Suzie Meakins was in Adelaide last Christmas when she received a troubling text from her housemate back in Medowie in the Hunter region of New South Wales.
“She took the dogs,” it read. “I can’t reach her. She won’t return them.”
Mindy, Polly, Elsey and Trixie were more than Meakins’ pets. The chihuahuas had belonged to her best friend – a man Meakins called her “gay husband” – who had left his “girls” in her care when he died. Now, she was told, someone had kidnapped the dogs.
“It was so distressing,” Meakins says. For her, giving up on Mindy, Polly, Elsey and Trixie was almost as unfathomable as giving up on missing children.
“I don’t have kids,” she says. “So they are my kids.”
Meakins flew home immediately but, when the police could not help her, she turned to social media.
“That’s when it started coming in,” she says. “Call Anne-Marie, pet detective. Call Anne-Marie.”
Anne-Marie Curry describes the company she founded and runs, Arthur & Co, as “Australia’s only comprehensive pet detective service”. And business, she claims, is booming. Over the course of the pandemic lockdowns, in Australia and elsewhere, cases of pet theft experienced a spike.
The advent of pet detectives reflects a broader change in the way many in wealthy societies interact with and value pets. Over the past few years, the price of pets – particularly dogs, and especially fashionable breeds – has vastly increased. Alongside the dollar value rise, pets have come to occupy an increasingly intimate role in Australian households. And with this, the business of not only keeping pets, but stealing – and retrieving – them has changed.
Cashing in the increased value ascribed to pets is a booming industry, worth $3.9bn in Australia and set to grow by 5% this year, providing products ranging from pet wearables (GPS trackers that monitor pet activity) to those that allow owners to wear their pets. Meanwhile, many pets have switched to organic and free-range foods, sustainably sourced from local farmers, while vending machines sell “100% human grade” pet treats; owners can cloak their canine in accessories from a monochrome Country Road recycled alpine reversible puffer vest ($99.95) to a Dolce & Gabbana leopard print carrier bag ($2,695); and pet owners may drop their pooches off at doggy daycare and check in on them during the day via Instagram updates.
From our offices to our beds and bank balances, pets are infiltrating parts of our world they had never previously inhabited.
Pets: property or sentient whole beings?
One area of slower change, though, is the law. In December last year South Australia passed a law recognising pet theft as a distinct offence and Western Australia is considering heading in a similar direction. Meakins’ home state of NSW also has a standalone criminal offence of dog theft, however it carries a year’s jail, as opposed to the maximum five-year sentence for other forms of nonviolent theft. And pets – legally speaking – are still considered items of property. In all states, taking someone’s dog or cat is treated not as an abduction but a theft; like the taking of a TV, the picking of a pocket.
However, in 2019 the Australian Capital Territory made the significant legal step of recognising the sentience of animals under legislation. France, Quebec, New Zealand, Peru and the United Kingdom are among the jurisdictions around the world to change their laws in recent decades in an attempt to recognise animals not as inanimate objects, but individual beings capable of experiencing love and hurt.
And pet owners in situations such as Meakins’ who live in the UK may one day be able to press charges of pet abduction, after the government’s pet theft taskforce, established in 2021 in response to rising pet theft there, made the recommendation explicitly reflecting “the fact that pets are not just property”.
University of South Australia criminal law lecturer Lisa Parker argues such reforms may have limited impact in preventing pet theft – pointing out that the new dog theft laws in her state carry a maximum penalty of $50,000 or two years in jail, as opposed to 10 years for basic theft.
“This new offence doesn’t actually do anything or fix any gap in terms of the law as a vehicle to deter people and to hold them to account,” she says. “But it does have symbolic value.”
The rise of the ‘multispecies family’
For Andrea Laurent-Simpson, a lecturer at the Southern Methodist University in the United States, the symbolism is acknowledgment of the increasingly accepted fact that many now live in what sociologists like her call “multispecies families”.
Laurent-Simpson’s 2021 book, Just Like Family, traces the rise of such households to the societal and economic changes in the 1970s – and attempts to explain how human-pet relationships have plumbed new depths of emotional attachment in recent years.
Particularly in childless families, she says, pets may now play many of the roles traditionally occupied by children. In high-income, post-industrialised countries with declining fertility rates – such as the US, UK, Japan, Czech Republic and Australia – our relationship with pets, she argues, is only set to intensify, with everything from calls for leave from work to care for new pets to pet food stamps for people struggling to feed the pets they own.
“[There is] increasing cultural acceptance of the multispecies family as a genuine family type that needs recognition as such,” she says.
Among those interviewed by Laurent-Simpson for her research were pet owners who read stories to their dogs at bedtime, referenced the “pitter-patter” of their footsteps in the hallway and changed work hours to spend more time with their “babies”.
For such people, pet theft is a “terrifying prospect” which would cause “deep emotional trauma”.
“Research has shown time and again that pets are grieved in much the same way that humans are upon death,” she says. “However, death is final, right? Pet theft provides no closure. What has happened to my dog? Is he being mistreated? Is she scared?”
In this state of trauma, many are left vulnerable – willing to do and believe anything to get their pet back or, at least, to know what happened to them.
Jade To, a 32-year-old western Sydney woman who runs a beauty salon, has experienced suddenly and mysteriously losing a pet. One night in April, To came home to find her black cat, Kuro, gone.
To scoured her street and neighbouring properties. She extended her search across her suburb, plastering lost cat signs, knocking on doors. Then she went online and, like Meakins, was recommended a pet detective service (not Curry’s).
After her deposit of US$200, the service claimed to send an investigator to her area and told To they had obtained CCTV footage featuring a mysterious man driving a Camry.
To says those she dealt with were highly skilled at giving her exactly what she needed, something that no one else could give her: hope. But, she says, nothing ever came of the service’s alleged investigation.
“For some other people, it’s just like a cat, nothing more,” To says. “But for me, it’s my family. I really feel worried, and in pain as well, every time I think: what is happening to my cat?”
To still wonders – Kuro was never found.
‘We’re not returning a laptop’
Meakins’ story, however, had a far happier ending.
In a video posted by Curry to social media, the pet detective opens the boot of her car and steps away theatrically to reveal a dog carrier containing four ecstatic little chihuahuas. Meakins gasps as she picks up the dogs and embraces them in a cuddle, laughing and crying as they lick and paw her face, tails wagging frantically.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” Meakins cries. “You poor things. You’re coming home now.”
For Curry, it is moments like these that make the job.
“We’re not returning a laptop or a diamond ring, we are finding a sentient and feeling being, who knows when they are lost or when they are scared or when they are not safe, who experience feelings of attachment and grief,” the pet detective says.
After days of stress and exhaustion, the reunion brought Meakins an overwhelming sense of relief. And then life returned to normal.
“Every evening, they’ve got the whole couch, but all four of them sit on my lap,” Meakins laughs. “I’m just so relieved to have my girls home.”
