DEPARTMENT: Animal Care Services
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Heber Lefgren
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: All
SUBJECT:
Pet Sales Ordinance and proposed updates and revisions to City Code Chapter 5 and Chapter 20.
SUMMARY:
A review of proposed amendments to Chapter 5 and Chapter 20 of the City Code and the public engagement process used to inform staff recommendations.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
Animal Care Services (ACS) committed during the FY 2019 budget development process to study the issue of pet sales in San Antonio. Best practices research identified two states (California and Maryland) as well as 280 cities who have restricted the retail sale of dogs and cats. Animal rights organizations including the Humane Society of the United States and the Best Friends Animal Society have uncovered systematic inhumane treatment of animals in commercial breeding facilities and recommend stronger regulations of this industry, including retail pet sales bans at the state or local level. These regulations have the beneficial side-effect of encouraging community members to adopt pets from animal shelters and nonprofit organizations.
Previous local actions taken to regulate pet sales include establishing a ban on roadside sales in 2010, creation of a permit process for breeding and selling animals in 2017, and the addition of an Animal Care Officer (ACO) position in 2019 to specifically target online and roadside sale of dogs and cats. These actions were designed to regulate the sale of pets by individual residents. Since 2010, 265 citations have been issued for roadside sales, while 382 citations have been issued for violations of the permit process created in 2017. Since the Animal Care Position was filled in April of 2019, an additional 522 pet sales cases have been investigated and 266 citations have been written.
In July of 2019 and February of 2020, ACS conducted "SASpeakUp" surveys in English and Spanish designed to gauge whether San Antonio residents iden...
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