How Shropshire Council licenses Shrewsbury's dog boarders
Dog boarding, home boarding and day care are licensed activities under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, and the whole of Shrewsbury and rural Shropshire sits under a single council, Shropshire Council.
A register that needs a workaround
Shropshire Council's own online licensing register is a client-side application that returns no readable content when checked directly, so the working source for this directory is the third-party mirror animal-licensing.uk, which lists more than 330 operators across the whole of rural Shropshire. That mirror gives a licence number, licence type, star rating and expiry date for each operator it holds, but no address and no phone number for any of them, so a business first has to be found by name through an open web search, its address confirmed on its own site, and only then checked against the mirror.
What could be confirmed
Seven of the nine businesses listed here are confirmed against the mirror: House of Hounds, Fairfield Boarding Kennels & Cattery, Maggie's Mutts, AristoDogz, Netley Boarding Kennels & Cattery, Lower Mill Boarding Kennels & Cattery and Whitley Crest Boarding and Doggy Daycare. The other two, Waggy Warehouse Shropshire and Wags Day Care Shrewsbury, each state a licence number on their own site, but neither number could be matched to an entry on the mirror in this check. That does not mean either business is unlicensed — the mirror's own text can be incomplete, and matching depends entirely on a name search rather than an address lookup — so no licence details are shown for either, and it is worth asking to see the current certificate directly.
Why no star rating is shown here
The mirror's own operator pages do carry a star rating field, and at least one Shrewsbury-area business's page was read as showing one during this round of research. That figure is not yet reflected in this directory's structured listing for any of the nine businesses shown here, so no star rating is currently shown against any Shrewsbury listing; treat this as a gap in what has been added to the site so far rather than evidence that ratings do not exist. If a star rating matters to your decision, check the business's own animal-licensing.uk page directly or ask the business itself.
What a licence actually covers
A Shropshire Council licence covers premises or home standards, record-keeping and how many dogs a business may keep at once; it does not fix a price, promise a particular room, or guarantee group sizes, so ask those questions separately even once a licence is confirmed. See our vaccinations and licences guide for the questions worth putting to any business here before you book.
More names than are listed here
Shropshire Council's register mirror lists considerably more operators across rural Shropshire than the nine shown on this page, the great majority of them outside Shrewsbury's five defined areas. A business is left off this page either because its base sits outside SY1 to SY6, because no phone number could be confirmed from an accepted source, or because — as with Church Stretton, which currently has no listing at all — every dog-care business found while researching the area turned out to be based over the boundary in the Craven Arms or Clun postcode district. If you cannot find a business you know operates locally, it may hold a current Shropshire Council licence without yet having a confirmed listing here.