Ending the Trade in Pets
A UK-based campaign group is raising awareness of animal exploitation in the pet industry. Advocating for an ‘adopt, don’t shop’ policy, they took to the streets of New Malden in Surrey to picket the UK’s largest pet retailer, Pets at Home. Their campaign has ignited a public conversation on the ethical and moral flaws in pet retailing, but perhaps their biggest contribution will be motivating us to rethink the very essence of our relationships with the animals that share our lives.
Picketing Pets at Home
Last weekend a dozen campaigners gathered outside Pets at Home in New Malden. Armed with placards, their message was simple – it’s time to end the trade in pets.
The group from Rescue Not Retail targeted the UK’s largest pet chain, which produces sales of £1.5 billion from its retail, grooming, and veterinary operations. What the retailer doesn’t break out in its trading reports is how many live animals (including aquatic vertebrates, or fish) it sells through its nationwide outlets. That opaqueness appears deliberate, as some are starting to question the moral and ethical legitimacy of selling pets.
“I noticed that no one’s talking about the pet retailing industry, and it seemed like an unrepresented issue within the vegan and animal rights spaces. In December 2024, we mobilised a campaign targeting the pet trade” said Illy, from Rescue Not Retail.
The Pet Market
The number of pets is difficult to size with any exact precision, but credible estimates for 2024 suggest the UK aquatic pet population was around 100 million, while the non-aquatic population was approximately 36 million, with 60% of households owning at least one pet. Dogs constitute almost half of the number of non-aquatic pets (13.5 million), followed by cats (12.5 million), indoor birds (1.5 million), rabbits (1 million), tortoises and turtles (700,000), horses and ponies (700,000), and hamsters (600,000). While some of these pets will have been homed via shelters and rescue centres, a large proportion will have been bred and sold as chattel.
“Not many people know about the reality of the pet trade. If you buy an animal, you are supporting an industry that treats them as commodities. Some animals sold as pets are taken from their homes in the wild and transported to dealers and shops in countries all over the world. Others are bred intensively in breeding mills. Before being sold, animals may be transported long distances with limited or no access to food and water. Snakes may be kept in cages that don’t allow them to stretch, fish are seen as nothing more than decorations, and hamsters are often marketed to children,” warns Rescue Not Retail.
Loose Legislation
The trading of pets is loosely regulated and poorly enforced. You need a licence to sell animals as pets but much of the language is subjective and ambiguous, considering it relates to the welfare of a living being. On the odd occasion when the legislation is specific, it is still a blunt instrument. In 2020, Love Island stars Molly Mae Hague and Tommy Fury very publicly mourned the loss of their newly acquired puppy, which died just days after arriving from Russia. The couple came under media scrutiny as it appeared they had bought the dog via a third party, which is prohibited under legislation commonly referred to as Lucy’s Law. (Lucy’s Law bans the sale of puppies and kittens by third-party sellers unless they are licensed breeders). Despite publicly acknowledging they had flouted Lucy’s Law, the couple weren’t prosecuted, which isn’t uncommon.
While all pets in the UK are in theory protected under the 2006 Animal Welfare Act, some remain more vulnerable than others.
“The fish get a really rough deal” says Illy.
For too long our understanding of fish was shamefully deficient. Somewhere in the bowels of time we were told fish had a three second memory, and this made them a lesser being and the butt of jokes. More worryingly, the three second label went unchallenged and soon myth became fact.
Despite having a small neocortex, the part of the brain where humans perform many of our cognitive functions, fish can complete numerous tasks including navigating based on remembered mental maps, assessing the strength and threat of other fish, and distinguishing between them. Fish can also attribute volume and size and have numeracy competency – they can perceive patterns and use tools (i.e. blackspot tusk fish use rocks to open cockle shells) and they are known to co-operate when seeking food. We know fish can perceive and respond to noxious stimuli (tissue damage) including shifts in mental states. In a ground breaking 2017 study by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, fish were found to be ‘sentient animals who form friendships, experience positive emotions and have individual personalities.’
I wonder if we got it so wrong for so long with regard to fish, what else are we mistaken about. I’m not alone. Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal is also preoccupied by this question, and has written a book titled Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? His conclusion: “We love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone. It is good to realize, though, that this is an outdated way of putting it.”
I have a couple of pre-owned copies of de Waal’s book, complete with scribbles in the margins and fluorescently highlighted sentences – not all made by me (some are deposits from previous owners). I sent one copy to Pets at Home. They should have received it by now. I hope they read it.
The next day I visited the fish wall at Pets at Home and stared into the tanks.
I recalled my conversation with Illy: “Most fish sold in UK pet shops are from overseas; they’re not bred in this country. And they will be shipped from overseas via standard postage, packed in cardboard boxes, and they’ll be in those boxes for weeks. They’re sedated while they’re in the bags, and if they’re not healthy a lot of them will die. Many don’t make the journey from fish farm to pet shop.”
My Unanswered Email
When sending de Waal’s book to Pets at Home, I also emailed them asking a few simple questions:
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- What animals (aquatic and non-aquatic) do you sell, and in what volumes?
- Do you have a specific team that buys these animals? If yes, could you provide some details on their professional qualifications?
- What are the minimum standards of care you provide to the animals you sell?
As of the time of writing, they haven’t replied.
I ask Illy if Pets at Home have engaged with Rescue Not Retail.
“We’ve tried speaking with Pets at Home. We sent them emails back in December when we first started the campaign, and we’ve reached out to them several times since then. We’ve not heard anything from them. On Sunday, at the New Malden store nobody even came out to speak to us,” said Illy.
The lack of response to my email – while disappointing – didn’t bother me, it comes with the terrain. But writing the email did feel awkward. There was something uncomfortable about referring to the buying and selling of a living being, about the ownership of a life – whether dog or cat, rabbit or hamster, guinea pig or fish. Rescue Not Retail have started a public discussion about the ethics of the pet trade, but I don’t believe it will stop there.
Leading advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have also critiqued the pet trade, concluding it ‘encourages the public to view animals as impulse purchases, no different from fashion accessories that are acquired on a whim and discarded when the novelty wears off, rather than seeing them as feeling beings who deserve love and respect.’
And like an air bubble floating to the surface, it revealed itself. The trade in pets is fast retailing, with plentiful supply that is loosely regulated and affordable. At Pets at Home, you can ‘acquire’ a fish for as little as £2, a hamster £11, a rabbit £60 and all with no proof of I.D or vetting. The framing of pet ownership taps into the human emotion of affection, in both its giving and receiving forms. While the ‘adopt don’t shop’ practice emancipates animals from being bred as chattel, we also need to unshackle them from emotional servitude, so they experience the respect PETA spoke of.
Delve into the shadows of pet ‘ownership’ and there is an uncomfortable truth. Frequently we are practising a form of emotional exploitation, sealing off what is innate and natural to animals in the process, so we can orchestrate a ritual of pet-directed affection. The psychological setup is principled on server and served.
“Too often, in us seeking our emotional fulfilment we enact a benign form of manipulation. Pets are here to serve our emotional needs and in doing that we take them away from their family, from their natural environment and deny them their real nature. These are not relationships based on symmetry” said bioethicist and researcher Jessica Pierce.
Pierce’s assessment isn’t unique. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan suggests keeping a pet is, at its crux, an act of domination, or hierarchy, but it slips under the radar, a pathology of control that goes unchecked, because our behaviour is disguised as affection.
Rescue Not Retail is an abolitionist movement challenging the buying and selling of pets. If successful it will create an alternative model that better supports the existing pet population in shelters and refuges, as well as ending the breeding of animals for retail. But what we also need is a philosophical rupture that examines the very nature of our relationships with our animal pets.
(Note: Increasingly pets are referred to as companion animals. As we have drawn quotes from multiple sources, we have used the term pets to maintain consistency and to avoid confusion).
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© 2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer Insta: @theafghanwriter
