Breeders warn of Shiba Inus: living dogs fall victim to crypto hype

Breeders warn against Shiba Inus
Living dogs are falling victim to the crypto hype

It all started years ago with a parody cryptocurrency with a dog logo. There are now dozens of digital currencies, some worth billions, bearing the name or image of a Japanese hunting dog, and more and more crypto fans, like Elon Musk, want a real one.

Shiba Inus were originally bred in Japan for hunting. You can tell that in the dogs to this day, warns Jeri Burnside, breeder and board member of the National Shiba Club of America. “Most Shibas will never be 100 percent off-leash obedient. It will probably never be safe to take them to the dog playground, where they should play lovingly with other dogs. They will likely kill your smaller pets,” explains the expert. In short: Compared to many other breeds, Shiba Inus are extremely unsuitable as a starting point for inexperienced dog owners.

But Shiba-Inu breeders, especially in the USA, are currently being overrun by inexperienced newbies. Bloomberg reports of breeders who sometimes receive 150 to 200 inquiries a month. “All of my breeder friends are currently inundated with puppy inquiries and have long waiting lists,” says Jeri Burnside in an interview with Yahoo Finance. Most of these inquiries come from people who are barely prepared for life with a dog, let alone a hunting dog like a Shiba Inu, quoted Bloomberg breeder Stephanie Abel from Ohio. If she educates customers about all the negative things about dogs, “they run away”.

This naivety of most New Shiba fans is not surprising when you look at where this sudden enthusiasm originated: from the cryptocurrency scene. In 2013, three developers originally created the digital currency Doge-Coin as a satire. They provided its logo with the image of a Shiba Inus that happened to be circulating on the Internet at the time. From then on, the hype about doge coins took on a life of their own, which this year finally rose to become one of the most valuable crypto currencies of all.

Animal shelter solicits crypto donations

But it didn’t stop with Doge-Coin. The success resulted in numerous copycat currencies, one of which, simply called Shiba Inu, is now one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies with the highest market value. The hype about the currencies and the dogs was fueled by none other than the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. The crypto fan initially expressed himself enthusiastically in spring about Doge-Coin as “the people’s currency”, whereupon the price literally exploded. Eventually he got himself a real Shiba-Inu puppy. Floki, as Musk christened his dog, has been delighting Musk’s fan base on Twitter with cute puppy photos for months and has in turn inspired new copycat cryptocurrencies with names such as Floki Inu, Shiba Floki or Baby Floki Doge.

While developers are collecting millions of dollars on the virtual trading platforms with the help of ever new, otherwise meaningless cryptocurrencies based on the Shiba-Inu meme, living dogs in reality bear the consequences of the hype. Serious breeders cannot even begin to meet the demand for the dogs, which give birth to an average of only three puppies per litter. Expert Burnside therefore fears that there will be reckless mass breeding by “backyard breeders and puppy mills”. Important standards such as health and character tests in breeding dogs threatened to take a back seat.

The hype is already noticeable in the case of Shiba Inus who are obviously overwhelmed by their owners in the USA. Burnside reports that volunteers who take care of such dogs are overwhelmed by the skyrocketing number of misbred and unbred or incorrectly raised Shiba Inus. In order to get this problem under control, an animal welfare organization is contacting those responsible in the crypto scene directly: The PAWS animal shelter in Chicago has been actively soliciting donations in the form of crypto currencies, including doge coins, since this summer.

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