Canada keeps rescue‑dog ban

Canada has decided that its “temporary” rescue-dog ban is not temporary at all. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says commercial dogs from countries it classifies as high risk for canine rabies still cannot enter the country, and that rule will stay in place until further notice. In practice, that still blocks dogs brought in for adoption or fostering from more than 100 countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, eastern Europe, and parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. The policy began in 2022, after two dogs imported from Iran were found to have rabies despite paperwork that appeared valid. Those cases rattled officials for a simple reason: Canada had eliminated canine-variant rabies decades ago, and reintroducing it would be far harder than containing the wildlife strains the country already deals with in bats, raccoons, skunks, and foxes. Rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms appear. For the agency, one infected dog is enough to justify a very large wall. That wall was built fast. On June 28, 2022, the CFIA announced that commercial dogs from high-risk countries would be barred starting September 28, World Rabies Day. “Commercial” sounds narrow, but the definition is broad. It covers dogs imported for resale, breeding, exhibition, research, gifting, fostering, and adoption. Rescue dogs were folded into the same category as every other non-personal import, which meant established adoption pipelines were cut off in one move. The official logic has barely changed since then. The CFIA still says imports from those countries pose a serious public-health risk, and its current import guidance still states that commercial dogs from high-risk countries are not permitted entry. The list itself remains long. It includes countries such as Haiti, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Thailand, the Philippines, China, Brazil, and more than 100 others, and the agency says the roster is reviewed regularly. The ban is not a narrow pause aimed at a few places with acute outbreaks. It is a standing system. That breadth is why advocacy groups have spent years attacking it. Their argument is not really about whether rabies is dangerous. It is about whether Canada chose the bluntest possible tool and then never came back to replace it with something more precise. Groups including Animal Justice and Soi Dog Canada pushed the agency to revisit the measure, saying vaccination, titers, microchips, quarantine, and tighter documentation checks could screen dogs without shutting down legitimate rescues altogether. They also went to court, and lost. In October 2025, a Federal Court judge upheld the ministerial orders behind the ban. The ruling accepted the government’s central claim that even one rabid dog could expose people, pets, and wildlife, and noted evidence that commercial dog imports into Canada had surged over the previous decade. That mattered because officials feared Canada could become a back door for dogs shut out of the United States or other markets with tighter rules. So the ban stayed, and the practical effect stayed with it. Canadian rescues that once placed dogs from Phuket or Port-au-Prince or Kyiv have had to reroute animals to other countries, keep them abroad, or stop those programs entirely. The CFIA’s own web pages still point importers to the same 2022 notice and the same prohibition structure. More than three years later, the country’s answer to rescue dogs from high-risk rabies countries is still the one it wrote in the first weeks of the crisis: no entry.