Help stop puppy farming and cruel cat & dog breeding practices

If you want to stop puppy farming and cruel cat and dog breeding practices, can you send an email today?

In October 2021, Animal Justice Party MP Emma Hurst introduced a Bill to the NSW Legislative Council to regulate companion animal breeding and effectively stop “puppy farms”. That Bill was referred to a Select Committee on 24 November.

In November, the NSW Department of Primary Industries released a Consultation Paper “Licensing and regulation of cat and dog breeders” and is seeking public comment by 31 December 2021.

We don’t know about you, but we’ve faced a lot of additional pressure over the past several months due to Covid and there’s no way we can or could provide thorough comment in that timeframe.

NSW DPI states “The purpose of this consultation paper is to seek feedback on:
• Which breeders should require a licence
• Whether any additional dog or cat breeders should be exempt from the Breeding Code.”

The “Breeding Code” is the NSW Animal Welfare Code of Practice: Breeding Dogs and Cats.

In our opinion, the Breeding Code falls short of the standards that ought to be in place. Improvements proposed in 2017 didn’t proceed, and a limited consultation on amendments in July this year focused on a few issues that didn’t seek to improve animal welfare.

Establishing a new licensing scheme for ‘some’ breeders; leaving ‘some’ breeders subject only to the Code; and leaving ‘some’ breeders out of any breeder-specific regulation is a significant undertaking. It is not one that the community can realistically contribute to at the end of an exceptionally difficult year in the lead up to Christmas. We don’t know what’s proposed in the NSW animal welfare law reforms more broadly, making it even more difficult to comment.

You can read our submission here

If you agree that animals deserve better standards of care and that there is no place in our society for cruel puppy farms, then we encourage you to email
animalwelfare.submissions@dpi.nsw.gov.au before 31 December 2021 saying that more time and information is needed to develop a proper framework to protect the health, safety, welfare and wellbeing of breeding cats and dogs.