How Lapa.shop Selects Breeders

Lapa.shop unites only reputable breeders. We worked with experts in cat and dog care to create clear selection criteria that anyone selling pets on our website must meet. Our standards today are stricter than those of many other pet sales services and marketplaces in the USA and Europe.

Official Registration

A breeder must be registered with an international feline or canine organization

Registration with such an organization is proof that the breeder raises purebred cats and dogs and can provide documentation to confirm it. Additionally, each of these organizations has its own set of rules aimed at preserving and improving existing breeds.

Occasionally, as an exception, we accept breeders from organizations whose activities are limited to one country. This is because international systems have higher standards. However, after a thorough inspection, it may be found that a breeder operates at a high level, even with registration only in a local organization. In that case, we accept them.

Only Breeders from Europe and the USA

We also limit the geographical range of breeders we allow to work with us

Our website features kittens and puppies from breeders in Europe and the USA. An important note: we do not accept breeders from Russia or Belarus into our network.

Ban on Resellers

Breeders must sell only their own pets

Resellers are strictly prohibited from selling animals on Lapa.shop. Sometimes even registered breeders engage in reselling, meaning they have a licensed kennel and use it to sell animals they’ve bought cheaply from other sources. Lapa.shop forbids this practice! Every kitten or puppy must go to their new pet parent directly from the breeder’s home where they were born.

Breeder’s Reputation

Even registered kennels can break the rules…

Checking the registration is only the first step in evaluating a breeder. Registered breeders do not always follow the rules for keeping and breeding purebred animals set by their organizations. Some use registration merely as a facade, but in practice are no better than puppy mills, focusing solely on profit and cutting costs at the expense of the animals.

In many countries, professional breeders must be registered with a canine or feline organization and obtain a license for their activities, which includes additional inspections. However, in some Eastern European countries, breeding is not a licensed activity. Additionally, canine and feline organizations do not check the conditions in which the animals are kept. This means breeders can assess their own quality of work. Some even forge pedigree documents for kittens or puppies and commit other violations.

That’s why it’s crucial for us to ensure there are no complaints from colleagues or buyers about the breeder’s work. The absence from blacklists maintained by agents and couriers, as well as from other open and closed sources, is the next step in evaluating the breeder.

In some cases, no one could have anticipated what would happen. The breeder is registered, respected by colleagues and even acts as a club president. Then, suddenly, animal welfare activists, responding to complaints from neighbors, visit and confiscate all the cats. They find that the cats are sick with ringworm, conjunctivitis, and coughing, as well as malnourished and kept in horrible conditions in cages. The breeder doesn’t live with the cats and only comes to feed them. This actually happened in Ukraine. There might have been some justification for the situation at the breeder’s home. However, there was no excuse for the breeder having continued to sell her cats on classified ads and social media.

Therefore, the Lapa.shop administration must constantly stay alert. Sometimes such stories escape all blacklists and are discussed only in narrow circles among colleagues. If you are not working in this industry, you will never know about them and won’t be able to accurately assess a breeder.

Quality Assessment

We conduct our own assessment of their approach to work

We review their social media, have conversations, and gather information through other means about the living conditions of the animals, sales conditions, communication style, and more. If the kennel is located in a country where this type of activity requires a license, we also verify their license.

We also ensure that breeders are familiar with our rules. At this stage, many choose not to work with us, understanding that they cannot meet all of our requirements. There are also breeders for whom our conditions are new, but they want to improve their quality and need guidance. In such cases, we advise them on what specifically needs to be done.

Breeder Verification

Confirmation of the kennel’s location

Only after a successful evaluation is a breeder allowed to undergo the verification procedure. Recently, it has become mandatory for all breeders to pass verification at their place of residence. During the verification process, we confirm the breeder’s physical location at the address they provided.

Our Experience of Collaboration

The absence of any negative experiences during our collaboration

Occasionally, during the process of selling, some issues arise that we find unacceptable. If, after the first warning, the situation does not change, we exclude the breeder from our network. There are even times when we halt the sale process if we see that something is wrong. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, there are cases where a breeder worked at a high level, but then everything changed. Situations vary, but buyers should not have to suffer.

On Collaboration with Large Breeding Facilities

Knowing the size of a breeding facility will not help you evaluate it

In the course of our work, we also had to evaluate our stance on large breeding facilities, where many animals and sometimes multiple breeds are housed. These places are often disparagingly referred to as puppy mills, implying poor animal care and low-quality practices. However, our experience has shown that this is not always the case.

Often, the large size of a breeding facility indicates that the people involved are professional breeders, meaning it is their main occupation and source of income. Such facilities can have excellent living conditions, and the breeder may devote adequate attention to each pet. The key point here is to ensure that there is no overcrowding and that each litter has enough space. Overcrowding can lead to outbreaks of infections or result in offspring growing up physically weak.

What about small-scale breeders? They come with both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, they are less prone to mass infectious outbreaks. They can also provide more individual attention to each pet. However, in reality, this isn’t always the case.

The downside of a small breeding facility is that it may not be sufficient to support the breeder, meaning it becomes only a supplementary source of income. As a result, the breeder often has a main job, and cares for the animals in their spare time. This may leave them with too little time for proper socialization and care of the pets. Additionally, small breeders often do not invest in thorough health testing for the breeding animals, as this is expensive and also requires extra time.

During inspections, we’ve seen small kennels in apartments with overcrowding where the animals grew up weak. And we’ve also seen large, professional kennels with 20 adult dogs plus puppies, kept in nearly royal conditions.

So, which type of breeder is better? Our answer is that knowing the size of a breeding facility will not help you evaluate it. The simple truth is this: everything is individual. This is why the Lapa focuses primarily on other criteria: reputation, show success, living conditions, and the quality of the breeder’s work, as supported by evidence. If, during our work with a breeder, we discover that they do not meet our standards, we no longer allow them to sell through Lapa.shop.

Our Core Breeder Evaluation Principle

Prioritizing Animal Welfare and Integrity Over Short-Term Gains

If a customer asks us to describe the most important criterion for the Lapa.shop team when evaluating breeders, our answer will be clear and definitive — arrived at through careful research, though it may seem simple. A breeder’s priorities must align with ours: the well-being of the pets and the breeder’s reputation must always come first, ahead of short-term financial gain.