog online is a safe process.” We actively blocked certain bad actors from posting ads on Dogs.ie.’
Armed with a checklist of tell signs, McDermott was directed to a family home where he met with a ‘lovely grandmother’.
‘We went though the checklist of things that you are supposed to do. They were really friendly,’ he said.
‘So we took it as good, this is a family dog, it’s been ethically born, the lady was telling us about her grandkids, how they play with the dog everyday, it all felt just really lovely in itself.
‘She had all the documentation stamped by a vet. She gave us the form to sign and said she’d send if off and it would go from being registered from our family to your family. She just seemed like a nice lady who had a dog and it was a
family pet and the mom was there and that was it,’ McDermott said.
When he posted a picture of Rua on Instagram, however, someone contacted him asking if they could check the identity of the ‘lovely grandmother’ – and established they are registered as a dog breeder, telling him ‘this dog was bred for profit’.
‘So that was really disappointing. We had been looking in shelters for about a year, then when we did go looking we took on face value on Dogs.ie that they don’t do this type of sale,’ he said.
‘We are going to shower our dog with love but, like a lot of people, if we had known in advance we maybe wouldn’t have bought that dog.’
New laws introduced by the Department of Agriculture in February are meant to protect buyers and pups, with fines of up to €250,000 and/or five years in jail for breaking laws requiring microchipping and licence numbers to be displayed on ads.
A recent investigation by the MoS resulted in big name companies pulling their advertising from Done Deal which then suspended its pet section. Like Done Deal, our investigation showed that many ads on Dogs.ie and Gumtree.ie had too few chips for each litter, were fake or invalid, and chips showed pups registered to puppy farmers.