NAIA Official Blog

Last week in California, a French Bulldog owner arrived home just in time to make a nightmarish discovery: her dog was being stolen! The intruders yelled at her and struck her in the face, then ran off with her pregnant dog, Melani. It is suspected that the dognappers cased the location after learning Melani was pregnant through the owner’s Instagram dog breeding page.

At first glance, this reads like “just another week, just another French Bulldog robbery.” Frenchies are a popular breed, and there have been numerous incidents like this in the last few years. Recently, and perhaps most famously, Lady Gaga’s dogwalker was injured by a shooter, and two of her Frenchies were stolen. However, there are several details here that speak to larger cultural issues.

First, the dog is purportedly worth $7,000 – a price tag that, even accounting for inflation and the breed’s enormous popularity, is far too expensive for most people’s tastes. There’s popularity, and well… there’s this. People desire specific types of dogs, and this shows how far they will go to get them.

Second, Melani’s coat color/pattern is merle, a color combination that the French Bulldog Club of America and many other AKC breed clubs disqualify because it can be linked to problems if improperly bred.

Finally, the pregnant dog is only 10 months old. At this young age, the dog is still growing, so even though it is physically possible for dogs to become pregnant at this age, allowing a young female to be bred at her first heat cycle is uniformly opposed by experienced breeders and kennel clubs. While this story has something of a clickbait headline, the details within may be even more attention-grabbing to those of us who are involved in animal husbandry.

Resources
★     AKC: French Bulldog
★     A member of the group that stole Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs and shot her dog walker was sentenced to 4 years in jail