The helpless pups are chained to shopping carts and placed in cold cages. This is an exhausting journey.
These slum Polish dealers purchase truckloads full of adorable, but fragile, dogs that they can smuggle to Britain, where they sell at enormous profits to unaware British families.
It’s at the center of a brutal, billion-pound trade in dogs from Eastern Europe. Many of these dogs are unvaccinated or otherwise not healthy.
The investigation obtained fake birth certificates for a beagle pup. Since 2015, more than 3200 beagle puppies were intercepted by the UK border. Around 22 percent of them came from Poland.
The dogs are frequently bred in filth and shipped across continents for as long as 33 hours, sometimes with very little food or water.
They are then sold by unscrupulous middlemen as British-bred, to meet the increasing demand for pet family members.
The minimum age for dogs to receive rabies vaccinations is 12 weeks. They must then be at least three weeks old before they may be allowed to travel to the UK.
Daily Mail’s investigation revealed that dealers can obtain fake documents for puppies as early as seven weeks of age, making it possible to allow them to bypass UK border controls. The results of our undercover investigation:
- Polish flea-market breeders provided birth certificates that falsified the ages of their puppies to help them pass border inspections.
- One of his accomplices revealed that they had a deal with British breeders in order to transport whole litters by trucks to Britain. Gangs targeted younger puppies because they are more valuable.
- Corruption or inexperienced vets routinely vaccinate dogs underage or provide false proof of vaccinations for the purpose of smugging them across the Channel.
- Ads on sites including Gumtree offering to ship underage puppies from Eastern Europe to the UK using ‘certified’ drivers for £250.
Slomcyzn Market in Poland: Underage puppies sold in freezing conditions
Cross-party demands for ministers’ action to end the ‘abhorrent trade’ were sparked by these findings. Jim McMahon is Labour’s Environment spokesperson. This should not happen to a puppy.
Since 2015, over 3,200 puppies have been intercepted in the UK, 22% of which are from Poland according to Dogs Trust.
Claire Calder from Dogs Trust’s Public Affairs Department said that this is only the tip of the Iceberg. Hundreds more people evade check, and Christmas usually sparks an increase in searches online for puppies.
Uncover Mail journalists posing in British breeders visited Slomczyn’s sprawling marketplace. Slomczyn was located around 23 miles away from Warsaw. Here, puppy traders professed to have the ability to create fake birth certificates, so that underage dogs can be brought into the UK.
Slomczyn doesn’t appear in British tourist guides. However, the market remains a popular destination for puppy smugglers from around the world.
It is mostly devoted to second-hand cars and clothes, but you can also take your pick of the most sought-after dog breeds – if you know where to look.
Jozef Nowak looks after an eight week-old Labrador. For four months, he faked his birth certificate.
The main entrance leads to a group of breeders that sell puppies for a low price, sometimes to the UK.
Polish law prohibits selling animals to markets. The association therefore owns and operates the land.
Our undercover reporters arrived on Sunday, February 1st to discover those who were eager to break the rules.
Numerous sellers were selling the shivering puppies’ cots, cardboard boxes, and cages to their customers in corrugated iron pens.
A birth certificate for an underage puppy beagle says it’s four months instead of eight.
The fake forms were created in just minutes at an onsite “office”. One trader, Arkadiusz Kazimierczak, offered an eight-week-old beagle for £110 – the average price in the UK is around £1,400 – adding: ‘The birth certificate would be that it is older, no problem’.
The Mail paid £9 for the certificate as a deposit and Mr Kazimierczak returned about ten minutes later with the paperwork, which included details of the puppy’s bloodline, breeder and kennel – but crucially altered its date of birth to make it appear 16 weeks old.
Jozef Nowak (a trader) gave us a fake birth certificate in order to give the impression that our labrador, a 7-week-old Labrador, was actually 15 weeks old.
He offered the labrador for £170, although they can fetch up to £2,500 in the UK. Mariusz Sarna revealed to Mariusz that his partners at the market were selling whole litters of labradors to British breeders “all the time” during spring and smuggling them by truck, car, or both.
He also suggested that we’smuggle all the litter’ because it would make us money to export them.
One former Polish head veterinarian stated later that untrained vets “will likely vaccinate” underage dogs brought to them by fake birth certificates. They can then transport the puppies to the UK.
Others will just forge vaccination documents – putting Britain at risk of rabies. Ineffective vaccinations of underage dogs may also prove to be ineffective.
The Mail decided to not vaccinate Slomczyn’s puppies and did so ethically.
The Slomcyzn Market has puppies that are tied to shopping carts and placed in cages under freezing conditions.
No evidence suggests that Mr Sarna, Mr Nowak or Mr Kazimierczak were involved in the smuggling of puppies into the UK.
Slomczyn was also home to Polish shelters that had found false paperwork from Slomczyn breeding dogs for the underage.
Michael Bizuk of the Society for the Protection of Animals in Poland stated that one Slomczyn breeder boasted of exporting British dogs using false vaccination and birth certificates.
Bizuk stated that she also provided advice on “tricks for lulling customs officers”, including cleaning the cage before inspects, and making the pups sleepy.
The puppies are then sold online by Eastern European sellers once they arrive in Britain.
According to Four Paws UK, a third of all online adverts for puppies in the UK seem to be targeting imported dogs. The Slomczyn traders didn’t respond to our requests for comment.