Police urge pet owners to submit dog DNA to national database

Gloucestershire Police says it is the first force in the world to use the technology to tackle dog theft, which has increased during the coronavirus pandemic.

The DNA Protected scheme involves owners purchasing a £74.99 home kit to take a swab from their dog’s mouth, before sending it to testing company Cellmark Forensic Services.

Cellmark, which has been working with dog DNA for five years, then develops a profile for each dog and uploads it to a national database that is accessible to police forces.

Owners are encouraged to use branded accessories such as leads, collars and tags, as well as stickers for their home and car, to alert would-be criminals that their dog is part of the scheme.

Police say DNA Protected, which was launched on Wednesday, will act as a deterrent as well as improving the chances of dogs being reunited with their owners in the event that they are lost or stolen.

Currently, all dogs across the UK are legally required to be microchipped by the time they are eight weeks old, with the contact details of the owner stored on a database.

However, criminals are able to remove the tiny chips and in some cases replace them with false information – making a stolen dog difficult to link to its original owner if it is recovered.

Kim Mowday, harm reduction adviser at Gloucestershire Police, decided to investigate other methods of identifying pets after meeting a family whose female dog had been stolen along with her six puppies.

“Aside from the actual theft, it was the hurt that they were suffering from the loss of the dogs and it affected me that we weren’t doing enough and we couldn’t do enough to try to identify the dogs if we recovered them,” Mr Mowday said.

“The problem is that if we recover dogs, they probably won’t be in the area, they will have been passed to organised crime groups who will pass the dog to their various safe locations.

“If we were to go to those locations and recover a dog, it may not be local, we would have to try to prove that the dog is stolen, and get it proven in court beyond reasonable doubt that it is stolen.

“It struck me then that the only way we could prove it was dog DNA.”

Mr Mowday said he considered other methods, such as using dog nose and paw prints, but only using DNA proved “foolproof”.

Creating a dog DNA profile is a similar process to the one for humans and uses markers to establish an individual’s identity.

Cellmark says the technology is sensitive enough to differentiate between dogs in litters of pedigree puppies.

David Hartshorne, managing director of the company, said: “We have already successfully used the technology to reunite animals and also to investigate some criminal cases involving dog crime.

“The database has only been launched today.

“That means that if an animal is found by the police and they aren’t able to identify it in any other way, they can take a swab, send it to us, we’ll profile it and search the database to see whether or not that animal is on there.

“We would then be able to give those details back to the police and notify the owner that their animal has been found.”

Mr Hartshorne said a key part of the initiative was crime prevention, so it was important that owners made people aware that their dog had been DNA profiled.

All of the police dogs at Gloucestershire Police have been swabbed and their details uploaded to the database, with patches on their harnesses reading “DNA Protected”.

Chris Allen, head of forensic services at the force, said: “The strength of a database is in its size, so we need people to join the database.

“Currently, when a dog turns up or we find a dog, we don’t know where that dog has come from.

“It is virtually impossible at this time to search that unknown animal against the country’s missing dog database because there isn’t one.”

He added: “This is low-risk, high-return for them at the moment and we need to reverse that by not only acting with the courts but also with the science and making this database.”

Chris Nelson, police and crime commissioner for Gloucestershire, said dog theft had been “one of the most distasteful elements of lockdown” but the DNA scheme offered an opportunity to counter it.

“I think when criminals become more aware of what we’re doing, they will realise it would not be a clever thing to steal that animal because they wouldn’t be able to hide its identity,” he said.

“It’s not just about retrieving the dog, it’s actually preventing the dog from being stolen in the first place.”

The kits will be available through Gloucestershire Police’s neighbourhood engagement vehicles in the coming weeks, or can be purchased on the DNA Protected website.