AAS BACK YARD BREEDER DATA BASE TEAM
If you are willing to consistently send us ads from your local papers, you can become a tracker..email us at bybtracker@animaladvocates.com
(you must send us your full name, address, phone number, and you must tell us the names of the newspapers you will be tracking)

We have trackers for these papers: Abbotsford Times, Burnaby Now, Chilliwack Times, Coquitlam Now, Delta Optimist, Langley Advance, Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows Times, New West Record,
North Shore News, Richmond News, Surrey Now, Vancouver Courier, Maple Ridge News, Buy and Sell, Chilliwack Progress, Victoria Times Colonist, Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Prince George, Trail, Delta News, Ladner Leader. We want to cover the whole province so sign up now!

Read the AAS proposal to control breeding, click here
Read our puppymill investigations, click here

This database has been needed for twenty years. And it is more than just tracking back yard breeders, but dog resellers and puppymills too. Many of the resellers in this data base sell sick pups from vile puppymills. Many others breed large mixed-breed pups for the yard/guard dog market that end up spending their miserable, lonely lives on chains or in pens. This is the uncontrolled source of the pups that end up being killed at SPCAs and pounds when the fun of owning a pup is over and the responsibility begins.
The solution to the problem of so many dogs that need to be impounded, "rescued" and destroyed because no one wants them, is to control the source - not to keep killing the victims.

Breeding and selling and reselling of thousands of pups a year is a "cottage industry" in BC. It is often a supplement to welfare and it is not unusual to find it combined with drug dealing and the breeding and selling of other species of animals. Income is seldom ever reported. GST is not collected.

Why has the SPCA never attempted to control this - the source of the dogs that its "shelters" are full of and the result of which means it has to kill hundreds, perhaps thousands of dogs a year?

The SPCA is supposed to be advocating for laws to protect animals from cruelty, including laws to control breeding which is a source of great cruelty. The provincial government expects the SPCA to bring matters of necessary legislation to its notice; in fact, the BC SPCA is the only body in BC that has this duty and privilege and is the only body acknowledged by the government to have any credibility or authority.

New puppy mill legislation in the U.S. resulted from several bodies in the U.S. with the same authority as has the BC SPCA, promoting and lobbying for the new laws - just what the BC SPCA has not done.

From Crystal Kerr, rescuer of the victims of uncontrolled breeding (read about Crystal, click here)
"Breeding is not a private affair. We all become involved at some point, to mop up the overflow of unwanted, abandoned, abused, cross-breeds and yes - purebreds. Think of the outlets a great number of these animals end up in - pet stores, shelters, country roads, chained up in backyards to become a community problem. It looks like legislative action will not take place on this issue without animal welfare action like this data base. Government will never bother to do anything at all about this issue if animal welfare groups don't make it an issue, This is the very last thing the government wants to deal with, and there's no way on god's green earth it would be dealt with if animal welfare societies didn't spearhead it, because so far, the BC SPCA has turned a blind eye."

Animal Advocates Society has been contacted about many puppy mills and multi-breed resellers in the Lower Mainland of BC. AAS learns of these puppy mills when it is contacted by purchasers of sick or genetically malformed pups; by potential puppy purchasers who have been horrified by what they have seen; and by neighbours of the puppy mills.

In almost every case the complainant has first asked the BC SPCA to “do something” and has been told by the SPCA that there is nothing the SPCA can do.

The existence of some of these puppy mills and the glaringly inhumane conditions have been known to the SPCA for many years, sometimes for many decades.

We believe that there are a hundred or more puppy mills in BC and we believe that the BC SPCA has been told of most, if not all of them.

The SPCA admits that it knows that one puppy mill (investigated by those who care enough to try, with no resources, to do something, click here) has existed since 1956.

The BC SPCA did take action against one notorious puppy miller, Marcie Ryan of Agassiz BC, but not until she had been in business for many years and not until Global TV did a story on her. So it seems that the BC SPCA can do something if there is enough publicity.

After fifty years of complaints about puppy mills, the BC SPCA still has no policy regarding them, nor to our knowledge has it ever asked for regulatory legislation. And yet they are the only authority that the province and municipal governments acknowledge. They have the power to make the changes.

This data base will be used in several ways:

to report breeders and sellers to their municipalities for running unlicensed businesses;

to report their businesses to Revenue Canada;

to convince municipal governments to regulate the breeders in their municipalities;

to give the evidence of the extent of uncontrolled breeding to the SPCA;

to give the evidence of the extent of uncontrolled breeding to the provincial government.

Watch this space for updates on the growth of the back yard breeders's data base