Stollen Dogs
The Monroe News had a front page story about a woman whose dachshund had been stolen by a woman in a blue van. It is a horrible fact that dogs are stolen every day here and around the nation. If your dog is lucky, it is being stolen because it is cute, and somebody wanted a cute dog free of charge. But if your pet is unlucky, it was stolen for other, nefarious reasons.
When I was conducting animal welfare inspections, we inspectors learned several reasons why people would steal a typical pet out of a yard. Years ago, the primary reason was to resell the pet to laboratories for animal research. People would either answer classified ads for “free dogs” (or cats), or steal them right out of fenced yards. They would then collect up a few and turn around and sell them to places like hospitals and vet schools for research. These people were called “bunchers” and were making nice profits until the laws changed to require traceability for these so called random sourced dogs and cats.
But the practice still exists today, although it is much less common. The good research labs are extremely careful about buying random sourced animals and screen each animal carefully before starting any research testing. But occasionally they are sold a stolen dog by a licensed USDA B class dealer. When that happens there are protocols to follow. Most importantly remember this: they do not want your pets and they will gladly return your pet if it has ended up in their lab. Many researchers are pet owners themselves and are repulsed by the thought of using a beloved pet in any research project. Plus, what would be more tarnishing to an institution than the fact that they are using stolen animals?
As I said, stealing animals for research is not a common practice today. Much more commonplace is stealing animals for pit bull training. Training a pit bull to fight and kill other dogs is a long process. Most pit bulls will not instinctively kill anything, so they have to be trained. Typically trainers start with kittens.
Teaching the pit bulls to kill starts with a kitten, and progresses into killing something that fights back– which is usually adult cats. After building up the dog’s confidence, the trainers switch over to puppies because a dog will rarely kill a puppy on its own. Again, after the dog successfully starts killing puppies it needs to build confidence and that means larger and larger old dogs. Old dogs put up a fight, but are easily defeated. Eventually, the pit bulls are paired with other pit bulls and their fighting careers are begun. As you see there are kittens, cats, puppies, and all sizes and ages of dogs needed to train a fighting dog, thus creating a market for stolen animals.
Because Michigan is full of pit bull fighting rings, (as well as cock fighting rings), many pets are stolen every month. Your best defense against theft is common sense. Do not let your pets roam freely. House your pets indoors, and watch them when they are outside. Keep collars and tags on them when they are outside and report any odd behavior by neighbors and strangers when you see it. Lastly, contact your representatives and tell them to crack down on animal fighting. It is against the law but seldom does it get law enforcement’s attention. With effort, the activity can be abolished and there will not be a market for stolen dogs used for training.
July 1st, 2007 at 12:45 am
my friend owns showcase collectables on cass corridor .Gary took his 7 year old english bulldog to work everyday and the dog vreeted all people on cass and gary turned his back for one second and mikey was gone ,where do these dogs just disappear to ,are they resold ,kept by others or what? where do you go from here after thousands of fliers are distributed and nothing , where do you look .Mikey has a huge reward posted and nobody has seen him .
July 1st, 2007 at 9:04 am
Hopefully he was stollen because he was such a great dog. You can only hope that he is OK somewhere….