The industry behind pets

Animal love is good business

Behind our pets lies an entire industry. Not just for breeding, catching or sheltering animals, but also for supplies such as food, cages and toys. Companies use marketing to persuade more and more people to buy a cute animal.

A guinea pig in its cage. Its territory here is about 0.15 m² (30 x 50 cm). Normally it would be at least 200 m², over 1,250 times as large. Animals are bred to suit people's wishes.

Just as in factory farming, the pet trade has its own mass production and extreme breeding, with all the harmful consequences.

An angora rabbit. Only one of the many "models" rabbits come in today. People decide what they find beautiful and breed the animal to match. The animal's own interests hardly count.

Exotic animals

Some species, especially exotic ones, are taken from their natural habitats. Between 2004 and 2014 the European Union alone imported more than 20 million live reptiles. Of the imported chameleons, 84 percent had been caught in the wild, of the tortoises 66 percent.

Many animals do not survive the journey. Smugglers sometimes expect only two out of twenty birds to arrive alive. Those that survive the exhausting journey spend the rest of their lives in a cage or terrarium to entertain people.

A customs officer with seized exotic animals.

Many animals spend their entire lives in a very small space, for example birds, rabbits, guinea pigs and fish. This is not a natural situation for them. They can hardly express their natural needs, if at all.

The living space for a rabbit in this "spacious" hutch is just over 0.5 m² (52 x 107 cm), about nine sheets of A4 paper. Wild rabbits normally have a range of about 300 m², almost 600 times as large! The animal spends its entire life here. There is no room for natural behaviour such as digging burrows, contact with other rabbits or sexual behaviour.

When people get tired of their animals, some simply set them free. Turtles and rabbits released this way usually die, because they are not adapted to life in the wild. Animals raised by people depend on them and often do not know how or where to find food. If they are lucky, they end up in a shelter.

The animal shelter

Many animals end up in a shelter when people no longer want to or can care for them. Worldwide the problem is enormous. A global study in 20 countries estimated that there are about 362 million homeless cats and dogs. Some 16 million of them are in shelters: 12 million dogs and 4 million cats. The rest live on the streets.

Animal keeper in a cat shelter. These animals were often given up because people no longer had the time, the inclination or the possibility to care for them.

Animals that reach a shelter are lucky, because others are simply dumped, for example in a forest. In the shelter they live in a pen or cage, alone or together with other animals. Either way the space is too small to behave naturally. Cats are usually neutered, dogs often too. The animals have to wait until someone comes along who finds them cute, beautiful or pitiful enough to take them home. When a shelter is full, animals in many countries are put down to make room.