Puppy mills: A story your dog can’t tell you

Normally when someone decides to buy a dog they will eventually go to a pet store to purchase one. This process needs to be put to an end. The average consumer becomes an unwitting accomplice by supporting puppy mills, where dogs are being severely mistreated.

A puppy mill is a breeding factory that practices inhumane treatment to produce puppies for a profit. This can vary from debarking, which is ramming a steel rod down their throat to rupture their vocal cords, to dogs losing feet because they are caught in the wire floor of the cages they live in. Nearly 99 percent of puppies sold in pet stores come from these mills.

In many cases, innocent people/families buy a puppy to soon find out it has a genetic disease or emotional issues. A lot of these medical problems cost thousands of dollars. The emotional problems occur because dogs from puppy mills have not been properly socialized, let alone stepped foot on grass.

When talking with Lisa Fischer, a volunteer and teacher at Main Line Animal Rescue, about the ongoing battle of puppy mills, she raised a great point: morally, do we want to be a society that, just because we want this instant gratification, behind the scenes we allow for innocent living things to continue suffering?

Fischer is not only a volunteer at the Main Line Animal Rescue animal shelter but acts as a teacher in a program call ‘Homeschool,’ where dogs that have been rescued from a puppy mill are placed in a home environment to transition them into a new home.

“You see that they can’t do so much and how much they were affected,” Fischer said. “It’s an injustice and to me you’d be a strange person if you could just forget that.”

Main Line Animal Rescue has been advocating against puppy mills and in 2008 spoke about it on the Oprah Winfrey show. It continue their efforts with campaigns, getting bills passed and simply getting the word out.

The Animal Welfare Act was signed into place in 1996. It’s a federal law that regulates the treatment of animals in research, exhibition, transport and by dealers in the United States. The harsh reality, though, is that many dealers are not abiding by this law. The most common and crucial cause to action against puppy mills is refusing to buy a puppy in a pet store and spreading the word for others to do the same.