Page 5960 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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or understanding the animal’s needs or costs. In cases where puppies or kittens are not sold quickly enough, pet stores tend to use discounting or other marketing measures in order to ensure sales, which is a practice that is likely to encourage impulse buying.
Animal welfare laws are not adequate to protect cats and dogs and other pets from being treated as commodities, as happens in pet stores. Pet stores are part of a profit-making industry focused on creating a demand for animals and benefiting from the impulse buying of young animals.
One area of particular concern is that there is nothing to prevent pet shops from acquiring their stocks from intensive puppy-breeding facilities. These are usually called puppy farms but in fact they are areas where dogs are bred in horrible conditions solely for the purpose of sale and with little or no consideration given to their welfare. They are basically factory farms for dogs. It is yet another sad situation where animals’ welfare is compromised for profit.
Pet stores have also been exposed for keeping and selling animals in poor conditions. An undercover RSPCA investigation into a pet store in Sydney this year documented frequent breaches of animal welfare codes of practice in a range of areas including welfare, selling, sourcing—that is, where the animals were bred—hygiene, neglect and nutrition. Some of the footage from this investigation was aired on a television news program recently.
The exposure draft of the bill which I table proposes a number of initiatives to deal with these problems and I will outline them briefly. I encourage all members to look at the exposure draft and the accompanying material.
Firstly, the bill proposes introducing mandatory licences for cat and dog breeders to ensure that they meet proper standards of animal welfare and to stamp out unethical breeding operations. This will be accompanied by mandatory conditions which breeders must meet that will maximise animal welfare. It also proposes a code of ethical breeding with which breeders must comply.
Secondly, the bill proposes banning the sale of cats and dogs from stores and markets, with limited exceptions for animals being sold on behalf of animal welfare organisations and shelters. As I have said, there is no reason why someone needs to buy a cat or a dog from a store or market when there are numerous welfare issues which result from the continuing commercialisation of animals through stores, and where there is, fortunately or unfortunately, an ongoing and continuing supply of cats and dogs from the RSPCA and other similar organisations.
The bill also introduces additional requirements on the selling of animals, including the mandatory provision of care information to all buyers, the banning of the display of animals in store windows and restricting the sale of animals to children. The bill restricts the advertising of animals for sale except by approved sellers. There are exceptions, however, for people who are rescuing and rehoming animals or are simply trying to sell their home pets because they are, for example, moving home.
Due to the requirement to gain approval from the registrar to advertise multiple sales of cats and dogs, this regime is expected to prevent unregulated backyard breeders from advertising animals for sale. The registrar will be able to monitor advertising by
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