Pet shops in India: what the 2018 Rules require, which states have registered a shop, what the courts have said, and what 800 Google Maps listings in eight cities show

What a pet shop in India must have: the 2018 Rules in one table

The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Pet Shop) Rules, 2018 were notified on 6 September 2018 after a draft published in December 2016. They are short, specific and almost entirely unenforced.

A pet shop in India may not sell, house or exhibit a pet animal for sale without a certificate of registration from the State Animal Welfare Board, and the certificate must hang in the shop. That is Rule 3 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Pet Shop) Rules, 2018, notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change as G.S.R. 844(E) on 6 September 2018 under section 38 of the 1960 Act. The Rules define a 'pet animal' to include 'dog, cat, rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, rodents of the rat or mice category, pet birds' and any other animal whose trade is not otherwise prohibited, and a 'pet shop' to include a stall in a weekly market and 'online platforms over which the sale and purchase of pet animals is carried out'. A shop that sells only food, leads and litter is not a pet shop under this definition; the moment it sells a fish, it is.

Registration is the hinge. Rule 3 bars anyone from carrying on 'the business of sale or trade in pet animals, whether retail or wholesale' without the certificate, and the second proviso tells the State Board or the SPCA to seal a shop that failed to apply within sixty days of 6 September 2018 and to confiscate its animals, with thirty days' notice. Rule 14 then makes the Board's certificate a precondition for the municipal trade licence, so a shop cannot be legal with the corporation and illegal with the Board. The fee is Rs 5,000 per premises, the certificate runs five years and is renewed for the same fee, and the Board must have the shop inspected by a state veterinarian within three months and at least once a year thereafter. Shelters, registered animal welfare organisations and CPCSEA laboratory establishments are exempt.

The Second Schedule: how much floor a dog is owed

The Second Schedule is the part of the Rules a buyer can check with a tape measure. A pen of 24 square feet, roughly 1.5 by 1.5 metres, may hold one dog of 21 to 30 pounds, two of 11 to 20 or three under 10; a solid floor is mandatory, and 'the height of the enclosure or pen shall be such that the dog or pup cannot escape'. Rabbits get a minimum enclosure height of 48 inches and never a wire floor; guinea pigs 36 inches; hamsters 1.5 square feet each; birds 'large and spacious aviaries' with perches placed so that droppings cannot foul food and water. Cats must have elevated resting surfaces and a litter box that does not count towards the floor area, and may not share a room with dogs. The dog table is the only one with numbers for the animal most people buy; the Rules give no cage dimensions at all for cats or birds.

Who has actually registered: every official count of registered pet shops we could find, state by state

No ministry publishes a national figure, and the Animal Welfare Board of India has said in writing that the states do not send it one. What exists is a ledger of fragments.

The Rules require each State Board to send the Animal Welfare Board of India a consolidated report every year of the animals its registered pet shops sold, traded, boarded and lost (Rule 12). On 28 December 2023 the Board's Secretary wrote to the animal husbandry directors of every state and union territory that 'except the state of Maharashtra, no state has sent the progress of implementation of the aforesaid Rules' and that 'the details of the number of Dog Breeding Establishments and Pet Shops registered till date has not been provided'. Five years after the Rules, the central regulator did not know how many pet shops were registered in India, and said so. No state-wise table has been published since, and a Lok Sabha reply titled 'Pet Business' (Unstarred Question 2829, 18 March 2025) listed on the department's website returned 404 on this attempt.

The ledger has a shape. The counts that exist were produced by courts, by RTI applicants and by one state board that chose to publish; none came from the reporting the Rules themselves require. In 2020 PETA India sent every state a letter enclosing the RTI replies it had received, which 'confirmed that most pet shops and dog breeders operating in the country aren't duly registered', together with a list of at least 100 shops per state found by a web search, and the Animal Welfare Board's circular of 1 May 2020 that only registered pet shops and breeders could reopen after the lockdown. Haryana's annex ran to 88 named shops. Maharashtra's Commissioner of Animal Husbandry replied in kind, directing every district collector and police commissioner that 'no pet shop and dog breeding and marketing center shall be opened after the lockdown is over without doing registration at Maharashtra animal welfare board'. Three years later Maharashtra was the one state the Board said had reported.

Tamil Nadu's register: 399 pet shops, 166 of them in Coimbatore, and 373 past their expiry date

Tamil Nadu is the only state that publishes its register of pet shops as a document anyone can read. Read in full, it is both the best evidence of compliance in India and a record of how registration lapses.

The Tamil Nadu Animal Welfare Board's 'List of pet shops registered in TNAWB' runs to 65 pages and 399 entries, each with the shop's name and address, district, the animals it is permitted to sell, a registration date, an expiry date and a registration number. Tamil Nadu constituted its State Board in November 2018, one of the first states to do so, and the register shows it: the earliest certificate is dated 12 January 2020 and 309 of the 399 entries carry a 2020 registration number, 65 a 2021 number, 24 a 2022 number and one a 2024 number. Registration in Tamil Nadu happened in a burst in the Board's first two years and then almost stopped.

Coimbatore holds 166 entries, 41.6 percent of the state's registered pet shops, against 45 in Chennai, a city with more than twice its population. Madurai has 28, Erode 20, Tiruppur 18 and Dindigul 16; the western belt of Coimbatore, Erode, Tiruppur and Karur together account for 210 of the 399. That is not where the pet shops are, it is where the registration drive was run: a district whose SPCA or veterinary officers took the Rules up in 2020 produced a hundred and sixty certificates, and a district that did not produced a handful. The register is a map of enforcement effort, not of the trade.

Birds, not dogs

The register is also a map of what Indian pet shops sell. Of the 399 entries, 336 are permitted to sell birds, 114 fish, 80 dogs and 43 cats, with five registered for 'all legalised pets'. The typical registered Tamil Nadu pet shop is an aviary and aquarium business in Coimbatore permitted to sell 'exotic birds', 'love birds' or 'ornamental fish'; the shop selling Labrador puppies that most readers picture is one entry in five. Six owners hold 13 entries between them, because the Rules require a separate certificate for every premises; one bird farm in Chennai registered three sites on the same day in January 2020.

The expiry problem

A certificate under Rule 4(11) is valid for five years. On 1 November 2026, 373 of the 399 entries were past the expiry date printed beside them and 26 were in force, and the register lists no renewals, so either 373 shops renewed and the Board did not record it, or Tamil Nadu's registered pet trade is now mostly unregistered again. The Board's August 2025 order after a fatal pit bull attack in Chennai, giving every pet shop and breeder until 30 September to register or face legal action from 1 October, said that 'a few pet shops and dog breeding and selling establishments had registered'; a Board member told DT Next that Chennai alone had more than 100 illegal breeding centres and that the fine amounts were still being finalised. The Board's separate list of registered breeders, read the same day, holds six entries, all numbered 2026, among them the state's own Dog Breeding Unit at Saidapet and the Rajapalayam Co-operative Kennel. In February 2026 the state extended registration to boarding centres, grooming facilities and professional trainers.

Delhi and Telangana: a capital with no registered pet shop for five years, and a state that reported 86

The two best-documented jurisdictions are documented because people took their governments to court.

Delhi: zero registrations, 56 applications, a Rs 50 fine

In September 2023, five years after the Rules, the Hindustan Times reported that 'currently not a single pet shop in Delhi is registered with the government, official data shows'; the Delhi State Animal Welfare Board had been constituted only that April and had held one meeting, and an official said 'we have 56 applications from pet shops for registration and we have even issued them a receipt'. A three-month inspection of 30 Delhi pet shops between October and December 2021 had found cages too small for the animals in about 95 percent of them. Shop owners quoted in the report said they had filled in forms two years earlier and heard nothing.

The push came from the Delhi High Court. A public interest petition by Dr Asher Jesudoss and others over the non-implementation of the Pet Shop Rules had drawn notice in May 2022, with the Bench giving the Delhi government six weeks for a comprehensive affidavit, and Gauri Maulekhi's 2018 petition on illegal dog breeding, W.P.(C) 7467/2018, was still being heard. On 6 November 2024 the Delhi Animal Welfare Board issued a public notice giving every pet shop and dog breeding centre one month to register through the e-district portal or face closure, 'following an order from the Delhi High Court to ensure accountability'. A month later the government's counsel told the court that 'no centers had complied with the registration process', that a 90-day registration window had lapsed in September, and that Rs 50 was the maximum penalty the dog breeding rules allowed; the petitioner pointed out that the authorities had identified only two illegal breeding centres in Delhi NCR and fined them Rs 50 each. The Bench called the State's suggestion that no breeders exist in Delhi 'inaccurate'. On 7 January 2026 the court directed the Board to file a fresh affidavit of the steps taken and added the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and Delhi Police as respondents.

Telangana: 70 shops and no registrations in 2021, 86 registered by 2023

In June 2021 Telangana's Principal Secretary for Municipal Administration posted that 'none of the 70 pet shops in Hyderabad have mandatory registration' and directed the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation and the Director of Animal Husbandry to close any that did not comply within four weeks. Two years later Humane Society International India put an RTI reply before the Telangana High Court showing that 'out of thousands of pet shops and dog breeders that function in the State, only a scanty 86 pet shops are registered along with 9 dog breeders', that chains with several branches had registered one, and that in some cases 'no shops existed in the registered location'; the petitioner had itself inspected 44 pet stores and 26 online businesses in 2022. The Division Bench of Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice N.V. Shravan Kumar directed the State, the Animal Welfare Board, the Forest Department, the municipal corporation and the police to file status reports within four weeks. Telangana's 86 is the one statewide registration count in India that was produced in time to be compared with a shop census: Bonbeno's Google Maps pull for Hyderabad alone returned 100 listings, 73 of them classed by Google as pet stores.

What the courts have said, 2017 to 2026

Four High Courts have ordered pet shops registered or closed. The orders are dated, specific and, so far, mostly unmet.

• Bombay High Court, 2017 to 2021. In 2017 the court directed the Maharashtra government and the Mumbai corporation to close illegal pet shops selling birds and animals at Crawford Market; a 2019 order directed 'immediate closure of illegal pet shops'; in February 2019 Shivraj Patne's petition argued that most pet shops in Mumbai and the state were operating without the Rule 3 certificate. On 26 August 2021 a Bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice G.S. Kulkarni directed the State Animal Welfare Board 'to inform it about the number of pet shops that were registered and were operating as per rules'. No figure from that exercise has been published.
• Karnataka High Court, February 2020. The court directed all pet shop owners and dog breeders in the state to obtain a certificate of registration from the State Animal Welfare Board within three months, noting that the Board had been established in 2018 and had given no opportunity to register earlier; the Karnataka board told the court on 5 February 2020 that it had issued a notice.
• Delhi High Court, 2022 to 2026. Notice on the Pet Shop Rules petition in May 2022; the November 2024 registration notice issued on the court's order; the December 2024 hearing at which the State admitted no centre had complied and the court rejected the claim that Delhi has no breeders; a fresh affidavit ordered on 7 January 2026.
• Telangana High Court, October 2023. Status reports ordered from five authorities on Humane Society International's petition, on the strength of the 86-shop RTI reply.
• The regulator's own paper trail. The Animal Welfare Board of India's circular of 1 May 2020 allowed only registered shops and breeders to reopen after lockdown; its circular of 28 December 2023 recorded that no state but Maharashtra had reported and asked the directors of animal husbandry to make their boards send the annual consolidated report 'as per the statutory provisions'. The Board can ask; under the Rules it cannot compel.

The pattern across the four courts is the same. Each order produces a notice and a deadline; each deadline produces a handful of registrations; the handful is not published; and the next count comes from the next petition. The penalty structure explains part of it. The Pet Shop Rules provide for sealing and confiscation, which require the Board to act, and the Dog Breeding Rules carry a fine the Delhi government itself described to the court as capped at Rs 50. A shop that is sealed loses its stock; a shop that is not sealed loses nothing by waiting.

Birds and exotic animals: the trade the register is mostly made of, and the 2024 Rules that reach the buyer

Four pet shops in five on Tamil Nadu's register sell birds. Since 2024 a second set of rules applies to the exotic ones, and it binds the owner, not only the shop.

The Pet Shop Rules have one clause for imports. Rule 15 makes the pet shop owner responsible for ensuring that suppliers of 'imported, exotic breeds of birds and animals' hold the Director General of Foreign Trade's licence, a sanitary import permit and permission from the Animal Quarantine and Certification Services, and that 'the imports of live animals have been done through legal and appropriate channels'. Bonbeno's guide to importing a dog to India describes what those documents are and what they cost for a single animal; for a shop importing exotic birds in volume the same three approvals apply to every consignment.

The Living Animal Species (Reporting and Registration) Rules, 2024, notified by the environment ministry as G.S.R. 145(E) on 28 February 2024 under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, added an obligation on the buyer. Every person in possession of any animal species listed in Schedule IV of the Act, the CITES appendices, had to report it and apply for registration electronically within six months of the Rules, and thereafter within thirty days of acquiring it, with a fee of Rs 1,000, a physical verification by the Deputy Conservator of Forests within thirty days and a certificate within fifteen days after that. Births must be reported within seven days, transfers within fifteen, deaths with a veterinary post-mortem report; the owner must have the animal examined by a veterinary practitioner every six months, prevent its escape and not let it breed with indigenous species, and an animal without a certificate is dealt with under section 49Q of the Act. A buyer of a macaw, an African grey, an iguana or a ball python from a shop therefore takes on a registration of their own, and the shop's Rule 15 paperwork is what makes that registration possible.

The Google Maps layer shows how large this part of the trade is. Of 800 listings returned for 'pet shop' in eight cities, 93 are classed by Google as aquarium, tropical fish, bird or reptile shops, 23 of them in Ahmedabad, 18 in Hyderabad, 17 in Bengaluru and 15 in Kolkata, against two each in Mumbai and Delhi; many of the 641 'pet stores' sell birds and fish too, as the Tamil Nadu permit column suggests. Bonbeno's guide to keeping cats, birds and fish in one home covers what the Second Schedule's rule against housing inimical species together means once the animals come home.

What 800 Google Maps listings in eight cities show: 641 pet stores, 154 names selling live animals, 29 chain outlets

If the registers measure enforcement, Google measures the trade. We pulled the first 100 results for 'pet shop' in each of the eight cities Bonbeno covers.

Google returned 800 listings, of which 641 are pet stores or pet supply stores in its own classification, 93 are aquarium, bird or reptile shops, 40 are clinics, groomers, boarders or breeders, and 26 are not pet businesses at all. Delhi and Mumbai are the cleanest results, 98 and 94 pet stores in 100; Ahmedabad the noisiest, with 61 pet stores, 23 aquarium and bird shops and ten results that were hardware shops and general stores. Thirty listings across the eight cities were marked temporarily closed, ten of them in Bengaluru. The 733 pet businesses with a rating carry 98,075 reviews between them; the median pet shop has 103 reviews in Mumbai and 20 in Chennai.

Live animals, in the shop's own name

154 of the 800 listings have names that advertise live animals: 'puppies for sale', 'kennel', 'breeder', 'birds', 'aquarium', 'exotic', 'kittens', 'hamster'. Ahmedabad has 36 such names, Hyderabad 28, Bengaluru and Pune 18 each, Mumbai seven. Google classes several of them as 'Dog breeder', two in Mumbai and one in Pune, which under Rule 7(25) and the 2017 Rules means a registration of their own. Set the 28 Hyderabad names beside Telangana's 86 registered pet shops statewide, and the 36 Ahmedabad names beside a state whose Board has published no register at all, and the gap between the trade and the paperwork has a size.

Local chains, veterinary retail and going upmarket

In November 2018 the trade journal GlobalPETS described Indian pet retail under the headings veterinary retail, going upmarket and local chains flourishing: Heads Up For Tails had fourteen stores and hoped for 25 by the end of 2019, Just Dogs had 22 across ten cities, eighteen of them franchises, and Glenand four in Bengaluru. Seven years later Heads Up For Tails reports 115 stores and 95 pet spas in more than 18 cities, and yet the chains are 29 of the 800 listings Google returns for 'pet shop': Heads Up For Tails 18 times, JUSTDOGS nine, Zigly and Supertails once each. Heads Up For Tails is the most reviewed pet shop in Mumbai (two Bandra and Prabhadevi stores above 1,000 reviews each) and the second most reviewed in Delhi, but in Hyderabad and Kolkata no chain appears in the first hundred results. The upmarket pet shop that sells no animals, the format the 2018 article celebrated, is real and growing, and it is a small share of what a search for 'pet shop' finds. The bulk is independent, two thirds of it has no website, and the Tamil Nadu register suggests most of it sells birds and fish alongside food.

What a buyer should check before paying for an animal

The Rules were written so that a buyer can test a shop in ten minutes. Eight checks, each one a clause.

1. Look for the certificate on the wall. Rule 3(2) requires the certificate of registration in Form II to be prominently displayed, with the shop's address and the animals it is permitted to deal in. In Tamil Nadu the number has the form TNAWB/district/serial/year and can be checked against the published register; elsewhere, ask for the number and the Board that issued it.
2. Ask for the breeder's registration. Rule 7(25) bars a shop from selling an animal from an unregistered breeder, and the Form V supplier register must be available to 'any intending purchaser' under Rule 8(5). A shop that cannot name the breeder is selling outside the Rules; the breeder checklist says what a registered breeder's papers look like.
3. Check the age and the chip. No pup or kitten under eight weeks may be sold, and every puppy must be micro-chipped by a veterinary practitioner, with a reader on the premises to prove it. Bonbeno's guides to bringing a puppy home and bringing a kitten home explain why eight weeks matters.
4. Take the receipt. Form IV, in duplicate, with the species, breed, age, vaccination details and price, is required for every animal sold (Rule 7(13)). It is the document a buyer needs if the animal falls ill in the first week.
5. Measure the pen against the Second Schedule. Three small dogs or one large one in 24 square feet, a solid floor, no wire under rabbits, cats and dogs not in the same room.
6. Ask when the vet last came. Rule 7(24) requires a veterinary practitioner to check every animal and issue a fitness certificate at least monthly, and 7(2)(k) allows only animals certified healthy in writing to be offered.
7. Count what is on display. Pregnant animals, mothers with un-weaned young, mutilated animals (cropped ears, docked tails) and animals in show windows are all prohibited.
8. Consider the shelter first. Every exemption in Rule 4(13) is for a shelter or a registered welfare organisation; Bonbeno's guides to adopting a dog and adopting a cat in India cover how, and the street dog report shows where the animals are.

What it takes to open one: the statutory costs, the two licenses every shop needs, and the estimates

For a prospective pet shop owner the Rules are cheap to obey and expensive to ignore. The investment figures that circulate online are estimates, and this report labels them as such.

The statutory cost of selling animals legally is small: Rs 5,000 for registration per premises, valid five years, the affidavit, the application in Form I with photographs of the premises, and the inspection. Tamil Nadu's Board publishes its guidelines and application route online, requires the fee by demand draft payable at Chennai, and tells applicants the certificate and the species sold must be displayed 'in a prime place'. The two licenses every shop needs regardless of animals, registration under the state Shops and Establishments Act and GST registration above the turnover threshold, apply as they would to any retailer, and Rule 14 makes the Board's certificate a precondition for the local body's trade licence once animals are sold.

A shop that sells only pet products and accessories is outside the Rules, because Rule 2(k) defines a pet shop by the sale, housing or exhibition of pet animals. That is the business most of the venture-funded chains run, and it is why Heads Up For Tails can operate 115 stores with no Animal Welfare Board paperwork while a one-room bird shop in Coimbatore needs a certificate. Bonbeno's companion report on the pet products market in India sets out what that products trade is worth, what it imports and who is investing in it.

The investment figures online are third-party estimates. IIFL's guide for Telangana, published in July 2026, puts the startup costs of a modest district-town shop at Rs 3 lakh to Rs 5 lakh and 'a larger Hyderabad shop with live animals and grooming' at Rs 8 lakh to Rs 15 lakh, with licence and registration fees of Rs 5,000 to Rs 15,000 in Hyderabad, and labels all of it indicative; Franchise India's December 2025 guide to starting a pet shop in India lists ten steps from business model to growth options without a rupee figure. Neither is an official source and this report uses neither as one. What the official record does say is that the Rs 5,000 certificate is the one cost that separates a legal shop from one the Board may seal, and that in every jurisdiction that has counted, most shops have not paid it.

What this data does not measure

The registers, the court records and the Google layer each measure a different thing, and none measures the whole trade.

• There is no national count of pet shops, registered or otherwise. The Animal Welfare Board of India said in December 2023 that the states had not supplied one; the only parliamentary reply on the subject this report could identify returned 404. Every count here is a state, a city or a court record, with its own date, and the rows of the ledger cannot be added.
• Tamil Nadu's register records certificates, not shops. Six owners hold 13 entries; five registration numbers appear twice; one date reads 2031; and the register shows no renewals, so 'in force' and 'expired' are read from the printed expiry dates and may understate renewals the Board has processed but not published.
• The RTI and court figures are the petitioners' accounts of official replies. Telangana's 86 shops and 9 breeders, Delhi's 56 applications and the Rs 50 fine are as reported in the petitions and hearings cited, not from a published register.
• The Google Maps layer is 100 results per city for one search term. It is a sample of what Google ranks for 'pet shop', not a census: a shop that calls itself a 'pet clinic' or an 'aquarium' may be missing, and Google's category field, the chain match on the listing title and the live-animal word list are each imperfect. Ratings are Google's and unaudited; 24-hour claims are unverified.
• 'Names advertising live animals' is a word match. A shop called 'Birds and Beyond' that sells only seed is counted; a shop called 'Pet Palace' that sells puppies is not. The figure is an indicator of how openly the trade advertises, not a count of shops selling animals.
• The Rules' text is read from the Gazette as reproduced by the Animal Welfare Board and the Tamil Nadu government. Any later amendment not reflected in those copies is not reflected here, and the Dog Breeding Rules' penalty figure is as the Delhi government described it to the court.
• Dog bites, rabies and the stray population are outside this report, although the pet trade feeds all three; they are covered in Bonbeno's dog bite report and street dog report.

How this report was built

Every clause was read from the Gazette text, every count from the document cited, and the Tamil Nadu and Google Maps figures were produced by scripts kept with the report.

1. The Pet Shop Rules, 2018 were read clause by clause from the Gazette of India text, G.S.R. 844(E) of 6 September 2018, as hosted by the Animal Welfare Board of India and, with the Tamil Nadu Board's forms attached, by the Tamil Nadu government; the December 2016 draft was read from the environment ministry's copy. The Dog Breeding and Marketing Rules, 2017 were read from the Board's copy and the Living Animal Species Rules, 2024 from the Gazette.
2. The Tamil Nadu register was downloaded as the Board's PDF, converted to text, and parsed by a script that splits entries on the registration-number pattern TNAWB/n/n/year, reads the two dates in each entry, matches the district line against the state's district names and classifies the permitted-animals line by keyword; it counts 399 entries, 394 distinct numbers, 373 expired and 26 in force on 1 November 2026, and writes the district and year tables used above. The breeder list was read by hand.
3. The state ledger was assembled from the Animal Welfare Board's circular of 28 December 2023, PETA India's letter of 14 May 2020 with the Maharashtra Commissioner's letter and the Haryana list annexed, and the reports cited for Hyderabad, Telangana and Delhi. Court orders were read from LiveLaw, Bar and Bench, LawBeat, the Free Press Journal, DNA, The Print and the Deccan Chronicle as cited; no judgment text was obtained directly.
4. The Google Maps layer is eight runs of the Apify Google Maps Scraper on 1 November 2026, search term 'pet shop', one city each, 100 results per run, no add-ons; the downloaded JSON and the summary script that produces every figure in the dataset are kept in the research folder. The 2018 chain store counts are from GlobalPETS and the 2025 counts from Entrackr.
5. Investment estimates were read from IIFL's Telangana guide and the steps from Franchise India's guide, and are labelled as third-party estimates wherever they appear. Nothing in this report was taken from a search-engine snippet; every figure was read on the page cited.