Rowena Packer Puppy Purchasing Paper

Jess Sedivy (00:00)

Welcome to the Functional breeding podcast. I’m Jess Sedivy Gunderson, filling in as interim host for Perry while she is on a break.

The FDC podcast is here to explore what goes into breeding dogs for functional health, both behavioral and physical. This podcast is brought to you by the Functional Dog Collaborative, an organization founded to support the ethical breeding of healthy, behaviorally sound dogs. The FDC provides educational, social, and technical resources to breeders of both purebred and mixed breed dogs.

You can find out more at functional breeding.org or in the functional breeding Facebook group, which we work very hard to keep friendly and inclusive. If you would like to support the podcast, you can find us on Patreon. There will be a link in the show notes.

We’re really glad to have Dr. Rowena Packer back on the podcast. Rowena is a companion animal behavior and welfare scientist with a PhD from the Royal Veterinary College in London, where she still works.  She is routinely invited to lecture at conferences around the world, and earlier this year, she received the Ray Butcher Award for her outstanding contribution to canine welfare science and her leadership in addressing major welfare challenges.

In her previous visit, Rowena and Perry explored the bigger picture of canine welfare—especially how human behavior, perception, and demand shape the dogs we breed and live with. It was a conversation that challenged listeners to look beyond individual choices and think more critically about the system as a whole. We are going to build on that foundation today.

Rowena and her colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College published new research in April of 2026 examining how acquisition practices impact puppy health outcomes later in life. And what this study makes clear is that those early decisions have meaningful effects for dog welfare.

I loved everything about this interview, and feel it needs no further introduction.  Let’s get right to it.

Jess Sedivy (02:18)

Welcome Rowena welcome back to the podcast. I’m very excited to have you here. And what I want to do today is go over the paper that you recently published. And so this was a large scale longitudinal research study. And so for our listeners, longitudinal research is when you take a group of dogs, a cohort, and you follow them over time. And so this is called the Pandemic Puppy Research Program.

And it was it emerged from the COVID-19 setting and so can you talk a little bit about how the study uses puppies acquired during the pandemic and what made that time such an important window to study.

Rowena Packer (02:57)

Yeah, absolutely. So back during the very start of the pandemic where obviously all of our lives became very topsy-turvy and I was at that point doing some quite clinically based research in our referral hospital at RBC and suddenly had to pivot to becoming desk based. I thought, right, what are the welfare issues du jour? And I’m sure across the world we saw a lot of media articles around this sort of boom in people either buying or wanting to buy puppies. We had headlines in the UK, like the Financial Times, places that wouldn’t usually report on dogs, saying we have a shortage of puppies ⁓ alongside with other things like toilet rolls in the UK. This kind of very, really encouraging this scarcity mindset of if you want a puppy, you need to go out and get one right now. You’re going to be battling people to try and get one. And I thought, okay, this doesn’t sound great. Having done some puppy buyer research prior to the pandemic, that well, we’ve got the potential for people to be potentially cutting corners in this really what felt like a high stakes attempt to acquire this dog that was going to potentially massively enhance their or their family’s ⁓ quality of life during this unpleasant period. So we set out about studying how and why people were acquiring puppies during the pandemic. Thankfully the lovely Animal Welfare Foundation in the UK recognized researchers’ needs and said, right, we’ll fund some desk-based work rapidly. And that’s basically where this whole programme of work stemmed from. So we initially went about recruiting owners who, during 2020, so our first lockdown in the UK was on the 23rd of March of 2020. So from that point onwards, we wanted to find puppy buyers ⁓ and get them to report relatively quickly after their acquisition what factors had motivated them to want a dog, to want their specific breed, what they were looking for in a breeder. So relatively comprehensive in terms of those thought processes and then how they had actually purchased that dog. We know there’s huge variability in how people end up with a puppy in their household. 

And we were particularly interested in those that were buying dogs, say, rather than getting them from a shelter because we knew there were huge constraints on the shelter sector at that point. We wanted that purchasing process, really getting to grips with how do people navigate that from identifying a breeder, or indeed a seller, if we’re going to be a bit more liberal with the use of who actually was selling that puppy to them. And then looking at their early life initially. We wanted that to be comparative so we initially also looked at the exact same time period but time locked to the year before, so pre-pandemic 2019, what were people doing throughout those same seasons (we know the seasonality to puppy purchasing too).

And so we found very early on that there were big changes in how and why people were acquiring puppies. The majority of which were, unfortunately, a red flag for anybody who is concerned about canine welfare. We saw that people were spending a lot more on puppies, which again, if we just think of basic economics, made sense where it was very much the seller’s market. They could charge what they wanted and people would buy those dogs. The concern there was that we were potentially seeing a fueling of that un-scrupulous through to illegal trade in puppies, that people were not following at least what in the UK would be best practice in buying a puppy. So even the basics of seeing a puppy with its mother, which for most of the UK is the law, buying a puppy from where it was raised, again, partly because of social distancing, people buying puppies through doorsteps, meeting people at different locations, all of those kind of transparency indicators of “was that puppy really bred by that person in that place” started to fall away.

So we were really interested, given early life is just so crucial for future dog behavior and welfare. We wanted to start following these guys at least for the early years of their life to see, does this have an impact? You know, I think sometimes when we acquire a puppy it’s such a positive emotional kind of moment for a household that we probably don’t then think about what the actions that I’ve just undertaken. Are they going to have any negative consequences in six months, a year, two years? It’s all about that moment of “here I am with my new family member.”

Jess Sedivy (07:24)

Yeah. And I, as we go along, that is something I want to dig into with you. The part of your paper that talks about that gap, the disparity between what people intend to do and what they actually do. So I think that that will be something cool that we can kind of lead into. Was there anything that really stood out to you in that early section about how puppy buying behavior changed? I was really shocked to see the statistic that you had broken down about how many people, I mean, the demand was just so far outstripping the supply of puppies. And it was a shocking number to me about, you know, 400 plus people looking for each available puppy. What do you think really changed with puppy buying behavior during that period? Like the main things, was it just urgency or?

Rowena Packer (08:00)

Yeah. Yeah. Convenience became a huge part of that, so where historically we see that one of the big motivators in terms of what type of breeder, what characteristics of a breeder are appealing will be some of those things that we said are basic law – like I want to see to meet a breeder who will let me see my puppy with its mum with its litter – instead it came down to do you have a dog right now? Are you in a distance that I’m willing or able to travel? Do you have the right breed or colour? It was more I guess human oriented it was can I actually do this? Can I acquire this dog in this very rapid time frame?

You know, we talk a lot about impulsive purchasing and I think that’s a really difficult thing to quantify from a scientific perspective because, you know, at what point in time has your mind gone, I’m going to get a dog now, I’m ready to get a dog now through to actually getting a dog. I’ve always really struggled with that. How do we accurately try and portray that? But it did look like people were very rapidly saying, right, we have decided that we’re getting a dog. We are going about this immediately.

Jess Sedivy (08:59)

Mm-hmm.

Rowena Packer (09:21)

I really don’t think the whole, the more that we talked about the pandemic puppy phenomenon, the more I worried that actually we were fueling it because people were getting into their heads. A dog, know, the whole kind of hatred, like human animal interaction literature of dogs are good for us, dogs are this sticking plaster to our emotional health, to our physical health. That was actually being really spun as a strong narrative at that point. And I can understand people’s kind of desperation that anything that would improve their lives during that period was something to seek out and it was just really unfortunate that dogs ended up in that kind of crosshairs.

Jess Sedivy (09:59)

Definitely. ⁓ Do you think, and maybe your research hasn’t focused on this, but as somebody who lives in the UK and you’re more plugged in than our American listeners would be to the publicity around it, do you think that any of those puppy buying patterns have reverted now back to how they were pre-pandemic or have some of them been lasting?

Rowena Packer (10:23)

So we studied that in 2021, we kind of looked at was there a kind of long COVID effect? Were we, at least in that peri-pandemic period, still seeing some of those effects? And thankfully most had reversed. So even within a year, the majority had reversed. One of those traits that we were worried about that seemed to be persisting, though, was people were still viewing dogs online. So over videos or just being sent photos and videos that were pre-recorded.

And we were worried about that, although, you know, we live online, we live on our phones, we live on our computers, so many things, even big purchases can be done through a tiny few-inch screen. That trying to actually get across that that is not the best way to go about buying a sentient animal, I think is a tricky one because it’s just so ingrained in us that that’s how we can do that. And I think we’ve got a huge level of trust, at least in the UK from our puppy buyers, about the kind of sources of dogs that are available. Think about where, for example, if somebody was buying a used car, we’ve got this whole concept of tire kickers that people would be really cautious. They’d be putting on their detective hats and going in thinking, this person’s trying to dupe me. I think at least in the UK, that’s exactly the mindset that people should be going in with when trying to buy a puppy because such a small percentage of our dogs are domestically bred in good welfare conditions, that that should be the kind of framing of that.

Where if you’re saying, okay, I’m happy to buy a dog who I’ve just had a video of sent over, you know, whichever messaging service you use, or I’ve had, you know, some kind of online chat with the breeder and they’ve shown me a bit of my puppy, that does not substitute for going to a breeder’s home. And repeatedly, that’s one of our key things is people are often buying the first time they meet that “breeder” in inverted commas and that dog, where one of the key markers of transparency is going back to the same location, same dog, same person repeatedly to build up that trust that this isn’t, for example, a show home where those puppies were shipped to 24 hours before, even the day of purchasing that puppy. So I think the digital age is intersecting with the pandemic there, that it’s more acceptable that you’re not traveling long distances to repeatedly see a puppy, that there’s a shortcut.

Jess Sedivy (12:42)

So another thing that really stood out to me in your study was just the percentage of first time dog owners. And I thought it was really cool that you broke that out because that’s something that I just, I think it gets lost. ⁓ you know, it’s that, that data point gets lost, but so for our listeners who haven’t read the paper, the study looks at how puppy acquisition and the details around how someone finds and purchases a dog relate to that longer term physical health. There have been numerous studies about how puppy acquisition impacts behavioral health, but this actually looked at physical health. And then the second piece was that you also looked at expectations versus realities of veterinary costs, which we’re going to get into later in the episode. But I think that also ties back a little bit to this fairly high percentage that you had as first time dog owners in the cohort.

Rowena Packer (13:35)

Mmm.

Jess Sedivy (13:37)

And so before we get really into the findings, I’d like to start with some background and just a few definitions for our listeners. So can you tell us what it means to be a licensed kennel in the UK and talk through what some of the primary requirements are for licensing?

Rowena Packer (13:55)

Yeah absolutely so this is a tricky one even in the UK when think about definitions even though it is law. So if you were breeding fewer than three litters a year you technically do not need to be licensed, so you don’t have to register with your local authority. You can breed dogs and you can choose, for example, to register them with a body like a Kennel Club, but you don’t need to be on the radar of your local authority. If you breed three or more then you automatically should have a license. There’s a challenge in between there that there’s also this thing called the business test, that if you are running your breeding establishment as a business, so you’re advertising puppies for sale, then you actually also should be licensed. So that means that some people, mean there’s a lack of clarity there as to whether some individuals should be licensed or not. The challenge is often that people don’t realize they should be licensed until the taxman in the UK comes and asks to see how much money have you made from…selling dogs. So it is an oddly grey area but if you are licensed then you’re subject to inspections from your local authority. Somebody will come out to look at the of host boundary conditions that your dogs are kept in. We’ve got some primary legislation is the Animal Welfare Act and then we have a secondary piece of legislation licensing of activities involving animals, the LIAR, and that sets out minimum standards for a breeding establishment.

It’s tricky because we’ll often talk about looking for a licensed breeder. Some people inherently won’t want to purchase from a breeder who they perceive to be large scale, so having that three or more litters per year. So it’s not a perfect kind of indicator of “this is the type of breeder you should go to.” And also within our licensing legislation, large scale commercial breeding of cats is also licensed. So we’ve got particular hotspots throughout the UK and parts of Wales and Northern Ireland that are historically well known for having large scale, what people might call puppy farms or puppy mills, but are actually within the legislation. They can tick the boxes of what are the minimum requirements. So it’s one of those really difficult areas to navigate. Often owners say, well, should I be looking for a licensed breeder? And in part, it does add some transparency and I get bored of saying the word, but transparency I think is really key in the puppy buying process. But equally you can’t equate it to good welfare standards either, it’s kind of very minimum, and what we want from a dog breeder is – some of it’s tangible, some of it’s more intangible. 

Jess Sedivy (16:32)

So my understanding of the legal side is that you have animal welfare regulations and then sitting kind of on top of that is something called Lucy’s law. And so can you tell our listeners a little bit about Lucy’s law? And the timing of it is that the law went into effect just as the pandemic lockdowns were happening. It was almost simultaneous. And so can you talk a little bit about how Lucy’s law changed who can sell puppies?

Rowena Packer (17:02)

Yeah, absolutely. So Lucy’s Law is within that act, I said within the Liar, so it’s kind of the levels of legislation. So this was following a long campaign from a good friend and excellent veterinary advocate, Mark Abraham, who had spearheaded this along with lots of other dedicated campaigners. Lucy was a breeding bitch. She was the Cavalier King Charles of Spaniel who had been rescued from a large scale low welfare breeding establishment.

And this brought in another level of restriction in that we could no longer have third party sales of puppies. So historically in the UK there has been, for example, pet shops or there has been suppliers to ⁓ a seller. So it’s more of a supply chain. So for example, a larger scale breeding establishment could sell to a smaller scale individual who then sells on those puppies. So Lucy’s law brought in this extra level saying that you need to buy directly from that breeder in the place that that animal was bred or this puppy was bred and you need to also show the puppy’s mother at sale. So the legal obligation is on the seller, the breeder, not the buyer. And often when we talk about illegal sales, we’ll have owners concerned saying, Have I done something illegal? And technically no, but you have also supported somebody who is selling illegally but yes this came in just at that point of the pandemic, but it was a long time coming in the UK. It’s not all over the UK, so we’ve had a kind of spread of it from England to Scotland and Wales. The remaining quarter of the UK is Northern Ireland, but it’s now being proposed in Northern Irish Parliament to bring it in there too, which is an essential part here because Northern Ireland is one of the biggest producers in the UK of puppies often through these larger scale establishments, who are then being shipped to the UK. So you need that consensus with the law to try and harmonise standards.

Jess Sedivy (19:06)

Your study focuses on dogs, where they come from, but you talk a lot about low welfare sources. So can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by low welfare and what that looks like to you?

Rowena Packer (19:13)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the right frame in there as well, Jess, in terms of what it means to me, because I think there is a big variation in what any individual would consider a high welfare start to be. And I think sometimes we can either raise the bar so incredibly high that there’s no breeders that meet it, or we can drop it so low that it is just meeting a basic legal standard, but it’s still not sufficient for good health and welfare going forward.

I think as the basics, you know, we’re thinking about the physical and emotional health of that individual. So prioritisation of the puppy’s welfare from before conception. So thinking about individual selection of mothers and fathers and all of the issues probably for another podcast – that’s my other hat, thinking about things like extreme conformation and inherited disease, but we’ll be here all day!

But thinking about appropriate selection decisions that are prioritising offspring welfare as well as the welfare of the mother, that we are very conscious and are putting in efforts post birth and during that crucial sensitive period for development for puppies, that window of opportunity to really show puppies what to expect of the world, to understand normal interactions, that there’s the strong effort there to socialise those puppies ahead of them going to a new home, given the majority of that sensitive period is in the breeder’s environment.

And also the very basics, often you miss them, but even just the basics of hygiene and preventative healthcare. So when we’re thinking about vaccinations in the UK, puppies have to be microchipped ahead of sale.

And I think the challenge is that lots of those things are missed by owners. I still think we have a very low level of awareness as to what even a basic level of being a good breeder could look like in our dog owning or dog purchasing population, which means that lots of puppies are sold without even those basic markers of good welfare. So obviously on top of that, there’s, when we think about, for example, breeders who are very dedicated to their breed, you know, the breed is a very big part of their identity in their life, that there’s so many extra levels on top of that in terms of the care that can be given. And I often feel a bit guilty of kind of discount, not discounting, but not emphasizing that people should be searching out for a breeder with a long-term commitment to a breed who’s incredibly knowledgeable about their breed because that’s just such a tiny proportion of sellers, at least in the UK, that that can become a kind of unattainable goal because we know lots of those breeders have extremely long waiting lists that the kind of in 2026 people are not willing to wait for or there’s nobody within miles of them. So I have ended up in a bit of a pragmatic approach in terms of trying to advise on what is at least a minimum welfare standard.

Jess Sedivy (22:22)

I would say that I see that too, in the sense that, you know, puppy homes come to us when they’re ready for a dog. And it is a struggle because there there is this push-pull of, you know, long term breeders almost have grown to be able to be in the position to have the expectation that people wait years for a dog. And I’ve always struggled with that as a breeder myself, because I’m not sure that’s fair, in the sense that, you know, but I also don’t know how to fix it. So I don’t know what the solution is. But the unfairness of it is striking to me in the sense that, you know, if you’re a family or you’re a young couple and you’ve bought a house and you’re ready for a dog, and then someone comes back to them and says, well, that’s nice that you’re ready for a dog. But I expect you to wait and just kind of how.

Rowena Packer (22:52)

No, it’s so tricky!

Jess Sedivy (23:16)

That’s just a mismatch. And again, I don’t know how to solve it, but I think that that probably was exacerbated during this period. And so the ⁓ I think we talked a little bit too, just about, how what motivated this. And we interviewed Jane Lindquist, who founded Puppy Culture just recently. Last week, we interviewed her and talked about, you know, observations of pandemic puppies. And so this ties in really, really nicely.

Rowena Packer (23:23)

Mmm, absolutely.

Jess Sedivy (23:45)

That and how you know COVID was an experiment that nobody ever would have set up because it would have been completely unethical for both dogs and people. So I have a lot of respect for how quickly you guys moved on this and were able to set it up because it really was a fascinating window of time to really capture it. And so for this segment of the puppy pandemic research program –

Rowena Packer (23:50)

No. No. 100%.

Jess Sedivy (24:15)

…you looked at dogs up to a certain age and so that was 21 months for this portion of the study. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose that age?

Rowena Packer (24:18)

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, absolutely, so some of it is pragmatic. We managed to get follow-on funding after establishing this cohort, and I will be fully hands up. We got this huge response to the initial study, just looking at cross-sectionally how and why people were buying these dogs and some very early indicators of health and behavior. And then when we realized we had so many, we said, well, we’ve got a role with this. This is such a…fascinating population to study, and in academia longitudinal studies are notoriously hard to set up and maintain. Most of my colleagues who’ve even dipped their toe in there are like, do not go there. But we thought, you know what, this is such an opportunity that owners were so willing to give us so much information, and very honest information, about this early period with their dog, that we sought out more funding, which is unfortunately the lifeblood of asking interesting questions. And then we started follow up with these dogs over the first two years. So we followed them until they were three eventually, so we’ve got some more follow up from this, intersecting in this case in the UK with the cost of living crisis, but that’s matter for perhaps another day. But we thought, Okay, let’s look in early adulthood, so once puppies have gone out of that initial puppy period. And at this stage you know you would expect a 21 month old dog to be in rude health – you know, we’re not worrying about age related issues. There’s the potential for some of those inherited disorders starting to rear their heads depending on which one we’re talking about. The caveat here is that we had a relatively innately healthy population just based on breed here. We didn’t have lots of brachycephalics in our study, or other breeds that we know have these predispositions. We had a huge number of designer cross breeds, as we call them in UK, so people crosses. But we would have expected at 21 months things to be pretty good.

And I think for most owners when we look at their expectations, they wouldn’t be expecting high levels of veterinary interventional cost at this point. So we use this time point where we still had a high level of retention, which is the absolute killer for most longitudinal studies, keeping people on board. We are like – my research group – we torture dog owners. We completely rely on their incredible generosity of their time. We write Bayom off surveys and we allow people to skip or choose whichever bits they want to answer.

Jess Sedivy (26:31)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rowena Packer (26:45)

This cohort were just remarkable in terms of just coming back for more. We were very conscious that we didn’t want to overload with other things. know other studies in the UK, for example, ask for biological samples alongside that or more detailed diaries. And although I would have loved some of that information, equally, I didn’t want to be really pressing people during, you know, this time when they’ve got a young dog, they’ve just emerged from the pandemic. And I think that was actually crucial. I’ve had all the researchers say, how did you keep that retention? I’m like, well, although our surveys were pretty long, that was all we were asking. They were only every few months and people seemed very keen to also get some feedback, obviously sending them back our research findings, but it was hands-off enough that people kept coming back for more.

Jess Sedivy (27:31)

That’s great, because I think that retention is just always the crux of these longitudinal studies, no matter how big or small they are, it seems like holding onto those responses and tracking over time is always really the hurdle. ⁓ So for your study, I think for a long time,

Rowena Packer (27:36)

⁓

Yeah, 100%.

Jess Sedivy (27:52)

…breeders and trainers and researchers have been saying that where a puppy comes from matters. So we’ve been talking about that for a long time, but your study really put data behind it. And so as we talked a little bit earlier, can the findings be broken into two groups? And so first let’s focus on physical health. the puppies and overall what did this study tell you about physical health in the cohort as it relates back to where the dog was sourced from?

Rowena Packer (27:56)

Mmm.

Yeah, absolutely. So similarly, you know, digging into this literature here, I was really shocked that we’ve got policy based on this, probably my too high bar of how policies are made. But I expected there to be a pretty healthy literature on the impact on health of those provenance decisions. But as you’ve mentioned before, Jess, it’s very much driven by a handful of good studies on behavior. And I could only find one study published that showed that age at separation from a puppy’s mother was associated with relatively short-term increases in morbidity and mortality. So we wanted to look and see well at a reasonably fine-tuned level if we follow these dogs, get their owners to report on their health problems – and we know sometimes that can raise eyebrows because yes there is obviously very variable health literacy in owners – but again it can also be very useful because we know lots of owners don’t present their dogs to the vets for some issues that they feel that they can manage at home. And there’s been some other studies, for example, out of the US showing that owner reported health actually correlates pretty strongly with electronic patient records. So that made us feel a bit better on that front. But we were really keen to look at during this couple of years, how many times have people gone to the vet’s? What kinds of issues had their dogs been diagnosed with or were they suspected to have? And also what were their chronic issues? And again, this is thinking, well, these dogs should be – they’re in the prime of their life.

And we were interested in a range of risk factors. The risk factors that were largely reported from the study were around provenance, but we were conscious that health is obviously an extremely multifactorial outcome measure, that there’s lots of different aspects that can impact a dog’s health, both from its innate aspects in terms of their genetics, and the way in which they’re managed by their owners, whether thinking about nutrition and exercise.

But the key factors – so we conducted a relatively large scale set of statistical modelling to look for which factors are most influential, or influential at all. And the really key ones that came out were about provenance. So the two key ones that we found were age at sale, and whether the puppy was sold with their mother. So again, when we think about Lucy’s law, does massively correlate with that, which is

It feels odd to retrospectively validate the piece of policy saying, yes, this did make sense. And again, biologically, there’s good explanations there. Again, it’s both useful to say, these are meaningful restrictions to have in place for breeders, but it also begs the question, obviously we had, as you’ve just said, this natural experiment in what happens when puppy buying goes wrong or the poorer purchasing behaviors are amplified.

It really did show that people are still, even with that piece of legislation in place, not adhering to it in quite large numbers.

Jess Sedivy (31:24)

Yeah, because I believe when I was reading up on and studying the legislation, some of itsl centers around that puppies should not be sold before eight weeks of age. And so your study really kind of looked at that under six weeks ⁓ or around six weeks of age. And those were the puppies that really had significantly more health issues.

Rowena Packer (31:34)

huh.

Yeah, we looked at different cut-offs and that was the one that seemed most important. Again, it’s tricky because of the numbers that are sold at different ages and obviously statistical modelling versus the real world. It’s an approximation of it. But again, I think that it correlates with that previous study that found that younger ageing, six weeks versus 12 weeks was associated with worst outcomes.

Jess Sedivy (32:00)

Mm-hmm.

Rowena Packer (32:12)

And ⁓ people could beg the question, well, who would want a six week old puppy? Or how do people not recognize that? But I think we’ve got about 2 fifths of this cohort are first time owners. They might have had limited interactions with puppies to recognize what a very young puppy even looks like. So I can see how these under eight week sales are facilitated.

Jess Sedivy (32:28)

Yes.

Yeah, when I was reading and kind of putting it together in my head, when you’re talking about 40% of the cohort being first time dog owners, how, you know, are they people who can even really look at a puppy in somewhat realistically gauge how old the puppy is, things like that. So I can, I can definitely see, you know, that that was, that’s a substantial factor. That I think when you break it down statistically and show people those numbers, it really does give you quite a bit to think about. And so your study found that about 91% of all the puppies in the study did have at least one health issue by 21 months. Can you just kind of touch on what some of those most common health issues or disorders were?

Rowena Packer (32:56)

Yeah, absolutely. So we use what we’re coding from obviously, this epidemiological tool, Vet Compass, which some of your listeners might be familiar with. It’s basically a big old repository of vet records from dogs that are attending vets from across the UK. And it’s really useful from even a perspective of using that specific data, but the kind of ways in which you can map diagnoses. So in this case, we looked at the owner’s free text. So owners could say whatever they wanted about their dog’s health. Some of it very descriptive, some of it very brief, as free text always is. And we looked against these Vet Compass categories to see what were the most common disorders – with the caveat that, because of the variable level of detail, we tried to group those instead into the types of disorder. So what body systems were most likely to be affecting these dogs.

And they were very much the kinds of issues we would expect with young dogs, so particularly gastrointestinal issues, injuries, traumatic injuries, eye problems, ear disorders. So at a very broad level, it was very much problems of dogs. It wasn’t that we were seeing that they had very specific, unique profiles of poor health that was associated, for example, with those risk factors. It was just that they were very colloquially sicker than we would have expected.

Jess Sedivy (34:43)

Yes, I think the way I read it was that when you have the undesirable early sourcing factors, that leads to an increase not just in the risk of issues, but also the numbers of issues. Not just that they’re present, but that there was a meaningful increase in that segment of the cohort that you were able to tease out.

Rowena Packer (34:59)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It is that overall kind of burden of health issues. So if we look at how many different categories of health issues these puppies had, those puppies who had those illegal sales indicators, all those puppies that had been purchased by first time owners just had more health issues in that 21 months than those that didn’t.

Jess Sedivy (35:29)

So two really clear and really powerful takeaways I took from reading the paper is that puppies need to stay with their mom and their litter mates beyond that six week mark. But I was also really struck by your finding that centered around the question of whether the puppy’s mother was present at the time of the sale. And so can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at that question? Was that mostly driven by the legal requirement, but can you talk a little bit about what maybe even formulated that legal requirement in the past and how you arrived at that, at the importance of mom and puppy being together at that time?

Rowena Packer (36:10)

Yeah, no, that’s a really good question, Jess. So at least in the UK puppy market, it’s been increasingly recognised over recent years, probably the past 10 to 15 years, that we’re seeing a shift away from the kind of smaller scale domestic breeder, to importation. So we have an unknown number, but potentially a high percentage of dogs coming to the UK from continental Europe, so thinking particularly central and eastern Europe, and that we have lots of dogs that are being bred without licenses in potentially large scale but lower welfare establishments, so however we want to frame that, puppy mills etc. And that to sanitise the provenance of those puppies to a potential buyer, that there are ways and means to sell those dogs to obscure that provenance. A term coined by DEFRA, a government department that covers animal welfare called “pet fished,” sort of play on cat fished, that there are sellers who are trying to show a would-be owner that their dogs, their puppies have had a really good start in life, but actually it’s completely obscuring what could have been a very poor start in life. And for some of those sellers, they are, for example, if puppies are being imported, they’re often separated from their mum at a very young age and then imported over long distances to the UK without their mum and then will be sold without their mum. Occasionally we have heard reports of almost stooge mums being brought in. So mums are sometimes the same, sometimes with really slightly different looking breeds, even seeing some of this in online adverts to try and dupe people that this is mum.

A really unpleasant part of that is moms, heavily pregnant moms being imported to then give birth in the UK to then be sold as his mum. That’s less common, from more anecdotal reports, but that does show that mum being there is not entirely foolproof. But having mum there, again even to the extent of seeing that puppy with its mum at a young age, where it’s still feeding from its mum, we want to see those puppies being fed by their mum to show that this is biologically their mother to see those interactions between the puppy and their mum that it isn’t a random dog that’s been brought in, that they don’t have that positive maternal relationship with, as just a very basic marker of “this dog has been bred here and this is its dam.” So it feels like an impossibly low bar really as to why would we want people to do this, but that fed into Lucy’s law with the campaign before that called Where’s Mum?

I’m always interested in talking to colleagues internationally because, you know, I’d love to hear from you just thinking about North America where there’s more kind of long distance shipping, couriering. Totally, massively. Where, you know, in the UK we’re pretty small when people can drive from the top to the bottom of the UK, can drive all the way to Scotland if you really want a puppy. And people certainly do.

Jess Sedivy (39:15)

Yes. Geography is almost always a factor here.

Rowena Packer (39:32)

That’s a good marker of the origins of that dog.

Jess Sedivy (39:39)

Well, and the pet fishing angle is both interesting and depressing in the sense that we talked about that in the United States too, around that time. And there have been breed clubs and things that have pressed for, if you can’t visit the breeder ahead of time, you should do a video call or a zoom call. And there really just is no way to prove where somebody is or that they are accurately representing the situation and I think that that is always just such a struggle. And so in your study, do you think there’s a physical benefit to the puppy being with mom up until the time they go home or is that merely an indicator of other early welfare factors or is it some combination of both?

Rowena Packer (40:29)

Absolutely a combination of both and that was me admitting that there. I think that early relationship with their mother, and how much they learn from their mother, that we’re not having inappropriately early weaning, that they’re having that interaction potentially with their litter too, you know there’s that question mark of you know how long should they stay off, you know there’s conversations in the UK of breeders saying we don’t want them to stay in that environment for too long and take up too much of that sensitive window for development if it means it could be detrimental to their learning of what will hopefully be their lifelong environment after that. But I think that the emotional, the physical elements as well as this kind of cultural marker of where does this dog come from, they all intersect in a positive way.

Jess Sedivy (41:15)

So my impression, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression from this study was that for a segment of puppies, or for most puppies, these issues probably come to some type of resolution. And so there maybe are more issues and there’s maybe more expense early in life for dogs that come from low welfare situations. But some of that starts to balance out.

Rowena Packer (41:38)

Mm-hmm.

Jess Sedivy (41:41)

However, there is a segment of puppies that are really at risk and that is really, really impactful and somewhat damaging to them. How can we conceptualize for buyers that just acquiring a puppy and loving them isn’t necessarily enough to fix some of those early deficits?

Rowena Packer (42:06)

Yeah, I think that’s a really key messaging point and it intersects with so many aspects of my team’s research. We’ve got this phrase in our research group of “love and stuff is not enough.” Like that you can’t just stick plasters of your own emotions, your own, for example, finances to just throw all these sticking plasters on these dogs and say, well, this dog has good welfare because of all that I can provide it l, where that early portion of life, both with reference to this paper in terms of health, but as everyone should well know in terms of their behavioural development, is so crucial. That’s one of the biggest gifts that you can give to your dog’s long-term wellbeing – A. picking a breed that has low risks of inherited disorders, that has an innately healthy body shape that will allow it to live its kind of life to its full capacity.

And B. that it comes from a source that is setting it up for a healthy future. And I think unfortunately in the UK we’ve been going down a path, a really unfortunate path on both fronts, that people are not giving the time and due diligence to where their puppy comes from or not appreciating the core importance of that for that dog’s welfare, but also for their well-being as an owner. You know, when we think about the caregiver burden of owning the dog with behavioural problems or with health problems, they should really be taking it into consideration more.

Then also picking breeds that have predictable preventable health problems. I think trying to have more kudos to how you buy your dog is something that has been on my mind for the past few years. How do we make it an important kind of social marker of where you got your dog from? And I guess the flip side of that is to not frame a poor welfare source as rescue.

And I think that comes up time and time again in our team’s research, whether we’re talking about imported rescues or we’re talking about dogs coming out of poor welfare breeding situations, that owners feel, prospective owners feel that if they can rescue their animal, in the sense that they can take it from a poor situation to a better situation because of what they can offer, that that is a virtuous behaviour to engage in. When we say to somebody, I’ve got a new dog, the thing that would often roll off our tongue is, Well, what breed is it?

I think it’s vanishingly rare that anybody will ask, Well, where did it come from? And that just should be so central to thinking about – have you done a good thing here? And, I know, it sounds extremely judgmental, but I think when there’s such high stakes at play, we do need to have more kudos in buying well, and more shame in supporting poor sources. And I know shame is a really unpleasant kind of human behaviour change tool, but…for people to be able to walk away feeling good when they know that they potentially supported an illegal or poor welfare establishment is worrying.

Jess Sedivy (45:01)

Well, the peer pressure angle there is is definitely very real in the sense that, ⁓ you know, we, should be asking those questions a little bit more. You know, another part of your study found this misalignment between what, ⁓ what a owner, a puppy buyer expected to spend on veterinary care versus what they actually spend. So there was that expectation. It didn’t really always meet reality. ⁓ Can you talk a little bit about that and why you chose to look at that in tandem with health in this section of your study?

Rowena Packer (45:43)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think when we were thinking about health in this cohort, we’re obviously keen to look at the outcomes of their health. But we know from previous research that expectations differ from reality for lots of different aspects of dog ownership, whether we’re talking about the kind of problem, maybe we’re talking about training needs, but also health are really key, given that if there’s a mismatch there, that is potentially risking that that home cannot be long-term sustainable, that people can’t change their lifestyles around these dogs and can’t keep that dog long-term. In terms of relinquishment risks, that’s a factor that comes up again and again in the research. So in terms of veterinary care, we were acutely aware that at least in the UK, we’ve had increases in veterinary care costs in recent years. It’s a really tricky one.

There was a conversation at a welfare event in the UK last week, in the welfare discussion forum, of what’s responsible dog ownership, and often finances come up in that. And you know we have to think from a social justice point of view that not everybody has to have very deep pockets to be able to enjoy the benefits of a bond with a dog. But equally, people need to go in with open eyes as to -how much could this cost me? what is the kind of risk even by breed of how much money am i likely to spend on this dog’s health needs? So we were really keen to see how much their previous expectations, when they were going to buy this puppy, aligned with the last two years of owning it or less than two years of owning it. Where we think, you know, that’s a relatively short timeframe where, as we said before, there shouldn’t have been so many issues popping up. But we found that almost a quarter of owners had spent more in that time period on vet care than they expected.

And from a welfare perspective, it’s of concern that even basic care costs might be too much for some owners. We’re not advocating, work at a university with a large referral hospital, I’m not saying that if you can’t afford high level advanced tertiary care that that makes you a bad owner, not at all. But just for the kind of basics in terms of preventative healthcare and also those unforeseen things. And the second most common thing we saw was traumatic injuries that we can maintain that dog’s welfare. We don’t want to end up with under-treatment or ineffective DIY treatments at home as part of that.

Jess Sedivy (48:15)

Yeah, the takeaways too for me were – you have this combination of potentially first time dog owners put with a puppy that has more health problems. Subsequently, the owner ends up spending more money than they anticipated, and how all of those factors just combined together. And I think it undeniably has to impact dog welfare in those situations. ⁓

Rowena Packer (48:23)

Mmm.

The odd thing there as well is that so many of these, when we looked at this cohort initially, the purchase cost was dramatically higher for our 2020 pandemic puppies compared to 2019. And for all those reasons, we discussed it becoming a really frantic seller’s market. And if people upfront were spending, at least in GBP, in excess of £1,500 on a puppy, but then within the 18 months that follows, are finding that they can’t afford the veterinary costs, it really makes me think about long-term planning, if it’s better off to potentially buy a lower risk puppy from a good source of a lower risk breed in terms of innate health and have some of that money saved for those unforeseen costs, than to basically use all of your resources just to get that dog into your home.

Jess Sedivy (49:31)

Well, and it’s also a really clear snapshot of a mismatch between. How are just what it means to have a good breeder who talks to you about those things? So my breed is the flat coated retriever, which I’m sure you’re familiar with in the UK. ⁓ But undeniably part of that discussion is the cost of a puppy in the beginning.

Rowena Packer (49:44)

Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

huh.

Jess Sedivy (49:59)

And, you know, there is going to be more cost over time. I think that maybe breeders, that’s an area breeders can work on, is really talking about that. And so when we get to what buyers can work on, what do you think some of those red flags, what are the big red flags that buyers are still missing when they’re looking for a puppy?

Rowena Packer (50:09)

Yep.

Anything that feels like it’s obscuring where is that dog coming from? I think, although I’m a scientist, gut feelings are strong in a lot of this. We have a lot of sense as a human that if somebody is avoiding the questions that you’re asking, is unwilling to answer questions about any basic aspect of your dog, of your dog’s breed, of your setup as a breeder.

Then that is an immediate worry. know that those really committed breeders who, you know, such a large part of their life is running their, you know, their breeding program is loving and caring for their dogs, that they should be open to all of the questions because that is, you know, something that they have great pride in and are looking to interview you, where instead where you’ve got people who are brushing people off with very short answers or have excuses as to, for example, why can’t I see the dog with its mum today? ⁓ the mum’s been taken to the vets, the mum’s on a walk. Anything that feels like you’re being brushed off should be an enormous red flag. It should be just such a basic thing that you can build up a relationship with that breeder that you can visit them multiple times. As we said, geography-wise in the UK, you can get most places in a few hours. And given you’ve got a potentially 12-plus year commitment here to that dog, doing a few car journeys to visit a breeder should be a very small cost in the long term kind of well-being of your dog and your family. So I think being able to build up a trusting relationship and not feeling like you’re being brushed off and I think unfortunately we’ve got such low expectations because of the online market where everything becomes so extremely transactional that if I, know, mean, Hertfordshire just north of London today, if I wanted to go buy let’s say a Frenchie puppy this afternoon, one of the most commonly sold breeds on online sale sites in the UK, I could pop out and get one if I could spare 700 to a thousand pounds. I could go and get one this afternoon, which is a ludicrous state of affairs, that I can buy a sentient being with little to no question asked and come home with it the same day. So I completely get your point earlier of just trying to balance out how urgently you want a dog with the kind of ethics you have in terms of where it comes from.

But it’s just so essential that you feel that you can trust who is selling you that dog. We’ve looked previously at things like breeder contracts and we know that lots of individual breeders will have their own contracts. And that, for example, in the UK we had a multi-stakeholder scheme called the Puppy Contract, which most owners don’t engage in. It’s basically showing an owner all of these key questions to ask your breeder throughout that sales process.

And we found most owners weren’t aware of it and if they were, they kind of felt happy to go it alone, that they felt like they knew enough already. Where I think the puppy market is constantly mutating to become smarter, to be more ready to dupe people in a more effective way. That actually what you knew when you bought your last dog, that could be over a decade ago, is not the same as what we’re facing right now. And actually having that guide is kind of essential to avoid falling straight into these traps.

Jess Sedivy (53:28)

Hmm.

It’s so funny that you mentioned that because I had never considered that as a breeder. I feel that the people who approach me and inquire about puppies that they have gotten smarter over the years and more educated, but it never occurred to me that on the other side, the same thing was happening. ⁓ yeah.

Rowena Packer (53:55)

Yeah, I spoke with a colleague, there’s a really lovely vet in the UK, David Martin, he’s a welfare advisor for one of the big veterinary bodies. And when I first started publishing this work, he said, you know, your paper is going to end up on the desks of some of these huge commercial legal breeders, because they’re going to be looking at what you’re telling people to do or not do. And it’s like an arms race. It’s literally how can we obscure the next thing? And it’s just so unfortunate that so many well-meaning people just play into this every single day.

Jess Sedivy (54:21)

It is.

Rowena Packer (54:31)

I feel like I end up being a puppy selection counsellor for friends and family. The amount of WhatsApps get of sending me screenshots of adverts and like, I’m just the fun police. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. But it’s like, educated friends who are so, they really want to do the right thing, but they’re just completely duped by an advert that has enough kind of text on it to just fulfil what they think is well it’s got the licensing number and as we discussed earlier that’s not a perfect marker or look there’s a picture of Pup with its mum and I’m like message them and see if you can come and visit just in a very non-committal way. you can’t they’re being sold on this specific day like it’s it breaks my heart that people are not from like a horrible judgment way of them but that people are so easily duped.

Jess Sedivy (55:14)

You talked about that in your paper too of this intention behavior gap that puppy buyers have where there’s this difference between what puppy buyers say they want to do and how they want to approach it and then there’s what they actually do. And so this is all tied up in urgency and emotions and availability of a puppy. What do you think some of those really big intention behavior gaps are, and do you think that causes people to just overlook these warning signs?

Rowena Packer (55:54)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think in the original study of this cohort before we started following them, the number one thing people wanted to see in a breeder was that they sold with mum. And yet there was an enormous gulf in how many said that but then actually did that when they bought their puppy. I think it’s that the ability to compromise is one of the areas that worries me the most. We need to have some kind of lines that we hold regardless of what’s going on and sometimes it can be – so we’ve done lots of free text analysis alongside some of more quantitative work. If, you know, there are people who are aware of red flags, when they first go to say, collect their puppy or ideally visit it before collecting it. And they see that mum isn’t there, but they feel sorry for that puppy because there’s other aspects of the environment that they feel aren’t great for them. So they want to rescue them. Or perhaps the environment ticks enough boxes that even if the things are aware of that should be in place but aren’t so, things like being sold without a microchip or being sold without any vaccinations, that people will. It’s not enough to tip the kind of dial towards no I need to walk away.

And that’s why I think it’s so important that all of that kind of police work goes on before you go anywhere near that breeder’s property or near that puppy. Because we know that hearts completely overtake minds in those moments and that our brains are spectacular at doing gymnastics to justify what we want to do. You know, we just think, and particularly, the pandemic being that kind of pressure cooker for it, this could be your only chance to get a puppy. I’m doing a good thing, you know, the whole kind of white knight complex comes in. If I’m saving it either way, whatever I do is a good thing. You know, we’ve spoken to owners who’ve done that and said, well, did you report them to your local authority? No. You think well if you could have done one redeeming thing in that cycle when you’ve just given a potentially illegal seller £1,500 you could have at least tried to get them on the radars of people who can try and change things.

So I think it’s really tricky when we’re talking about heads and hearts, when we’re thinking about intentions and rationality versus what we actually do. And we’re all completely irrational beings, I’m not removing myself from that whatsoever, but I think here where there’s so much at stake, we do really need to have some very set standards. For example, if it is a household, everybody is accountable for saying we will not do this at any cost.

Jess Sedivy (58:30)

Yeah, because your paper highlights buyer behavior, but clearly this is a much bigger issue. So we know, cause we have buyers, but we also have breeders. have legislature, you know, legislators. have the people in the UK who are tasked with enforcing, you know, all of this stuff interacts and, and responsibility in truth is, is spread much more broadly and each piece you know each player in this game has some level of responsibility but it does really seem to me that the success of the legal framework in the success of really driving some of these breeders to be better still does really rely on behavior of the buyers and their choices.

Rowena Packer (59:18)

Yeah, I think, yeah, completely. I think I’m keen to say that at least after this paper came out we did have some accusations that we’re putting everything on the buyers and clearly a big focus of this paper was buyer behaviour, partly from an empowerment point of view that the puppy market could be changed relatively rapidly by positive shifts in buyer behaviour. You know, as consumers, I it’s horrible thing to think about when we’re thinking about our dogs, but as consumers that market could change if we did have stronger boundaries in terms of who we won’t give money to for their puppies. But a huge elephant in the room in this is around, you know, legislation. And obviously this was very acutely after the implementation of Lucy’s law, but there aren’t indicators in the UK at least that things are improving dramatically. Since then, the enforcement is key, even basic awareness from both the breeders and from potential buyers of these legal requirements is important and it’s a challenging one because the more kind of legislation we have for dog breeding we get a lot of pushback of saying well you’re going to stop you know good breeders from wanting to continue with this because there’s too much red tape there’s too many kind of hoops to jump through they just want to do what they’re doing and I’m a strong advocate for increasing domestic breeding I think it’s a really unfortunate situation yeah absolutely why are we importing puppies from Eastern Europe who’ve been bred for, you know, £15 sold for £2,000 and have had a horrible socialisation period and are potentially set up for health problems and behaviour problems for life? So I’m very much for how can we increase low-scale in-home breeding of healthier dogs in the UK and how can we get the public to want that? Because I think right now we’ve got such a negative culture around as soon as you say you bred a litter, oh, you’re a backyard breeder.

I had a colleague at my university who was breeding beautiful puppies in her home, had socialised with children, dogs, cats, chickens, really really cared for them. Just started it as a hobby, you know, as a hobby. And she was being nicknamed the puppy farmer at work and it was like, how are we so ingrained that as soon as somebody starts doing this, even with good intentions, that they are out for money?

And yet the actual industry that’s out for huge amounts of money in illegally trading these puppies, they just go under the radar. So I think we’ve got to have some huge kind of paradigm shifts around what’s acceptable or who is acceptable in breeding a dog for you.

Jess Sedivy (1:01:59)

I definitely, yeah, I completely agree. I thought I was chatting with Charmaine and I were chatting with Perry yesterday about the paper. I one of the first things I said to Perry was I said, when you start breaking this down to when you started with the entire cohort and then worked your way down to the dogs that were spayed and neutered and then worked your way down to the dogs that were actually being reserved to to plan to breed them.

Rowena Packer (1:02:09)

Mmm.

Mmm. ⁓ it’s tiny.

Jess Sedivy (1:02:29)

That number was so small to me.

Like to me, I was just, I was stunned by that. but, and I don’t think that that’s unique to the UK. And I don’t even think that’s unique to your study population. I just think I had never thought about it before and never had been confronted with that number and how small that is and how much of a struggle it is to really breed good dogs and put those dogs with people and make all of that add up because it just doesn’t. And the reality is that these low welfare situations exist because we cannot produce enough well-bred dogs and good dogs to satisfy the demand. I don’t know how to, that’s another problem I don’t know how to solve. ⁓ But I do think too, a takeaway for our listeners who are breeding is that even if even if we don’t have a dog to place with, with a puppy home that has inquired to us, it’s worth spending five or 10 minutes to talk with people and make sure that we’re helping really prepare them for the realities of a dog of, of owning a dog, especially if you’re getting inquiries from first time dog owners, just having, taking some of that time to set aside and talk with them and talk about cost and talk about some of these very, you know, these are pretty easy indicators.

Rowena Packer (1:03:36)

⁓

Yeah.

Jess Sedivy (1:03:52)

Make sure that you get a dog that’s a little bit older and make sure that you get a dog that legitimately stayed with its breeder and its mom and its litter mates and that just overcoming a few of those small things and educating people in our own time in our own conversations really does have a big impact on dog welfare. And I think all of us that are ethically breeding dogs want to see dog welfare improve and do anything that we can. And that’s one little area I think we can work on as breeders.

Rowena Packer (1:04:22)

Yeah, absolutely. I think it coming from breeders, know, with people who are respected in those communities. We don’t hear enough breeder voices. I don’t think it really out there enough to know in the UK we have a lot of defensiveness from breeders, which is understandable when there is public backlash, but having more visible positive breeders in the public eye. We’re doing some filming for a kind of info series on Buying a Puppy with a UK charity Nature Watch at the moment and just being able to showcase a breeder who’s doing really good stuff with their dogs and is willing to even put their head above the parapet and show that that’s what they’re doing I think it’s really refreshing because I feel like the kind of breeder community of the types of breeders who we want people to seek out are really hidden right now.

Jess Sedivy (1:05:09)

I think so too. And for various reasons. And when I think about my evolution as a breeder between when I read my first litter and now I do think there has been a lot more social pressure and there has been a lot more social backlash against breeders and this attitude that we are in it for the money and throwing out that we’re all backyard breeders. And people have said that to me recently and just that whole definition that you’re somehow ⁓ a bad person if you intentionally breed dogs and again that sentiment is a mismatch between what’s really going on in society and who’s and people who are looking to acquire puppies and and there is there’s just so much we have to talk about culturally but to kind of wrap up if you could simplify your research into just a few key takeaways for for buyers for the for listeners to our who are acquiring puppies what would a few of those.

Rowena Packer (1:06:16)

I think the key is just that really early life really does matter, that we can’t substitute for a poor start, and that that will leave a mark on your dog potentially long term at least in the first couple of years of its life and your life shared with it. I think just getting your detective hat on, being as cautious as possible when going through that process and having your own list of what are the basic things that have those boxes that have to be ticked for you to buy that puppy and reviewing that and being really methodical in the types of breeder that you are considering getting dogs from. Alongside that is that patience piece that, yes, we’re not expecting everybody to spend several years waiting for their dream puppy, but that the one that turns up on the day where you make that decision is very likely not the right one. The stars would have had to have aligned for that dog to be ready the moment that you decided you were ready.

Jess Sedivy (1:07:14)

Mm-hmm.

Rowena Packer (1:07:17)

So I think just trying to play a slightly longer game of finding that right fit, because it is that potential decade-plus commitment. And what you do now is shaping that future in ways that you might not even appreciate right now. So it’s all the really boring stuff, Jess, is telling people to put the brakes on. It’s saying that this is not a speedy and sexy process. It’s a really methodical, slow, and considered process. But we’ve got data now to show that it matters for the behaviour of your dog, for the health of your dog and even if your dog is not the central focus of all of this it will matter to you, it will matter to your financial situation, to your emotional health as a dog owner and your ability to keep that dog in the long term. So I think it’s just early life, it matters and we can’t just stick plasters over it if we’ve made poor decisions.

Jess Sedivy (1:08:16)

So you have now started to connect the thread of welfare and how puppies are raised and you’ve connected that to behavior. You’ve connected that to physical health. You’ve connected that to the financial health of the owners. I did take a little bit of a sneak peek and it looks like you are looking to do some research into the 24 month area and the 27 month area. Can you give us a little bit of a preview as to what questions you’re looking to answer further down?

Rowena Packer (1:08:46)

Yeah, so we followed all the way to 36 so far and although we’re looking at those same markers and we’re keen particularly to look at kind of more lifetime exposure. So we looked at things individually. So at each time point had to experience but clearly these things are cumulative as well. behaviour problems, health problems. So we’ll have a more powerful picture in terms of when we look over those first three years, which risk factors are associated with better or worse outcomes.

And then at the moment, as I our focus at the 36 months time point was specifically also looking at financial health of owners in like the cost of living crisis. So we know that we’ve had this unfortunate Venn diagram of general household life costs increasing, I think pretty much globally, but in the UK we’ve certainly seen a lot of that. Vet costs increasing above inflation. And so people not having any of that kind of disposable income to commit to their animals. So we’re really interested in how these pet owners are navigating this, particularly in light of, as we’ve discussed, these being first time owners who perhaps hadn’t had that level of financial planning in mind. And partly, I mean, some of that from, I say, with that paper’s under review, but it’s a kind of heartening, but also heartbreaking story as how much some of these owners will sacrifice of their own lives, their own wellbeing to maintain their animals. And it’s a beautiful kind of legacy as to the strength of the dog owner bond. But it also reflects that, as we’ve talked about today, forward planning financially is so important. And I can’t expect everybody to have a crystal ball for what curve balls life will throw at them financially, but at least having a kind of longer term plan for your dog’s health, I think is really key there.

Jess Sedivy (1:10:08)

Yes.

Rowena Packer (1:10:34)

It was quite emotional really when you read some of the free text and the accounts of how people are willing to give up basically everything to keep their dog around, well, alive, and often in a better living situation than they are. So yeah, quite powerful stuff.

Jess Sedivy (1:10:51)

Very powerful. Rowena, thank you so much for coming on today. And I’m going to go ahead and just invite you to come back in the future when your next paper rolls out from this cohort, which is really cool and just a really unique cohort, we would love to have you back. So, ⁓ yeah. Thank you. I had a wonderful time meeting you and this was really great. And I think a productive conversation that our listeners are going to resonate with them. Thank you very much.

Rowena Packer (1:11:25)

I hope so. Thank you.

Jess Sedivy (1:11:26)

To learn more about the functional dog collaborative, visit functional breeding.org. This podcast is brought to you by the Functional Dog Collaborative. This episode was produced and edited by Charmaine Swan with production support from me, Jess Sedivy Gunderson. If you’d like to support the show and FDC itself, you can find us on Patreon. Check the link in the show notes. Enjoy your dogs.