What actually is a puppy farm? Is there a definition of, of what a puppy farm is? And is a puppy farm always bad?

Well, what is a puppy farm? There's lots of varying definitions as to what a puppy farm is, but here at the RSPCA, we tend to use that to describe the intensive commercial breeding of dogs.

And typically, this is the breeding which prioritizes money over health, behavior, and welfare.

So most of the time it's a very high volume of puppies being produced, and also they are being reared and housed in very low standards, typically often not meeting the legal standards that they are required to do.

And they essentially do this because they want to produce as many puppies as possible in a shorter space of time as possible to meet that existing demand that is there.

And operating at a higher welfare standard not only costs more money, but also it takes a significantly much more amount of time, so there's a lot more thought that goes into responsible breeding.

So often puppy farms are operating illegally without a local authority license, and they tend to get away with doing this because they operate using lots of different aliases.

What tips do you have for people to help distinguish between a reputable breeder and a, and an irresponsible one?