To think that the answer to getting rid of puppy farms and thus millions of unwanted dogs is to ban the buying and selling of dogs for money?

[wannaBe]

We see thread after thread on here about people who inadvertently, and sometimes not so inadvertently buy puppies from unscrupulous breeders who are only in it for the money. The trade in designer mongrels crossbreeds is big business, with people paying sometimes up to £1500 for a dog just because it looks cute, and the breeders raking in the cash from their several bitches which they breed to the point of exhaustion before getting rid of them.

And even the breeders who only breed a litter or two still make money from the exchanges. And let's not pretend that just because someone is KC registered they aren't in it for the money.

There have been all sorts of suggestions as to how this can be resolved, make breeders be registered/only allow them to breed certain numbers a year being just a couple. But in truth there is no way to police this and once a dog is pregnant there is no way of doing anything humane about it, after all, no-one would advocate destroying a fourth litter when the breeder had already bred three that year, for instance?

For me the answer is simple. If it was simply illegal to buy and sell puppies then the puppy farms would have no incentive to exist. If the law was very clear that by advertising dogs for sale you were breaking the law, no-one would actually pay money for puppies, and the sites like gumtree would not be allowed to advertise them.

The exception could be made for e.g. The cost of vaccinations/micro chippinG so that genuine breeders wouldn't be out of pocket, but actually, if you were breeding for the good of the breed the food etc would still be the breeder's responsibility.

Take the prophet out of puppies and the need to breed so many of them would no longer exist.

The owners do pay for maternity care, they pay all vets fee's most insurance won't cover breeding a few do but your monthly payments can be expected to be huge per month per dog.

It's the people who just shut two dogs out in a garden and leave em to it that need to be stopped. The breeders who take their dogs to the vets/health test nothing would change apart from they would stop breeding and you would only be left with the Byb who would then rather than take cash swap a puppie for a TV/drugs/iPhone etc if you stopped being able to sell puppies for money.

It's no use passing laws you can't enforce. This would be as successful as Prohibition.

I agree with those that said their should be a requirement for licences for selling and owning a dog. All dogs need to be microchipped now so will be easier to trace provenance.

The substantial cost of the licences will ensure that people have thought things through properly, and pay for the scheme to be administered.

Furthermore all dogs will be DNA tested, and unpicked up dogshit will be DNA tested and the owner fined. This will also pay for itself..

"Furthermore all dogs will be DNA tested, and unpicked up dogshit will be DNA tested and the owner fined. This will also pay for itself.."

Yes! I wish this could happen.

This:
We probably need a change in cultural attitudes rather than legislation
and this:
I don't think there's anything wrong with someone breeding dogs for money as such - it takes a huge amount of work to do it properly.

I'd resist anything that involved oversight by the RSPCA: in my (limited) experience of them they are useless.

Also, in my view, six months is way too young to neuter some dogs (we neutered our big chap at 6 months and, in retrospect, that was far too soon: a year or even 18mo would have been better). So that's not an easy out either.

Seriously, if puppies could no longer be sold for cash, there wouldn't just be fewer puppies: there would be almost no puppies. Who is going to volunteer for all the costs of vaccinations, chipping, flea treatments, puppy food (never mind care of the dam), if they will get precisely £0 for each puppy?

Do you know what proportion of the fines already imposed are paid?

A lot of dogs are kept by people who shouldn't because they can't afford it. They won't pay the fines.

A lot of dogs are kept by people who shouldn't because they can't afford it. They won't pay the fines

They won't be able to afford the license so won't own a dog...

As for the RSPCA: they prosecute people who live from one benefit payment to the next and then ask for costs on a scale which would not be out of place in a civil action in the High Court over a claim for a squillion pounds. I don't like to think how much of what people give them goes to m'learned friends, who are not the animals most donors have in mind when they part with their cash.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine MN is rammed with people who would not do anything which required a licence if they could not afford the licence - RL is not like that.

Neutering a medium or large breed dog before he is fully grown and his growth plates have fused can cause a lot of health problems.

Personally, I would have been happy to pay a dog licence fee or £50 or £100 when I lived in the UK for my appropriately neutered, chipped and insured dogs if the rest of the already in place dog legislation had ever been enforced. While there isn’t the money or the will to enforce the current legislation, I can’t see much point in more of it.

How on earth would you police that Op?

People will just buy and sell quietly. It will never ever stop it happening.

They won't be able to afford the license so won't own a dog.

Licenses are compulsory here in NI. They are cheap too (£12.50) yet there are thousands of unlicensed dogs all over the place. Loads of people dont bother and it isnt policed.

Central database linked with microchip. Vets/police/RSPCA all have scanners and access to database. Dog owner has no license, dog confiscated. No license breeder, owner and breeder investigated. No microchip, dog confiscated and microchipped.

Licenses are compulsory here in NI. They are cheap too (£12.50)

Need to be more expensive £100+ p/a?(exemptions for assistance dogs). Yearly renewal of license requires vet check and paperwork check. Bit like owning a car, yes there are uninsured drivers, and drivers on the road with no MOT, but they are in a pretty small minority.

There is no way to enforce licensing though. Given there is no actual way to prevent puppy farming it seems or to prevent someone mating their dog with next door's in order to create the next desirable cross breed, once the litters are born there's. No way to keep up with them, and no way to prevent someone buying one without a licence. Similarly it's not going to be possible to enforce micro chipping either.

Responsible dog owners buy them from reputable breeders or from rescue where they are already chipped. Anyone prepared to go to a puppy farm is probably equally prepared not to buy a licence or have the dog chipped.

And as controversial as this may seem, perhaps it's. Time some of the no-kill rescues revised their policies. If a dog is so traumatised and psychologically damaged that it can never be rehomed then it is not living a decent life by being in kennels for the rest of its miserable existence. I'm not talking about dogs living in foster homes, essentially those dogs have been rehomed it's just called fostering with a hope of rehabilitation. But I'm talking about some of the miserable dogs paraded on the dogs trust etc adverts with captions that "you could sponsor a dog like this, because it is so psychologically damaged that it will never find another home." And meanwhile these charities send chuggers door to door paying them upwards of £9 an hour to get money from the public to keep these dogs in kennels for the rest of their days. And in the meantime there is no space in the rescues for dogs which are suitable for te homing and many decent potential dog owners are turned away because they are not suitable for the dogs on offer (the ones the rescues fail to put out of their misery), and the potential rescuers go out and buy a puppy instead because the rescue seems to have such draconian rehome get policies that most people will never be considered suitable to rehome a dog, and most of the dogs there aren't. Suitable to be rehomed anyway.

So yes, if a dog is so traumatised by its previous experiences then do the poor thing a favour and put it out of its misery rather than using it to promote an altruistic but unworkable agenda.

Agreed that male dogs should be neutered later, but the recommendation still is to neuter bitches after their first season.

Need to be more expensive £100+ p/a?(exemptions for assistance dogs). Yearly renewal of license requires vet check and paperwork check. Bit like owning a car, yes there are uninsured drivers, and drivers on the road with no MOT, but they are in a pretty small minority.

Yes i totally agree with this and have said the same on previous threads. But it requires being properly policed. How many dogs do you see out on walks every day that may or may not be licensed (here in NI anyway) and nobody checks. The only time it would be checked is if your dog gets loose and is picked up by the council dog warden. You have to purchase a license before they will release the dog back to you. But otherwise there is absolutely no-one checking. Even when my dad's dog died a license renewal was sent and he called in to let them know his dog was dead. They asked for no proof. They just accepted this and stopped sending renewals.

Wannabe uses voice recognition software hence the prophet but it made me laugh too wannabe :o

i dont know what the answer is tbh but something needs to be done :( i am a bit boggled by the new trend for ££££ mongrels which leads me to believe ppl are a bit daft

Well, on other threads I see Honeydragon's dog has just coughed up Jesus, so maybe the prophets are also involved...

Owl. actually it's voiceover on an iPhone and I am typing on a Bluetooth keyboard but auto correct has gone a bit bonkers of late and one word's pronunciation is the same as another it would seem, so never even thought to check. .

If a license was £100 there would surely be more money to back random checking by a dog warden.
It should be linked to the microchip so as easy to check as police randomly checking number plates for info on individual cars.
This is all a very interesting discussion, but I can't see any government backing any of this, as they won't be interested.
Wannabe I agree with you about no-kill rescues. If a dog can't even be walked without an experienced handler it is very unlikely to be successfully rehomed, and permanent kennel life must be psychologically damaging in itself.

I agree with annual licences for dogs and, as Sashh said, think the fees for an unneutered dog should be high.

I would like to see the financial difference being big enough to really discourage indiscriminate breeding. Something like £20 or £30 annually to licence a neutered dog or a dog under (say) 8 months old, and £300 to licence an unneutered dog aged 8 months or over.

Compulsory microchipping will open up a huge amount of safeguarding possibilities.

For example, it will then be feasible to legislate that puppies must be microchipped before being sold/given into their new home and that the microchip log also records the parent's (dog & bitch) chip numbers/owner's addresses/etc.

As has been suggested, it will also be possible to include either neutered or entire status on the chip log, which brings us back to the potential for huge annual licences for entire animals.

Presumably if a lost dog is recovered by the authorities but found to be unchipped, the owner will be able to reclaim it if they can prove ownership and pay the (hopefully huge) penalties for keeping an unchipped dog.

However, I think that should be taken a step further, in that if a dog is found to be both unchipped and unneutered, it should not be returned to the original owner, but be available for re-homing after chipping/neutering.

There is the potential for so much good to be done, to protect our canine friends, on the back of microchipping legislation. My concern is that it either won't be followed through in any particularly effective way or, as has often been the case since passporting and microchipping horses, authorities won't have 'the teeth' to effectively enforce.

That's it there to a PP people's attitudes who buy those dogs/pups need to change.

It's the I want it and want it now type who won't go on a waiting list or look into a breeds lines.

The I'm not paying ££££ when I can pick one up for £160 from joe at the pub who haven't even bothered to vaccinate and the pups are still under 8weeks old.

It's also the people who think they are being kind and buying the pup because well the breeder is terrible and I want to give it a good life.

If people stopped buying from those who put no thought or care into it those pups would never exist or at the very least be handed over to rescues as the owner wouldn't get anything from it.

You won't change say a drug user letting his bitch breed and breed because hey even if he only gets £50 a pup it helps support his habit from breeding from making it illegal but if people stopped giving him that £50 he wouldn't want those pups making a mess everywhere.

I remember when mongrels where given away or £50 at most where as now certain types command more than pedigree dogs. Sure if you want a mongrel buy one but still make sure both parents have been health tested for each breeds type of health issues and that's more than a simple "vet says she healthy".

I don't think making licenses expensive so the poor cannot afford a dog will do anything. The guy round the corner from us is loaded. Has a big massive house and six un neutered badly trained dogs that are a nightmare.

I am on a low working income with one neutered, chipped, inoculated dog with pet insurance in place.

Actually I am wish a dishbesteatencold.
Do not punish those on lower incomes who have trained, neutered, vaccinated, chipped. Punish the ones who haven't regardless of income.