SINGAPORE — The owner of a luxury pet hotel was fined S$2,500 on Wednesday (April 8) after she pleaded guilty to selling cats without a licence in 2018.
Estelle Tayler, managing director of The Wagington in Tanglin estate, put up four pedigree cats for sale on Facebook at S$2,800 each. She sold three — two British shorthairs and a Ragdoll — to two customers without a licence between Oct 1 and Nov 13, 2018.
The court heard that in early 2018, the 37-year-old kept eight imported cats on The Wagington’s premises at 27B Loewen Road.
She applied for a pet shop licence in August that year, but had not followed through with her incomplete application before she sold the cats. She needed to submit more supporting documentation to complete her application.
Tayler could have been fined up to S$5,000 for the offence under the Animals and Birds (Pet Shop and Exhibition) Rules.
On Wednesday, Mr Jonathan Phipps, her lawyer from LegalStandard LLP, said the eight cats that were kept at The Wagington were Tayler’s.
She bought the cats between 2016 and 2018, and they were at least one year old when she sold them, he said.
He said the transactions were of no monetary benefit to her, as the sums that she charged were “just to cover the cost of her purchasing these cats and importing them from the United Kingdom”. They were also “one-off transactions”.
“She did not, in general, treat her workplace as a pet shop,” Mr Phipps told the court.
The Wagington houses 40 luxury suites for pet dogs and cats in a converted British colonial-era bungalow. It has a 1.2m-deep bone-shaped dog pool, and provides pet transport services as well as full-time daycare and other activities for dogs.
Also taken into consideration during Tayler’s sentencing was another charge of exhibiting cats without a licence at The Tea Moments in The Purrfection Suites, an extension of The Wagington reserved for cats.
She was said to have allowed customers to play with the cats there for S$15 an hour in early 2018.
