It’s officially been 10 years today since we launched our petition to make Kijiji stop facilitating commercial sales of animals on its website! 

Over the next few updates, I’m going to lay out the strategy I’ve developed in that time for how we can finally get to victory. 

Even though we haven’t yet reached our ultimate goal, we’ve made huge strides along the way and stopped a lot of potential animal abuse! Here are the highlights of that 10-year journey and what they’ve taught me about how to keep up the fight:

1. Petition signers are the ones who make everything possible. Alone, I wouldn’t have been able to make much of the progress listed below, but there are 460 thousand of us working towards the same goal! Together, we made sure people in power are listening.
   
   
2. Building signatures also opens doors to all kinds of endorsements and media coverage. As the petition grew, I was able to have more conversations with animal welfare groups, more than 30 of whom then publicly endorsed our petition.
   
   
3. Speaking of telling truth to power: we’ve received coverage in national media outlets highlighting the problems we want to solve and how Kijiji can help solve them. That coverage was crucial to spread awareness and pressured decision makers to act.
   
   
4. Sometimes you find support in unexpected places. Over the years, our campaign has been endorsed by some of the largest banks, websites, and telecommunications providers in the country. And they put their money where their mouth is — pulling their ads from Kijiji until greater action is taken to protect our pets.
   
   
5. Your petition might even succeed with other companies! In 2015, Used.ca decided they were no longer comfortable facilitating any level of animal abuse on their site. They even said that it was in large part because of our petition, despite not being the official target!
   
   
6. No matter how frustrating it can be to feel like you’re not being listened to, it’s better to partner with the people you want to change. I’m proud to have kept open communication with Kijiji — that communication has led to improvements like the credit card verification requirements they have invested in since we started our campaign!
   
   
7. Official responses from your decision maker help show that they are engaged and can guide you in choosing the path forward.
   
   
8. Always keep learning about your petition topic. The countless hours of research I’ve done to help push for ending pet sales on Kijiji have added countless points in our favor — including uncovering even more cases of Kijiji users who have been cheated by unscrupulous animal breeders. Without that, we wouldn’t know if ending pet sales was necessary or if Kijiji’s incremental changes have solved the problem (and they haven’t)!
   
   
9. It’s also important to be flexible in your strategy and know what angle to take to have the best chance of success. In our next few updates, we’ll look at whether government permits could be the solution to regulating this market that we’ve been looking for!
   
   
10. And most importantly, never give up! I’ve been at this for a decade, but every minute of it has been worth it for the animals we’ve saved from abuse by making it harder for them to be sold without accountability. Thank you for joining me on that journey!

Keep an eye out for Part 1: What are responsible breeders?