Puppy Mills: Profit Over Animal Welfare

Tiffany Baldeo MWF 8:00-8:50am ENC1101 Informative Essay Puppy Mills, Be gone! Bulldogs on sale! Yorkie puppies available here! Have you ever wondered where all these cheap puppies for sale in pet stores come from? The answer is that they are produced in factory-like environments known as “puppy mills”. Puppy mills are large-scale dog breeding operations where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs. Puppy mills treat dogs like products, not living beings, and usually house them in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions without adequate veterinary care, socialization, or even food and water.

The cute puppies for sale at your local mall were probably bred from dogs that don’t play outside or get groomed. Puppy mill dogs are typically kept in cages with wire flooring that injures their paws and legs and cages can be stacked up in a column, which means waste falls on the dogs housed below them. Compromised health and conditions like matting, sores, mange, severe dental disease and abscesses are often widespread. Many puppy mill puppies are born with or develop overt physical problems that make them unsalable to pet stores, which mean they end up abandoned or just left to die.

Many sick puppies do manage to end up at pet stores, though, where the new puppy owner unknowingly purchases the sick dog. Breeding dogs at the mills sometimes spend their entire lives outdoors, exposed to the elements, or crammed inside filthy structures. When a parent at a puppy mill is no longer able to produce, the dog may be given to the nearest shelter, abandoned, or even destroyed. Also, because the puppies produced in puppy mills do not have safe and healthy homes selected for them ahead of time, if they are not purchased by the time they hit a certain age, they may suffer the same fate.

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Female dogs usually have little to no recovery time between bearing litters. When, after a few years, the females can no longer reproduce or when their breed goes out of style, the dogs are often abandoned, shot, or starved until they eventually die. Many pet stores with cute puppies for sale will tell you that they don't get their puppies from puppy mills. They'll say their puppies are all from "USDA licensed breeders. " If you dig a little deeper into what that actually means, you'll find that it's not worth much. The standards of care required by the USDA are woefully inadequate and not what most of us would consider humane.

They leave a lot of room for dogs to be severely mistreated. Even if they were adequate, they're not enforced. Take a look at a scathing report done by the Inspector General on USDA's lax enforcement of the law regulating breeders and judge for yourself whether USDA licensing of puppy mills is enough to make you shop at stores that sell puppies. In fact, you only have to be licensed by USDA as a commercial breeder if you are selling puppies to pet stores or brokers. So USDA licensure is actually a pretty good indicator that the breeders are, in fact, puppy mills.

Small hobby breeders, who sell their dogs directly to the public, including those who only sell their puppies online, do not have to be licensed or inspected by USDA. Don’t support the industry. Most pet shop puppies come from puppy mills, and so do most dogs sold over the Internet. Pet shop puppies are separated from their mother at as young as six weeks of age. The health of the puppies is not always guaranteed. Purchasing a puppy for sale at a pet store or online often supports the horrible puppy mill industry. Buying anything in pet stores that sell puppies supports the industry, too.

Buy all your pet supplies, toys, pet food, and kitty litter, from stores that do not sell puppies, or buy your pet supplies online from websites that do not sell puppies. Breeders or owners of large kennels are supposed to adhere to regulations and follow protocol when it comes to their business and the wellbeing of the animals that are in their facilities. The puppy mills project states that of the 3,000 USDA licensed breeding facilities, a large number of them have violations that go unpunished and led to the maltreatment of the animals behind the walls.

The United States government should be making more strides to help the animals that must endure these horrific living conditions. The Animal Bill of Rights is being used by the Animal legal defense Club to show that there is a large amount of support that is going towards the promotion of more strict animal rights. They also need to help congress come up with harsher punishments for the people that feel that they are above the law and do not need to follow the laws when it comes to animals and abuse.

The Fund also states in their website that in the United States about 45 states including the District of Columbia have a type of felony level animal cruelty provision which may be in forced in cases of animal fighting or death of an animal. States need to take a closer look at the puppy mill facilities or “breeding kennels” and take more drastic measures against people who violate regulations. It is not fair to the animals that they have to live in such conditions that can make them sick and feel unloved.

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