About Bad Pets

It started with a leash that broke

My shepherd saw a cat. He was on lead, walking beside me, and then a cat ran across the footpath in front of us. He lunged. The leash snapped — not the webbing, not the stitching, but right at the buckle clip. The cheapest part.

He went after the cat. The cat went under a parked car. That gave me the few seconds I needed to get a hand on his collar.

Nothing bad happened. The cat was fine. My dog was fine. But we were near a road, and I had a large dog off-lead and running, and the only reason it ended well was luck.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Not the broken leash — the fact that whether it ended badly came down to where the cat decided to hide.

What we build, and why

Bad Pets exists because there is too much cheap dog gear on the market that breaks.

Not gear that wears out. Gear that fails — usually at the hardware, usually under load, usually at the exact moment it matters.

A harness isn’t a fashion item when your dog weighs 40 kilos. It’s the only thing between that dog and a road. So we build for the moment it’s actually tested: the lunge, the bolt, the sudden pull nobody saw coming.

Specced, not sourced

We didn’t take a catalogue product off the shelf and put our name on it.

We chose the components — the hardware, the webbing, the construction — from what was available, and we chose the ones built to hold. That costs more. It’s the reason our harness weighs what it does, and it’s the reason people pick one up at a market and say the same thing every time: *this is solid.*

You can feel it in your hand. That’s what we were aiming for.

Tested on dogs that test gear

Our gear is used on a working German Shepherd and on protection-trained Dobermans.

These are dogs that generate real force. They train, they work, and they put equipment under loads most harnesses will never see. If something is going to fail, it fails on them first — which is exactly the point.

We don’t sell anything we haven’t put on our own dogs.

Quality products with attitude

The name is a joke. The gear isn’t.

Bad Pets is Australian-owned. We hold our stock here, so when you order it ships from Australia — not on a slow boat with a three-week wait.

If a buckle or a seam fails on something we sold you, tell us. We’ll make it right. We can say that because we know what’s in these, and because we’ve already trusted them with our own dogs.

Bad Pets — quality products with attitude.