NEWS AND OPINION: Puppy famers aka puppy mills (and also kitten mills) use Pets4Homes, a major online presence for the adoption of cats and dogs to sell their illegally created companion animals. They have done so for years. They are difficult to stop as they use a range of anti-detection methods such as multiple accounts under different identities, stealing images from bona fide licensed breeders and forged documents.
Every day 250,000 users visit Pets4Homes. There are 4,000 new adverts per day and 60,000 images. 50,000 messages are sent.
In the UK, puppy and kitten mills are illegal operations and banned under Lucy’s Law. Only licensed, registered breeders can operate. So, these puppy farm ads represent illegal operations and they deceive buyers who are sadly often more concerned about cuteness and the appearance of the puppies and kittens than their origin and health.
In the UK, for puppy and kitten adopters, appearance nearly always trumps health. I hope and believe this is changing thanks to articles like this and other articles I have written and articles on other websites.
In order to uphold Lucy’s Law and protect buyers, Pets4Homes has wisely turned to the power and speed of artificial intelligence (AI) to rapidly scan adverts, images, vaccination records and financial activities to detect puppy farm sellers.
So far, they have blocked and banned 27,000 users thanks to AI.
This is a great use of AI, which can be used beneficially or to our detriment. Pets4Homes said that their operations had stopped one listing where images were flagged for not containing a photo of the puppies together with mother and where one image had previously been used for a different listing. They investigated further and discovered that the listing had been uploaded by a family member of a known puppy farm in Doncaster, in the north of England. The same seller had further attempted to evade detection by using 11 different family member passports to create 11 different accounts for other listings, according to a report by The Times newspaper, for which I thank them.
Pets4Homes used AI to fingerprint devices and link IP addresses and postcodes. They found the accounts were linked and then banned them from Pets4Homes before the seller managed to contract with the buyer.
The Kennel Club, in a survey during 2023, found that 25% of dog owners did not research before buying. As mentioned, they often prioritised the appearance of the animal over ethical or non-ethical breeding. Also, the same research found that twice as many people are acquired puppies through social media compared to 5 years ago. A third of the puppies came directly from puppy farms. The problem highlighted indicates the great difficulty in enforcing Lucy’s Law.
There are many areas of domestic dog and cat ownership which need to be tightened up but successive governments, in my view, have baulked from doing this because of the difficulties of enforcement. And if you can’t enforce a law, it’s almost worthless if the population do not wish to act responsibly and ethically. And in the UK, there is a cultural shift towards a slow degeneration of ethical behaviour as evidenced by rampant shoplifting across the country, greatly increased from years gone by.
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