If you’ve read the newspaper or watched TV recently, you’ve probably heard about the horrors of puppy mills.

The Harsh Realities

Puppy mills are nothing less than breeding factories that employ inhumane tactics to produce puppies for profit.

Puppy mill breeder dogs live their entire lives in unlined, wire cages, often stacked one on top of the other so that the urine and feces from above drips down into the cages below. These animals receive no human contact, inadequate nutrition, no veterinary care, and no exercise.  These dreadful conditions promote diseases which can be passed on to the other animals, painful injuries which often go untreated, and even birth defects and deformities from over-breeding and in-breeding.

The female dogs are usually bred continuously from their first heat cycle, until they can no longer produce any more puppies. After a litter is born, the puppies are taken from their mother before being properly weaned, and sold to – that’s right – pet stores!  The statistics are staggering, claiming that 99% of puppies sold in pet stores originate from puppy mills.

Which Pet Stores Sell Puppy Mill Puppies?

The pet stores acquiring their puppies from puppy mills are the ones selling them for a profit. These are the large retail chains, and the small pet store “boutiques”.  No matter how nice the owner of your local pet store is, or how much she appears to love her dogs, odds are she’s purchasing her inventory off the back of a truck, where dozens of puppies are crammed into crates and trucked around from store to store until the truck is empty.

Reputable breeders do not sell their dogs to puppy stores or on Kijiji   If you ask the puppy stores where they acquire their dogs from, they should tell you.  If they hesitate, or say they “don’t know”, chances are they don’t want you to know. Most of the dogs sold on the internet on sites like Kijiji don’t care where the puppies are going and they choose their qualified new puppy owns by nothing more than your ability to pay the asking price!

A Different Perspective:

People often tell us that they purchased their dog from a puppy store or Kijiji and other internet websites because they wanted a “pure bred” dog, or because they wanted to “save” their dog from the puppy store.  We understand where those folks are coming from, but would like to make two points to put things in perspective:

1. Having a pure bred pedigree (and a hefty price tag) does not guarantee a loving, forever home.

Many of our dogs were actually purchased from puppy stores and internet sites  for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars, but once their owners no longer wanted them, they found themselves abandoned on the streets, or surrendered to  shelters  (often along with their fancy paperwork).

2. For every puppy you “save” from a puppy store, thousands are left behind to continue the cycle of suffering and over-breeding.

The only way to stop this cycle is to stop purchasing dogs from puppy stores!  Instead, adopt a dog from your local shelter – remember,  the shelter has all kinds of dogs…puppies, pure breds, and mutts.  We love them all!