FrenchBulldogs.co.uk
The claim everyone repeats
Four dogs a day. Around 1,626 stolen in 2025. French Bulldogs the most targeted breed. Nearly four in five never come home. Those figures are in every article on the subject, usually without the sentence that ought to follow them.
The sentence that ought to follow them
The Pet Theft Taskforce, set up by the government to look at exactly this, reported that:
Pet theft is not a specific crime in law nor classified as a specific crime type.
Reliable data on "pet theft" is limited and there is no centrally-held data on criminal justice system outcomes for "pet theft" as it is not a separate identifiable offence.
And, on where its own evidence came from: "As there is no centrally held data on pet theft, most of the evidence presented in this paper on pet theft is based on incomplete evidence collected by third parties or the private sector."
Pet Theft Taskforce report, read 9 September 2026
Why the national data cannot make a map
The police open data service is the obvious place to build one. It publishes street-level crime with coordinates, which is exactly what a hotspot map needs. It has 15 categories, and this is all of them:
- anti-social behaviour
- bicycle theft
- burglary
- criminal damage and arson
- drugs
- other theft
- possession of weapons
- public order
- robbery
- shoplifting
- theft from the person
- vehicle crime
- violence and sexual offences
- other crime
- all crime
No pet theft. No dog theft. A dog taken from a garden becomes burglary; one taken on a walk becomes other theft or theft from the person; and neither is recoverable from the national figures afterwards.
But the forces themselves will tell you
That closes one route, not the question. Individual forces can pull records tagged with a stolen dog, and they release them on request. West Yorkshire Police published a response covering every dog theft it recorded in 2024, with the month, the breed where one was noted, and whether the animal came back.
Kent Police did the same, and its figures are the reason we have not drawn the map that would seem to follow.
Kent, 2024. 154 dogs stolen. 21 recovered. Of the dogs whose breed was recorded at all, the most taken was the XL Bully, with seven. French Bulldogs came next, with four.
Nationally the French Bulldog is reported as the most stolen breed. In the county with one of the highest theft counts in the country, it was not. That is the whole problem with the obvious shortcut — take the national breed percentage, multiply it through each force's total, colour in a map. It would have shown Kent as a French Bulldog hotspot in a year when Kent's thieves were taking something else.
The breed share is not a constant either. It has been reported at about 2.4% of stolen dogs in one recent year and nearer 10% in an earlier study using a different method and a different set of forces. And no one publishes dog ownership or Kennel Club registrations by region, so there is nothing to correct the assumption against. A map built that way would not be a finding about French Bulldogs. It would be a map of total dog theft with a French Bulldog label on it.
What a real one would take
It is a Freedom of Information round, not a download: the same question put to all forty-five forces for the same year, asking for dog thefts, recoveries and breed where recorded. It has been done before — a journalist ran a forty-five force round, and a security company published a nineteen-force one — but never as a maintained, same-year, breed-tagged dataset anyone can cite.
Two things would have to hold for the result to be worth publishing. Non-responding forces would have to appear as missing rather than as zero: past rounds have got answers from roughly half to three-quarters of forces, and one force returned zero thefts purely because it does not tag them. And the breed field is patchy even inside a force that answers — most of Kent's 154 had no breed recorded at all.
What the Pet Abduction Act did and did not do
The Pet Abduction Act 2024 made taking a dog a specific offence in England and Northern Ireland, rather than a theft of property valued like a bicycle. That is a genuine change and campaigners worked years for it. It did not, by itself, produce a published set of figures — and whether forces are now recording pet abduction consistently enough to be counted is a question nobody appears to be publishing an answer to.
That gap is the one worth watching, and it is answerable: it is a question forty-five forces can be asked directly.
Where the numbers on this page come from. The Taskforce quotes are from the government report linked above. The category list is read from the police open data service's own live catalogue. The annual estimates are insurers' press releases, which is what they are — estimates from partial returns, quoted here because they are the only figures that exist, not because they are reliable.
What we would tell an owner
The honest position is that theft risk for this breed is real and unquantified. The things that actually help do not depend on knowing the number: keep the microchip record current — it is the legal route back and the one most often out of date — and know that a dog's value to a thief tracks its resale price, which for this breed has fallen a long way alongside registrations.
Use this
Free to use with a link back. If a force publishes something that changes this, tell us.
Cite this page
FrenchBulldogs.co.uk, "Dog theft: why nobody knows the real number", https://www.frenchbulldogs.co.uk/data/dog-theft-data/ (reviewed 9 September 2026).
Common questions
How many French Bulldogs are stolen in the UK each year?
Nobody knows, and anyone who gives you a confident figure is quoting an estimate. Pet theft is not a separate offence in police recording, so there is no official count. The widely-quoted breed figures come from insurer press releases built on Freedom of Information responses that only some forces answer.
Why is there no dog theft map?
Not from the national crime data: the police open data service publishes 15 categories and none is pet or dog theft. Individual forces will disclose their own dog theft records on request, so a map is buildable from a Freedom of Information round — it is just that nobody maintains one. What does not work is scaling a national breed percentage across force areas: in Kent in 2024 the most stolen breed was the XL Bully, not the French Bulldog, so that method would have invented a hotspot.
Did the Pet Abduction Act 2024 fix this?
It made pet abduction a specific offence in England and Northern Ireland, which is a real change — before it, a stolen dog was legally just property. What it did not do by itself is create a published statistical series. Whether forces now record it consistently enough to count is not something anyone currently publishes.
So is dog theft going up or down?
The insurer estimates point down — roughly 1,626 dogs in 2025 against 1,808 in 2024. But those come from partial FOI returns whose response rates have themselves fallen, so some of the decline could be fewer forces answering rather than fewer dogs stolen. That is precisely the problem: the measurement and the thing being measured move together, and no published source separates them.