UK study highlights health and regulation risks in rescue dog imports

Adopting dogs rescued in other countries has become common practice in Europe, driven by good intentions and by a network of organisations, transporters and foster homes. The welfare implications for the animals, however, have been little studied. A qualitative study published on 9 September 2026 in PLoS One, by researchers at UK universities, went to hear from those who live that chain from the inside.

The team conducted 30 interviews and four focus groups, totalling 54 participants: overseas and UK rescue representatives, trainers, transporters, veterinary surgeons, animal health officers, government representatives, fosterers and owners. To that material they added 18 publicly available online forum threads, selected purposively. Inductive thematic analysis produced seven themes.

Six themes concern health and behaviour: dogs unfit for transport; welfare during transport; infectious disease; novelty (exposure to a completely unfamiliar environment); agency (the dog's capacity to exercise choice); and caregiver expectations. The seventh gathers regulation and enforcement challenges, with sub-themes on non-compliance, lack of resources, communication, jurisdiction and lack of cross-sector regulation.

The finding that runs through the accounts is the gap between expectation and reality. According to the authors, caregivers' expectations often did not align with reality after the dog arrived, leading to costly surprises for new owners; some dogs were felt to be poorly matched to the household and displayed challenging behaviours. Participants saw rescue organisations as morally responsible for providing accurate information and pre- and post-adoption support, but reported this was inconsistently provided. Preventing the problems runs up against the difficulty of regulating and monitoring animal movements between countries. The recommendation is twofold: greater education about what to expect from an imported dog's health and behaviour, and improved monitoring of rescue organisation and transport processes.

In Germany, where more than 100,000 dogs are imported each year from other EU countries, mainly Romania, a study published in 2025 in the journal Animal Welfare carried out a systematic content analysis of the websites of 241 organisations rehoming dogs from southern and eastern Europe. Many lacked information on the dogs' origin, transport method or health status, which, according to the authors, sometimes makes it hard to distinguish rescue from illegal trade. Behavioural descriptions appeared in only two-thirds of adverts, and information on vector-borne diseases and the typical behaviour of imported dogs was not provided comprehensively. Few organisations violated legal standards, for example by offering underage puppies or banned breeds, or by failing to use the TRACES transport system.

The infectious disease theme has a documented example. In the Netherlands, Brucella canis had never been isolated until November 2016, when it was identified in a dog imported from Romania. In the following 25 months, 16 suspected cases were notified to the authorities; ten dogs were seropositive, and contact tracing found another eight seropositive littermates. All were rescue dogs imported from Eastern Europe. The case series, published in 2021 in Emerging Infectious Diseases, recovered the bacterium from urine, blood and other specimens, and the authors stress that urinary shedding should be considered when assessing zoonotic risk. The conclusion is that importing infected dogs introduced the bacterium into a country where it was not endemic.

For the veterinarian who receives an imported dog in the consulting room, the three papers point to concrete questions: where it came from, how it was transported, what health screening was done, what documentation exists and what the adopter was led to expect. None of the studies opposes cross-border adoption; what they ask for is verifiable information at every step, so that good intentions do not turn into harm for the animal, the owner and the local dog population.