Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

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fourpawsonthefloor
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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by fourpawsonthefloor »

http://www.stoppuppymills.org/ Excellent site, by the hsus, that has a GREAT video that you should all watch. Trust me on this, this video is very MILD. Conditions in puppy mills/dog farms can be a lot worse.

Some things that they don't mention are that these puppy farms have crap quality breeding dogs, which aren't tested for genetic problems - which significantly raises your chances of having an unwell dog. The other thing is that these dogs are almost always very poorly socalized. A puppies needs a LOT of socializing to develop a proper human bond. You tell me how these people with 100 plus dogs manage to spend the intensive time socalizing each puppy. It simply isn't likely.

Add to that, the higher number of puppies in crowded facilities like this that get diseases...and its a mess.

Do your research when aquiring a puppy. You should go to the home of the people who bred it. You should ask to see the mother. You should ask to see (based on your research) the certificates for the tests that each breed needs to certify is as a 'fit' breeder (ie are the hips good/the eyes ect). OR go to your nearest shelter/rescue group and pick up a puppy or a dog that really needs a home.

And spay and neuter your animals people. Unless you are ready to go through the expensive process of certifing your dog for breeding, do up contracts for each of the adopters and start a good screening process, in my humble opinion, you shouldn't be breeding your dog. Don't even get me started on cats. There are just way too many dying.

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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by JSherlock »

Poor animals. :( My family has always gotten our animals from shelters. Why the hell would anyone want a "name brand" dog anyway? Just to say they have one? I'm sure they love them just as much, but still.
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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by fourpawsonthefloor »

Its advertizing and commercialism. Its 'fun' and 'trendy'. They think they are cute, or what have you. Many pet store purchases can be very 'on the whim' as well, which adds to the problem. Very few stores do good screening, if any at all.

Plus, people think that they are getting a bargain. Why pay $700 for a puppy from that reputable breeder down the road that health screens and only breeds 1 litter/bitch max per year and requires a contract, when they can go to a brokerage website or a pet store and pick up a dog for $300-$400, no questions asked.

What they often don't know, is that in a few days, that puppy could be dead from infections, or in a year, they could be spending 100's of dollars trying to treat a medical condition from bad breeding. Bargain? I think not. What's even more frusterating is that I've spoken to people that have done this, spent thousands in vet bills, to only euthanize the dog at a very very young age, and they STILL think its a bargain to get the 'cheap' puppy. :doh!

Education is the key. The more people that we can tell, the more people know, the less cruelty will happen.

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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by Garble »

I encourage people to avoid buying a "pure" breed from any kind of breeder. Even the nice ones.

It's the demand for inbred dogs that makes puppy mills profitable.


There are tons of dogs, young and old, waiting to be adopted at pounds and shelters. And when you rescue a dog, it knows that you've saved it's life, and it remembers.

You might find some pure breeds if you really are set on having a certain kind of dog, but honestly mutts are much smarter, saner and healthier.
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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by CurlyyHairGirl »

I'm going to bite this.

I work at a dog kennel (as in animal boarding while people go on vacation. Why explain? Because people do get it confused with Pound), and working there, you see all sorts of dogs...and cats.

One of the things my coworkers try to pass on is to spay and neuter your animals: Its fine and dandy to have puppies and kittens. It's not fine to abandon them and make living worse for them if they don't have proper homes. This is one of the main concerns when it comes to pets. We got a litter of flea infested kittens dropped off at our kennel because the owner didn't want them. Spaying/nuetering prevents this from happening.

Puppy farms/mills are just an even worse version of that. I don't want to think of the dogs who don't get adopted by unsuspecting customers. We get dogs and cats dropped off at the kennel because nobody wants them anymore. We house three dogs premanently and 9 cats. Its sad.

We had a mutt, Sarah. She was found in a box in the middle of a feild with 3 other siblings, and we took her in, and we loved her. We have had 4 shelties, all purebred, since she died. We have the papers and everything. The breeders we got them from have a huge arsenal of questions to make sure that their dogs go to the right homes. Many DO want to meet the perspective owners, as they should. They ask for references, photos of your home, the whole nine yards. We paid between 300 and 600 dollars for ours. We just didn't want any problems as far as medical things go.

I am all for adopting animals, no doubt about it. There is nothing wrong with taking in mill puppies...I just hate those who run mills with such bad conditions, for money.
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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by fourpawsonthefloor »

I missed this! LOL. But yeah.

The one thing people have to stop doing is buying from mills to 'rescue' the animals too though. That just feeds into the profit machine as well. Frusterating to the max, eh?

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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by GreenLanternGrl »

Originally posted by fourpawsonthefloor
http://www.stoppuppymills.org/ Excellent site, by the hsus, that has a GREAT video that you should all watch. Trust me on this, this video is very MILD. Conditions in puppy mills/dog farms can be a lot worse.

Some things that they don't mention are that these puppy farms have crap quality breeding dogs, which aren't tested for genetic problems - which significantly raises your chances of having an unwell dog. The other thing is that these dogs are almost always very poorly socalized. A puppies needs a LOT of socializing to develop a proper human bond. You tell me how these people with 100 plus dogs manage to spend the intensive time socalizing each puppy. It simply isn't likely.

Add to that, the higher number of puppies in crowded facilities like this that get diseases...and its a mess.

Do your research when aquiring a puppy. You should go to the home of the people who bred it. You should ask to see the mother. You should ask to see (based on your research) the certificates for the tests that each breed needs to certify is as a 'fit' breeder (ie are the hips good/the eyes ect). OR go to your nearest shelter/rescue group and pick up a puppy or a dog that really needs a home.

And spay and neuter your animals people. Unless you are ready to go through the expensive process of certifing your dog for breeding, do up contracts for each of the adopters and start a good screening process, in my humble opinion, you shouldn't be breeding your dog. Don't even get me started on cats. There are just way too many dying.

Paws
Thank you for this video paws. :). I now will not ever buy a dog from a pet store.
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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by Ult_Sm86 »

Newsweek just did a recent article on Puppy mills.

Here's a portion of it. The link is here.
The White County sheriff's department noticed the stench from a mile up the road. By the time rescuers entered the series of sheds in Sparta, Tenn., some were forced to wear respirators. Inside each shed were scores of dogs in tiny cages, many covered in feces. The sheds reeked of urine and were so frigid the officers had to set up portable heaters to work inside. Authorities, who raided the farm in February after receiving tips from angry customers who'd purchased sick puppies, discovered 300 dogs on the three-acre property—many of them malnourished, mangy and infected by parasites. Some were housed a half dozen to a cage in near total darkness. Many of the pups were "designer dogs"—trendy new breeds like puggles (which result when a pug is bred with a beagle), Maltepoos (a Maltese-poodle mix) and Chipins (a Chihuahua-pinscher cross). "It's market driven," says Melinda Merck, a forensic veterinarian who assisted with the Tennessee raid. "People just see a designer breed and say, 'I've never heard of that dog but it sounds cute'." And for puppy mills like this one, designer dogs—many of which sell for more than $1,000 apiece—have become a huge business.
This is a very sad read.
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Paws rants again: Puppy mills and Puppy farms.

Post by Saint Kurt »

Good article. I'm glad they came right out and said the Obama connection is tenuous right at the beginning. :)

By sheer coincidence I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was living in Chicago and working at Illinois' largest animal shelter during the November election. I did not go to Grant Park afterwards but the atmosphere in the city was pretty electric on election day. It was like, you'd walk down the street and everybody's face was all determined because today was the day we were electing America's first black president. (I'm not saying that this was the only reason people were electing him just that in Chicago, on that day, THAT was what everyone around me was talking about.)

A few days after the election, the head doctor at Anti-cruelty where I was, asked me to get a bunch of supplies together and we went through the kennels picking out dogs and doing physical exams. We picked out various shihtzus and terriers and poodle type dogs (low allergen) to make sure they were healthy. The finalists were altered, vaccinated, and bathed. The next day they were crated, secret service picked them up, boarded them on a jet, and took them to New York for the Obamas to look at. (I never understood why they didn't just wait from them to return to Chicago.)

All the dogs were returned. The head of medicine was very happy - he said that high profile adoptions never went well from a PR point of view.

So in the beginning at least, the Obamas were interested in adopting a dog from a shelter.

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