Front lined and Panacur’d

Selling kittens and cats on Gumtree needs to stop. Have you seen the phrase “front lined and Panacur’d” before? Well, I hadn’t until today when I visited Gumtree, a British website which is a bit like Craigslist in the USA.

Well, in case you didn’t guess, “front lined and Panacur’d” refers to applying the flea treatment drops called “Frontline” to the a cat and also treating a cat infected with roundworms and tapeworms with the product called “Panacur”.  The phrase is sometimes used by hobby breeders.

Getting that little introduction out of the way, I can proceed onto the main reason for this post which is that Gumtree allows the advertising of kittens and cats for sale on its large site; it shouldn’t. In fact, there is a wide range of animals advertised on the site.

It makes me sad to see these kittens. If you search for “kittens” on Gumtree, most of the adverts would appear to be placed by people who have simply allowed their cats to breed. They have neither spayed their female nor neutered their male cat and have just let them get on with it. You wonder if this is deliberate to make a few quid on the side? Are these people on benefits living in council houses on sink estates? Or perhaps, on occasion, they are hobby breeders, as I said, doing this sort of irresponsible thing on an ongoing basis.

There seems to be quite a lot of it in the UK, certainly in London. Cardi, the sweet little female who died recently was a pet shop cat. She was not a robust cat.

The big personal retailing sites such as eBay and Craigslist have banned the sale of animals as it leads to abuses. Although I did see some kittens advertised on Craigslist. I think they are banned though. The general feeling is that it is unethical to sell animals in personal adverts on these sites.

The sort of thing that happens is that unpleasant people who deal in cats for animal testing trawl through the ads and collect unwanted cats. These are dealers in animal abuse. Also you’ll get puppy mill type backstreet breeders selling their “products” on Gumtree. Gumtree has a poor reputation as a vehicle for landlord scammers taking deposits and doing runners, by the way.

There is the obvious and starkly unethical aspect of selling kittens on the internet through a very commercial website when there are many beautiful cats and kittens at rescue centers needing a home. We don’t need that contrast to conclude that it is immoral to sell cats as a product on the internet in personal adverts.

There is a lack of awareness amongst a segment of British society. They are not thinking. They are just doing what they want to do while disregarding the finer points of decent behavior.

What is interesting is that Gumtree was bought by Ebay through one of their businesses, Kijiji, in 2005. So, Gumtree is a subsidiary of eBay and yet eBay, we are told, do not allow people to advertise cats and animal for sale on their website.

It seems that the bosses at eBay, consider Gumtree a seedy subsidiary to their more ethical major site. Or perhaps the managing director of Gumtree has the final say. Suchi Mukherjee, an Indian lady, was the Managing Director from January 2009 to August 2011. She resigned from Gumtree and started a retail website called Limeroad.com. I don’t know who the current MD of Gumtree is.

Well, there it is. eBay appear to be treating the UK as a downbeat, Anglo Saxon, do as you please, commercial center and sod the ethics. The UK does have a reputation for unregulated commerce. That is because nothing in the public sector works. There is no one doing the regulating.

Visitors might like to go to the Causes site and sign the petition to top this happening. Please search for this: Gumtree – Stop Allowing Pets for Sale. I can’t link to it because the link will disappear eventually.