Aftermath of the Covid puppy boom: ‘A tsunami of unwanted dogs’

“This is the worst year we’ve ever experienced” in terms of the numbers of dogs being surrendered and abandoned, says Fiona Gammell, founder of Wicklow Animal Welfare.

She gestures around the shelter’s rows of freshly swept enclosures. There are tiny Labrador mix puppies with brindle coats and startling blue eyes; fearful West Highland terriers; five bouncing cocker spaniel crossbreed puppies; two slightly older cocker mixes; a big bounding goldendoodle; a joyful Pomeranian in a red jumper who is recovering from a broken leg; and a handful of bigger dogs who have been here for a long time and sport an air of weary resignation. Every one of these dogs needs to go to a new home, and the phone won’t stop ringing with calls about more dogs who need to be taken in.

This is the collateral damage of the Covid puppy boom. Gammell and her volunteers had been braced for the aftershocks, but “I didn’t honestly believe it would come this hard or this fast”, she says. Later today, she will have to start finding space in the rescue for 25 more puppies – 13 from one litter and 12 from another.

After I leave, she texts me to say that she had four calls to take more dogs. “It’s been like a tsunami of unwanted dogs.”

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Lauren Byrne and Rob Jones arrive at the shelter to collect their new pup, Archie, a tiny black handful of fur, with white paws and brown eyes blinking sleepily.

Gammell describes Archie’s background: he was one of six cocker spaniel mix puppies who came in together. “They would have been bred for sale [but] they can’t sell them. And then they want rid of them, so they end up here.”

Gammell microchips the puppy, who emits a tiny yelp, before a delighted Byrne and Jones are allowed to take him home. Minutes after they drive away, a woman comes to collect Snowy, a fluffy white bichon frise mix, who seems confused to find himself in a shelter. “This is a typical Covid-bought dog. He’s about 18 months to two years old, bought during Covid” and never microchipped or neutered, says Gammell.

“Microchipping has been law since 2016, but we’re still seeing dogs all the time that are not microchipped... 85 per cent of the dogs that we get in here are not microchipped... The buyer is breaking the law and the seller is breaking the law.”

With Snowy safely dispatched with his new owner, who is under instructions to make sure he knows who is in charge, a family of four arrives to collect Archie’s sister Lily. “The whole thing is to keep them moving. We have to keep them moving,” says Gammell.

What Tim Kirby, a vet based in Skerries and founder of PetBond.ie, which only works with safe and ethical breeders, describes as the “chain of misery” created by the puppy farm industry has, for these brief few hours, become a conveyor belt of joy. Life is about to get better for Archie, Lily and Snowy, but the requests for rehoming or the calls about puppies left in pounds or at halting sites won’t stop coming. Earlier this week, it was reported that, with Irish shelters heaving at the seams, dogs are being sent to new homes in Italy and Sweden.

How did we end up in this situation? The early months of the pandemic saw an unprecedented number of new dogs bought by families who thought they finally had the time to look after one.

The number of new dogs registered with the Fido.ie database in June 2020 was 46 per cent higher than 2019. Prices soared as dogs – especially small, so-called designer breeds – sold for four or five times their pre-Covid prices. As lives are now returning to what was normal and the cost of living is rising rapidly, some owners feel they can no longer manage their dogs. And breeders are finding themselves left with puppies no one wants to buy.

Gammell used to have an arrangement to rehome some dogs in England through a shelter there, but it is experiencing its own crisis on a similar scale, and no longer has space for Irish-born dogs.

It feels like we’ve gone back 10 years to a time when we used to be inundated with requests for surrenders

—  Corina Fitzsimons of Dogs Trust

Wicklow Animal Welfare is just one of the rescue organisations dealing with the fallout. Dublin-based Dogs Trust has taken in 54 puppies in the past three weeks alone. They include eight Pomeranian crosses who are now four weeks old; four Jack Russell terrier crosses; and 15 crossbreeds from the local authority dog pound – and all arrived without a mother.

The shelter also has four litters who are still with their mothers – including Labrador crosses, Belgian shepherds and three chihuahua crosses.

“It feels like we’ve gone back 10 years to a time when we used to be inundated with requests for surrenders,” says Corina Fitzsimons of Dogs Trust. The organisation has had to put out an urgent appeal for foster homes.

“We’ve 2,180 requests to take in dogs this year. By this time last year, we’d had 1,638 and the number of requests for the whole of 2019 was 2,307.”

The main reasons people have for requesting to surrender their dogs are unwanted behaviours in the animals, and that they don’t have enough time to care for them. Often, says Fitzsimons, they don’t realise there’s a connection between their lack of time and the dog’s barking or chewing.

If a puppy is born in a shed with hundreds of dogs around, they are not getting those life experiences; if the mother is worried and stressed and overbred, she can pass that on

—  Corina Fitzsimons, Dogs Trust

The organisation works with owners to try to help them keep their dogs in their home wherever possible and assiduously avoids ‘shaming’ owners. “The last thing we want to do is get back to a situation where people are driving up the side of the mountain and just letting their dogs out.”

Occasionally, the dogs’ needs can be more complex. “Some of these designer breeds, the ‘fluffy mcfluffersons’, are bred by people who breed them for money,” she says. In the case of some large-scale breeders, if “a puppy is born in a shed with hundreds of dogs around, they are not getting those life experiences; if the mother is worried and stressed and overbred, she can pass that on.”

Sometimes, she says, “they can end up with a fearful nature for the rest of their lives”.

By the time they end up in places like Wicklow Animal Welfare, a small number of these puppies are showing signs of trauma, says Gammell. Others have physical problems. “Everything is scary. Everything is a challenge for them. They can take weeks or months to come right.” She describes a pair of Pomeranians who have been here six months. “One of them is still not right.”

She points to the three Westies in a cage nearby. When we approach, they retreat, backing away into the corner. “They were born in a puppy farm. And they were sold to a puppy farm. So they knew nothing only sheds, and everything outside of that shed is scary. They don’t have any concept of normality. Buyers should see the puppy’s parents who are left behind and then end up in a place like this.”

Offers to adopt small breed puppies – finding new homes for big dogs is much more difficult – still pour in through the organisation’s Instagram page, where they are carefully vetted by a “brilliant team” of volunteers who all have full-time jobs to make sure they are the right match. Before she leaves with Archie, Byrne says she has “stalked the Instagram page” for nearly two years before getting an offer of a puppy for adoption, but she was happy to wait.

Others are not. During the pandemic, “the average research done [by families wanting a new dog] was about 15 minutes”, says vet Tim Kirby.

Even now, “the public are still driving up laneways collecting puppies, and giving your man €700 or €800″ without doing any research or asking to see the mother, he says. “A puppy shouldn’t be an emotional comfort blanket. It’s a 15-year commitment.”

The past two years saw demand rise for smaller, mixed breed dogs – the usual poodle and cocker mixes, but also more experimental hybrids creating by crossbreeding tiny dogs like Pomeranians and chihuahuas with a much larger dog, he says. The result can sometimes be striking looking dogs with a host of behavioural or physical health issues.

“We’re seeing Pomeranians crossed with huskies. They’re being marketed as ‘miniature huskies’.” He’s aware of some which have been “sold to Singapore for €35,000 apiece”.

Vet Finbarr Heslin, who runs the Fido.ie database, says the number of microchipped dogs being rehomed is in line with what would be expected, given the big increase in dog ownership rates during Covid. If the numbers of rehoming requests are up, he suggests, it may be because the number of dog owners – especially first-time dog owners – also went up. What vets are seeing are some behavioural problems linked to a lack of opportunities for puppies to socialise during the pandemic.

Kirby would like to see the rules around large-scale breeders tightened. “At the moment, you can have one staff member for every 25 breeding bitches. If each of those bitches has a litter of six, that’s one staff member for 150 puppies. That needs to be completely revamped. But the most important thing is the buyers. If everybody before they got a puppy asked themselves a single question – what state is the puppy’s mother in? – that would wipe out a lot of supply overnight. Getting a puppy shouldn’t be like dialling in for a Deliveroo.”

Wicklow Animal Welfare’s Instagram page has more information about adopting a puppy or an older dog. Dogs Trust is urgently looking for foster and permanent homes