Ok so this was brought up at work today as we were discussing this ridiculous pet ban that is flying through the WV house right now.... nonprofit groups are exempt from a lot of these laws, so somebody asked if we could legitimately qualify as a non-profit group since we do a lot of public outreach and education with our animals.
I looked it up, and a site called "SNPO: Starting a Non-profit organization" defines a non-profit organization as this - "The difference between nonprofit and for-profit organizations is that nonprofits use their profits to advance their programs, while for-profits distribute their profits to their owners or stockholders."
It seems to me that people like us would possibly be able to pull this off if any profits we made from breeding/selling and our programs went back to the food, heat, new animals for the projects, and equipment for the programs themselves (we do a multimedia thing involving live animals, video projector, screen, etc...).
However, the other half of my brain says there's not a chance that could actually happen.
If any of you have any input on this, please let me know.