Animal rescue centres in the San Francisco area are calling it the "Paris Hilton syndrome", and they are not talking about the latest hair style or taste in glitzy clothes.

They are referring to chihuahuas, those tiny, wiry, anxious little dogs who the hotel heiress helped to turn into a fashion accessory, as de rigueur as the Prada handbag you pop them into.

Over the past year animal rescue workers have noticed the number of abandoned pooches rise steadily and a third of the dogs in shelters are now said to be chihuahuas. In some centres, the proportion has already reached the halfway mark.

The most distressing statistic is that the diminutive dogs with the big watery eyes have now overtaken their antithesis - pit bulls - as the most commonly abandoned breed.

"All the shelters in California are seeing an upswing in chihuahua impounds," a spokeswoman for the San Francisco animal care and control department told the Los Angeles Times. "It's been a slow and steady climb."

Across America, numbers are rising too, but rescue shelters put it down mainly to the dire economy. Lynnie Bunten, who heads rescue services for the Chihuahua Club of America, said they had been seeing a wave over the past year which she put down to people being forced to leave their homes and having to give up their dogs in the process.

In California, though, the trend is particularly pronounced, and dog experts believe that is at least in part due to the impact of Hollywood and celebrity combined.

It began, they say, with Legally Blonde, the 2001 film in which Reese Witherspoon strutted her stuff with the aide of her faithful companion, a chihuahua called Bruiser.

Then there was Gidget, who appeared in a range of Taco Bell advertisements. And of course Paris Hilton's Tinkerbell, who she would dress up in suits to match her own and parade in front of her reality TV series.

For those who care about the breed, such as Bunten, the 2008 Disney film Beverly Hills Chihuahua was actually a benign influence as it stressed in the plot the need to care for the dogs. Several members of the film crew donated to the Chihuahua Club to help surrendered animals.

But the overall effect of the spotlight falling on the chihuahua has been a drastic oversupply, as unscrupulous breeders rushed to fill what they perceived as insatiable demand. In the end, though, Paris Hilton's grip on the public imagination seems to have had its limit, leaving thousands of the poor pooches unloved and abandoned.

source: guardian