They will be at council to protest plans to build a dog breeding facility at Fosters Valley, about 20 kilometres south of Bathurst.

Objectors say the facility is a puppy farm that will house dogs in squalid conditions and keep them only for the lure of money.

Unsurprisingly, the developer – Kellyville Pets owner John Grima – sees it much differently.

Mr Grima says his new facility will be the best of its kind in Australia with animal welfare the priority.

Indeed, Mr Grima believes his facility is the industry’s best answer to unregulated puppy farms and should be a model for others to follow.

While the two sides of that debate will never see eye-to-eye, though, what is much clearer is the fact that their argument really has no place in this discussion.

Bathurst councillors are not being asked in this case to vote on the legitimacy [or otherwise] of a dog breeding facility, and nor would they have the expertise to do so.

Rather, they are being asked to decide whether a dog breeding facility is an appropriate use of the site at Fosters Valley under the planning rules currently in place, and whether the proposal before them complies with those rules.

As this newspaper has stated before, there appears little doubt it does – and the report to councillors by environmental, planning and building services director Neil Southorn comes to the same conclusion.

Mr Southorn acknowledges the objections to the proposal but maintains they can all be “adequately mitigated” by a raft of conditions to be placed on the development.

He has recommended it go ahead and it’s hard to see a majority of councillors voting against that recommendation.

Protesters at Wednesday night’s meeting won’t really be objecting to a dog breeding facility at Fosters Valley; rather, they will be objecting to dog breeding facilities per se.

But councillors do not have the luxury of applying that sort of hearts-over-heads thinking to this debate. If they do, we will surely end up in the Land and Environment Court.

Bathurst Regional Council – funded by Bathurst ratepayers – has been down that path before.

Let’s not go down that path again.