www.ShannonLHill.com

If you watched the Houston news this week, one of the leading stories is the theft of three English bulldog puppies, valued at $5000 apiece, from a local pet store.  $5000 apiece???  In the Houston Chronicle’s classified ads today, English bulldog puppies range in price from $400 to $2000.

When I was younger, going to the mall meant going to the pet store to see all the cute fuzzy puppies with ridiculous price tags.  I could spend hours playing with the puppies of all breeds and descriptions.

All I can say is that I didn’t know any better.  Now, as a member of the rescue community, I know all too well that many pet stores get their animals from puppy mills.  They charge those high prices and offer those money back guarantees because they expect a certain percentage of the animals to get sick and die.  And if you take a sick puppy back to a pet store for an “exchange”, you don’t want to know what the “returned” puppy’s fate will probably be.

If you walk into many pet stores, you will see that some of the animals look weak or listless, that some of them are shivering, that many of them are in cages or enclosures with no blankets or bedding.  You should also notice that there is a communal air supply for all the animals, which means that if a sick one is present, all the others have been exposed.  And it is not uncommon for the puppies and kittens on display to be as young as five or six weeks old – ie, really too young to be away from their mothers, and thus even more vulnerable to illness.

So about those puppy mills…recently someone whom I thought of as an educated, informed person admitted to me that she didn’t really know what a puppy mill was.

Basically, a puppy mill is the term we use for a breeding facility in which the animals are bred as often as possible, to produce as many puppies for sale as possible, without any particular attention to the health, wellbeing, care, feeding, hygiene, or socialization of the animals.  It is not uncommon to find the animals crammed by the dozen into filthy runs or cages, with contaminated water and food (or none at all).  It is not uncommon for animals to have longstanding untreated illnesses, injuries, even congenital deformities caused by unchecked inbreeding.  Respiratory illness, distemper, even ammonia blindness (caused when the fumes from the accumulated urine burn the eyes of the dogs) are all typical findings in puppy mills.

I’ve been inside a puppy mill.  The sights and smells…you never forget.

Common practice in these mills is to take the puppies away from the mothers as quickly as possible so that the puppies don’t have time to manifest any of the illnesses present in the mill before being sold. 

The next time that you find yourself tempted to pay the absurd prices in a pet store, think twice.  Don’t buy from the side of the road either, as those animals are even more likely to be sick or have congenital problems.  If you plan to avoid these problems by buying from a breeder, ask to see the facility and the mother dog, so that you can see the conditions in which the puppies and mother dog have lived.  Do your homework. 

Or better yet, adopt a rescued animal.

2 Responses to “Of Puppy Mills and Pet Stores”