Pets Are Family Too

We, all at one time or another, have visited pet shops and stores that sell puppies and want to take all of them home with us. The innocent yips from the cages or glass, or the curled up sleeping beauty makes you want to melt. Admit it, we love puppies.

As a child growing up, I thought that you got a puppy from a friend or family member whose dog had given birth to a litter, which is how I got my puppies. Of course this sounds like a long time ago, but there were not that many pet shops in malls at the time.

Now, there are many pet shops and stores that sell puppies from  puppy mills. What is a puppy mill you may ask? According to ASPCA a puppy mill is defined as the following;

A puppy mill is a large-scale commercial dog breeding operation where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs. Unlike responsible breeders, who place the utmost importance on producing the healthiest puppies possible, breeding at puppy mills is performed without consideration of genetic quality. This results in generations of dogs with unchecked hereditary defects.

Puppy mill puppies are typically sold to pet shops—usually through a broker, or middleman—and marketed as young as eight weeks of age. The lineage records of puppy mill dogs are often falsified.

Puppies are almost the cutest, and one of the most precious things to have, next to babies of course. The puppies sold by puppy mills are not so happy. Read the rest of this entry »