How Somerset Council licenses dog boarders in Taunton
Dog boarding, home boarding and day care are licensed activities under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, and in Taunton and Somerset that licence comes from a single authority, Somerset Council, which replaced the area's four former district councils on 1 April 2023. Unlike several other towns on this site, Somerset Council publishes no register that this directory could read online directly.
Why the council's own pages don't work
Somerset Council's own "Environmental Health Public Register" pages are split by the four former districts, and none gives a working online register. The former Somerset West and Taunton area, covering Taunton, Wellington and Minehead, links a SharePoint file share that asks for a Microsoft sign-in before it will show anything. The former Mendip area, covering Glastonbury & Street and Frome & Shepton Mallet, states plainly that you should email the council's own case address if you want to see the register at all — there is no online register for that area, not merely one this directory could not open. The former Sedgemoor area, covering Burnham-on-Sea, links an old search form that loads but returns a server error on every attempt to see a result. None of these three could be read for this page.
The one source that does work
A separate, county-wide listing at animal-licensing.uk, run independently of Somerset Council itself, is the only source this directory could use: a table of every licensed animal business across the whole of Somerset, including licence number and expiry. It is a third-party mirror of the council's decisions, not the council's own register, and it carries no address or postcode for any entry, so it could not be used on its own to place a business in one of this page's five areas. Because it is a mirror rather than the council's own register, no star rating from it is shown anywhere on this page, even where a business quotes one about itself.
What that means for the eight businesses here
Five of the eight — E S Pet Care, Barking Mad Taunton, Animals at Home Taunton & South Somerset, Hylands Dog Care and Steart Dog Lodge — have a licence number and expiry date confirmed against this mirror. Animals at Home Taunton & South Somerset's own site states a different star figure to the one the mirror shows for the same operator; that conflict is unresolved, which is exactly why no star figure is published here for anyone. The other three — Bark Place Dogs, LittleDogs (or not so Little Dogs) and Animals at Home Mendip & Bristol West — could not be matched to an entry on the mirror at all, so no licence details are shown for them; ask to see a current licence certificate when you call.
What to check yourself
Because Somerset publishes no register of its own that can be read online, the most direct check is to ask a business for its licence number and, if you want it confirmed independently, to contact Somerset Council's licensing team directly rather than relying on a claim made on a business's own website, which this directory cannot verify either. Asking to see the certificate itself, in person or by photo, is worth more here than in a town with a working register.
What a licence covers regardless of how hard it is to check
Whichever district a business's licence was first issued under, every licensed boarder in Somerset has been assessed against the same 2018 regulations covering space, exercise, feeding, record-keeping and how many dogs may be kept at once, and the council can revoke or refuse to renew a licence if a business falls below standard. A current licence is a meaningful check on its own, even where this directory could not confirm one directly or read a star score.