Policing Problematic Puppy Mills

Policing Problematic Puppy Mills

By Wes Hessel

 Producing Pets For Pure Profit

 By definition a “puppy mill” is problematic.  These breeders raise animals purely for profit.  At best,  conditions barely meet legal minimum standards.  Most often there is flagrant disregard of laws and the animals’ welfare, subjecting animals to horrendous conditions.

Per Wikipedia

Per Wikipedia, a codified uniform legal characterization has not yet been made.  A case law definition was established in 1984 by Avenson v. Zegart, as “a dog breeding operation in which the health of the dogs is disregarded in order to maintain a low overhead and maximize profits”.   “Emphasis on quantity over quality, indiscriminate breeding, continuous confinement, lack of human contact and environmental enrichment, poor husbandry, and minimal to no veterinary care”, is how The Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS)  Veterinary Medical Association describes the practice.

Make It Stop..

Senior director John Goodwin of The Humane Society of the United States is spearheading a stop puppy mills campaign.  The goal of the campaign is to activate the average citizen. Goodwin believes it is imperative that citizens report puppy mills and then refuse to  patronize stores who sell animals that come from these suppliers.  Some Mennonite and Amish communities have concentrations of puppy mills, particularly in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.  The Midwest has a large percentage of the offenders: the animal protection organization’s “Horrible 100” has five Indiana dog breeders on the list, for example, one of which is tied for the seventh worst.  Missouri, who has the highest number of puppy mills in the U.S., reported two breeders with significant numbers of emaciated dogs and abhorrent conditions.

It Gets Worse…

An Iowa  puppy mill with 650 dogs had more than 50 that were ill or injured.  Some of these operations have over a thousand canines in their charge.  Circumstances at smaller breeders aren’t necessarily better.  The Attorney General of Michigan is pursuing action against an AKC breeder for allegedly deceiving customers, euthanizing unwanted puppies, and selling sick animals.  A Kansas puppy miller admitted to shooting and killing over two dozen dogs.  Some others have been known to drown animals rather than go to the expense of humane euthanasia.

Help And Hope

Illinois is ranked 3rd in animal protection laws, yet mills continue to operate in the state and pet stores buy from them.  Puppy Mill Project, is based in Chicago.  Founder Cari Meyers was troubled to learn puppy mills and the stores buying from them are a big source of  sick animals.  Many of these sick animals are euthanized in shelters.  In the U.S. 3 million dogs and cats are “put down” by animal shelters each year. Many of these sick animals have come from puppy mills, which produces an estimated  2 million dogs each year.  Ms. Meyers wanted to “cut off the head of the dragon”, so the Project was born in 2009.

Their Mission, Which They Chose To Accept

The organization’s three primary goals: 1) educate and improve awareness of the commercialized animal cruelty including information on the retail outlets that help perpetuate the practice, 2) assist humane and shelter organizations to rescue animals from mills, and 3) lobby for better, tougher laws on puppy mills at all governmental levels.  Cari’s own Millie was a mill rescue and is the mascot for Millie’s Mission, a fund to help pay the veterinary costs for rescued mill canines.  One of the fund-raising avenues is the Chicago Pet Project, the sale of a coffee-table book featuring Chicago celebs and their pets.

Educate, Educate, Educate…

The education comes in forms such as the statistics cited above as well as abhorrent facts such as the cage for a dog being bred only having to be six inches larger than her body and she can live in that cage her whole life as long as they have the minimal food and water required. This should be unthinkable, but it is not. Overall, conditions in puppy mills are borderline at best.  Crowded places are full of cages, often open wire, stacked in ranks on top of each other, typically dirty and most likely filthy, with the animals’ solid and liquid waste spreading onto those below them.  These facilities are often barns or the like, without heat or air conditioning, some offering little, if any, protection from bad weather.  This leads to the spread of disease.

Sick Puppies Making Sick Puppies

Many of the creatures are sick, as a result, and veterinary care is unlikely, if present at all.  Treatment can be carried out by untrained breeders, sometimes without benefit of appropriate anesthetic.  The animals are packed into spaces which don’t provide for play or socialization. The closeness also creating behavioral issues.  Animals are in confinement 24 hours a day.  Females being bred are bred every heat cycle. They will typically be “put down” once their usefulness of giving birth is ended.  “Rare” or “exotic” colored or looking pups could be created from indiscriminate breeding which can dramatically increase the likelihood of birth defects or chronic conditions in those dogs.

The Numbers Are Staggering

In 2014, there were over 167,000 dogs bred in commercial facilities licensed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). That figure of course does not include unlicensed breeders.   Current figures on the HSUS website put the count of dogs being used for breeding at licensed locations at over 194,000.  Breeders are supposed to be licensed to be able to sell to pet stores, but this is recurrently overlooked.  These violations and others often go unenforced.  Mill breeders will change names and/or move to avoid law interference.  Selling these animals via the anonymity of the Internet makes tracking, enforcement, and rescue even more difficult.

Stopping It Isn’t Easy

Conditions can be such that rescuing professionals and volunteers are at risk for injury from hurt or abused animals.  At times, the filth is so bad, protective clothing and/or respirators are required.  COVID-19 has frozen or curtailed many states’ inspection and enforcement activities, as well as that of humane and rescue agencies, so the problem is likely worse now.  Wisconsin, New York, New Hampshire, and Illinois are looking at laws that would prevent the sale of puppy mill animals entirely.

Adding Insult To Injury, Literally

The abuses of puppy mills and the pet stores who enable them extend beyond the mistreatment of the animals.  Misleading new methods of pet sales and even outright scams are coming to light.  The latest way to try to unload a puppy mill animal on unsuspecting consumers is by way of a “puppy lease”.  According to the American Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), some pet retailers are pushing these problematic, if not predatory, practices.  Set up in conjunction with finance companies, you put down a payment, such as $100, and pay monthly for the term of the lease.  But the charges and fees added into the financed amount aren’t disclosed well, if at all.

Not So Non-Profit

The ASPCA also noted there are fake non-profit organizations created to funnel pets from puppy mills through “adoptions.” These services  create the illusion of a rescue of these animals, not just another way to make money and pawn off a puppy produced for pure profit.  Companies who benefit from puppy mills are even taking government assistance funds meant to help small businesses through the COVID-19 crisis.  A report from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) on the Paycheck Protection Program reviewed by the ASPCA showed these outrageous funding findings:

  • $2-5 million went to the corporate office of a chain of puppy-selling pet stores.
  • $1+ million went to a Florida-based pet retailer that cites having no employees.
  • $150,000-$300,000 went to two commercial brokers—businesses that buy puppies from breeders in bulk and transport them to pet stores—in Iowa and Missouri.
  • $150,000-$300,000 went to a Virginia company that processes predatory puppy leases.

(The SBA reports the funds disbursed as ranges, rather than specific amounts.)

Cat-tastrophe, In Progress

It isn’t just dogs – cats, are also bred in outrageous “kitten mills”.  Many years ago, my wife and I personally adopted a purebred cat male, who had been used for stud.  While not apparently one of the very problematic ones, the breeder who had him was finished with the sire, since he had become in their eyes too old to breed at five years.  If they couldn’t find a new owner, they were considering euthanizing the cat, despite the fact that he had fathered two or three champions and a grand champion.  We were told he had spent a good part of his life in a kennel.

They Can’t Breathe, Either

Before this, we had made the mistake of purchasing our first pet together as a couple from a mall store.  Our Himalayan came with an upper respiratory infection which required veterinary care. Asthma was a life-long after effect.  Distance transfers can increase health problems for animals. Distance transfers are not unusual, and can add another set of stresses and unhealthy conditions for the young creatures.  The possibility of an animal going from a Midwest breeder by truck to southern California or Florida is not uncommon.

Ways To Fight Back

Twenty-five per cent of  adoptable animals are purebred.  Some even have papers. “Mutts” and mongrels, or mixes can be unique, loyal, loving pets, and should not be ignored.

Six ways to help stop puppy mills:

  • Ask pet stores are the animals spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and does the seller screen potential pet parents?
  • Find out who supplies the animals and where they come from
  • Advocate to pet shops to not source from puppy mills,  but instead facilitate adoption in cooperation with local agencies and rescue organizations. Give business to those who do.
  • Lobby Congressional and state legislators to make humane animal treatment by breeders a significant priority, with funding and enforcement power.
  • Make your voice heard in letters to the editor, and on animal-themed web or social media sites.
  • Report any and all information about bad breeding practices to police, animal control/care agencies, and humane organizations.
Small Steps

The New York State Senate passed the New York Puppy Mill Pipeline Bill (S. 4234-A).  This law in the making would stop the sale through pet stores of dogs, cats, and rabbits.  Its companion bill in the New York State Assembly (A. 6298-A) is awaiting approval.  As the story on the ASPCA site points out, “At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many pet stores in the state continued selling puppies—a display of unfathomable disregard for the well-being of puppies and people alike. While most of New York was shut down in an effort to protect the public, puppy mills were trucking puppies into the state almost daily.”

More To Be Done

There are an estimated 10,000 puppy mills in this country, counting the licensed and estimated unlicensed. There is so much work ahead of us if we are going to be able to stop this horrible practice.  To learn more about puppy mills and how to help stop them, go to The Puppy Mill Project’s site, http://www.thepuppymillproject.org/, the HSUS site, https://www.humanesociety.org/, and the ASPCA site, https://www.aspca.org/.

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