Susan Emerson, aged 51, from West Sussex said: “My husband and I bought our first puppy, Millie, in June 2012, which should have been an exciting and happy time. We heard through a friend that a breeder was selling Shi Tzu puppies in our nearby town, Crawley, so we booked an appointment. We first saw her at four weeks old at and took her home at eight weeks, as is recommended, and she seemed to be a healthy puppy.

“Looking back on it now, there were early warning signs. She wasn’t very active when we saw her and we weren’t given any paperwork. We were also aware that the breeder had not had her vet checked. When we got her home things started to go badly wrong. She wasn’t very active and didn’t have much of an appetite, but as she was our first puppy we assumed this must be normal.

“When we took her to the vets for her first vaccinations he discovered that she had major heart problems, including a leaky valve and a hole in her enlarged heart. We were absolutely devastated as we had already bonded and said we would do all we could for her, knowing that it would be a short life. I did text the breeder to inform him about the problems that Millie had, but he pleaded ignorance and told me that she had been fine when she was with them. It also became apparent as Millie grew older she was not a true Shi Tzu but a Shi Tzu/Bichon Frise cross. We did everything we could to give Millie happiness in her short life but in the end the blood in her heart started to shunt in the opposite direction making it hard for her to breathe and we saw that she was losing the energy to live, so we had to make the heart-breaking decision to put her to sleep, just after her first birthday.

“I would never buy a puppy in this way again and I would never want anybody to go through what we went through. We now have a healthy, happy Lhasa Apso called Jasmine, which we bought from a Kennel Club Assured Breeder, and the experience could not have been more different. We were given reams of paperwork with detailed authentic information about her parentage, the vaccinations she had been given, the health tests the parents had been given and how to care for her. At least we know that Jasmine has been given the best possible chance of a healthy life, something that poor Millie was deprived of.”