Dog boarding kennels in Germany

The ten German kennels sit in seven Bundesländer. Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Schleswig-Holstein have two each; Bayern, Niedersachsen, Rheinland-Pfalz and Sachsen-Anhalt have one.

We used no national list. Permission to run a boarding kennel is granted under § 11 TierSchG by the local authority and recorded there, not in one central register, so there is no single national source to check a kennel against. Every German record is therefore based on the kennel’s own website.

One kennel publishes a maximum shoulder height instead of a weight limit. The card shows that limit exactly as published, in centimetres, because converting it into kilograms would be guesswork.

Prices are shown in the model each kennel uses, and dated with the day we checked.

None of the ten German kennels publishes a permission reference, which fits a system where that paperwork sits with the Landkreis rather than on the kennel’s own website.