When the new law concearning bringing dogs over most european borders was announced I honestly thought that this is a joke. There are a lot of laws who don’t have any effect at all – unfortunatly this one has……. just not the effect it was meant to have.
The idea behind it was to decrease rabies in europe and to have a better instrument to control illegal transports from puppy mills in eastern europe. There’s quite some money involved in puppy mills and lots of pet passports were falsified anyway . As far as i know there hasn’t been ANY influence on illegal transports from puppy mills at all by the new rules.
Second issue is preventing rabies from spreading in europe. This is really ridicilous: if you look at the statistic and risks concearning rabies , read this and this Report about it. In the ( 2 or 3) reported cases described in the WAO Report that occured in Europe were caused by bats. Dogs don’t play a role at all in spreading rabies in Europe.
The REAL bad thing about this law is that it forces responsible breeders and puppy byers who want to import a puppy from another european country in the illegal corner. Everybody who knows a little bit about socialisation and habituation of young dogs will agree that leaving them up to 15 weeks with the breeder (even when the breeder is doing his bloody best) , it’s not good for the developement of the puppy.
That vets make fuss about „illegal“ imported puppies that are most obvious from serious breeders is something I personally will never understand and why countries accepted this new legislation without asking ANY reasonable experts on that will always stay a secret.