‘He asked for money and threatened to shoot me’: dognapping victims on losing their beloved pets
Charlotte and Dale Robson with their Labrador Denzel, who was found by police three days after he was stolen by thievesWhen Angela and Giles Greenhough’s Norfolk Terrier, Ruby, turned four last week there was no birthday hug, no celebratory steak supper or game with her favourite ball which she had mischievously picked from a shop shelf and declared her own. All they could do was make a toast to the dog stolen from their farmhouse in Saltash, Cornwall, two years ago, and desperately hope that, wherever Ruby is, she is at least with Margie, their other beloved Terrier taken at the same time.Despite numerous leads and an extensive police investigation, the Greenhoughs are no closer to finding their pets, the loss leaving them in agonising limbo. “Our world stopped on June 24 2021. We don’t have children. They are our babies. They are on my mind every minute of every day. I feel utterly broken,” says Angela, 54, an accountant, through tears. “It hadn’t occurred to me that they had value t
When Angela and Giles Greenhough’s Norfolk Terrier, Ruby, turned four last week there was no birthday hug, no celebratory steak supper or game with her favourite ball which she had mischievously picked from a shop shelf and declared her own. All they could do was make a toast to the dog stolen from their farmhouse in Saltash, Cornwall, two years ago, and desperately hope that, wherever Ruby is, she is at least with Margie, their other beloved Terrier taken at the same time.
Despite numerous leads and an extensive police investigation, the Greenhoughs are no closer to finding their pets, the loss leaving them in agonising limbo. “Our world stopped on June 24 2021. We don’t have children. They are our babies. They are on my mind every minute of every day. I feel utterly broken,” says Angela, 54, an accountant, through tears. “It hadn’t occurred to me that they had value to anybody but us.”
Incidents of “dognapping” rose by 16 per cent between 2015 and 2021, and although the cost-of-living crisis subsequently led to a fall in demand for pets, an estimated 2,160 were reported stolen last year – around six each day. The horror such crimes elicit among dog owners was highlighted last week when footage of 16-month-old Dachshund Twiglet being snatched from an Essex kitchen by a robber masquerading as a delivery driver went viral. Fortunately, Twiglet was found and returned.
Two principal factors are behind the prevalence of dog theft: the inflation in the price of dogs during lockdown; and the derisory punishment for the crime. Dognappers can theoretically receive a maximum seven-year sentence – but only if the dog is worth over £100,000 (like the Tibetan Mastiff that sold for £970,000 in China in 2011). Many thieves are simply fined or given a suspended sentence, if caught at all.
“Pets are seen as chattel where any sentences are informed by their monetary value,” explains Dr Daniel Allen, animal geographer at Keele University who set up the Pet Theft Reform campaign with the Stolen and Missing Pets Alliance (Sampa) in 2018 to change the law so the penalty for dog theft reflects the “traumatic experience of being stolen or abducted” for both owner and dog: “We want to make sure there’s recognition that pets are family.”
Ruby and Margie, aged two and one at the time, had just returned from their morning walk when they scampered into a small area of woodland behind Angela’s home office. Both wore GPS trackers designed to alert their owners if they crossed a “virtual fence” that, if crossed, would alert their owners via their phones. When neither returned after 10 minutes, Angela checked the trackers, fully charged that morning, to discover they had no signal, meaning either the trackers had been turned off or the dogs had gone underground. The Greenhoughs used diggers to excavate every potential hole in the area, and deployed working dogs who found no trace as police gave them a crime reference number.
Their loss put a strain on the couple’s marriage, with Giles braced for “the worst-case scenario”. Angela says: “It got to the stage we could barely be in the same room. Everything I said upset Giles and everything he said upset me.”
They launched a Facebook group – Help Find Margie & Ruby – but initially followed police advice not to offer a reward. When desperation took over after six months, their financial incentive attracted scammers.
Angela, home alone, was called by a man who said he had her dogs and would come and beat her up if she didn’t pay him £2,000. “I kept saying ‘I’ll get the money to you but I need to see a picture first’. In the end he put the phone down. I was a wreck.” On another call, she remembers, a man told her he was kicking her dogs. “He got someone to make a screaming noise. He asked for money and threatened to shoot me. If you are the thief, you know where I live. That makes me feel vulnerable.”
She tortures herself that her dogs are “not looked after, living in a cage, being used for hunting” although her “rational brain” tells her they’ve been sold: “If someone can get £6,000 it’s worth the risk.”
Charlotte Robson, from Nantwich, Cheshire, is one of the lucky 25 per cent of owners who have had their dogs returned. Her chocolate Labradors Denzel and Welly, then aged eight and six, were found by police three days after thieves snatched them from outside her local supermarket in March 2021. “There was such relief,” says Charlotte, 33, who runs self-development organisation The Authentic Girls Club.
Her dogs were tracked to a house in Tunstall, Staffs, where Malachy Doherty was arrested. He pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to 27 weeks in prison that June. An unnamed 14-year-old was also found guilty. “That the crime is seen as property theft is horrendous,” says Charlotte, married to Dale, 36. Dale was in Marks & Spencer near their home in Nantwich, Cheshire, for a few minutes when the dogs, tied up outside, were taken.
A friend helped her spread the news on social media, a local baker’s CCTV picked up footage of two people fleeing the town centre with the dogs, and as the Facebook post went viral, Charlotte recalls “the guilt, worry, anger. The emptiness of the house haunted me.”
The next day the couple received the first of several blackmail attempts. She was about to make a payment out of desperation when a Google search image told them the picture of the dogs they’d been presented by a scammer as their own were in fact from a YouTube video. After a witness reported seeing the dogs being taken into a house in Tunstall, police arrested Doherty, bringing the dogs back to their station. “We worried they’d have changed personality, but they greeted every person in that yard. I remember thinking if they’ve not lost their trust in humans, I can’t either,” says Charlotte.
However, Welly, the more sensitive of the dogs, was returned with a swollen stomach. A vet said he’d developed excess fluid, and two operations failed to return him to health. He died last January, his demise, Charlotte is adamant, linked to the stress of his abduction.
Could such thefts be avoided? To reduce the risk, police advise making sure your dog will return when called and fitting a bell or alarm to gates to your property. Dr Allen hopes the law will soon also act as a deterrent to dog nappers, whose crime he describes as “highly traumatic”. “Something has to be done,” he says.
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