Unlicensed dog breeder must pay more than £40,000 after Proceeds of Crime Investigation

It's time for lifetime bans on breeding animals if they have ever been doing it illegally. If they are prosecuted for maltreatment and deliberate animal cruelty there MUST be lifetime bans on ownership of any animal. I can sympathise with accidental issues like someone losing their job and struggling to keep up with monthly pest treatments and the cost of quality food when they are struggling to feed themselves but feeling desperate to not give their pet up to a shelter that will re-home it. That is not willful cruelty. On the other hand, any person who deliberately hurts animals is clearly never going to be a fit person to care for them. If they have made an active choice to beat a horse or breed a dog over and over until it dies from the stress or if they are sick enough to make animals fight then everything about the way they perceive the value of animal lives is wrong. Banning them from ownership for a few years makes no sense at all and it muddies the waters for those trying to enforce protection for animals. If you are willing to commit such a crime then as soon as you are found guilty you should be banned from breeding, owning and also working with animals in any context. You should be banned from owning or working in (or with) any business that has any connection to working with animals. Any person prosecuted alongside the guilty party who has knowledge of the animal cruelty being committed but did nothing to prevent it or report it should face the same legal restrictions because these are often "family businesses" and if one of gets a ban then the business just reopens under the name of a different family member and the same bad practices continue. If everyone involved faces the same restrictions then entire communities of animal abusers would be stopped in their tracks. With no difficulty over working out whether this person was still under a restriction and did the restriction also apply to her brother etc....the police could just act as soon as any of them was seen in possession of an animal. If those lifetime bans were linked to seriously concerning consequences then it wouldn't be worth the risk when getting caught would be so much easier. I know that what I want probably seems like pie in the sky but it could easily be done with only the tiniest tweaks to the guidelines. It wouldn't even require new laws. It would just require the will to make any offence of deliberate cruelty the last one they get to commit.