So, I’ve been promising some posts about puppy mills for a while now. I’ve watched several videos on YouTube and looked at lots of awful photos and spent many tears on the horrors I’ve seen. It’s such a complex and emotional problem. I think it’s difficult to approach a reasonable solution because emotions run so high and the financial stakes are enormous. I’d like to think that those who make their money running puppy mills are simply ignorant of the suffering they’re causing. Many people think animals don’t have emotions. In fact, it’s only in the last 20 years or so that we’ve been using anaesthetic and painkillers for animals requiring surgery. Truly. For some reason, we thought they don’t experience pain….

I’m not trying to be an apologist for puppy millers in any way. My sweet Rosi was rescued from a puppy mill and was old before her time when she came to me. She eventually succumbed to mange, a highly treatable issue in dogs with healthy immune systems. Over the year and a bit that she was with me, I did everything in my power to help her and she simply couldn’t rally. I still cry, more than 5 years later. The injustice is infuriating, and while I try not to hate, I struggle knowing there are so many more dogs out there and so many puppy mills still running at full capacity.

My second encounter with puppy mill fallout was assisting in transporting some rescued Cresteds. These 4 little ones had spent their entire lives in cages. The kind people who initially rescued them had driven several hundred miles to pick them up, and had bathed them and shaved the hopelessly matted powderpuffs by the time I met them. In spite of their expert care, they still had dark pee stains on their feet and they smelled just awful. They had never been on leashes and when we stopped en route to let them stretch and do their business it was evident that they had never encountered grass either. They were afraid of it. We were able to coax them onto it and eventually they relaxed enough to lie down and take advantage of the cooling effect on a very hot day. These four had a happy ending. But it doesn’t happen that way for most of them.

The thing is, we have to figure out our own complicity. The infrastructure that supports puppy mills is huge. There are the mills, there are brokers, there are auctions, there are pet store chains, there are pet food manufacturers and suppliers, there are pet pharmaceutical manufacturers and suppliers, there are breeders who are careless with their breeding programmes, or careless about who they sell to, there’s a lack of understanding about spaying and neutering, there’s an entertainment industry that cashes in on animals, there are Kennel Clubs that are funded by registering pure bred dogs. That’s just off the top of my head (and I’ll come back to some of this over the next few weeks). We’re being suckered into believing that shelters and rescues have inferior dogs, or don’t have puppies, or don’t have purebreds, and we’re being manipulated into thinking we have to have a puppy, or a purebred and that we’re better off buying from a pet store because somehow that protects us from an ‘inferior product’.

There’s so much more to cover, and I’ll be doing just that in the coming weeks. If you have any comments, please don’t hesitate to leave them here, or go to the contact page and email me privately. I welcome open respectful discourse on this topic. Let’s see if we can come up with some creative ways to solve this difficult and heartbreaking problem.

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