Disney ‘fuels’ trend for ear-cropping dogs

CHILDREN’S and celebrity trends are making people think that it is acceptable to crop their dogs’ ears, an MP has claimed.

Neil Hudson, a Conservative MP, spoke yesterday in support of a Bill that would make it illegal to bring puppies and kittens younger than six months into the country. It is against the law to crop a dog’s ears, but some owners send their pets abroad for cropping. Others buy foreign puppies whose ears have already been cropped.

As the procedure has to be carried out on very young dogs fellow Conservative MP Selaine Saxby’s Bill could help to close a loophole in the law.

Mr Hudson told the House that children’s films like as well as “popular culture” and “a celebrity culture”, leave people unaware that dogs with cropped ears are “horrifically mutilated”.

The Disney Pixar movie features an evil Dobermann pinscher with cropped ears in a central role.

Mr Hudson said: “If you look really closely at the dogs in that film, many of them are cropped. So if people are going to the cinema with their kids, and seeing this on the big screen, that looks normal and that is wrong.”

People therefore “don’t realise that ear-cropping is not normal” and so “want to have those dogs”, he continued. He added that “we need to educate people that these dogs have been horrifically mutilated”.

Other cropped canines include Ace, the superhero boxer-Chihuahua crossbreed from Bluey, an Australian cattle dog from the children’s cartoon of the same name, and Scooby Doo – the iconic Great Dane.

Ear-cropping, along with tail docking, has been illegal in the UK – except for medical reasons – since 2006. Both are referred to as “mutilation” in the Animal Welfare Act.

Yet the practice is on the rise. More than 1,000 cases of cropping have been reported to the RSPCA since 2020.

The RSPCA recently co-hosted an event at Parliament with Mr Hudson, who is a vet himself and has long campaigned on issues of animal welfare.

He has represented Penrith since 2019 and is the only veterinary surgeon sitting in the House of Commons.