How we vet breeders

How a breeder gets onto bebepet

We research each breeder directly, from their own website or a Kennel Club breed-club page. We never copy a listing from another classifieds site. What's shown on a breeder's page — breeds kept, litters per year, health testing policy, licence number — is what that breeder has published about themselves, written up in our own words rather than lifted as-is.

What the licence badge means

Every breeder's page carries one of four states, shown as its own badge rather than folded into a single "verified" or "not verified":

• Hobby breeder. Not required to hold a local authority licence at the scale they operate.
• Says licensed — not yet checked by us. The current state for every licensed breeder on the site. This is what the breeder's own site states, not something we've confirmed against the issuing authority yet.
• Licence checked. We've checked the licence number against the issuing authority's own record and it matched. We'll always name the authority and the number we checked.
• Licence details did not match. We checked, and what the breeder states didn't match the authority's record. We don't remove the breeder's page when this happens — we show the mismatch instead, so you can see it and decide what to do with it.

We found no licence is a different thing from a breeder is unlicensed, and we try to keep that distinction clear rather than collapse it into one badge.

The legal basis for licensing

In England, breeding three or more litters of puppies in any 12-month period requires a local authority licence under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) Regulations 2018, as does breeding and advertising puppies as a business regardless of litter count. We're voluntarily building to the standard set out by the Pet Advertising Advisory Group, the industry body backed by Defra that major UK pet classifieds sites commit to — without having formally joined PAAG ourselves yet.

What we haven't done yet

Checking a licence number against the issuing council's own register, breeder by breeder, is work we haven't started at scale. Until a breeder's page says we've checked it, treat the licence number shown as a claim to verify yourself — most UK councils keep a public register, and their environmental health or licensing team can confirm a number over the phone or by email.