An Open Letter to Craigslist and Facebook:

Dear Craigslist and Facebook,

Please stop helping people sell dogs on your sites. Oh, I know, you say you don’t allow these sales – that these activities are prohibited by your terms of service – but you do absolutely nothing of value to stop them. Backyard breeders wouldn’t be able to succeed without you!

Facebook, when I search your site for “puppies for sale,” I do get a warning page that says, “Are you sure you want to continue? This search may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals. Animal abuse and the sale of live animals between private individuals is not allowed on Facebook.”

But the two options from that page are “Continue” or “Learn more” – and if I click on “Continue,” I am served up a variety of pages from which I can shop for puppies! That’s an incredibly useless warning.

Craigslist, I know that you allow other users to monitor and “flag” posts from breeders, but seriously, that’s a joke. It would take an army of volunteers working around the clock to flag the ads for puppies appearing in the hundreds of local craigslist pages in the U.S. Also, each ad needs to be flagged numerous times before it gets removed; why not just remove the entire “pets” category?!

I’ve seen it mentioned on other forums that the “pets” page on craigslist can be used for good, to help people rehome individual animals. Unfortunately, that’s just not how the page is used by the vast majority of users, despite the fact that everyone who sells puppies now asks for a “rehoming” fee. Give me a break: These pages are a cesspool of ads for breeders, plain and simple.

Note that I’m not against breeding altogether – but breeders who are truly responsible produce such a small number of puppies that they have long waiting lists of buyers; they don’t have to advertise to find homes for the far-too-many pups they force their females to churn out.

Also, I would guess that almost every dog or puppy who gets sold through craigslist or Facebook ends up reproducing. Most states have legislation requiring that shelters and rescues adopt out only animals who have been spayed or neutered. There is no such requirement for buying a puppy from a breeder someone finds on Facebook or craigslist, and these surgeries are expensive. Also, the people who go puppy shopping through these sites are largely inexperienced owners who don’t know how to responsibly shop for a dog; they probably aren’t aware of how much spay/neuter surgery will cost, or when it should be performed – and don’t know how to prevent their new dog from reproducing in the absence of such surgery!

Are there “good” breeders advertising their wares on Facebook and craigslist? I don’t know anyone who would answer “yes” to this question. These are people who are straight-up using their pets for income. While some have improved their “professionalism” to the extent that they can take decent pictures of their merchandise, many more show puppies growing up in squalid, dirty environments to mothers that look unhealthy and unloved.

And if you need even one more reason to stop the flow of income to craigslist and Facebook breeders, please go visit any “open admission” municipal shelter near you – not a pretty, well-funded “limited admission” shelter, but the kind that is legally required to take in all the unwanted dogs in an area. Ask how many kennels they have (what number of dogs the facility was designed to hold) – and how many they are actually holding. (Hint: It’s gotten really bad in the past few years since covid; every shelter in the country is screaming about too many dogs and not enough adopters, which is what makes these ads for backyard breeders on your sites just that much more galling.)

PLEASE, shelter and rescue workers and volunteers are BEGGING you: Put an end to these ads. Ban these pages. Without free advertising and a ready market for their puppies, people will be forced to slow or stop breeding (after a glut of surrendered puppies and breeding animals end up in the shelter, of course).

PS: If for some reason, you just can’t bring yourself to cut off these loathsome users, here’s another idea: Charge a pretty penny for the ads, and then donate the income to nonprofit spay/neuter providers. If there were free spay/neuter surgery available to anyone who wanted it for the dogs they bought from an ad they saw on Craigslist or Facebook, there would be MANY fewer dogs being given away, abandoned on the streets, and surrendered to shelters.