Good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's webinar. My name is Bruce Stevenson and I have the honour and privilege of chairing tonight's webinar before I get in. Into it, I'd like to say a huge big thank you to Elanco for their generous sponsorship of tonight's webinar.
If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be able to bring you fantastic topics and speakers like we have tonight. So thank you, Ilano. We do appreciate it.
Tonight This webinar is going to be a little bit different from our side, from your side, you're still gonna be able to enjoy it. We will still have a Q&A at the end, but we are going to be doing it in different sections with pre-recorded videos. And I just have to point out to you, the main part of the presentation was recorded back in March.
Some of the facts have changed. So, if you do hear something that is different, please don't panic. We are aware of it.
And Paula will touch on those later, and we can discuss them in the Q&A. So for those of you who are new to our webinars, this format, as I say, is different, but what is not different is the fact that you can ask questions. So if you have any questions for our presenter tonight, just move your mouse over the screen.
You'll see the Q&A box pop up on the control bar. It's normally at the bottom of the screen. Click on that Q&A and write your questions in there, and we will get to as many of those as what we can, in the time we have at the end.
Just to let you know, if there are more questions than we have time for or if there are very technical product questions, we won't cover those. And if we don't, if we run out of time and can't cover them tonight, then you will be contacted via email. So please don't think that you're going to miss out.
You really won't. So get those questions in to Paula in the Q&A box and we'll get to as many of those as we can. So before we start with the first promo video, I would like to introduce our speaker.
Paula Boyden graduated in 1992 from the RVC and spent 11 years in general practise before moving to a technical role in industry. Paula joined the Dogs Trust in 2010 and became the veterinary director in 2011. And that was a position that she held up until April of this year.
All his responsibilities included the puppy smuggling campaign, focusing on the illegal importation of puppies and pregnant bitches. She is a founder member of the Association of Charity Vets, and in 2023, Paula was awarded the WSAVA Global One Health Award, and in 2024, the BVA Chin Award. Paula, welcome to the webinar, and I look forward to hearing your presentations.
Beck, if we can roll, please. Hi, I'm Paula Boyd and I'm veterinary director of Dogs Trust, er, the UK's largest dog welfare organisation, and I want to talk to you today about the what we call the Trojan dog, so this is all around importation of dogs and what's actually happening in addition to to physically moving a dog, into the UK. We can't talk about the Trojan dog without talking about the rules of pet travel and the the impact that the changes to those rules have had on the whole demographics of dogs moving into the country.
So to start with, I just want to take you back to 2000 when the pet travel scheme was introduced. And for the first few years of the pet travel scheme, we had a number of rules that we had to comply with in order to bring a dog into the UK which included microchipping, vaccinating against rabies. And then there was a requirement to actually take a blood sample from that that individual, 30 days later.
The dog was then allowed to travel, 6 months after that blood test, assuming it was successful. There was also a requirement for treating against tick and tapeworm prior to entry. The rules of pet travel changed at the beginning of 2012 to er harmonise the UK with the rest of the EU and suddenly those those were really quite different and you can see here that no longer was there a requirement to undertake a blood test, no longer a requirement to treat.
Ticks, the wait period dropped from 6 months down to 3 weeks, and the, the treatment window against the tapeworm chinococcus multilocularis, increased from between 24 to 48 hours to 24 to 12 120 hours. So what does that actually mean? What it means is that in terms of activity, the, the, the minimum age of entry reduced from 10 months down to 15 weeks, that's a legal minimum age.
And what's that that has led on to is a significant increase of illegal importation of underage puppies coming into the UK for rehoming. And because of that, that wait period dropping from, you know, 6 months down to just 3 weeks, it's also led to an explosion of, adult dogs being imported into the UK for rescue and rehoming. And if we look at this graph here, this is a graph showing the numbers of dogs coming in under the pet travel scheme right the way from sort of 2010 all the way through those changes.
And you can see here this change, this jump between 2011 and 2012, which is over 60%, and that correlates with that change in the pet travel scheme, so we see an automatic increase in the number of dogs being imported. Bear in mind this is the pet travel scheme, so this is for individual pet owners to to move with their pets. There's an equivalent.
Mirror piece of legislation called the Balay Directive, and that's aimed at commercial travel, and, and within that, that includes rescue and rehoming, so, so the rules basically say if you are moving a dog for the sole purpose of change of ownership, it's considered to be a commercial movement and we'll see some figures a bit later on. When we drill down into those figures a little bit further, this is this graph here is from one of the five reports that Dogs Trust has undertaken into the illegal activity involving importation of puppies. You can see that although that jump between 2011 and 2012 was just over 60%.
We jumped again into 2013. The numbers coming in from countries like Lithuania and Hungary went up many, manyfold, so you can see here that the dogs coming in from Lithuania went up by some 780% and those coming in from Hungary by over 660%. Sadly, we can't measure these figures anymore because the, the country of origin is no longer recorded, but you can see that how important it is to understand this, that although that the overall numbers have increased, there are certain countries that are responsible for some of that increase.
This graph relates to the numbers coming in under the Balay directive, you can see the the the yellow line at the top that is these relate to dogs being imported commercially from Romania. Now that you can see that significant increase in 202,020 and 2021, and that obviously correlates with that big event in our. The pandemic.
So what basically has happened is that a lot of puppies that were or dogs were being imported via the pet travel scheme. People were no longer travelling non-commercially because of the restrictions, so the importers immediately flipped over and started importing those dogs commercially instead. And I think this is one of the take home messages with with all of the issues around the pet travel scheme.
That those involved in importing perhaps with less honourable means are very good at at at adapting and tweaking their activities in response to to what the market is telling us. So what, what, what are the demographics of the dogs coming in? Well, first and foremost, it's underage puppies, and, and certainly Dogs Trust has been running, what we call the puppy pilot, although it's, it's now, in its 10th year, it's been running since the end of 2015.
And what we've been doing with that is underwriting, so to allow APHA colleagues. At the port of Dover in Eurotunnel to see suspected underage puppies, to allow them to be seized, and then when they are invariably abandoned, Dogs Trust will put them through quarantine and responsibly re-home them. What we're seeing with the underage pup puppies, remember the, the legal minimum age is 15 weeks, .
We have seen puppies as young as 4 weeks of age coming into our care, and not only are they not legally allowed to come into the country, they're also not legally allowed to travel with their mum because the, the, the welfare of animals in transport says that a puppy that cannot travel without its mum until it's at least 8 weeks of age. These pugs that you can see in the the image here, these puppies were just 4 weeks of age when they came into our care, so we still had umbilical cords attached and they actually were transported in this wicker basket, which is why you have it in the image here, so it really just describes and illustrates the lengths that the the importers will go to to bring these puppies into the country. So we can see with adult dogs here, that this is a a a a type 2 transporter, so this is the sorts of conditions, dogs should be transported in.
We know from our own investigations in the puppy trade that these dogs are enduring journeys well in excess of 24 hours, not in great conditions, generally no food, very little water, no stops for comfort breaks, so these, these are, you know, really challenging journeys that these dogs are undertaking. Just to point out on this image here, you'll see top centre, there's a toy dog. This is Charlie who we will revisit a little bit later on to highlight some of the challenges with the pet travel scheme.
Although this is what should happen, this is the reality of sometimes what we are seeing, so these puppies are being transported, they, they don't have enough room, they don't have any bedding, certainly their welfare needs are not being met and, and particularly considering that the duration of their journeys, this is not a great way to, to transport dogs. One of the other things that we are seeing a lot of is, is heavily pregnant mums, which I'll come back to, but again, if you look at these dogs in the image, you've actually got 3 dogs in this very, very small confined space, for that duration of journey, so this is the, the reality. One of the other things that we are seeing a lot of, particularly in recent years is dogs with mutilations with cropped ears.
Now, contrary to to perhaps popular belief, cropping of ears is an illegal activity right across all EU member states, so, so importing a dog with cropped ears, that in itself is an illegal activity, but we see a lot of it, and certainly again with the work that that we've been doing, down at the port, you know, I think. Most if not all, of the cane Corsos that have come into our care have already had their ears cropped because it's obviously a popular thing to do at the moment. And then the pregnant mums is something that we have really started to see an increase in, particularly since 2020.
Again, the law says that er a a a dog cannot be transported in the last 10% of gestation. And we are seeing them very, very close to whelping. We've certainly had pregnant mums whelp literally within a few hours of coming into our care and again you can see from the image that their welfare needs are not being met quite often these are very, very frightened dogs again because of the sorts of environment they've been kept in.
So what will basically happen is they're transported into the UK. Very very easy way of getting a litter into the UK. Those pups are then born here, they're sold on as UK bred, and then the mums are recycled back to Central and Eastern Europe and the whole cycle starts again, so just a horrific life for these mums to endure.
This, we, we spoke about Charlie a little earlier on, the, the toy dog, Charlie and Charlie's pal Mitzy, really illustrated. The the challenges with the, the lack of checks at the port, so we're told there are documents and identity checks, which means that if you as an individual pet owner were to take your, bring your dog into the country, you would hand your your pet's passport over, you would be given a microchip scanner to scan your pet, and then the operative would check that those numbers match up and that the appropriate treatments have been given at the appropriate time. When, when we imported Mitsy into the country, we did it on 4 occasions, both through Eurotunnel and through the, the, the ferries.
That succeeded on 3 out of 4 occasions. The only reason it failed on the 4th occasion was because the microchip failed. How did we do it?
Oh well, we, we stuck a microchip to the inside of the carrier, which we know quite often. Illegal importers would do, when we went into the the the the check-in office we literally just faced the carrier away from the check-in desk, scanned the carrier, and Charlie was in the country. We were assured that this, after this, that we, we, we'd obviously flagged this, that, that it was very different, so the next year.
We moved Charlie, you can see Charlie top centre there, so Charlie did just two journeys, one on the ferry and one on the Eurotunnel, and again completely successful. So this is how easy it is, and clearly if you're not, you know, visualising the animal, how can you tell if it's potentially pregnant, if it's potentially underage, if it has any mutilation. So this is one of the real challenges that we are dealing with.
So if we can just drill down into the risk of disease and, and, and here I'm specifically talking about rabies at the moment, so this is in, in, conjunction with the 3 week waits that we know we now have to do, post rabies vaccination in order to bring a dog into the country. The incubation of rabies is variable, as, as we all know, so for dogs it can be between 3 and 24 weeks, but importantly, most cases will present between 3 and 12 weeks post infection. So you can see that's also post that wait period, so why would we do that?
Well, that wait period is purely to allow the rabies vaccine to stimulate the immune system. It bears no resemblance to the incubation of rabies at all. Similarly with cats, the average is between 4 and 6 weeks, so again, post that 3 week wait.
So, potentially, and, and I think it's really important to point out the risk of rabies is incredibly low, but it is not zero, so we could potentially have a dog or a cat that has been vaccinated, that's incubating disease, and they're already being brought into the country by the time that disease will manifest itself. Other variables in terms of the incubation of disease, certainly will be the age of the bitten individual, the sight of the bite, how innovated it is, how close it is to the central nervous system. No great surprise with humans, it's mostly young children that tend to be impacted because the bites are quite often much closer to their central nervous system.
The other thing to bear in mind are the limitations of the vaccine now, now pre those changes back in 2012, because of the requirement for the blood test, the, the advice from the the manufacturers, the rabies vaccines was to for dogs to give a primary course of two vaccines to maximise the chance of them actually passing the rabies teeter test. We don't have that now, however, we do have some great data. For those first years when this was in place.
And this was an abstract that was presented that was actually analysed the rabies serology and, and, and two things I'd like to pull out of this. One is there was variation between the brands of vaccine, but more importantly, what they found was that adult dogs, and they defined an adult dog as between 1 and 7 years, responded much. Better than an an older dog that responded much better than a puppy, but obviously we don't know that now, or we don't have that data now.
The other thing that came out of that abstract was that it seemed that black and tan breeds of dogs did not respond particularly well either. But again, we have no idea now by looking at a dog, has it actually responded to the rabies vaccine or not. And there were two papers that were published, have been published in recent years, again, highlighting concerns with regard to imported dogs.
So the, the first one on the left here, the, the, the Clava paper, this was looking at dogs, that were imported into Norway, mostly from Romania versus, Norwegian home dogs, if you like. And they looked at the rabies serology of the two groups of dogs and what. They found was that with the imported dogs, over 50% of them did not have a protective teeter against rabies, and worryingly, 20% of those dogs actually had a teeter of less than 0.1, which is which is assumed to be consistent with not being vaccinated at all.
If you compare that to the, the control group, which were Norwegian dogs, over 85% of them had a protective teeter, so they were significantly different. And then the second paper here, this is a Finnish paper, again looking at Finnish dogs, versus imported dogs, and most of those dogs were imported from, Russia, and again, out of those, those dogs imported from Russia, 14 of the 36 dogs had a teeter less than 0.1, 19 of them had a teeter of less than 0.5, versus the, the only 2 out of the 36 Finnish dogs had a teeter of less than 0.5.
So again, the concern is, well, what's happening here. Is it that they weren't vaccinated, or is it that they have some perhaps underlying health, reason why these dogs are not responding to the rabies vaccine? But a real worry that that there are significant differences, for these, these, two sample sizes, where the imported dogs really did not have, a good response to the rabies vaccine.
So we've obviously spoken about rabies, but I think when we're talking about importation, we do have to consider other neurological diseases, so. Although there's a requirement to vaccinate against rabies, there is no requirement to vaccinate against the other diseases we might normally vaccinate against, so distemper, hepatitis, and parvo. So it's, it's very much distemper I want to focus on here.
We know again it will present with neurological signs. This is a social media post from a, a vet based in the Midlands, basically they had, encountered a a a. An adolescent dog, that was showing signs of distemper and sadly that dog was euthanized.
But the, the reason I wanted to share this with you is that that dog was actually part of a cohort of 100 dogs that were imported into the UK. Now, thankfully it was distemper, but what if it had been rabies, you know, if those dogs have been dispersed to various locations across the country. Sitting behind that, we know that quite often importers will congregate on the port in in France.
They will swap the dogs into different vehicles depending on their, their, their destination, and then they set off along those those drop off points. And these are the lists of the 22 of the vehicles that were dropping. You can see the first one starts over in East Anglia in Ipswich and Cambridge, and goes up the M1 and ends up across in Liverpool and Wales.
And then the second vehicle starts down in Kent, moves along the south coast and ends up in the Midlands, and, and, you know, this is a real concern if we are starting to try and trace these dogs should it be necessary. One. We'd love to see, is that that that requirement to, to scan the microchips, you, it is possible to get microchip scanners that have a, a data logger on them.
That would then at least tell us when a dog came into the country and that it came in legally, and at least if we know when it came in, that will help us assess the level of risk if we were dealing with something like rabies. This is a case, this is a, a, a, a so-called welfare organisation up in Lincolnshire that was, part of, an RSPCA, activity. They've been real concerns, so they, they undertook a raid on this, premises.
Dogstra stepped in to help with them, because we knew there were going to be lots of dogs. This organisation was responsible for importing between 25 and 30% of all dogs coming into the UK from Romania. There were concerns about the welfare of the dogs at the, they were running an illegal veterinary practise in the premises.
As a result of that, Dogs Trust, were able to accommodate 60 of those dogs across a number of our centres. And one of those centres was this one here in Loughborough, and if I can point you to the the the the the the the the building on the, the right hand side of the picture there, that's basically our intake block, so when we take dogs into our care, we put them into a separate isolated intake block for a period of time to make sure they're not carrying any disease before we mix them with the the rest of the population in the centre. In this case this was pertinent.
One of the dogs that came into our care, was showing neurological signs. It was ultimately euthanized and we had a very tense 24 hours, to find out whether it was distemper or whether that dog actually had rabies or not, so this is why it's so important that we, we have this traceability. Of dogs coming into the UK and equally the importance of having things like this intake blog for those dogs being dropped up the the the corridor, there's there's no way of of of quarantining them, and certainly we know that quite often there's no support for for owners of dogs once they've been imported into the country.
It kind of cocks a multilocularis, so this is the, the tapeworm, this is again, this is the the reason for the mandatory tapeworm treatment on entry into the UK. You can see from this, this distribution map that's been borrowed from SAP that Kinnecock is already kicking at the shores of France. This is not a disease that we want, you know, it's got a very long incubation period.
Quite often it can be 10 to 15 years. It will have a significant impact on humans in terms of both your quality and your quantity of life, so it's not something that we want to have in the UK. This was a survey that was undertaken by, Maggie Fisher and colleagues, what they basically were doing was surveying, imported illegally imported dogs that were coming into the animal reception centre at Heathrow.
They surveyed 65 dogs, out of those, almost 28% of those dogs had evidence of ender parasites, and significantly one of those dogs, had a, evidence of a teenia tapeworm. Now obviously teenia's not chinococcus, but clearly Pratoquantal does not decide which tapeworm it hits, so certainly indicating that that dog had not been appropriately treated. So again, this is not something that we can sit back on our laurels with.
This is a, a checklist that APHA have developed for people bringing their pet into Great Britain, and it's great that we've got this, in terms of what you need to do. But the worrying element with it is, and I, I've highlighted here that the ad they're advocating that for short trips you can actually tapeworm treatment your dog before you leave the UK and then that will tick the box for complying with the rules of pet travel. Now, whilst it's not illegal to do this, clearly this is not in the spirit of the pet travel scheme, and this will not prevent Echinococcus multilocularus coming into Great Britain.
So this is why it's so important that we have those conversations with clients, and although this might be easier to do, it's so important that the clients understand that they must take worm treatment, their dog on return to the UK to make sure that they're not carrying this, this or any other end of parasite. So we've spoken about the the pet travel scheme and some of the challenges with that, so I, I now want to move on to that other Trojan dog, which is the other diseases that we may encounter because of importation into Great Britain. This is, a graph from, what's called the Daktari scheme.
So when the pet travel scheme came into effect, back in 2000, the DEFRA set up this scheme to record, the numbers or the figures for non-endemic diseases being diagnosed by veterinary surgeons across the UK. Brilliant to have this scheme, I think the big flaw with it was that it relied on vets reporting. In rather than perhaps going to the laboratories, and, and we can evidence that so you can see from here, I'm going to, if you can just discount the diaphylaria, which is just the 3 cases.
So out of the other 106 cases, you can see we've got figures for Leishmania, Babezia, and Erlikia. At the same time, the ARA Laboratory, which is now Langford Diagnostics, so AAIS was set up by, Sue Shaw, developing the PCRs for these tests. So whilst we've got the 106 here, at the same time, Acurus, the laboratory, had diagnosed 172 cases of Erlichia, 165 cases of Birbezia, and 357 cases.
Of Leishmania, so Daktari 106, Acura 694, so there was significant underreporting there. This is why things like the, the, you know, the SANet and Vet Compass that we now have, SANet is tied into a number of the laboratories. So we can try and get some accurate figures of the prevalence of these diseases actually being imported into Great Britain.
Just moving on from that, in terms of those diseases, so what we are starting to see now is some of these what we would term non-endemic diseases, being diagnosed in dogs that have not travelled outside of the UK. So this was a, a letter here in the vet record, of Babezia Canni being er diagnosed in untraveled dogs, in Harlow in Essex. And then moving on from that, there were more cases that came to the fore, so there were a couple of other outbreaks.
One was in Romford in Essex, and the other one in Ware in Hertfordshire, so we're starting to get these clusters of Babezia in untraveled dogs, which is obviously a real concern. So does that mean that the, you know, Babezia is now being carried in ticks that are within within Great Britain? This was a, another paper that was looking at at ticks on dogs, so they, they surveyed, just over 12,000 dogs, and of those 12,000 dogs, over 6500 ticks were, were removed and identified.
Now, importantly within that, out of that that cohort of dogs, 56 of those dogs had travelled within, two weeks of the samples being taken, and out of that cohort of of 56 travelled dogs, 77% of them had ticks, so we had Ios, ripocephalus, and dermiental species from those, those travelled dogs. And, and this is one of the the concerning things about us know. Longer being, you know, required to, to treat a dog against ticks before it comes back into the UK.
It is happening. This is a risk of these non-endemic diseases, these vector-borne diseases being brought into the UK, so again an evidence that we really must be having those conversations with our clients, and pointing out that, you know, complying with the rules of pet travel does not mean that our pets are going to be safe from a health perspective. Leishmania, so Leishmania is one, it's potentially zoonotic, and the reason I call it potentially zoonotic is although humans can get it, we do not have the sandfly vector in the UK, so you wouldn't expect to, to, contract leishmania.
From a dog, it's prevalent in the Med basin because that's where the sandflies are, although you can see from the map here, the UK has certainly been highlighted as where we have seen cases where there's been dog to dog transmission, although we don't have that sandfly vector there. This was one of the, the early cases that was, identified, so this was a, a 3 year old, shih-tzu, that actually showed signs, clinical signs of leishmania. This shih Tzu had never left the UK, however, it was living with a dog that had been imported from Spain, and that dog had clinical signs of, er, leishmania and was ultimately euthannased because of those clinical signs.
So we've got evidence here of dog to dog transmission. So how has that happened? So is it that it's gone direct from dog to dog?
There was certainly no history here of, you know, going venerially or through blood transfusion, or is it that the leishmania is adapting in some way to a different vector? We have no proof of that, but we can't at the moment disprove it either, so it's something that. Really, I, I think with the, the changes in our climate as well, it's something that we must continue to monitor.
So this is a case that that we dealt with at Dogs Trust. Now, any dog that comes into our care that's either originated or travelled overseas, we will, will blanket screen for non-endemic diseases. This case involved two dogs that were relinquished to us.
One had never travelled overseas, the other had been imported. From from Thailand, but because they'd spent a significant amount of time together in, in their home, we elected to er screen the the non-traveled dog. And what we found with that dog was that they did, they had been exposed to leishmania, so again it's the question is how has that actually happened there they weren't positive for active disease, but they had definitely been exposed to the disease.
So this is our experience today, so we only have, data from 2018, like I say, we, we screen, any dog that's come into our care that's travelled or originated overseas, and you can see we have, got a number of cases here, of, of all of the cases, diseases that we would be concerned about, I deal with Brusselle Cannis separately. We also had two other. Cases of dogs, so a dog that's due to come into us, if we can, we will screen it before it comes into our care and and there were two dogs that were showing clinical signs of leishmania that we were unable to take into our care because we know that the stress of coming into a kennel environment, if anything, would have exacerbated that, so, so we weren't able to, to help those particular dogs.
This is, one of the cases I wanted to, to share with you. This is a dog that did come into our care, so, Ellie had been, brought in from Spain at 2 years of age, and the history that you can see on the screen there is, well the, the, the ailments and the, the, the clinical treatment that Ellie had had coming before she came into our care. So a couple of years, various ongoing issues with, you know, ocular problems, ear problems, and such like.
So she came into our care, and she had ongoing challenges, so she had a conjunctivi, she had a lymphadenopathy. We found she was PCR positive for these mania. We also found that she was Brucella Cannis positive, so we've got that concurrent disease, and I think this is a thing to remember about these non-endonmic disease.
They can be concurrent. So sadly because of that long history of, of, of ill health and because we know that that Ellie had those concurrent diseases, er, we made the, the difficult decision to, to euthanize, er, because we didn't feel it was something that we could continue to support and we certainly wouldn't be able to re-home her with all of these ongoing issues. Brielle Canus is something that that came into our lexicon back in 2021 when the Chief Veterinary Officer had this letter published in the vet record, really highlighting and bringing our attention to Brisella Cannis.
So, prior to that, there, there had been ongoing investigation, there had only been 22 other cases diagnosed within the UK. Seeing a quite a marked increase in the number of cases, most of those involving dogs being imported from Romania, but if I can refer you back to the the Balay directive figures of dogs coming in from Romania, obviously the demographics has a part to play, so it's not a case of Romania is bad and other EU countries are good with regards Buchannis. The largest case actually involved a breeding establishment er within the within England.
Now that establishment consisted of both untraveled and also imported dogs. At the time, the disease was neither notifiable or reportable. The recommended approach to to Bruceella positive cases is euthanasia, but if that's not going to be the case, then you know, the advice is to neuter using pre and post-operative antibiotics, limiting exposure to dogs and humans.
I think one of the big things with Brucella canni is there's still so much we don't know about the disease. And that really again highlight, as we already have, that other non-endemic diseases can be associated with importation and importantly those diseases can run concurrently. So this is some figures from er the Has documents, so this is human animal infections risk surveillance group.
So they pulled together this data looking at numbers of importations from the various countries and you can see Romania is by far out at the front. So naturally, because of those differences in numbers, er, you would expect that the greater prevalence of cases would potentially be from Romania, so really important to to factor that in. We've also seen cases of Brusella Canni become reported within Europe as well, so this was a case of Brucella Cannis in the Netherlands of a human being infected.
And again this was at a breeding establishment, now obviously bearing in mind that the most that the highest risk of of transmission of disease is through reproductive activity, so whether that's actually reproduction giving birth, it's unsurprising to see this was in a breeding establishment. And then, just a, a, a couple of years ago back in 2022, there was a lady, Wendy Hayes, based in Stoke on Trent. So Wendy had fostered a dog coming in from Belarus, and she deliberately decided not to support a dog from Romania because she'd heard about Brussella Canni.
That dog, whelped or or aborted, er, within a few days of coming into her care. Very long story short, Wendy subsequently ended up in hospital, er, and was, diagnosed as being positive for Brussella Cannis. The dog was also found to be positive for Brussella Cannis.
The dog was euthanized and, and, and tragically, Wendy made the very difficult decision to have her own dogs euthannas as well. She had, young, young grandchildren and could not take the risk of the disease, passing to her young grandchildren, so a really difficult time for her and her family. Since Wendy's case, there's been an updated, report from the Haires Group.
There has been another case of Brussella Cannis that was identified in, somebody working in a veterinary practise. So again with Brussella Cannis, the, the, the risk is low, but it isn't zero, so there are challenges there for us as a profession. In terms of confirmed and positive cases, and this is advice from APHA the only way to eliminate the risk of disease is euthanasia, and now obviously that's a a a difficult emotional challenging decision to make.
Treatment isn't recommended because. It basically involves several weeks of antibiotic therapy, often with dual antibiotics, with no guarantee that you are going to eliminate infections, so obviously there are significant concerns there with regard to antimicrobial resistance and particularly looking at things from a a one health perspective. There is obviously the anti use of antibiotics around neutering and that that's purely to, well, 22 reasons one is to protect the the veterinary staff involved, but also to try and minimise the risk of brelleanis being shed.
And the advice is to limit contact with other dogs and people, and this is one of the things we don't know is how infectious is it? We know that the pathogen can be spread from other bodily excretions, so for example, through urine, how infectious is it? We just don't know, so there is obviously a potential risk, but equally in terms of limiting exposure, that's gonna have, you know, impact on the welfare of the individuals as well, particularly if you're confining them in a, a very limited space.
So the public health challenges mostly attributed to a high risk exposure, so obviously veterinary surgeons, perhaps people working in breeding establishments. The risk of subclinical infection, I think this probably is one of those very underdiagnosed diseases. And if you think back to those pregnant mums that we spoke about, those pregnant mums being imported into the UK, although we know that there's a high chance that the, the puppies are going to fade, if they do survive, they've got a very high chance of being.
Brucella, Brucella canis positive. So obviously if those puppies are if the mums are imported, if the puppies are born and then sold on as UK bred, you've lost that traceability of actually the, the, them being imported and that risk of Brucella canis. So this is one of the concerns that we have.
So we'd certainly, you know, and, and the advice is to encourage both pre-breeding and pre-import testing for these dogs, and highlighting the risk to potential owners of those challenges with Brucella Cannis. So our experience, so with within Dogs Trust, following the CVO's letter we instigated and added Brisella Canni to the the, the, the screening that we do. Since then, these are figures from September 2024, we have tested 758 dogs and 16 of them have become positive.
Now I've divided our, our dogs and you can see on the screen again it it clearly not just Romania, there's a whole, Raft of source countries. I've split those dogs into two groups. There are the ones that are have been illegally imported, so they've come through the puppy pilot, and there's the group that are sort of pre, pre-testing that have come in actually come into our care.
Interestingly, the higher prevalence is in the dogs that are due to come into our care rather than the illegally imported. So we've got just over 1% of the illegally imported dogs, were rusella positive, just over 3.5% of the dogs that are due to come into our care were Bruceella positive.
Now what we do in terms of screening is we follow APHA advice, we, we undertake both an SAT and ILISA test. There is certainly. Significant concerns about the predictive values of those tests, particularly given that the prevalence seems to be quite low.
However, we have to work within the, you know, the, the, the, the data that we have and the challenge that we have as a welfare organisation is that in an ideal world, if, if you know one were to have a, a Brusella positive dog, you would then retest in a month's time. We don't have the ability to do that in terms of keeping that dog in isolation. The risk to the other dogs in our care, so if we have a Brusella positive dog, we would do what is, you know, what is required, as in it's a reportable disease, and we have to refer the owner back to their veterinary surgeon in terms of what are the next steps for that dog, and, and this is one of the challenges that for us is that there is then a loss of traceability, has that actually happened or not?
We don't know, and clearly within GDPR concerns with that as well. So in summary with Brisella Canni, there's still a lot we don't know about that disease. We need more information.
We believe that the disease is probably is subclinical, it probably is underdiagnosed, that there are clearly public health concerns, particularly for veterinary staff. We should really be considering pre-import testing, but if we do that, how do we make sure that it is bona fide? The international dog breeding trade, particularly these pregnant mums coming into the country, are a real worry because you lose that traceability of them coming in, from overseas, and we know that the treatment is not recommended, but equally euthanasia isn't mandatory, so there's a, there's a lot of emotion and discussion required around how we manage individual cases.
This is an example of, a passport of a dog that has been, come, come to us, through the, the puppy pilot down at Dover, and you can see on this certificate that this dog has been certified to be Brisella negative, Leishmania negative, Babe. And negative, GRD and negative, yeah, I'm not going to be hanging my hat on these results, and this is again, just one of the, ways that the, the importers will tweak their activity knowing what is happening and how we are addressing things within GB. So other considerations of that, that Trojan dog.
So we have other parasites, so the, the worms, lingoula, tongue worm, the eye worm, Hyalommalusitanicum, that is a form of tick that can carry, Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, so again that's another zoonotic disease, and then there's mesocystoides again, which is potentially zoonotic. So again, what we've got here, so this was a letter highlighting the importation of a hyaloma Lusitanum tick. These ones importing, talking about the eye worms, and this one talking about the risk of, mesocystos, so again, as I mentioned, another zoonotic disease.
One thing I would like to highlight is that APHA is running a a free parasite or a free exotic worm identification service. So if you do come across a worm that has come from, you know, perhaps a travelled dog. Please do utilise this because it will be, again, it's it's great horizon scanning, it's great surveillance for us to understand what's actually coming into the country and you can see the website there, so, so please do, you know, there there there's no cost to it and can actually give us a lot of information.
In terms of vector-borne disease, when we first started screening dogs coming into our care back in 2014, we used to use the, the the vector borne disease map, so we'd find out where the dog came from, and then tailor. The the screening dependent on that dog. We now blanket screen because we know of the act that the movement of dogs, is so great.
So for example, we know that quite often dogs will, will start off in Serbia, which is obviously not an EU listed country. They'll pop over the border into Romania and then they'll be passed off as EU bred, so we can't guarantee that the the the the the the documented country of origin is where a dog has come from, so we now use it to do a blanket screen but this, this map, the CVBD map is really helpful to try and get, give you an idea of, you know what diseases we are seeing and where they are. So the big question is, should we continue to import pets as we currently do.
There are, you know, clearly concerns, but equally we want people to be able to travel freely with their pets, so how do we manage it? And I wanted to, refer to a, a couple of other countries across Europe, in terms of what they're doing. And interestingly, they're almost taking a similar stance to the rules that we had prior to those changes in 2012.
So this is Norway to start with, and what Norway has basically said is you can no longer treat the movement of a rescue animal as a commercial activity. If you want to import a dog from overseas, it has to have been in your care, that's your care and not in a, a welfare organisation or whatever, for at least 6. 6 months, so it's, it's like that 6 month wait.
So what they're saying is you can't bring a street dog or a street cat and cats are a completely different category, you know, we would never ever advocate the movement of cats because they are so territorial, in addition to all the, you know, the, the challenges we've spoken about dogs, but you cannot bring a street dog or cat into Norway now. Then again, Iceland, similar, Iceland has, has really got very strict rules, so again, you have to have stayed in an exporting, an approved exporting country for at least 6 months or from birth in order to be able to go into Iceland. And they, Iceland has two categories.
There are ones from rabies free countries and one's the second category are from countries where rabies is managed. And what I've got here is the list from rabies free categories. So this is sort of in inverted commas, the safest category, and you can see you have to have a rabies blood test, you have to be vaccinated against those diseases like parvo, distemper, hepatitis, you have to have been tested against Brucella canis, you have to have been tested against leumania, angiotroullus, you have to have been treated against those internals.
Pays be examined for for tongue worm, for sarcoptes, for, for ringworm, for transmissible venereal tumours. And in addition to all of that, you then have to, the dog has to go into quarantine for 14 days on entry to Iceland. So you can see this is, this bar is incredibly high, but clearly they're working incredibly hard to, to stop these diseases getting into the country.
So how can we improve the effectiveness at our borders, and if we are going to continue to import dogs, what can we take to protect the population and, and, and both in terms of dog, cat, and, and obviously human as well? So we've had a bit of a chequered history. This is something that we have been flagging since those rules changed back in 2012.
So a few years ago, the Animal Welfare Kept Animals Bill was making its way through, Westminster. Sadly that bill was dropped, partly because it was, er, described as a Christmas tree bill, so it didn't just deal with importation, but there were other elements, and the concern was that, it would never get through because people would start adding things onto it. And then prior to the election back in 2024, Elaine Saxby MP was taken through a private member's bill, the, the animal welfare import of dogs, cats and ferrets Bill.
And this had great cross-party support. It was debated in Westminster and and everybody was hugely supportive of it. Because the it it didn't go through before the election was announced and it was a private member's bill, sadly that again dropped.
And, and now we have the new version of the animal welfare input of dogs, cats and ferrets bill. Again, this is a private member's bill, this is being taken forward by er Danny Danny Chambers MP who is also a vet. And the key things with that bill are to certainly raise the minimum age of entry to at least 6 months.
And what we've tried to do is put some, you know, from our perspective, put some science behind it, so rather than just say, you know, wait 3 months, actually that wait, that, that 3 month wait would totally coincide with the incubation of, of rabies, so there is, you know, good logic behind it. So that would raise the minimum age of entry to 6 months, and that would be really helpful. So at the moment ageing of puppies is very subjective.
You're looking at things like have they got any adult dentation, do they have any corneal reflex at all. The other things would be to reduce the point of pregnancy at which a pregnant mum can come into the country, so at the moment it sits at 90%. Hopefully that will be reduced to, about sort of 42 days, so about 2/3 of pregnancy.
The other is to ban the importation and hopefully that the sale of dogs with mutilations, even though cropping of ears is illegal right across all EU member states, it's still happening. So they are the key things. The other thing that Danny Chambers was hoping to put into that bill was to actually instigate pre-import testing for these diseases, and, and that would be amazing if it did happen, in, but we obviously need to have good reference.
To make sure that those results are robust. This bill is also supported by Neil Hudson, so he's the other vet who's in the House of Commons, and also Lord Trees, who's the only vet in the House of Lords, so it's got great support. The other things that we would like to see with, with regard to this bill is a reduction of the number of animals that can come in per vehicle.
So at the moment it's the, the, the, the maximum number is 5. We know from research, so, Jane Murray has done some research, . That, you know, over 95% of dog owners in the UK have 12 or 3 dogs, so actually reducing that number down would, would certainly make a significant difference.
We clearly, as you can see from your previous comments, we do need to have, better checks at the ports. We need those visual checks, and we also need better power. As well, the maximum sentence you would get for illegally importing a dog is up to 12 months.
We've never seen that. And, and certainly, for example, if you were to be caught smuggling cigarettes, you could get up to 7 years imprisonment, and you also wouldn't get your cigarettes back, but at the moment, if you illegally import, if you pay for the quarantine, you can actually claim your dogs back, so. So there are lots of things that we can actually do, and but I think the important thing is to hopefully get this bill through, and then we can start working on those other elements, but certainly raising the age, reducing the point of pregnancy, banning the importation, of of dogs with mutilation will be a significant step forward, in helping us.
Challenge these diseases and address these diseases, if we can have non the the the pre-import testing as well, that really will be the icing on the cake for it. So thank you for listening. I hope you've found that useful.
If you are interested in learning more, or indeed if you'd like to contribute and support Dogs Trust in the work that we do, if you follow this QR code, it will take you through to the Dogs Trust website, so thank you very much for your attention. Paula, thank you so much for that amazing presentation. I have to say, my mind is in overdrive with all the stuff that you brought up there and, yeah, change is not always good.
So, it's, it's a bit worrying that, you know, we, we make these changes to accommodate and be nice about things, but, they have substantial consequences. Absolutely, it really is, as you say, Bruce, that the law of unintended consequences, and I, I think, you know, when those rules changed back in 2012, I, I don't think anybody anticipated the impact it would have on, on both the importation of, you know, underage puppies for sale, but also this, you know, enormous market of, rehoming adult dogs as well. Yeah.
Wow. There, there's been loads of questions coming through. The end of your presentation there covered most of it, but the bulk of what people are asking again, and maybe I could ask you just to summarise it, what would you and Dogs Trust like to see changed as far as the regulations go?
The key things are those elements in the the the import of dogs, cats and ferrets bill, which is an increase of the minimum age of entry to 6 months, a a reduction of the point of pregnancy when a pregnant mom can come in, as we mentioned in the in the webinar. At the moment it sits at 90%, which means that, they are well advanced in their pregnancy when they come into. The country and also a ban on the importation of dogs with mutilations, particularly dogs with cropped ears.
In an ideal world, the other things that we would like, but I'm very mindful that it's really important we don't let perfect get in the way. Good at the moment is to actually ban the sale of dogs with mutilations as well. We need visual checks at the ports, when if if you had a a pet and you were taking it through the port at the moment, you basically you you hand over your pet passport, you're given a microchip scanner to scan your pet, and then you hand it back to the operative to check.
There's no requirement to visualise the animal at all. So, I suppose the metaphor I quite often uses it will be a bit like you or I walking through Heathrow with a paper bag over your head. So if you can't visualise the animal, how can you tell it's underage, how can you tell it may be pregnant?
How can you tell it has mutilation? So we need those visual checks, we need the resources at the ports, but we also need better penalties as well. You know, the maximum penalty is 12 months.
Imprisonment, but certainly in the time that we have been working on with the puppy pilot, there have been 3 prosecutions, and only a monetary fine for those, and certainly the monetary fine, really doesn't even touch the sorts of profits that are being made out of this. Yeah, I think that pets and everything, you know, if there's, if the consequences are not grave enough, then the the deterrent is not there. No, absolutely.
I think, as I say, there's loads of questions coming through to this. And just by the way, folks that are listening, the technical stuff that you're asking about specific tests and specific this and specific Eliza, we're not gonna cover those tonight. It's a huge big topic.
We will get answers to those, but it will all be done on email afterwards because otherwise we're not gonna have enough time. What I did want to ask Paula, is, how can we as veterinarians in this country, support you to get this changed? What have we got to do to make the politicians listen for the first time in their lives, maybe?
So I think that the good news is that the animal welfare imports of cats, dogs and ferrets bills, so this is Danny Chambers bill, is making its way through Westminster at the moment, so it's due for its third reading in the House of Commons on the 4th of July. It then has to make its way through the House of Lords, and then hopefully it, it gets to royal assent as well. But.
Please do contact your MP. Please do let them know just how incredibly important, this piece of legislation is. So it's, you know, there's still opportunities for MPs to discuss it in, in, the House of Commons.
It has had great support, but we need to keep that that pressure on, so that politicians, you know, are very aware of how important it is. Yeah, and, and, organisations like BSAVA and all of these, surely they're supporting you as well and, and can we put weight behind what they're doing? Yes, very much so.
So BSAVA, BVA, again, incredibly supportive of, of this, piece of legislation, as are, you know, all the welfare organisations as well. So we obviously Dogs Trust, er, Battersea and such like, you know, we, we are seeing the, you know, the impact of this, on a regular basis, so, the, the more weight we can add, add behind it, the better. Excellent.
One of the questions or suggestions that's come through, and I'm not sure if this is feasible or not, but is a form letter. If you guys have got some sort of a form letter that vets can, can kind of copy, paste, and, and get to their MPs to, as you said, there's a lot of reporting that doesn't happen in your statistics. I was quite saddened to see that there were so many diseases that weren't reported, but Then you think back to the average day in the life of a vet who's running crazy, short-staffed and everything, and you kind of go, OK, well, I understand why we didn't do that.
And I, I'm just worried that this might be another one of those where if there is somewhere, you know, that vets can go and download a form letter and put their name on it and get it off to an MP that would be awesome. Yeah, so I will certainly have a chat, as you know from the start, I'm, I'm recently left Dogs Trust, but I will certainly have a conversation with my public affairs colleagues at Dogs Trust and BVA and see if we can, organise a form letter that, that, you know, the profession can download and use. Yeah, that would be fantastic.
And, no promises, folks, but, we do know that, Beck has put the link onto the chat box for the Dogs Trust website, for a number of things with supporting and campaigns and everything else. So, let's keep our fingers crossed that Paula can get them to pop a form letter up there and we can all pester the hell out of the politicians and get them to do something, because this is a really serious problem. Yeah, very much so, yes, the, you know, we, we, this is a great opportunity now, so I, I, you know, the more we can do to make sure it gets over the line, the better.
Yeah, yeah, it's just, and, and, and checking. You know, it's we we've got legislation, just impose it and let's get it better, but that takes time. But what we've got, let's make sure that that's, that's being done properly as well.
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, well, I'm just scrolling through some of the questions and as I said, we're not gonna deal with any of the technical stuff tonight because we, we just don't have the time, . But there's lots of positive comments and lots of thanks to you, Paula, for the work you're doing and to Elano for bringing this out to our our, our knowledge so that we're aware of what's happening and the fantastic work that you are doing.
So thank you, Paula. No, thank you very much and thank you for your attention. It's, you know, it's it's, I suppose it's been a hobby of mine for quite some time now, so it will be brilliant if, if we can get this legislation over the line.
I think it will, you know, it, it will really make quite a big difference to the welfare of the dogs involved with this. Yeah, and that would help as well. Let's pester them.
Yes. Fantastic. Folks, that's all we've had time for tonight as far as Q&A goes.
As I say, you're not going to miss out because . Those questions will be answered, through or via email. And I just want to take this opportunity to thank Ilanco for their sponsorship tonight.
Thank you, Paula, once again for your amazing work and your time in bringing this to our attention, to my controllers in the background. Thank you, ladies. I do appreciate it.
And we're just gonna play you, a little, recording, and, then it's going to be good night. Thank you everybody for your attention tonight and once again, thank you to Ileo and to Paula. From myself, Bruce Stevenson, it's goodnight.
