Pets4Homes joins the Animal Welfare Alliance

In honour of Animal Welfare Week, we’re proud to announce our latest partnership—the Animal Welfare Alliance. We believe that initiatives in which industry peers collaborate have the opportunity to make a real difference.

The alliance hopes to transform the online pet advertising sector, making animal welfare and buyer protection stronger than ever before—the aim is to eradicate illegal and fraudulent breeders by collectively blocking their access to major pet advertising sites, removing individual ads from all of the alliance websites, and sharing information about suspicious accounts with enforcement agencies to be investigated centrally.

This revolutionary new approach will limit illegal breeder’s access to potential victims, and make alliance websites safer for prospective buyers. Vitally, centralising reporting and investigation of suspicious user accounts, will give enforcement agencies more data and allow them to track, investigate and build cases against illegal breeders more effectively.

Efforts Pets4Homes is taking for animal welfare

At Pets4Homes, our number one priority is always animal welfare and pet safety. Since coming under new ownership, we have deepened our collaborations with welfare organisations including Animal Protection Services, as well as introduced safeguarding features such as enhanced ID verification, a dedicated 24 hour Trust & Safety team reviewing adverts, and a deposit scheme which only transfers payment once a pet buyer is satisfied. We are proud that our ‘rehoming checklist’, providing guidelines for buyers to ensure a safe and successful purchase, will become an industry standard.

However, as the demand for pets has soared during the pandemic, the reports of sellers with bad motivations have also increased. We must work together in order to truly combat those who seek to exploit the goodwill of the public. Therefore, together with our alliance partners, we’ve created an easy-to-follow checklist with tips on how to safely buy pets online and links to further information and resources.

If you are considering buying a pet online, we strongly urge you to read through the below checklist and make sure the pet you are buying checks all the boxes.