What is a Puppy Mill?

You may have heard about puppy mills - or puppy farms - but many people don't really know what the term means or why it matters.

When you see a puppy in the window of the pet store or an ad online for puppies for sale, you can know with near certainty that the pup is from a puppy mill.

A puppy mill is a large-scale breeding operation, where "breeding stock" - rather dogs that are bred over and over again - are kept in cages their entire lives with little to no veterinary care, and then are killed, abandoned or sold when they are no longer fertile.

Puppy mills not only produce horrific endings for animals that are bred, but they tear puppies away from their mothers long before they should be. Purebred puppies are then sold in bulk to "brokers" and then those individuals sell the puppies (often with falsified purebred paperwork) to pet stores ... or sell them to laboratories for "research" - which I'm sure you can interpret intelligently.

In short, puppy mills are commercialized breeding and they are hiding in plain site in areas near all of us.

There are more than 6,000 commercialized breeders licensed by the USDA - our own government licenses these breeders, but they do not protect the animals or potential owners.

The USDA requires food, shelter and water ... but that doesn't translate to humane conditions. In fact, the USDA allows puppy mills - or commercial breeders - to own more than one thousand dogs, to keep all dogs in cages for years at a time, and to breed dogs as often as possible.

Even worse, there are thousands of puppy mills that are not licensed and have even more grotesque and unmentionable conditions.

Only four states (Virginia, Louisiana, Oregon, and Washington) have even limited the number of dogs that can be in commercial breeding facilities, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

Animals are not a mere commodity.

Perhaps that's a concept our government doesn't yet understand - or at least enforce, but I cannot imagine people would be so desperate for a puppy that they would knowingly purchase a puppy whose mom is sitting in a cage of her own feces with no veterinary care and who is impregnated and bred until she is useless to the breeder and then tossed aside like garbage.

Sometimes seeing the truth is the best way to truly understand it. You can search puppy mills and see thousands of pictures and videos, following is a video of a puppy mill rescue by the Humane Society of the U.S. that shows the animals being saved, but also shows the conditions of puppy mills: http://video.humanesociety.org/video/999193548001.

There is an entire glossary of lingo when it comes to puppy mills, which adeptly displays this industry - below are a few terms to give you a glimpse into commercialized breeders.

• Buncher: A person who takes puppy mill rejects—dogs not up to breed standards—and/or dogs advertised as "free to a good home" and sells them to Class B dealers, who will in turn sell them to industrial research laboratories.     
• Culling: The killing of puppy mill puppies who, for various reasons, are considered unacceptable (twisted leg, coat or eye color not up to breed standard, misshaped ears, etc.).     
• Debarking: A controversial procedure in which a dog's vocal cords are severed so that he is unable to bark. In puppy mills, this procedure is often performed by smashing a puppy's vocal cords with a pipe.     
• Source: ASPCA Puppy Mill Glossary: http://www.aspca.org/fight-animal-cruelty/puppy-mills/puppy-mill-glossary.aspx

I'm sure anyone who has read this blog isn't thinking Puppy Mills are a good idea, but I don't want you to only be against puppy mills, I want you to feel empowered to make a difference.

If you want to help stop puppy mills know that puppies sold online and in pet stores are almost always puppy mill dogs; increase awareness with the people you know - sign the ASPCA pledge against puppy mills, send a note to your legislators, don't shop at pet stores that sell puppies and support those that feature adoptable animals.

As long as we allow puppy mills to exist by continuing to buy puppies from pet stores and breeders, millions of animals will continue to die in shelters simply because there are not enough homes for them.

Know about puppy mills and tell people about it ... you will make a difference, and you can be the change.


Learn More:
http://www.aspca.org/puppymills
http://www.nopetstorepuppies.com/
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/puppy_mills/
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/puppy_mills/qa/puppy_mill_FAQs.html

Life of a Shelter Pet

I wake up and it is dark. Another dog is barking because he is scared of something ... that must be what woke me.

The sun isn't up yet so there's not any light coming through the small windows in the shelter. I can't see the sun or the grass or trees through them anyway, but it is nice when the light shines through and I can imagine those things that I know are out there from when I get to go outside on a walk with a volunteer.

But, for now it is dark.

The air around me smells stale and like feces. I hate how it smells, but I can't blame the other dogs - we have all been in our cages for a really long time, so we don't have the option of going to the bathroom outside.

Sometimes a volunteer will take me on a walk and I run out and go to the bathroom in the fresh grass - well, if I'm being honest, I normally have to go so bad I just squat as soon as I get to anything that resembles grass - even if it is the dirt littered with trash outside the shelter.

I used to live in a house with a family and a yard, but one day they brought me here and said they couldn't keep me. I never understood what I did, but somehow I ended up here.

Even though I've been in a shelter for a couple months now, I still don't like going to the bathroom inside. But when you're in a cage sometimes for 24 hours a day - for a couple days at a time with a walk maybe once a day - you really don't have much choice.

There's a lot about this shelter that's hard to get used to.

Tonight is pretty normal, we all wake up when someone barks or gets scared by a noise or has a nightmare ... so now I'm just sitting on the cold concrete in the dark, trying to fall back to sleep. Sometimes in the middle of the night, in the pitch black, I can see the eyes of another dog glisten when it hits the dull moonlight - they are waiting to fall back to sleep like me. 

It could be worse though. We do get a blanket here and sometimes a bed - I've heard the shelter volunteers say to each other that it's good we get that when not all dogs in shelters do.

We also get time because we somehow made it to a no-kill shelter. At normal shelters, dogs don't get more than 7-10 days to get adopted ... I know I'm a good dog and I'm still here, so I'm glad I didn't get put down after a week.

The shelter staff has to go home at 4:30 p.m., and they don't arrive in the morning until 7:30 a.m., so we're alone for a long time. In the morning, we don't get transferred into another kennel for our cages to get cleaned right away, so usually there is a stream of pee coming out of each of our kennels. It's humiliating for all of us.

Sometimes I try to remember what it was like outside of here.

There are people who take us all on walks - they sign us out on this notepad and then take us out for 15 or 20 minutes to go to the bathroom and stretch our legs a little. Sometimes they don't have time to volunteer or not enough people come to help, so we don't all get walks - some days we get lucky and get two walks.

When we do get out of our kennels, it's so nice to get some attention and get pet for a few minutes. Sometimes one of those volunteers will scratch behind my ear or even brush me once in awhile, and it makes me feel loved - like I used to feel all the time.

Now, every day I sit and wait, latched behind crisscrossed metal.

People walk through the shelter sometimes and look at all of us. It's hard to show them what a good dog I am from in here. 

I know I'm one of the lucky ones, but sometimes it's hard to feel that way.

I know I'll feel lucky when someone who walks by finally calls my name and picks out a collar just for me ... maybe they'll even let me pick out my own bed ... maybe someday I'll have my very own family.

For now, I'll be here waiting.
The sun is coming up now, so maybe today will be my day.

Bellow's Story

About a month ago, I wrote about a dog whose owner relinquished her while I was at the shelter.

This adorable basset hound named Bellow, is just one of the animals I've seen surrendered while volunteering at the shelter.

Honestly, I can't remember a time I was volunteering for a couple hours when I didn't hear the shelter staff over the loud speaker say something to the effect of: "Please prepare a kennel in the big dog room for a new dog." That's what they say when there is someone in the lobby who came in with a dog and will leave without one.

So, while Bellow isn't a rare story at the shelter, she was the first dog I saw relinquished, so I've watched her from the start and seen the change a shelter environment can have on an animal.

Today when I walked into the back room of the rescue, Bellow was asleep on her bed much unlike the other times I've seen her. She didn't open her eyes when she heard me coming. She didn't give me a longing stare, silently begging me to take her on a walk. She didn't howl, pleading for me to care that she was in a cage by herself. She didn't care that I was there this time.

It occurred to me that people walk by her every day and don't stop. In fact, more than that - a lot of people don't even come to look. They try to save their hearts and they try to pretend that dogs like Bellow don't exist.

In the single month that she has been at the shelter, Bellow has become desensitized.

She now doesn't expect to be pet. She doesn't expect to be loved. She doesn't expect to even be looked at.

As a volunteer, I can devote three hours on a weekend to walking dogs and only get through walking six or seven animals. Despite the best efforts of the small staff and group of volunteers at the shelter, it's pretty frequent that all the dogs don't get walked every day - or if they do, they only get a single walk and end up spending nearly 24-7 in a small cage in a loud room.

I don't blame Bellow for giving up a little bit after being in a shelter for a month - it must be an unbearable change to go from a loving home with a soft cushy dog bed, to being confined with little human or animal (or any kind) of contact.

And despite the stressful conditions of a shelter environment, I'm constantly impressed with how quickly dogs can light up and instantly come to life with excitement that you are there to spend a couple minutes with them - walk them, pet them, brush them, give them some kind of effort.

This post is just to recognize that we shouldn't be making these dogs wait too long - we shouldn't make them lose faith in humans.

We can give them hope and we can do it now. You can make a difference in their lives - whether it is volunteering, donating money, encouraging people you know to rescue rather than buy, or if you're able, adopting a shelter pet yourself.

Whatever it is, don't wait to start making a difference.
Dogs like Bellow are literally waiting for you.