The Laws That Regulate How a Pet Is Built

The Laws That Regulate How a Pet Is Built

Our exotic pet law hub answers one question: which species you are allowed to keep. That question is settled almost entirely by state and local law in the US, and it is the question most owners think of as "pet law."

There is a second axis, and almost nobody in the US knows it exists. It asks a different question: which shapes an animal is allowed to be. Not what species, but how it was built.

Europe has been answering that question for over a decade. The US has never answered it at all.

The Netherlands Went Furthest

Dutch law has prohibited harmful breeding since 1 July 2014, under Article 3.4 of the Besluit houders van dieren, the Animal Keepers Decree. It is an open, outcome-based rule that binds anyone breeding companion animals, not just commercial breeders. It requires that so far as possible, breeding must not pass on serious hereditary defects, external characteristics with harmful consequences for welfare or health, or serious behavioral disorders.

That second clause is the one that matters here. It makes the shape of an animal a lawful subject of regulation.

The muzzle rule

In January 2019, Utrecht University's companion animal genetics center wrote enforcement criteria for short-muzzled dogs. Inspectors began applying them that March, and they were formalized in August 2023 as a policy rule rather than a statute, which is an important distinction: it binds how officials exercise their discretion, not the public directly.

The test is not one threshold but two bands, built around the craniofacial ratio, the length of the nose divided by the length of the skull. For scale, a wolf scores 1.0.

Alongside the ratio sit five other features, including audible abnormal breathing at rest, moderate to severe stenotic nostrils, and an eyelid that cannot fully close. And one clause with real teeth: a feature counts even if it has been surgically removed. Correcting a dog's airway no longer launders it into breeding eligibility, and failing dogs may no longer be used for outcrossing either.

There is no breed list. Every dog is assessed individually.

The cat ban

On 1 January 2026 the Netherlands went further than any other country, inserting a new set of articles into the same decree. Get the shape of this rule right, because most reporting on it is loose.

The drafting is unusually precise. It names the TRPV4 variant behind the folded ear, then adds a presumption that any cat with forward-drooping ears carries it, which is what makes the rule enforceable on sight rather than by DNA test. Hairlessness is defined functionally: permanently lacking a functional coat, or lacking whiskers and tactile hairs. Rex-coated breeds fall outside for now, because their coat counts as functional.

Penalties run through the enforcement regulation rather than the press release: 1,500 euros for keeping a banned cat, 500 for entering an exempt one in a show. Administrative fines, not criminal ones.

The consultation drew 537 responses, with opposition coming mainly from Sphynx keepers and breeders and from three cat registries. It did not change the decree.

For what this means for the breeds themselves, see our Scottish Fold and Sphynx guides.

Norway Did It Through the Courts Instead

Norway has no breed-specific legislation and has never issued regulations on dog breeding, despite having the power to. What it has is section 25 of the Animal Welfare Act, which says breeding shall promote characteristics giving robust animals with good function and health, and must not pass on genes that negatively affect physical or mental function.

In 2021 the Norwegian Society for Protection of Animals sued the Norwegian Kennel Club, two breed clubs and six breeders. It was a civil declaratory action, not a prosecution, and it went the distance.

Note which breed flipped. Popular accounts often say the Cavalier ruling was overturned. It was the English Bulldog that survived, and only conditionally: the court found that grades 2 and 3 of brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome do exceed the legal threshold, but that an active breeding program with demonstrated improvement saved it. The judgment says in terms that the result may differ if that program fails to reduce severe cases, or if caesarean rates stay high.

The Cavalier finding rests on a single number: at least 15% develop syringomyelia and Chiari-like malformation solely because of breeding for exterior traits.

Two things about that ruling are routinely misreported. It is declaratory only, and no injunction survived the appeals, so nobody was ordered to stop. And the court noted expressly that outcrossing the Cavalier with other breeds would not necessarily contravene the judgment, with a pilot running in 2023 and 2024. It is not a ban on Cavalier-looking dogs. It is a ruling against continuing the current closed population.

The most consequential holding is the quietest one: section 25 can be applied at breed level, not merely animal by animal.

Germany Has the Oldest Law and the Least to Show for It

Section 11b of the German Animal Welfare Act, the Qualzucht or torture-breeding provision, prohibits breeding vertebrates where breeding knowledge gives reason to expect that offspring will hereditarily lack, or have unfit or altered, body parts or organs, with resulting pain, suffering or harm. It is forward-looking, aimed at the breeding act itself, and it covers all vertebrates rather than just pets.

Breach is a regulatory offence rather than a crime, carrying a fine of up to 25,000 euros, with confiscation of the animals available.

So why is Germany not the strictest jurisdiction on this list? Because the section contains no list. No traits, no breeds, no thresholds. The Act empowers a ministerial regulation to specify them, and no such regulation appears ever to have been made. What exists instead is an expert opinion from 2 June 1999 on how to interpret the section, which the Bundestag's own research service describes as an important decision aid and guideline. It binds nothing. Its own introduction concedes that implementation of section 11b had so far been unsatisfactory.

A government bill in September 2024 would have fixed exactly this, adding a list of 18 indicative symptoms including breathing difficulty, hairlessness, exophthalmos, deafness, skull malformation and body shapes making natural birth improbable, plus a display and advertising ban. It had its first reading, went to committee, and then the coalition collapsed, the Bundestag dissolved, and the bill lapsed under the principle that unfinished legislation dies with the parliament.

The clearest evidence it never passed is the statute itself: the official record still shows the last amendment as December 2022.

The Registries Move Faster Than the Governments

The single most decisive action against a breed on health grounds was not taken by any legislature. It was taken by a cat registry.

FIFe deleted the Scottish Fold's registration codes with effect from 1 January 2012, and its rules state they cannot be re-created. Affected cats, and any cat with such a cat in its ancestry, cannot be registered, bred, shown, promoted or advertised. A separate clause closes the obvious workaround by refusing to register the progeny of an affected cat as a British Shorthair or Longhair regardless of ear type.

Set that against the CFA, which grants the breed championship status across four divisions and instead disqualifies a tail lacking in flexibility due to abnormally thick vertebrae. Two registries, one mutation, opposite operational conclusions. FIFe treats the folded ear itself as the disease marker. The CFA treats a stiff tail as the sign to act on.

FIFe is notably softer on hairlessness: no new preliminary recognitions for hairless breeds, but the Sphynx, Don Sphynx and Peterbald keep full status and are still bred and shown.

On the dog side, no kennel club has de-recognized a breed on health grounds. The Royal Kennel Club de-classifies breeds only for a decade of registration inactivity. What it does instead is grade them: nine breeds sit in Category 3, defined as visible health concerns linked to exaggerated conformation requiring increased support and proactive measures.

Registries do also refuse registrations on welfare grounds, just not conformation ones. Royal Kennel Club rules bar registering a litter where the dam has already had two caesareans, is over eight, was under one at mating, or came from a parent-offspring or sibling mating.

One case is often described wrongly. The Dutch Kennel Club did not voluntarily stop issuing pedigrees for flat-faced breeds. The muzzle criteria are government enforcement criteria it opposed, and in June 2025 an Amsterdam court ordered it to stop issuing pedigrees for the brachycephalic breeds without a health declaration for both parent animals, on penalty of 2,500 euros per improperly issued pedigree. The registry disagrees with the ruling and is considering its next steps.

The UK Splits Down the Middle

England licenses dog breeding and applies a condition that no dog may be kept for breeding where, on its genotype, phenotype or state of health, breeding could harm it or its offspring. Two limits matter. It binds only licensed breeders, meaning three or more litters a year or advertising a business. And cat breeding is not a licensable activity in England at all, so it does not reach cats.

The statutory guidance goes further than the regulation, telling licensing authorities that dogs which have required surgery to correct an exaggerated conformation, or which need lifelong medication, must not be bred from.

Scotland went further still. Its 2021 licensing regulations cover dogs, cats and rabbits, and both the dog and cat schedules name the word on the face of the instrument: no animal may be kept for breeding where, on its genotype, conformation, behavior or state of health, breeding could harm it or its offspring. It is the only UK provision that names conformation outright, and the only one that reaches cats.

That matters for one claim in particular. You will often read that Scottish Fold breeding is banned in Scotland under a 2020 Act. That does not appear to be right. The actual mechanism is the 2021 licensing condition, which binds licensed breeders rather than imposing a general ban.

Now the United States

Here is the finding, and it took real work to establish because proving a negative is harder than finding a rule: no US jurisdiction regulates breeding for conformation. Not one state. Not one city.

The evidence:

• The only bill ever introduced was New Hampshire HB 1102-FN in 2024, which would have treated breeding or selling animals with a birth deformity that causes suffering, naming brachycephaly, as cruelty. It covered French Bulldogs, English Bulldogs, Pugs, Boxers, Boston Terriers and Persian cats. PETA described it as first-of-its-kind, which is itself the strongest confirmation that nothing comparable exists. The American Kennel Club campaigned against it. The House tabled it.
• Over 30 states have commercial breeder laws. They cover food, water, exercise, veterinary care, space and rest between breeding cycles. A search of the full state-by-state table for congenital, hereditary, genetic defect, breeding soundness and conformation returns nothing.
• Thirteen states preempt breed-specific local ordinances entirely, foreclosing action at city level.

There are two narrow near-misses worth naming honestly. Virginia requires a commercial breeder to have a veterinarian certify annually that a female is in suitable health for breeding, and to breed her only between 18 months and 8 years. That screens the mother's condition on the day, not heritable traits. And Illinois requires licensees to release for sale only animals free of disease, injuries or abnormalities, which is a point-of-sale condition on the individual puppy rather than a restriction on the mating.

Twenty-two states have pet purchaser protection laws, the so-called puppy lemon laws, giving buyers a refund or veterinary costs when a dog turns out to have a congenital condition.

So the American approach is consistent: it regulates the transaction in a genetically compromised animal, and the mother's condition on the day of mating. It has never regulated the mating decision itself.

By contrast, a 2023 survey found 11 of 22 European countries legislating on extreme breeding, across six distinct models: banning breeding for specific features, banning breeding of certain breeds by conformation, protecting future offspring, banning import or marketing of extreme features, banning the showing of certain breeds, and banning ownership of certain features. Flanders bans both breeding and ownership of Scottish Fold cats.

What the US Regulates Instead

If American law will not touch how an animal is built, it does have something to say about how it is altered afterwards. Not much, and unevenly, but something.

Declawing

Non-therapeutic cat declawing is now banned in six states and the District of Columbia.

You will sometimes see this counted as seven states. That count includes DC.

Watch out for a category that gets miscounted into these totals: several states bar a landlord from requiring a tenant to declaw a cat. Those are tenancy provisions. They do not ban the procedure.

The city-level story is the better one, and it turns on an accident of timing. In 2009 California enacted SB 762, barring cities from prohibiting a licensed healing-arts professional from performing acts within their scope of practice, effective 1 January 2010. Seven California cities passed declaw bans in the last ten weeks of 2009 to beat the deadline. The Los Angeles ordinance's own urgency clause says so explicitly, citing the incoming state law as the reason for haste.

Denver followed in 2017, the first outside California. St. Louis, Austin, Pittsburgh and Madison followed. And in 2023 Missouri legislators moved to preempt the St. Louis bans by state law, which is the same maneuver California pulled, running in the opposite direction.

Ear cropping and tail docking

Here the finding is blunt: no state law prohibits ear cropping or tail docking of dogs.

Nine states regulate ear cropping and three regulate tail docking, and every one of those is a rule about who may perform the procedure, not whether it may be done at all. Five require general anesthesia. Pennsylvania's is the most detailed, making docking an offence only in a dog over five days old and permitting a veterinarian to dock at twelve weeks under general anesthesia.

The American Kennel Club's published position, issued in 2008 and still standing, is that cropping, docking and dewclaw removal are acceptable practices integral to defining and preserving breed character. No AKC breed standard disqualifies a natural ear or tail, though many describe the cropped or docked appearance, which quietly disadvantages natural dogs in the ring.

Compare the UK, where docking is prohibited except for certified working dogs under five days old, ear cropping has no exemption whatsoever, and it is a separate offence to show a docked dog at an event the public pays to enter.

The Line That Says It All

American law is perfectly capable of writing a categorical ban on cosmetic body modification with no veterinary escape hatch. It has done so. Just not for dogs.

New York bans docking a horse's tail outright, and separately bans showing a docked horse. Two sections later in the same chapter, its law on dogs does nothing more than require that a veterinarian perform the cropping under anesthetic, and expressly permits importing a cropped dog for breeding purposes.

Two species, two philosophies, adjacent sections of one statute. California does the same, banning tail docking of horses and cattle with an exception only to save the animal's life or relieve its pain. Rhode Island bans it for bovines. Ohio restricted it for dairy cattle from 2018.

Livestock and horses get the categorical rule. Companion animals get a rule about who holds the scalpel.

If You Are Buying

The practical upshot of all this is smaller than the legal detail suggests, and it comes down to three things.

Where you live decides very little. Unless you are in the Netherlands, no law is going to stop you buying a dog that cannot breathe. That decision is yours, and the BOAS grading scheme exists precisely so you can make it with information rather than hope.

Registry paperwork is not a health guarantee, and registries disagree with each other. A breed in championship competition with one registry can be barred from registration entirely by another, on exactly the same evidence. The Scottish Fold is the cleanest example, but the same logic reaches the French Bulldog, the Bulldog and the Persian.

The direction of travel is one way. Eleven European countries legislate on this now, a Norwegian court has held that breed-level breeding can itself be unlawful, a Dutch court has ordered a kennel club to withhold pedigrees, and the Netherlands has made keeping two cat types an offence. Nothing in this area has moved toward permitting more.

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Sources & Further Reading