The law is already on your side

The photos are lovely, the website has a rosette on it, and the woman on the phone can tell you which pup snores. None of that is evidence — it is the cheapest part of a puppy farm to fake, and the part you meet first. What is evidence is where you are allowed to stand.

Lucy’s Law — named after a spaniel rescued from a puppy farm — made it illegal to sell puppies or kittens under six months old through pet shops or dealers. It has been in force in England since 6 April 2020 and in Wales since 10 September 2021. Stripped of the legal wording, it hands you two things to insist on:

• Buy directly from the breeder. A third-party seller cannot legally sell you a young puppy, however polished the website or plausible the middleman.
• Meet the puppy where it was born, with its mum genuinely there among the litter — not fetched in from another room, not “just at the vet’s”.

Sellers who break it risk an unlimited fine or up to six months in prison. So the request that feels rude to make — “can I come to you, and see mum with the puppies?” — is precisely the one the law was written so you could make.

In England, anyone breeding puppies as a business must be licensed by their council. The council inspects them and awards a 1–5 star welfare rating, and a licence runs one to three years. There is no national register — each council publishes its own, so the check has to be made against whichever council the breeder names. So it is one question, and then one lookup:

• “What’s your licence number, and which council issued it?” A licensed breeder answers without pausing. It is on their paperwork and usually on the advert.
• Then go and look it up on that council’s public register. Two minutes online — and the only check here that doesn’t depend on somebody being honest with you.

More stars mean higher welfare standards and a stronger track record. And “I don’t need a licence”, from someone selling several litters a year, is itself a red flag rather than a shortcut.

A good breeder has nothing to hide — and will quiz you right back. Six things to look for, and the first one outweighs the other five put together.

Dogoos carries an adopt-and-buy-safely section in the app, and it earns nothing whatsoever from any dog finding any home. It lists the four national rescue charities with their registered numbers printed on the card — RSPCA 219099, Dogs Trust 1167663, Battersea 206394, Blue Cross 224392 — so you can check all four on the Charity Commission register without taking our word for anything. Past those it hands you to ADCH’s own postcode search. England licenses no rescue at all — anyone can open one tomorrow. Scotland licenses rehoming establishments and Wales runs a voluntary code, so accreditation is the nearest thing to a signal that holds wherever you happen to be looking.

The folder the breeder handed over goes in a drawer, and three weeks later somebody asks when the worming was done and whether the loose stool started before or after you switched food. The Health Hub keeps all of it as you live it — weight, medications, vaccinations and symptom notes, with reminders that ring on the phone rather than sitting in a list — and builds a vet visit summary on the device itself: 90 days of your notes and 30 days of mood, in one handover. It records what you observe; it never diagnoses. And when the breed on the paperwork and the dog on your sofa start drifting apart, the AI breed check reads one photo and labels what comes back an estimate, on the screen it appears on. It is on Tracker and above, and the checks come from a lifetime pool rather than a monthly one — six of them on Tracker, and nothing resets them.