USDA Seeks to Limit Pet Store Exemption

[mewickham]

The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) regulates and inspects commercial sellers of animals whose places of business are not generally open to inspection by the public, or who sell "exotic" animals. Pet retailers have been specifically exempted from this (except those who sell exotics, such as monkeys, kinkajous, etc.) because the public has easy access to inspect them. But the USDA is proposing to change some rules in an effort to close the "Internet loophole." The proposed change could change the definition of what is a retailer, requiring retailers who also sell over the Internet to be USDA licensed.

While this regulatory change wouldn't affect most pet retailers, it would affect some. As a person who has held a USDA license to sell exotics in the past, I can verify that it's not a big deal to be inspected (at least, for us, because we kept things clean), but the recordkeeping IS a pain in the butt. In order to sell the occasional exotic, we had to start keeping extensive records on all the warm-blooded animals we sold, including hamsters, mice, birds, etc. Government paperwork!

Anyway, if you would like to read the proposal and comment on it, here is the information:

http://pijac.org/_documents/usda_proposed_rule_limiting_pet_store_exemption.pdf

[Herpchat]

Where do you stand with it?

[Jackielee]

Less government involvement and more freedom in the land of the free.

[mewickham]

My feeling is that I don't have a problem with the purpose of the new bill, but see an absolute need to tweak the wording, so that brick and mortar retailers who occasionally sell over the Internet, too-- something that's very likely in this day where everyone can have a website-- won't suddenly be moved out of the retailer classification and lose their exemption from the licensing requirement. (Sorry for the run-on sentence!)

[Herpchat]

Run-ons are fine.

I get the whole slippery slope thing however I see too much abuse.

Government has a way of once they are in they go overboard. That is my biggest fear.