The History of SHWA-UK

The welfare situation in UK Siberian Huskies was fairly stable through the 1990s. The creation of a new online market via the Internet resulted in a massive increase in the indiscriminate commercial breeding of Siberians by puppy farmers, backyard breeder and naive / greedy / stupid “pet” breeders. The resulting mass sale of dogs to naive and ill-prepared new owners with little or no support meant that the welfare situation at the beginning of the 21st Century began to spiral out of control.

By 2006, a group of individuals based around an Online Forum run by Mick & Terry Brent, who had been working independently to rescue and rehome unwanted Siberians for about five years, found that their commitment to welfare had increased to the extent that it was barely manageable. In the year up to Christmas 2006, this group had rehomed 70 unwanted Siberian Huskies.

A the same time, the Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain Welfare Scheme (which at the time was the only dedicated breed rescue scheme for Sibes in the UK as a whole) was going through a crisis of its own, and in December 2006, the club decided that its Welfare Section could only deal with KC (Kennel Club) registered dogs bred by or owned by club members. This meant that there was no breed specific safety net out there for the vast majority of unwanted Siberians, which were not KC registered. In response to this, Terry and Mick Brent organised the founding meeting of SHWA-UK in February 2007. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of the our volunteers, many years on and many hundreds of rehomed Siberian Huskies later, we are still going strong – growing each day and, thanks to our amazing volunteers, working tirelessly on behalf of unwanted Siberian Huskies in the UK.