Thank you to everyone of you who signed, commented, shared and helped us reach 100k signatures! What an amazing result!
Also thank you to those who re-tweeted my message from yesterday.
This afternoon I received a response from Mark Singleton, Director of Pets4Homes. I appreciate that he is looking into the issue and I will send a reply as soon as I can. In the meantime I have pasted his email below, if you have any thoughts on this please leave a comment. I do read them all and take into account.
Thanks again for speaking up and for being the voice of all the animals exploited for profit at Christmas.
All pets advertised 'ready now' are at risk of being purchased as a Christmas gift only to become unwanted in the New Year. It is not fair that rescue centres are left to pick up the pieces!
Isabelle Rineau
@babbacampaign
www.facebook.com/BabbaCampaign
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Hi Isabelle, thanks for your email and sending of your petition. We do
agree with your concerns that pets should not be sold as gifts for people
at christmas, easter and other holidays and as you have mentioned it is
against our terms and conditions.
I understand that some of these types of adverts have got past our filters
and approval process before christmas and when you first alerted us to
them we have taken this seriously and cracked down on these types of
adverts by disabling them. What you have seen is only a small proportion
of the actual adverts that we have managed to stop before they went live
on the site.
We are working hard in the background to not approve these types of
adverts and to email the advertisers in an attempt to educate them.
I have been thinking about this recently and we have an old article below
regarding why you should never give pets as presents at christmas.
https://www.pets4homes.co.uk/pet-advice/why-you-should-never-give-pets-as-presents.html
I am looking to have this article updated by one of our writers soon, and
if you have any suggestions for the article, please let us know and we can
update it to reflect your ideas. I am also going to look at adding a
warning message to all adverts around christmas and easter, which warns
people that pets should not be given as gifts and link through to the
article above, and possibly link through to our pet adoption sections.
Regarding suspending all adverts around christmas on one online
platform/website, would just mean that all adverts would be placed on one
of the other 6 or 7 very popular classified platforms that allow adverts
for pets (i.e. freeads, preloved, shpock, Gumtree, FridayAds, Facebook
etc..). Some of which do not adhere to PAAG minimum standards or may not
have the same ethics as ourselves. We believe educating our visitors by
providing good and relevant content regarding issues around this may help
the situation. Our website is also successfully used by many people to
help rehome their older pets that they can no longer care for to other
loving homes, without which, they may end up being taken to rescue
centers.
Kind Regards
Mark Singleton
Pets4Homes
https://www.pets4homes.co.uk
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