'They make me go out': Why dogs can mean the world to our vendors

Most mornings, Ian Duff walks to his pitch on Union Street in Bath with a huge, fluffy dog on one side and a lean, bright-eyed one on the other. Trigger is the showstopper – a big, mixed-breed rescue (“bit of Alsatian, I think, bit of Bernese” says Ian) with a thick coat and a kind of gentle magnificence about him. Marlene is smaller and sleeker (“a bit of Whippet, a bit of Beagle”), a little nervier, but quick to warm to anyone who stops to say hello. Between them, they stop traffic. Or at least, they stop shoppers.

“Most people come up to see the dogs,” Ian says, laughing. “I’m not one of these sellers that goes up to people shouting ‘Big Issue! Big Issue!’ I don’t say anything. I just walk up and down, and the dogs do most of the work.”

Ian has been a Big Issue vendor for 17 years, always in Bath. Before that, he was a chef – trained in England, schooled in sauces in Paris, working kitchens all over. Then he ran pubs, until the company went into liquidation overnight and he found himself homeless. Big Issue gave him a way back. But it was his dogs that kept him here.

Before Trigger and Marlene, there was Boycie – named, like his successors, after characters from Only Fools and Horses (Ian ran a boozer in Peckham, where the show is set, for years). Boycie was with Ian for 16 years. When he had to put him to sleep on Christmas Day 2021 (“he was always an awkward bugger”), it hit hard.

“My mental health slipped quite a lot,” Ian says. “My anxiety was through the roof, which I didn’t really notice. It was the Big Issue office that noticed and got me the help I needed.”

For five months, Ian was without a dog. Then a woman with links to a Macedonian rescue brought Trigger into his life. It wasn’t straightforward – Trigger had been through a bad adoption and a spell in foster care, with almost no training in his first year. He was unsettled and skittish. After a year, Ian got back in touch with the rescue, and along came Marlene.

Marlene’s story is its own kind of remarkable. She’d spent her first year on the streets in Macedonia. She was taken in, neutered and released back – the shelters didn’t have space. Two days later, she turned up at the gates of a kill shelter, trying to get back in. The woman who runs the rescue raised the money to bring her to the UK, and to Ian.

The difference in Trigger was almost immediate. “When I got Marlene, he completely changed,” Ian says. “He’s much more content, a completely different dog. She annoys him, but he loves her. They cuddle up together all the time.”

The difference in Ian was just as clear.

“They make me go out, which is what I need,” he says. “Otherwise I’d probably just stay indoors. They’re a great help for my mental health, because it’s them that I have to live for now. That gets me going, makes me motivated.”

It’s a bond that anyone who’s ever relied on an animal will recognise – that quiet, stubborn way a dog can pull you back into the world when nothing else will. And it’s a bond that matters enormously to Big Issue vendors. For people whose lives can be precarious, whose routines are shaped by weather and footfall and the goodwill of strangers, a dog is more than a companion. They’re a reason to get up, a conversation starter, a warm body on a cold day.

It’s why Big Issue’s partnership with Animal Friends Insurance works so well. Animal Friends has long championed the connection between animal welfare and human wellbeing.

Its work with Big Issue – including sponsoring the iconic red dog tabards now worn by vendors’ dogs across the country, and sported proudly by Trigger and Marlene – recognises something that Ian and his customers already know: that looking after animals and looking after people are often the same thing.

“With these lovely tabards, it’s even easier,” Ian says.

“My customers already love them and I’ve got new people coming up every day, saying they’re fantastic.”

Animal Friends invests £1 million annually to animal welfare charities through the support of charities including Blue Cross, StreetVet and Born Free.

Its support for Blue Cross’s Pet Loss Service is particularly close to home for someone like Ian, who knows exactly how devastating it is to lose the animal that keeps you going. Animal Friends’ work with StreetVet, meanwhile, provides free veterinary care for pets belonging to people experiencing homelessness – protecting precisely the kind of bond that changed Ian’s life.

Back on Union Street, Trigger is sprawled across the pavement in that way that only very large, very confident dogs can manage. Marlene is tucked beside him, watching the passing feet with alert eyes.

A woman stops to pet them both, then buys a magazine. Ian grins.

“It’s not me,” he says. “It’s definitely the dogs.”

As of January 2026, Animal Friends has donated over £10 million to animal welfare charities and conservancies worldwide, helping to champion the bond between pets and people.
Find out more at: Charities We Support | Animal Friends