South Africa has a real animal welfare crisis. Rescue Rehab SA estimates that more than a million cats and dogs are euthanised annually. Seventeen SPCA branches have closed since 2018, and none has been replaced. The organisations doing animal welfare work receive no direct state funding and are collectively spending an estimated R183-million a year on cremations alone.
Meaningful criticism of the City of Cape Town’s draft Animal Keeping Bylaw requires an honest reckoning with those facts.
Having done the reckoning, I believe the draft gets the proposed solutions badly wrong. Not because it regulates animal keeping – which it should – but because it regulates the wrong things, at the wrong level, at real cost to people who are not the source of the crisis it claims to address.
When Pug Rescue South Africa briefed Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Agriculture in June 2025 their diagnosis was very specific – that the crisis was driven by unregulated, informal, cash-based breeding and trade. “Anyone can breed animals,” they told the committee. “There are no bylaws in place to restrict or monitor this practice.”
Their proposed fix was a national solution including a breeder registration number, a statutory oversight body and a code of practice for sale and breeding. They were explicit that municipal bylaws alone cannot solve the problems because unregistered breeders simply relocate to avoid them.
Cape Town’s draft bylaw doesn’t ignore breeding altogether. What it does is extend the permit requirement for commercial breeders that has existed since the City’s 2021 bylaw to online and social media sales.
What Cape Town wants to do is require a paid permit for every single dog and cat a household owns, a further permit if that animal isn’t sterilised, an approved building plan and fixed setback distances to keep a pet rabbit or a handful of birds, and a 21-clause construction and operations regime for pet-grooming businesses, including the requirement for a dedicated bathroom, an impervious-surface clipping room, and mandated noise-control retrofits.
And it wants to give the Metro Police, traffic officers and South African Police Service members the power to search a home without a warrant to enforce it.
None of these measures touches on the crisis caused by the informal breeder selling puppies. All of it lands on the compliant household, and the small groomer making a modest income by working out of a converted garage or a rented retail space.
It gets the penalties wrong too. National law reserves its harshest sentence of up to two years’ imprisonment for organised animal fighting, while animal neglect carries a lower ceiling of 12 months. Cape Town’s draft seeks to apply two-year maximum sentences to any contravention at all, including an expired pet permit.
In other words, the City regards failure to renew your dog licence as an equivalent “crime” to dogfighting.
Just about the only thing the bylaw gets right is to make it more expensive to own an unsterilised pet.
In England, dog licensing was abolished outright in 1987; the only requirement since 2016 is a microchip and a collar, and pet grooming is explicitly excluded from the law that licenses animal boarding.
New South Wales in Australia gives dogs and cats a single lifetime registration, not a recurring per-animal application, and has no grooming licence at all. Even Singapore, which is regarded as genuinely strict, limiting most households to one dog and two cats, licenses boarding but leaves grooming alone entirely.
In fact, I haven’t found a single jurisdiction anywhere in the world that regulates dog groomers the way Cape Town wants to. Probably because doing so would regulate them right out of business.
Given South Africa’s history of engineered inequality, equity is another important consideration overlooked by the City of Cape Town. Microchipping costs R150 to R275; add the bylaw’s per-animal permit fees, and a household in an informal settlement with two or three dogs faces unaffordable compliance bills.
The national government has recognised this problem in its significantly less-onerous Animal Welfare Bill, which has been waiting for approval for the past decade. Among the hold-ups is the necessity for an economic impact assessment weighing compliance costs against noncompliance costs for townships like Soweto.
Cape Town’s draft bylaw takes no account of inequality. A household that can’t afford to comply doesn’t just fall behind on paperwork but sits in continuous breach of a bylaw carrying warrantless search powers and a two-year jail term – while pet owners in wealthier suburbs can easily afford to comply.
Any registration model the City adopts must include a free or subsidised provision for lower-income areas, and a genuine grace period before enforcement attaches. With a strong focus on sterilisation.
So what should Cape Town actually do? Not nothing. Local government is the primary authority dealing with pet ownership. It should keep what works: the measures to stop cruelty and dangerous-animal provisions, the new welfare protections for working animals and the ban on glue traps.
Then it should right-size what doesn’t work: create a new regime of a single light-touch registration tied to microchipping (instead of permit applications per pet), grooming standards calibrated to actual risk, and search powers narrowed to genuine welfare emergencies rather than any suspected paperwork lapse.
And the bylaw should add what is genuinely missing: a resourced channel for reporting unregistered breeders, enforcement directed at the commercial trade the bylaw already has power over, and real partnership with the SPCA on the burden it currently carries alone.
A bylaw that makes life harder for a compliant family while doing little about the breeder down the road selling animals, with no vaccination records, arguably discriminates against poorer pet owners more than moving the needle on animal welfare.
Residents have until 29 September to tell the City to get off its high horse. That’s when public consultation over the Bill closes. I encourage Capetonians to read the draft and challenge the City to reconsider the burden it seeks to place on animal lovers and animal groomers of limited means. DM
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