Would you be surprised if I told you that Ebay sells puppys? Let me being. It start when I met someone good, I got a feeling. I met Kirsten, a vet in a rural patch just outside Frankfurt, Germany.
She fed me breakfast at her woodland cottage, introduced me to her four rescue dogs, I met her toothless thirty year old stallion, her husband and a dead puppy that she keeps in the freezer.
The puppy farming trade
The last patient to see Kirsten during her Saturday afternoon clinic is a Maltese puppy, his owner wants to know if he’s been trafficked and if he’ll survive to see his 18th week, such is the fate of many farmed puppies.
Kirsten tries to work out if this Maltese has been dred by puppy dealers
Puppy farming is poorly regulated
Puppy farming is big lucrative business, poorly regulated and is an attractive proposition for people willing to risk imprisonment in order to mass produce popular and often inbred designer breeds that fetch a high but competitive price compared to what you might pay for a sought after breed.
The market place is online – of course – and eBay Inc. has come under fire from animal welfare groups for enabling untraceable transactions between dealers and pet owners.
Four Paws’ solution
What’s needed, according to Four Paws, is a mandatory seller identity verification system implemented across all classifieds sites, and they want eBay Inc. to lead the way and I can see why, because eBay Inc. own Gumtree, Craigslist and similar classified listing sites across the globe – I did not know that.
This is the investigation film we made that can tell you rest of the story.
