Please be aware of animal exploitation on adverts.ie and other sites

--LOS-- · 25-04-2014 7:10pm #1

Firstly I hope this is ok to post, I checked with a moderator to make sure.

So this morning I came across an adverts.ie post on my fb newsfeed about pet adoption. I had a quick scan of the adoption section and noticed probably over half of the posts on there were selling animals either explicitly or more subtly; seeking offers and pet swaps. I began to question if selling animals was something that was supported by the site since the impression I got from viewing the entire pet section on adverts was that this is ok. Thankfully no, adverts rules dictate no pets are allowed to be sold in the pet section. You can read my post below which was my response to them for more info.

I just wanted to raise awareness about this so that animals are not being exploited on adverts.ie, gumtree or any other site for that matter. This is not a personal attack on adverts. I would encourage you to be pro-active and report posts you see that are ignoring the rules and exploiting these animals.

I think it's great that adverts supports pet adoption and I would encourage everyone to support adoption too. Please never pay money for animals or indeed take money for animals you are re-homing. There are just too many animals in need of a good home. By buying and selling animals you are only contributing to the mass murder of animals that are without a home.

response to adverts:

Adverts.ie I am extremely angry and disappointed right now. From looking at the pet adoption section and indeed the pet section as a whole, one would easily be led to believe that selling animals is ok on this site. However I was happy to see you had some great rules about pet adoption and pets for sale here ..... http://www.adverts.ie/help/pet-adoption-rules. Here it explicitly says "No animals are allowed for sale in the Pets section." There is a huge disconnect between these rules and what you are allowing to be posted on the site. I have gone through the entire pet section now including pet adoption and I have reported over 150 adverts that are breaching your rules; selling animals, sometimes along with equipment and seeking pet swaps. Shockingly a huge fraction of the ads in 'adoption' are seeking money. Most of these ads are explicit in their intent for sale, either in the title or the description, sometimes only sneakily in the comments. That is unacceptable, I fail to see how this is even happening, are ads not screened before they go live? Your modding has some serious short-comings, it took me a couple of hours to scan the entire pet section and report all rule breaches, regular moderation or simple screening of ads before they go live would obviously only take a fraction of that. I have hopefully saved you some time today and I am actually happy to volunteer my time if that's what you need.

Another thing I've noticed, while it is thankfully rare to see dogs and cats for sale on adverts, I've seen all kinds of other animals for sale; rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, birds, fish, worms, snails, snakes, lizards etc, with fish being the biggest offenders. These animals should not be exempt from your rules. Adverts appears to exercise good care in ensuring cats and dogs are not exploited on the site, you're also clearly aware of issues surrounding dog baiting and dog-fighting. However you are allowing many other kinds of animals to be exploited on this site, including all kinds of exotic animals.

So what do I get for my part in helping to enforce your own site rules? Deleted comments and an account ban, really? I made a comment under an offending ad reminding them of the rules and linking them to the rules. That comment was deleted by adverts while the seller's reply saying 'no spam on my ad' and his ad which is a breach of the rules is still live. Now my account has been banned by adverts.ie. Wow, what can I say, extremely questionable work by you guys.