Pet shops are outdated and immoral - it’s time to ban animal sales

18 April 2025, 14:13

This week, Pets at Home made headlines after announcing it would be pausing the sale of rabbits over the Easter weekend.

The pet chain - the largest and most recognisable in the UK - said it took the decision to “to discourage any impulsive choices.” Rabbit abandonment tends to peak after the Easter period, as people often buy them spontaneously for children’s gifts.

Pets at Home is right to pause rabbit sales. It’s also right to warn against impulse purchasing of animals. But stopping these sales for four days isn’t quite the ethical decision it may seem. Pets at Home - and all other pet stores - need to go much, much, further, and stop the sale of all live animals for good.

The pet trade tends to be viewed through rose-tinted glasses in the UK. Many of us have happy childhood memories of pressing our noses up against the glass tanks and coaxing our parents into buying us a hamster, rabbit, or guinea pig.

But behind the cute fluffy animals and brightly coloured cages is a huge, powerful, and rapidly growing industry that treats sentient beings as commodities. The global pet industry is worth more than $320 billion dollars, and it’s been forecast to grow to $500 billion by 2030. In the UK specifically, it’s valued at £8.2 billion.

You can buy a wide range of animals from pet shops. Pets at Home sells rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, fish, and rats, plus reptiles and amphibians in a small number of shops. In other independent pet stores, you will be able to find exotic birds like budgies, macaws, and cockatiels. We don’t know where Pets at Home gets its animals as it hasn’t made this information public, but many pet shops acquire them from mass breeding facilities that are completely hidden from public view.

Millions of small animals are bred, bought, and sold for private homes in this country. The majority are forced to live out wholly unnatural - and likely extremely distressing - lives.

Hamsters are often marketed to kids in a similar way to how toys are, meaning these wild and complex animals tend to spend their lives desperately gnawing on their cage bars in the corner of a child’s bedroom. Pet snakes are the only vertebrate animals in England who aren’t legally required to be able to stretch when held captive. This is despite the fact that a number of studies have concluded that they need to stretch just like any other animal. Fish tend to be viewed as nothing more than decorations, but research has shown these animals are far more intelligent than humans give them credit for, and they categorically don’t have “three-second memories” as is commonly believed.

The UK is in a rescue crisis, which has been exacerbated by the fallout of Covid and the rising cost of living. While media reports of this crisis tend to focus on dogs and cats, 184,000 other animals are abandoned in rescues every year. When there are so many animals crying out to be adopted, how can anyone justify paying for even more to be bred by visiting a pet shop? Adopting, not shopping, is the only ethical way to acquire an animal.

The UK outlawed pet shop sales of puppies and kittens in 2020 with a new piece of legislation called Lucy’s Law. This move rightfully had huge support from the public, but sales of smaller animals unfortunately haven't been met with the same level of controversy. Dogs and cats are the same as hamsters and rabbits in all ways that matter - and it’s time they’re offered the same rights and dignity.

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Polly Foreman is the editor of Plant Based News and a journalist specialising in veganism, animal rights, and the environment. She is also the co-founder of Rescue Not Retail, a campaign group raising awareness of animal exploitation in the pet industry.

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