ELK GROVE, CA – The French Bulldog business is booming for Jaymar Del Rosario, a breeder whose puppies can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. When he leaves the house to meet a buyer, his checklist includes veterinary documents, a bag of puppies and his Glock 26.
“If I don’t know the area, if I don’t know the people, I always carry my gun,” Mr Del Rosario said recently this afternoon while showing cashews, a 6-month-old French bulldog. a new “fluffy” variety that can bring in $ 30,000 or more.
With their lush ears, their eyes, please lift me up and swing me and your short-legged crocodile stride, the French Bulldogs have become the dog of this for influential people, pop stars and professional athletes. Loyal companions in the era of working from home, French bulldogs always seem ready to upload to Instagram. They are now the second most popular dog breed in the United States after Labrador Retrievers.
They have also been forcibly stolen from their owners with alarming frequency. Robberies of a French bulldog have been reported in the last year in Miami, New York, Chicago, Houston and – especially, it seems – in California. Dogs are often targeted. In perhaps the most notorious theft, Lady Gaga’s two French bulldogs, Koji and Gustav, were snatched from the hands of her walker, who was hit, strangled and shot during last year’s sidewalk attack in Los Angeles.
The cost of owning a Frenchie for years has punished the home budget – puppies usually sell for $ 4,000 to $ 6,000, but can be bought for more if they are one of the new, modern breeds. Yet owning a French bulldog is increasingly costly: the paranoia of a thief crossing a garden fence. Extreme vigilance while walking your dog after reading about the latest abduction.
For unfortunate owners, French bulldogs are at the crossroads of two very American traits: the love of canine companions and the proliferation of firearms.
On a frosty January night in the Adams Point neighborhood of Auckland, California, Rita Ward was walking Desi, her 7-year-old Frenchwoman, not far from home. The jeep stopped and its passengers got out and lunged at her.
“They had their guns and said, ‘Give me your dog,'” Ms. Ward said.
Three days later, a stranger called and said she had found the dog wandering around a local high school. Ms. Varda is now taking self-defense classes and advising French bulldog owners to bring pepper spray or a whistle. Ms Ward says she doesn’t know why Desi’s captors abandoned him, but it could be in his old age: the French have one of the shortest life expectancies among dog breeds, and the 7-year-old has already been in a tooth.
In late April, Christina Rodriguez returned home from work at a cannabis dispensary in the Melrose area of Los Angeles. When she stopped at her home in North Hollywood, someone opened the door of her car and picked up Mulan, her 2-year-old black-and-white Frenchman.
Ms Rodriguez said she did not remember many details of the theft. “When you have a gun in your head, you just darken,” she said.
But surveillance footage in her neighborhood and near the dispensary appears to have shown that thieves followed her for 45 minutes in traffic before attacking.
“They stole my baby from me,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “It’s so sad to come home every day and not be greeted.”
Patricia Sosa, a board member of the French Bull Club in America, said she was unaware of any annual thefts. Social media groups set up by French owners are often flooded with warnings. If you own a Frenchie, says a Facebook post on a lost or stolen French Bulldog, “don’t let it get out of your sight.”
“Criminals make more money by stealing Frenchmen than by robbing shops,” the statement said.
Ms. Sosa, who has a breeding business north of New Orleans, said the lure to profit from the French bulldog craze has also spawned an industry of counterfeit vendors demanding deposits for dogs that don’t exist.
“There are so many scams going on,” she said. “People think, ‘Hey, I’m going to say I have a Frenchman for sale and I’m going to make five, six, seven thousand dollars fast.’
Ms. Sosa said breeders are particularly vulnerable to theft. She does not give her address to clients until she has studied them thoroughly. “I have security cameras everywhere,” she said.
French Bulldogs, as the name suggests, are a French offshoot of small bulldogs bred in England in the mid-1800s. An earlier iteration of Bouledogue Français, as he is called in France, was preferred as a rat butcher hunter in Paris before becoming the toy dog of artists and the bourgeoisie and dog muses appearing in Edgar Degas’s works. and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Today, the American Kennel Club defines the French Bulldog as “a square head with bat ears and cockroach backs.”
In the world of veterinary medicine, the French are controversial because their favorite traits – big heads and bulging dog eyes, sunken noses and skin folds – create what Dan O’Neill, an expert on dogs at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, calls “Ultra-predisposition” to medical problems.
Their heads are so big that mothers have problems giving birth; most French Bulldog puppies are born by caesarean section. Their short, muscular bodies also make it difficult for them to conceive naturally. Breeders usually inseminate dogs artificially.
Most worrying for researchers such as Mr. O’Neill is the dog’s flat face, which can make it difficult for him to breathe. French bulldogs often make snoring sounds, even when fully awake, often get tired easily and are susceptible to heat. They can also develop rashes in the folds of their skin. Due to their protruding eyes, some French bulldogs cannot blink completely.
Mr O’Neill leads a group of veterinary surgeons and other dog experts in the UK who are urging prospective buyers to “stop and think before buying a flat-faced dog”, a category that includes French Bulldogs, English Bulldogs, Pugs , Shi Tzu, Pekingese and boxers.
“There is a crisis of flat-faced dogs,” Mr O’Neill said. French bulldogs, he concluded in a recent research paper, have four times the level of disorder than all other dogs.
These pleas and warnings have not stopped French bulldogs from growing in popularity, driven largely by social media. As in the United States, the French Bulldog in Britain has been neck and neck with the Labrador for the title of the most popular breed in recent years.
Ms. Sosa blamed poor breeding for poor results. “Well-behaved dogs are relatively healthy,” she said.
Mr Del Rosario, a stockbreeder in Elk Grove, a suburban town south of Sacramento, says professional footballers and basketball players are some of his most loyal customers. He has sold puppies to players for the Kansas City Chiefs, Cincinnati Bengals, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Houston Texas, New York Jets and Arizona Cardinals. Four years ago, the San Francisco 49ers bought Zoe, a black tiger Frenchman who serves as a dog to emotionally support the team. Two years later, the team added Rookie, a blue-gray French bulldog with hazel eyes, to its canine list.
Mr. Del Rosario’s dearest Frenchman was a lilac with a purple-gray coat, bright eyes glowing red, and a pink tinge to his snout. It was sold for $ 100,000 to a South Korean buyer who wants the dog because of its rare genetics. The dog was one of several hundred puppies that Mr. Del Rosario has sold in the last decade and a half.
He kept seven Frenchmen for his extended family, including his two daughters, aged 9 and 10. The girls play with the French at home, but Mr Del Rosario is adamant that he does not allow them to walk the dogs alone.
“I don’t care if you go to the mailbox,” he said. “No, they just can’t take the dogs out on their own.
“With all these things that happen to these dogs, you just never know.
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