French bulldog fascinates but generates more vet spending

The French bulldog trade is booming for Jaymar Del Rosario, a breeder who sells a puppy for thousands of dollars. When he leaves the house to meet with a client, though, the must-have list includes vet paperwork, a bag of dog food, and a Glock 26 pistol.

“If I don’t know the area or the people, I’m always armed,” he admitted recently, as he showed me six-month-old Cashew of the new “hairy” variety, which costs more than $30,000.

With pointy ears, prying eyes, short legs and alligator swagger, the breed has become the darling of influencers, pop stars and professional athletes. A loyal companion in the home office era, she always seems ready to show herself in Instagram posts. So much so that it is already the second most popular in the US, second only to the Labrador retriever.

For this, too, some are violently taken from their guardian. In the last year, several complaints have been filed in Miami, New York, Chicago, Houston and mainly in California. Typically, the dog is stolen on the basis of armed hand.

In what may have been the most famous attack to date, Koji and Gustav, Lady Gaga’s two bulldogs, were snatched from the walker’s hands, who took a rear naked choke and shot him in last year’s attack on a sidewalk in Los Angeles.

For years, the price of having a francesinho at home has been a stab at the budget, as the puppy usually costs between US$ 4 thousand and US$ 6 thousand, or much more if it is of one of the new varieties, but now more and more he It translates to non-monetary details too, like the suspect’s paranoia approaching the garden fence and heightened vigilance on the walk after reading about the latest violence.

For poor owners, the French Bulldog combines two very American characteristics: the love of canine companionship and the ubiquity of firearms.

On a cold January night in the Adams Point neighborhood of Oakland, Calif., Rita Warda was walking with seven-year-old Dezzie close to her house when a SUV pulled up to the curb beside her and passengers got out, advancing in your direction. “They were armed and told me to deliver the dog,” she said.

Three days later, he received a call from a stranger, saying that she had found the puppy wandering around near a school. Warda is now taking self-defense classes and advises the tutor to carry a pepper spray or whistle with him.

She says she doesn’t know why the criminals gave up on her little one, but suspects it could have been because of age: the French Bulldog has one of the lowest life expectancies among the breeds, and seven years is already considered old age.

According to Patricia Sosa, owner of a breeder north of New Orleans, the profit frenzy with the breed fever has also generated a market of fakes, who demand deposits for dogs that don’t exist.

“There are a lot of scams in the market. The person decides to put a bulldog that he doesn’t have for sale, advertises, makes five, six, seven thousand and disappears”, explained she, who is a member of the board of the French Bulldog Club of the USA. She added: “Creators are even more vulnerable to theft. I only give out my address after doing good research on the customer. And I’ve installed cameras everywhere.”

As the name implies, the French bulldog is a version that emerged in that country from the smaller English bulldog in the mid-19th century.

The first batches of the bouledogue français, as it is called in the native land, were used by the butchers of Paris as rat hunters; it was only later that the race became a mascot for artists and the bourgeoisie – and even a model for the works of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Today, the American Kennel Club defines it as having a “square head, bat ears and cockroach back”.

In the world of veterinary medicine, he is controversial precisely because of his characteristics that are so successful – the big big head and puppy eyes, bulging, the flat nose and the folds of skin. They create what Dan O’Neill, an expert at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, calls “ultra-predispositions” to ill health.

The head is so big that the mother has problems at the time of delivery, which is why most are born by cesarean section; the body, small and muscular, also makes natural conception difficult. Thus, breeders often resort to artificial insemination.

But what worries researchers like O’Neill the most is the flattened face, which makes it difficult for the dog to breathe. In fact, he makes snoring noises even when fully awake, gets tired easily and is very susceptible to heat, not to mention that he can develop redness in the skin folds. Because of their bulging eyes, some can’t even blink properly.

O’Neill leads a group of UK professionals who ask potential buyers to “stop and think before buying a flat-faced dog”, a category that includes not just the French Bulldog, but the English Bulldog, the Pug, the Shih tzu, the Pekingese and the boxer.

“The thing is so serious that there is already a crisis,” said he, who, in a recent survey, concluded that the francesinho has four times more health problems than all other breeds combined.

But neither the appeals nor the warnings stopped the breed from soaring in popularity, stimulated mainly on social networks. As in the US, in the UK he has been vying head to head with the Labrador for the most popular breed title in recent years.

Sosa assured that the breed’s problems are a result of crossbreeding problems. “A purebred dog with a good background is relatively healthy.”