All these shared missing dogs posts on Facebook

[QOD]

Are they stolen to be sold? The fighting bait awfulness?
Just seems to be endless "stolen from my garden"
Surely they don't sell for much? Even the pedigree ones?

I was wondering the same thing. The awful thing is that it's becoming too common now.... People have 'sharer' fatigue.

A friend lost his dog in the Lake District recently. Gave up after looking for hours and went home, put it all over relevant social media. Dog was found next morning (unhurt) and was local celebrity by then! Cheering in cafe etc. None of which answers your question, but I was surprised/pleased that these things actually give results occasionally!

Oh absolutely
i know locally a chihuahua and puppies were stolen. There had been a great big sign advertising them. Now that, I understand. Not nice but you know cute little puppies for sale
(The owner paid a ransom I heard and got them back btw)

but your 6 yr old springer or 4 yr old lab .... is there a market?

We've just had to put a bolt and padlock on our back gate of our very secluded garden with a 7' wall around it. 5 times in a week, we had found he gate open. The littlest dog has started weeing inside and appears scared of something at night and my garden table has one edge part snapped off.
We have added all of this up to someone opening the gate but we don't know who. Weirdly, it happened on Good Friday and I only noticed because I looked out the front window and my Lab was saying hello to some people in a car. Luckily she has good recall.
Now, nobody can open our gate, they would have to unscrew everything to get the locks off.

My dad lost one of his dogs twice. Both times they were found via social media.

The first time his dog bolted due to unexpected fireworks in the area and became an instant "face of all that is wrong with society" in the area but was widely shared and shortly after forwarded to us, having been handed into a police station.

The second time a different dog slipped his leash after a cat. I circulated his pic on FB within minutes. He was found a few hours later vie a FBooker. I dated each one of these of these pictures.

But, if in doubt, share, it helps.

Gibble that's horrible, are you scared or ok?

Not scared, flummoxed is a better description. Would be a different story if Lily had got run over though, she was in the middle of the road.

Sadly most of these dogs will have been stolen not for their current value, but to add to a supply of bait dogs or boost puppy farm stocks as breeding machines. :(

By making them "too hot to handle" it does increase chances of finding them.

We were also advised to get pup microchipped and put it on his collar for this very reason.

Watched a CCTV of a border terrier being stolen from a garden a few streets away, 5pm on daylight as well on main road

Ugh. Just to be clear, I'm not questioning the sharing, more the why on earth are so so many being stolen all of a sudden?
Devastating.

With chipping of dogs becoming law, to enforce this all new dogs at the vets should be mandatory scanned. And a greater share of information between the chipping companies and the vets. A good idea would be to have all pups chipped before being sold and when you change details, you are required to provide some kind of ID details from the old and new owner.

Perhaps (hopefully) there's not more being stolen, but an increasing % of people putting it on fb.

I keep seeing warnings about people coming round in a van purporting to be selling fish or similiar, but they're actually scoping whether there's a dog on the property and will come back later in an attempt to steal.

Or poisons in woods and parks.

It may be FB culture, but I do think there's an increase.
Dogs don't need to be worth a huge amount to make it worth the effort of grabbing one from a garden, and unfortunately there is an endless supply of people who will buy dogs from dubious sources. Gundog types are an obvious target, as are sight hounds - always people looking for pups,no questions asked :(
My dogs all have 'neutered, microhipped ' tags but I also don't leave them in the garden unless I am also outside or at least in the house with the door open.

I live in a fairly lively area shall we say and am a member of a few of the lost and found facebook groups. There does seem to be a bit of this about and I think I will get one of the neutered & microchipped tags. It sometimes gets written off as urban legend but someone on one of the groups did come back home from holiday to find a marking sprayed on their garden wall. Whether that's to mark their house as one with a dog worth stealing I don't know. It is scary because our dog is so friendly I think she'd happily jump into the arms of anyone.

I wonder whether actually many of these dogs aren't being stolen but that if a dog disapppears out of a garden then suggesting that it could have been stolen is far more likely to get a positive share than if the dog had managed to get out and wander off. I'm not saying that dogs aren't stolen, but given that many dogs these days are newtered there would be little market for a newtered four/six year old dog, for instance...

Last year there was a very high profile case of a guide dog going missing in Scotland. I can't link because on my phone, but basically the owner was free-running her dog and it went missing. For weeks, months even there were posters all over fb, with links to printable posters for people to share/put up all over the country. The story being shared was that it was believed this dog could have been stolen and could be anywhere in the country by now.

The reality is that this dog was running in a fairly open area near farmland, it is in fact far more likely that she ran on to a farm and was possibly shot by a farmer, although no farmer would have wanted to come out and admit that he'd shot a guide dog given the high profile nature of her disappearance, even though he wouldn't have been in the wrong for shooting a dog runing on to his farm and possibly scaring his livestock even if not agressively...

But once her disappearance was shared on fb guide dogs had to take it over and every possibility had to be explored. But they also will have had to be careful to avoid any criticism possibly directed at the owner/or the organisation.

After all imagine someone coming on here posting "my dog has wandered out of my garden," although some would be sympathetic there would be the inevitable calls of "why was your garden not secure? if you'd secured your garden the dog would still be here, you irresponsible dog owner..." and if someone posted that they'd been running their dog close to open farmland and she'd disappeared they would be called irresponsible for running a dog close to areas where livestock may be grazing and that the dog might have been shot and it would be all their fault.

Fwiw in this instance I don't think anyone did anything wrong, and as a guide dog owner I can't imagine what the poor owner here went through.

There's one doing the rounds on our local pages now. Two spaniels taken right out of their kennel. The poor chap that they belonged to is heartbroken according to his daughter and keeps crying. It's shared all over Facebook and it's been on the local news, I've shared it and seen it umpteen times. Unfortunately there's so many and as you say it becomes saturation. I dread to think that they might have been taken for bait dogs. A puppy farm would be preferable to that.

It's bad enough when your dog dies. The thought of someone deliberately taking them and doing God knows what, doesn't bear thinking about.

the springer/cocker spaniels? yeah, have seen that one as well and I'm not local to the area.

Although, if these dogs are such important members of the family why are they living in a kennel outside?

Working dogs usually do live in kennels outside. Doesn't make them any less of a much loved family pet. My sisters horse lives in a stable on a farm a mile from her house but she doesn't love it any less.

There was a thing going round recently apparently taken from a conversation with a dog fighting thug. They take any dogs they see in gardens and it also said that his wife dresses up smart and goes round buying dogs for sale pretending to be a responsible dog owner.

What chance do people stand against determined behaviour like that?

Bubble2bubble excuse my ignorance but why are gun dogs and sight hounds an obvious target?

Am very relieved our back garden is only accessible via the utility room, we have no side returns or gates or similar.

My dogs where let out recently thankfully whoever did it was stupid or very scared once they had three german shepherds coming at them... We got them back very quickly thankfully as one was pregnant at the time so she would of been worth keeping hold of for the sale value of 9puppies.

margot maybe just where I live, but if you are out and about with what looks like a good working type dog you may well be to be approached to sell it, and there are people who very much see these type of dogs as a disposable commodity. Labs and springers very, very frequently disappear :(

Ok thanks Bubble. We have a gun dog breed and have never been approached by anyone dodgy, thankfully.