pet connection

We can always hope so!

Best Friends reports (thanks,Kathleen) that this Friday (check for local times), Oprah will do a show on puppy-mills, those cruel mass-production facilities that treat pets like factory-farmed livestock (which is sick enough for livestock!) and sell their often sick, unsocialized and often impossible to house-trained puppies through retail pet stores and Internet sites. (Why would these puppies by so difficult to house-train, you ask? Because they grow up ankle-deep in their own mess, and come to think of that as normal.)

But the puppies get out of the living hell of the mills. Their parents never do. They are bred again and again and again, until they can’t be bred any more. And then they’re auctioned off, or even killed and fed back to the other dogs.

Yes, this is the cruelty you’re often supporting when you buy a pet-store puppy. Read Dr. Patty Khuly, on what a good veterinarian thinks of this situation:

How horrible must it be to live 3/4 of your life in a glorified duffel bag? Not to mention the real crime: being born.

Teacups are big business. While undoubtedly cute and often surprisingly good-natured, most owners don’t know the trouble that goes into crafting these hamster-sized dogs.

For each pup conceived, we’ll never know the percentage that makes it to market. But I’d wager it’s not even 10%. Now you know the real reason for the $1000 minimum on these pups (in Miami the average is more like $1500). Supply and demand. (I didn’t go to business school for nothing, though my Wharton classmates might argue to the contrary.)

I could go on for a long time in this vein. The only other subject that gets me going quite so hotly is the sale of these teacup pups in retail outlets designed to lure the fashionable and uneducated (human traits not mutually exclusive, I’d hasten to opine).

As you probably already suspect, the puppy mill industry and puppy retailers are in cahoots. Sometimes, they are one and the same—vertically integrated, as it were. More often, a network of ambitious backyard breeders or faraway mill-style operation is behind the pristine storefronts on fashionable streets hawking pups at the rate of its other retailers` Gucci knockoffs.

Teacups bred in these conditions are not only intrinsically sickly for their teeny-tininess, they are often housed in unfriendly environments (among their many pseudo-brethren) in cost-effective conditions.

And here’s what Christie has written for her Your Whole Pet column on the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com Web site:

Seeing a golden retriever so scared of people that she shakes is sobering for anyone familiar with the breed’s usually happy-go-lucky, ball-chasing, people-loving nature. But Sunshine had reason to be afraid: Until that day, she’d spent her entire life inside a wire cage, pumping out puppies for the puppy-mill trade.

Puppy mills are the factory farms of dog breeding, big commercial operations that produce puppies that are then distributed nationwide to pet stores and sold directly to consumers on the Web. The dogs are kept in small cages — which USDA regulations require to be no more than a few inches bigger than the dog — and females have puppies every time they come in season for their entire lives.

The commercial mass breeding of dogs is not illegal, underground or small scale. Stephanie Shain, the outreach director of the Humane Society of the United States, says that of the 7 to 9 million dogs acquired in this country each year, between 2 and 4 million come from puppy mills. Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council figures suggest that around 300,000 to 400,000 puppies are sold in pet stores annually — a figure HSUS puts at closer to 500,000. A report from the American Veterinary Medical Association indicated that more than 200,000 American families bought puppies online in 2004.

I’ll be watching Oprah (I usually TiVo it). I hope a lot of people who are even now thinking about buying a puppy from an puppy-mill outlet or Internet site will be watching, too.

People who buy these dogs are the reason this cruelty continues. The only way to stop puppy mills is to stop buying the puppies.

Oprah, tell it like it is.  And we’re sorry about Sophie. Save some dogs in her sweet memory.

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Elsewhere: Mutts blogger John Woestendiek alllllmost gets taken in by a pet-related April Fool’s joke. Your laugh for the day.  Me, I already got taken in once. But I’m not ‘fessing up. … Lance Mackey’s Zorro is expected to recover, but will likely never race again. The idiot who ran into Mackey’s team with a snowmobile had come forward. Turns out — what a surprise! — “alchohol was involved.” … When I first read the headline that Switzerland was to ban cat fur products, I figured the ban was would be on the importing of such things. But no: In Switzerland is is currently legal to hunt cats and sell their hides. Ugh. Story here.