Sarah Cox: My life with dogs

The Radio 2 presenter on putting her naughty dog on probation and supporting the Dog’s Trust, by Adam Bloodworth

The popular Radio 2 show is just one facet of Sara Cox: she’s also absolutely mad about animals. The former

Radio 1 Breakfast Show presenter and Big Breakfast host has three dogs, two cats and a horse, and recently rode to Parliament on horseback to promote the Kept Animals Bill, which aims to give imported and exported animals better lives.

Through her work with animal charities Cox has become something of an expert, and she starts every morning by walking her trio of furry friends up to her horse stables.

“No more pets now for a while,” she says through laughter. “I even wrote that in my husband’s birthday card in April. ‘Happy birthday! No more pets, I promise. Sorry, have a lovely day!’”

Cox is speaking to City A.M. as a spokesperson for the charity Dogs Trust, which has launched a new survey for Londoners to participate in about their dogs. The idea is for dog owners to let the organisation know about their dogs’ behaviour so experts can build knowledge about issues people are currently facing. Then the charity will run behaviour workshops and offer advice based on the demand.

The survey was commissioned in response to a sharp rise in the amount of young dogs that have been handed over to the Dogs Trust since the pandemic. The organisation has had 18,000 handover requests this year, 30 per cent of which are down to behaviour-related issues, including aggression, which could have been prevented with the correct intervention and support. The issue is that a lot of new dog owners adopted puppies during the pandemic, when they had plenty of time at home, but failed to give them the correct training.

“Any pups that were bought and rehomed during the pandemic may have spent twenty-four hours a day with their humans, they wouldn’t know that at some point their human would have to go back to the office and life would get busy again,” Cox says. “So I think it’s great that Dogs Trust are trying to help ease that.”

One issue is that puppies are always in high demand but require extra training and are a longer-term commitment than an older dog. “Pip, my new from Dogs Trust, is an absolute little cracker but it’s laborious and it’s repetitive and it takes time and it takes patience to house train a puppy so you don’t end up with a little nightmare on your hands. You’ve got to put the work in,” says Cox. The 47-year-old grew up on a farm in Bolton surrounded by big guard dogs as well as little terriers –working dogs with “brilliant characters”. But one lesson she learned was the value of adopting older dogs because her mum always chose them over puppies.

“My mum was ahead of her time really,” says Cox. “We never got a puppy, we’d always get a rescue dog. I always wanted a puppy but when our dog would pass away, we’d get them at an average age of seven or eight so we didn’t have that long with them and they’d die of old age or illness.”

Cox isn’t aware of the push for pet bereavement services that some employees and organisations are rallying for; instead she says she did “the opposite” of grieving when she lost her Maltese called Beano a few years ago.

“I kind of threw myself into work because I kind of have to, there were a lot of people relying on me,” says Cox. “I’m quite good at compartmentalising my brain but make no mistake I’m sure a lot of people aren’t able to do that and that must be really tough.”

Cox’s other animals helped too: “You can’t stay under your duvet all day if you’ve got dogs to walk, and a horse as well, so I’ve got to get up the yard.”

At home in London, she currently has Pip, a 19-week-old poodle bichon frise cross, Dolly, a seven-year-old maltese, and Daisy, a two-year-old flat coated retriever, as well as two cats and a horse.

Where does Cox stand on the contentious issue of kissing your dog on the mouth, which some owners seem to think is totally normal? “They can have my chin,” she says. “I think that’s quite enough. “You just have to be quick. You offer them the chin because you’re trying to get your mouth away from them, they’re trying to give you little kisses which are obviously cute. But we all know how animals clean themselves…”

Cox certainly wasn’t quick enough earlier this year when her terrier Dolly bit through a cable in the BBC Radio 2 studio, prompting the BBC to ban all pets from coming in with presenters.

Cox laughs at the mention of the incident. “She was very naughty,” she admits, although she denies she’s been campaigning to get dogs back in the building again, as some newspapers have suggested.

“The bloody dog chewed through something. Dolly had a moment of madness, she’s such a mild mannered fluffy little maltese, it was just a rebellious streak. She regrets it, she regrets her actions,” laughs Cox. “I’ll put her on probation for a bit. Put her on community service…”

£ For more information and to do your bit, complete the National Dog Survey online at nationaldogsurvey.co.uk. Survey closes 7 June.