The Queen’s favourite dog breed is on the brink of extinction – and everyone’s looking suspiciously at Buckingham Palace. There’s only one solution: eBay

It would make for a gripping murder mystery: corgis are dying out at an alarming rate; is the Queen of the UK at the bottom of it?

The Pembroke Welsh corgi has made it on to the vulnerable native breeds list compiled annually by the Kennel Club, the UK’s official canine governing body and dog lobbying group. A mere 274 corgi puppies were registered with the club in 2014, meaning that, for the first time, the breed is considered to be perilously close to extinction.

In the 1960s, the club registered a whopping 9,000 corgi puppies a year, according to its secretary, Caroline Kisko. Since then, she says: “They’ve fallen out of the limelight and out of fashion.”

“The problem we have is that they are seen as an old person’s dog,” Crufts-winning corgi breeder Debbie Richardson told the Daily Mail. She didn’t explicitly point the finger at the breed’s most famous owner, of course, but it seems obvious that the monarch’s life-long love affair with the dogs must have contributed to their fusty image.

For as long as it remains the royal pup of choice, the corgi seems unlikely to shake the tag of pooch for pensioners. When was the last time you saw a 20-year-old cruising down the street with one?

If the Queen were to take to eBay and sell her batch (Willow and Holly, along with two corgi-dachshunds called – wait for it – Candy and Vulcan), she might be doing corgis all over Britain a huge favour: their numbers could flourish, along with their street cred, and the Curious Mystery of the Disappearing Corgis could end happily ever after.