‘Criminal gangs know they won’t go to prison’: The pet detective tracking stolen animals

“To be a pet detective you need to be a combination of animal lover, private detective and police officer,” says Colin Butcher. “But first and foremost, you’ve got to be a detective. You’ve got to be able to work it all out.”

Butcher, 64, has been “working it out” on behalf of stricken animal lovers for more than 20 years, since he pivoted away from a career in the Royal Navy and the police to found Pet Detectives UK, the UK’s first such agency.

With the help of his trusty cocker spaniel, Molly, the UK’s only dog trained to sniff cats, Butcher helps despairing owners recover lost cats, dogs and other pets. His home office in Horsham, West Sussex, is like something out of a Raymond Chandler potboiler, with deep leather chairs, a large desk and a rack full of spy equipment: cameras, microphones and tracking devices to attach to cars. The only signs of the nature of his work are a stuffed decoy cat resting on top of his PC monitor and a model grey parrot.

To talk to him is to hear countless tales of cats found behind bathroom panels, or hopping into delivery vans while drivers are making deliveries. Snakes, lizards and tortoises, all safely returned. A chihuahua taken from a kennel, a French bulldog plucked from outside Tesco. Dogs, he says, are particularly targeted by organised crime, or criminals from traveller communities, who take them to breed or sell back to their worried owners.

You’d think that there’d be good news on the horizon, however, earlier this month, Julian Mead appeared in court in Nottingham. He is the first man to be charged with “dognapping” under the new Pet Abduction Act.

But Butcher is worried that Britain is about to experience a wave of pet theft. This is partly because the new law contains a loophole that actually makes it harder to prosecute thieves, and partly because certain types of crime are cyclical: every two years or so, dog breeders must source fresh bloodstock.

“The lockdown forced more and more people to breed illegally, because they couldn’t steal dogs, so they set up puppy mills around the country,” he says. “Now they need to restock. In order to have healthy pups the breeders will buy stolen dogs. They’re not selling to each other because they are in competition. [The wave] is already happening. I’m already noticing the increase.”

The loophole in the new law protecting animals, meanwhile, involves an unfortunate Catch-22. When the Pet Abduction Act, a Conservative policy, came into force on August 24, it made the abduction of dogs and cats a specific offence. The law was proposed in 2021. In 2020, more than 2,000 dog thefts, and more than 400 cat thefts, were reported to the police.

“It was supposed to be a game changer that would mean that people who abducted dogs or cats would go to prison for five years when punished,” Butcher says. “It makes a lot of sense, but it has all gone horribly wrong. The only reason Pet Abduction got a five-year sentence was to bring it in line with legislation on animal cruelty. But five years will only happen in a Crown Court. And Pet Abduction will only get dealt with in the magistrates’ court, because it’s considered to be a minor offence. The most you can get is six months.”

Under the previous legislation, dog and cat abduction was a form of theft, which could be part of a more serious offence, especially if it involved a break-in, which made it burglary. The case in Nottingham is an example: although Julian Mead is thought to be the first charged under the new law, he was also charged with burglary, attempted murder, GBH and possession of an offensive weapon, hence appearing in a Crown Court. Had he been charged with dognapping alone, it would likely never have reached that stage.

Now, to compound the issue, Sir Keir Starmer’s government has announced plans to presume that sentences of less than a year in the lower courts will be suspended, to help reduce pressure on prisons.

‘Green light for dog thieves’

“If somebody goes to court for pet abduction, they will not be going to prison,” Butcher says. “It’s a green light to the dog thieves. Word will get around that there’s a lot of money to be made stealing dogs and selling them back to the owners, or breeding from them, and you’re not going to go to prison. We’re fast approaching a nightmare scenario in this country where anyone who wants to make money selling pups or kittens can do. The authorities won’t have the resources to investigate the illegal breeders. The police will say ‘no crime has been committed here’.”

“Criminal gangs know the system intimately,” he adds. “They know that if they bring cocaine into Britain and they get caught, they’ll go to prison for 16 years. They also know that moving stolen dogs or moving illegally bred puppies around the country is not going to give you a prison sentence. Why on earth would you get involved in drugs?”

When certain breeds can be worth several thousand pounds, the risk-to-reward ratio of pet abduction starts to look extremely positive.

“If a van has 60 puppies in it, the van is moving product worth between 20 and 50 grand, depending on the pups they’re selling,” he says. “If you have the market for your puppies and your kittens, you’ll make a hell of a lot of money. And if you get caught, the chances are the local authority will write to you and offer the opportunity of buying a licence for £500.” He adds that gangs have become sophisticated about flogging illegally bred pups, too.

“The people selling the pups are really slick,” he says. “They’ll rent an AirBnb for two weeks. People will go there and think ‘oh this is nice’. There’ll just be ‘two pups and mum’ because they know what people look for. But it’s often not the mum, it’ll just be a bitch that has been drugged so it’s lethargic and sits on its side and the pups are running around. They’ll say they only have two left, a pressure sell, so you buy one. Then they’ll go to the van at the back and get another one. People are apprehensive before they come in, but if it looks white and middle-class, people think ‘oh, they’re honest’ and don’t dig any further. The last estimate is that over half of the puppies sold in the UK are bred illegally.”

Butcher credits his love of animals to an early childhood spent in Malaysia, when his father was a Royal Navy engineer working in Singapore. “I was exposed to animals at a very early age because they were coming into our garden,” he says. “We were right on the edge of the jungle. You would hear the tigers roaring in the distance.”

At 16, Butcher followed his father into the Royal Navy, initially training as a diver before becoming a pilot in his early 20s. In 1982, he served in the Falklands War aboard the frigates Andromeda and Charybdis. He left the navy in 1988 and joined the police, rising quickly to the rank of Detective Inspector. Along the way, he gained a reputation for his interest in animal cases, solving his first one in 1994. “Because I had an active interest in animals, if there was ever an animal-related case in my division, they would say ‘give it to Colin Butcher, he’s the animal guy’. Nobody else wanted them. They wanted the serious stuff.”

As a sergeant working on drugs enforcement, he got to see the spaniels working on finding drugs. “I was fascinated by their ability and thought the police weren’t using them to their full extent. Nobody was thinking ‘crikey, we could open up so much with dogs’. Now they’re finding SIM cards, ivory, money. You can train a dog to find anything.” After 15 years in the force, however, he was ground down by the nature of the work.

“You start to become cynical, and thick skinned,” he says. “You start to see the bad in everyone, because everyone you see has either committed a horrible crime or been a victim of one. Your job is to catch them. It was getting a bit unpleasant.”

He left the police in the early Noughties and went to work as a private investigator, contracting for oil companies as well as private clients, doing a mixture of private eye work – finding employees on the take, or unfaithful spouses – and animal cases, often involving race horses.

He eventually founded Pet Detectives UK to separate his animal and private detective work. In 2011, they had a PR boost when he was hired to help find Woody, Sir Ian Botham’s springer-cocker cross. He has been working with Molly since 2017, when she was trained to sniff out cats. It costs from £750 to call on her services; Butcher does not use her more than three times a week, so as not to tire her out. “But if the cat’s there, she’ll find it,” he says admiringly. In 2019, he published a book, Molly and Me, about his brilliant assistant.

Given the scent of an absconded cat, she will instantly run towards it. Often the pet will simply have got itself into a tight spot, out of the sight of its owners. “In the same way you or I could pick out someone in an orange jacket in a crowd, she can do that with smell,” he says. Butcher sometimes receives dozens of enquiries a week, but is picky about what he takes on. After an initial consultation about the situation, he will decide whether he takes on the case. In cases where Molly is not used, for example those of dogs, it’s a matter of working out what might have happened. Sometimes it can take weeks of surveillance, sometimes using hidden cameras, to work out where a dog has gone. If it is tracked to a traveller site, he will go with the victims to help get it back.

He warns that merely chipping pets can be inadequate. Thieves can cut chips out with a razor blade, or place another chip on top of the old one. It is better to have the dog registered with a DNA database, so you can prove unequivocally that it is your pet.

Despite the increasing demand for his services, and a wave of pet theft that is expected to increase, Butcher says he is not optimistic about the future of his unusual profession. There is no pipeline for pet detectives. None of the assistants he has had over the years have been able to stay the course.

“There won’t be another generation of pet detectives,” he says. “People have the capacity to deal with human-on-human violence, but when it’s an animal it can be brutal.”