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. Puppy mill puppies go through rigorous and inhumane treatment such as being kept in overcrowded, unsanitary breeding areas, as well as the females being bred often without much recovery time from a previous litter birth. In many cases, puppies bred in puppy mills lack exercise, basic socialization and proper grooming. Some of the health problems of puppies associated with being bred at puppy mills include

• Epilepsy
• Heart disease
• Kidney disease
• Musculoskeletal disorders (hip dysplasia, luxating patellas, etc.)
• Endocrine disorders (diabetes, hyperthyroidism)
• Blood disorders (anemia, Von Willebrand disease)
• Deafness
• Eye problems (cataracts, glaucoma, progressive retinal atrophy, etc.)
• Respiratory disorder

as stated at the ASPCA website.

Watch this video from ASPCA to learn even more about puppy mills.

However, if you believe your puppy came from a puppy mill, please continue to love them, and you may even want to love them more! To learn more, visit ASPCA website. We have only begun to shed light on the puppy mills, so come back as we talk about what Pet stores and shops are doing to combat the puppy mills.

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