There's a dog-friendly Christmas Pup Crawl happening in Liverpool

Dog owners are being invited to have a pint with their pooch on a Christmas Pup Crawl around Liverpool this December.

The Pup Crawl will bring together all kinds of different breeds, stopping off at dog-friendly venues in the city centre.

And it will help raise money to support the work of Freshfields Animal Rescue and its Hope for the Hopeless winter appeal.

The event has been organised by Lisa Stirling, who has her own 11-year-old Shepsky puppy – a German Shepherd/Siberian Husky cross – called Beans on Toast.

Lisa and her partner Sean had the idea after they got Beans and were looking for places to take him when they were out near their home in Waterloo.

“I’m Irish so of course I love going to the pub, me and my partner always go for a Guinness, and as soon as we got Beans we knew we were going to have to find some dog-friendly places that we were able to take him and have our normal pints with no bother,” she says.

“We just started exploring places to see if they were dog-friendly and when we found one we’d post it on Beans’ Instagram. People were messaging us saying, ‘I didn’t realise this place was dog-friendly, we’ll have to come and meet you’ so I thought it would be a fab idea if we just arranged for everyone to meet and pick some places for us all to go.

“In Liverpool it feels like there are dog meet-ups but they tend to be breed specific, so say cockapoo or sausage dog, and Beans is a big lad. I wanted something where all these different breeds would be able to meet up and interact with each other and no breed was excluded.”

Lisa organised the first Pup Crawl for the beginning of October, and had a great response from owners.

“We went to Brewdog, then to Crazy Pedro’s which a lot of people don’t know is dog-friendly because it seems like a late-night venue, and then to Patterson’s in their upstairs area. That’s another place people don’t think about if they’ve got their dog with them because it’s a restaurant, but we brought Beans in there when he was a puppy and obviously he was having the time of his life because he was getting all the chicken scraps!

“We all had a ball, everyone really enjoyed it, and we had quite a few people messaging asking if we were going to do another one. We decided we would and because it’s in the lead-up to Christmas we thought we could raise some money so that’s when I got in touch with Freshfields.”

Beans’ Big Festive Pup Crawl will be on Sunday December 10, meeting at 2pm at Outpost on Renshaw Street before heading to Shipping Forecast where there’ll be a prize draw supported by lots of local businesses, and finally on to Spanish Caravan on Slater Street.

Lisa says it’s a great way for owners to meet each other, or just dog lovers who don’t actually have one themselves.

“We had people come along to the first one who didn’t actually have a dog, they just liked being around them. I think dogs are a really good way of getting people socialising. If you’re sitting in the pub with the dogs you often get people coming over to you to pet them and you get into a conversation with them which is lovely and wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t have your dog with you.

“For me, I’d lived around the Smithdown area for the majority of my time in Liverpool and moving to Waterloo coming up for two years ago I was a bit out of the loop and didn’t have many mates here.

“Doing this I’ve actually got to meet more people who have dogs, I speak to a lot of them on a regular basis since the first pup crawl and we’ve met up and been round other dog-friendly places in the area.”

Lisa says the reaction from owners and venues has been so enthusiastic, she’s planning to make the pup crawls a regular event.

“It is something we would like to keep going and coming into the new year we’d like to do one every month or two months.

“We’d love to move outside city centre too and hopefully take it to Waterloo/Crosby, Aigburth/Lark Lane and the Baltic because there are loads of lovely dog-friendly places everywhere.”

Tickets for Beans’ Big Festive Pup Crawl are £5 for one dog and one human, or one human on their own, and that also gets you entry into the prize draw. There’s the option to add additional dogs and humans, or just buy raffle tickets if you can’t make it and all the money raised goes to Freshfields.