UK Pet Animals Act 1951 — licensing of pet shops (s.1) — verbatim extract of section 1 of the Pet Animals Act 1951 (14 & 15 Geo 6 c. 35) as published on legislation.gov.uk. The Act is the United Kingdom's core retail-welfare statute for the keeping and sale of pet animals; section 1 makes it an offence to keep a pet shop without a local-authority licence and obliges the authority, when granting a licence, to secure specified animal-welfare conditions. C1 substring-verified against pdf-raw/uk-2026/uk_pet_animals_act_1951_s1.txt.
Section 1
(1) [ F1 [ F2 No person shall keep a pet shop [ F3 in Wales ] except under the authority of a licence granted in accordance with the provisions of this Act. ] ]
(2) Every local authority [ F4 in Wales ] may, on application being made to them for that purpose by a person who is not for the time being disqualified from keeping a pet shop, and on payment of such fee . . . F5 as may be determined by the local authority, grant a licence to that person to keep a pet shop at such premises in their area as may be specified in the application and subject to compliance with such conditions as may be specified in the licence.
(3) In determining whether to grant a licence for the keeping of a pet shop [ F7 in Wales ] by any person at any premises, a local authority [ F7 in Wales ] shall in particular (but without prejudice to their discretion to withhold a licence on other grounds) have regard to the need for securing—
(a) that animals will at all times be kept in accommodation suitable as respects size, temperature, lighting, ventilation and cleanliness;
(b) that animals will be adequately supplied with suitable food and drink and (so far as necessary) visited at suitable intervals;
(c) that animals, being mammals, will not be sold at too early an age;
(d) that all reasonable precautions will be taken to prevent the spread among animals of infectious diseases;
(e) that appropriate steps will be taken in case of fire or other emergency; and shall specify such conditions in the licence, if granted by them, as appear to the local authority necessary or expedient in the particular case for securing all or any of the objects specified in paragraphs ( a ) to ( e ) of this subsection.
Honesty note: Only the s.1 provision text was client-extractable this session (sections 2–9 of the Act load via asynchronous JavaScript not captured by headless DOM retrieval, and the whole-act XML download endpoint is not reachable from this host). This topic therefore quotes only s.1, which it establishes first-hand; it makes no claim about the Act's other sections (powers of entry, offences, penalties, interpretation).