It was lockdown that convinced Richard to finally succumb and get a dog. Having fallen in love with their neighbour’s cavapoo, he didn’t hesitate in choosing Dexter.
Dexter is more teddy bear than dog. He insists on sleeping in the master bedroom, next to Richard and his wife, Amelia. Dexter is a fussy eater, with a particular affinity for poultry. ‘We’re roasting a whole chicken for him every week,’ Richard chuckles. With pleading eyes matched to curled off-white fur, he’s hard to resist.
While Dexter lives a life of luxury now, his first few weeks at his new home were traumatic, because Richard unknowingly bought Dexter from a puppy farm.
True to their generative semantics, puppy farms produce dogs that are bred for profit. Churning out a fast turnover of litters, often in unhygienic environments, the animals are then passed onto the front-of-house ‘breeder’. Dirty surroundings and swift separation from parents mean the puppies can contract chronic health and behavioural problems.
Last year promised to be a game-changing year for clamping down on puppy farms in the UK and abroad. A law regulating the industry – ‘Lucy’s Law’ – finally came into force in England. Now, breeders must show the puppy with their mum in their place of birth. A comms campaign was scheduled to educate the public on how to safely buy a puppy.
Then COVID happened. The comms operation was pulled. The new legal protections were temporarily lifted in lockdown. Though breeders were considered a business, collecting puppies – an opportunity to look for signs of negligence and abuse – was deemed a non-essential journey. Puppies would now be delivered to your doorstep. Lonely Brits rushed to replace co-workers with cuddly companions. Last year, the average value of a puppy for sale was £808. It’s now £1,875.
Safe-seeming breeders are often not what they appear. Raffles, a ‘family breeder’, has been rearing cockapoos for six years. Its website credits its ‘acres of land’ in the Cheshire countryside as giving their dogs the ‘best of everything’. But in a Facebook group called ‘Raffles have your say’, dog owners have been sharing their eerily similar stories of the health problems their Raffles puppies have contracted.
This is where Richard unwittingly bought his beloved, soft-eyed Dexter from. Locked down at home, he chose his new pet over a video call. When he pitched up outside Raffles, Dexter was carried out to him.
