BBC News
By Dafydd Evans
media captionDog day care licensing laws endangering animal welfare
The rules around pet day care are almost six decades old and need updating, the RSPCA has said.
Samantha Gaines, from the charity, said pet boarding standards are not clearly linked to animal welfare standards.
It comes as a business owner claimed the laws are endangering public safety and animal welfare.
The Welsh Government said it recognised the need to review the licensing of activities involving the boarding of animals.
However it said this needed to be done with a measured approach, and its recent focus had been to introduce new powers relating to the third-party sale of kittens and puppies.
Lancashire animal shelter concerned about lockdown puppies (Photo: Pixabay/Bleakholt Animal Shelter logo) Now we are all spending time more at home, welcoming a new dog into the home seems like a great thing to do during the pandemic. Between March and the end of December last year, the RSPCA’s Find a Pet section of the website had 39,835,657 views compared to 23,681,542 in the same period the previous year- This is a rise of 68%. The number of page views on the RSPCA’s ‘rehoming a dog’ section surged 87 per cent from 540,524 to 1,013,795 over the same period. However, animal welfare experts are concerned about these high figures, worried that it will lead to a surge in abandoned dogs once life returns to normality.
Pumpkin and Walt (Photo: RSPCA) Pumpkin is a two-year-old female and Walt is a one-year-old male. They are currently carrying a virus after being kept in an overcrowded multi-cat household. As a result, they will need a blood test in a couple of months to check that it is clearing. They are best suited to a household with no children and it would be ideal if they were the only cats in the house. Before adoption, they would need to be fostered and kept as house cats until the virus is cleared. Do you have what it takes to take care of Pumpkin and Walt?